his glasses and a fifty-page copy of his speech folded in half in his inner breast pocket. Like some magnificent Hector, he merely paused, considered the wound, determined that it had not reached his lung and so was not immediately dangerous, then stepped to the podium to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Come on. What? Then he spoke for ninety minutes. Blood slowly soaked his shirt a bright scarlet, but he stood and staunchly delivered his oratory. It was later decided that the least dangerous solution was to leave the bullet in the muscle of his chest, and so he carried it there for the rest of his life. Gumption.
Besides wrestling any strapping cuss he could get his hands on, Theodore Roosevelt also continued to see his love of the outdoors made manifest as he grew into middle age. “There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other men who love books but to whom . . . nature is a sealed volume. . . . Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of the outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand.” Which means that if you’re reading this right now in the woods, or floating down the Sangamon River in your canoe, then you would have been held in high esteem by old number twenty-six.
Roosevelt’s love of nature and adventuring led him to the great frontier beyond the Mississippi River, where he enjoyed the exploration of the wilderness almost as much as he loved hunting wild game.A well-born East Coast Yankee, he found that he flourished in the trappings and environs of the great hunters of the West, as well as the “cowboy life” of the great cattle ranches of his era. He even went so far as to try his hand at ranching in the Dakota Territory, a rugged and unforgiving land that brooked no weakness of body or, as it turned out for a few unlucky thieves, of character.
Whilst working the Elkhorn Ranch along the Little Missouri River in the early spring of 1886, Roosevelt and two companions awoke one morning to find that their boat had been stolen. The ice on the flooded river was just breaking up, rendering it extremely dangerous to navigate. The ranchers rightly suspected three known local horse thieves, but there was little to be done, as theirs had been the only boat known in the vast wilderness. Roosevelt and his companions, however, were not about to take this setback lying down. In a few days’ time they constructed a flat-bottomed skiff in which to give chase to the thieves.
On top of his service as an assistant deputy in Billings County, Theodore Roosevelt also took this criminal action as an attack on his personal pride and safety. In the lawless wilds of the Badlands, where one couldn’t call the sheriff or even send him a telegraph, a person needed to depend on himself for protection. As Roosevelt relayed in his book
Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
, “To submit tamely and meekly to theft, or to any other injury, is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense, in a place where self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one’s own under all circumstances rank as the first of virtues.”
Naturally (albeit impossibly), Roosevelt and his merry men caughtup with the thieves and captured them with no trouble. Now, normally in this wild land, as I’ve said, each man got to play judge and jury when it came to doling out punishment for known crimes. The three criminals were known to be wanted for not only cattle-killing but horse-thieving, which was considered the greatest crime one could commit on the frontier, thereby punishable by an immediate hanging. Throw in the boat-stealing (the rowboat was clinker-planked, no less, a hand-hewn craft made with care and skill), and nobody would have blamed Roosevelt for shooting these reprobates on sight.
But that was not the way of our Bull Moose. He
Besides wrestling any strapping cuss he could get his hands on, Theodore Roosevelt also continued to see his love of the outdoors made manifest as he grew into middle age. “There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other men who love books but to whom . . . nature is a sealed volume. . . . Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of the outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand.” Which means that if you’re reading this right now in the woods, or floating down the Sangamon River in your canoe, then you would have been held in high esteem by old number twenty-six.
Roosevelt’s love of nature and adventuring led him to the great frontier beyond the Mississippi River, where he enjoyed the exploration of the wilderness almost as much as he loved hunting wild game.A well-born East Coast Yankee, he found that he flourished in the trappings and environs of the great hunters of the West, as well as the “cowboy life” of the great cattle ranches of his era. He even went so far as to try his hand at ranching in the Dakota Territory, a rugged and unforgiving land that brooked no weakness of body or, as it turned out for a few unlucky thieves, of character.
Whilst working the Elkhorn Ranch along the Little Missouri River in the early spring of 1886, Roosevelt and two companions awoke one morning to find that their boat had been stolen. The ice on the flooded river was just breaking up, rendering it extremely dangerous to navigate. The ranchers rightly suspected three known local horse thieves, but there was little to be done, as theirs had been the only boat known in the vast wilderness. Roosevelt and his companions, however, were not about to take this setback lying down. In a few days’ time they constructed a flat-bottomed skiff in which to give chase to the thieves.
On top of his service as an assistant deputy in Billings County, Theodore Roosevelt also took this criminal action as an attack on his personal pride and safety. In the lawless wilds of the Badlands, where one couldn’t call the sheriff or even send him a telegraph, a person needed to depend on himself for protection. As Roosevelt relayed in his book
Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
, “To submit tamely and meekly to theft, or to any other injury, is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense, in a place where self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one’s own under all circumstances rank as the first of virtues.”
Naturally (albeit impossibly), Roosevelt and his merry men caughtup with the thieves and captured them with no trouble. Now, normally in this wild land, as I’ve said, each man got to play judge and jury when it came to doling out punishment for known crimes. The three criminals were known to be wanted for not only cattle-killing but horse-thieving, which was considered the greatest crime one could commit on the frontier, thereby punishable by an immediate hanging. Throw in the boat-stealing (the rowboat was clinker-planked, no less, a hand-hewn craft made with care and skill), and nobody would have blamed Roosevelt for shooting these reprobates on sight.
But that was not the way of our Bull Moose. He
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