The Other Teddy Roosevelts by Mike Resnick
Authors: Mike Resnick
Tags: Biographical, Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, adventure, Political, Short Stories (Single Author), Alternative History
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African analogs, and my observation—made very clear in all my stories and novels—was and still is that colonization has always had a deleterious effect on both the colonizers and the colonized.
One day I got a letter from a reader saying that he believed the fault lay with the Europeans, and that had America colonized Africa things would have worked out very differently. I had just finished reading all of Teddy’s twenty-plus books, and I thought: Okay, let’s let that greatest and most successful proponent of Americanism, Teddy Roosevelt, try his hand at it and see if things would have worked out any better.
I even found the exact historical moment for the story to begin—and to prove it, I began with two authentic quotes, and the date I started skewing history, a practice I would use in more than half my Roosevelt stories. I also got to use my second favorite historical character, a scalawag named John Boyes, whose two memoirs I was able to bring back into print in a series of classic African adventures I edited a few years ago.
Bully! was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula for Best Novella in 1991, and the Teddy Roosevelt stories were off and running.
***
1
“At midnight we had stopped at the station of Koba, where we were warmly received by the district commissioner, and where we met half a dozen of the professional elephant hunters, who for the most part make their money, at hazard of their lives, by poaching ivory in the Congo. They are a hard-bit set, these elephant poachers; there are few careers more adventurous, or fraught with more peril, or which make heavier demands upon the daring, the endurance, and the physical hardihood of those who follow them. Elephant hunters face death at every turn, from fever, from the assaults of warlike native tribes, from their conflicts with their giant quarry; and the unending strain on their health and strength is tremendous.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS “…When we were all assembled in my tent and champagne had been served out to everyone except Roosevelt—who insisted on drinking non-intoxicants, though his son Kermit joined us—he raised his glass and gave the toast ‘To the Elephant Poachers of the Lado Enclave.’ As we drank with him one or two of us laughingly protested his bluntness, so he gravely amended his toast to ‘The Gentleman Adventurers of Central Africa’, ‘for,’ he added, ‘that is the title by which you would have been known in Queen Elizabeth’s time.’
“A real man, with the true outdoor spirit, the ex-President’s sympathy with and real envy of the life we were leading grew visibly as the evening advanced; and he finally left us with evident reluctance. I, for one, was shaken by the hand three times as he made for the door on three separate occasions; but each time, after hesitatingly listening to the beginning of some new adventure by one of the boys, he again sat down to hear another page from our every-day life. We even urged him to chuck all his political work and come out like the great white man he was, and join us. If he would do this, we promised to put a force under his command to organize the hunting and pioneering business of Central Africa, and perhaps make history. He was, I believe, deeply moved by this offer; and long afterwards he told a friend that no honor ever paid him had impressed and tempted him like that which he received from the poachers of the Lado Enclave.”
—John Boyes
THE COMPANY OF ADVENTURERS
The date was January 8, 1910.
***
Roosevelt walked to the door of the tent, then paused and turned back to face Boyes.
“A force, you say?” he asked thoughtfully, as a lion coughed and a pair of hyenas laughed maniacally in the distance.
“That’s right, Mr. President,” said Boyes, getting to his feet. “I can promise you at least fifty men like ourselves. They may not be much to look at, but they’ll be men who aren’t afraid to work or to fight, and each and
One day I got a letter from a reader saying that he believed the fault lay with the Europeans, and that had America colonized Africa things would have worked out very differently. I had just finished reading all of Teddy’s twenty-plus books, and I thought: Okay, let’s let that greatest and most successful proponent of Americanism, Teddy Roosevelt, try his hand at it and see if things would have worked out any better.
I even found the exact historical moment for the story to begin—and to prove it, I began with two authentic quotes, and the date I started skewing history, a practice I would use in more than half my Roosevelt stories. I also got to use my second favorite historical character, a scalawag named John Boyes, whose two memoirs I was able to bring back into print in a series of classic African adventures I edited a few years ago.
Bully! was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula for Best Novella in 1991, and the Teddy Roosevelt stories were off and running.
***
1
“At midnight we had stopped at the station of Koba, where we were warmly received by the district commissioner, and where we met half a dozen of the professional elephant hunters, who for the most part make their money, at hazard of their lives, by poaching ivory in the Congo. They are a hard-bit set, these elephant poachers; there are few careers more adventurous, or fraught with more peril, or which make heavier demands upon the daring, the endurance, and the physical hardihood of those who follow them. Elephant hunters face death at every turn, from fever, from the assaults of warlike native tribes, from their conflicts with their giant quarry; and the unending strain on their health and strength is tremendous.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS “…When we were all assembled in my tent and champagne had been served out to everyone except Roosevelt—who insisted on drinking non-intoxicants, though his son Kermit joined us—he raised his glass and gave the toast ‘To the Elephant Poachers of the Lado Enclave.’ As we drank with him one or two of us laughingly protested his bluntness, so he gravely amended his toast to ‘The Gentleman Adventurers of Central Africa’, ‘for,’ he added, ‘that is the title by which you would have been known in Queen Elizabeth’s time.’
“A real man, with the true outdoor spirit, the ex-President’s sympathy with and real envy of the life we were leading grew visibly as the evening advanced; and he finally left us with evident reluctance. I, for one, was shaken by the hand three times as he made for the door on three separate occasions; but each time, after hesitatingly listening to the beginning of some new adventure by one of the boys, he again sat down to hear another page from our every-day life. We even urged him to chuck all his political work and come out like the great white man he was, and join us. If he would do this, we promised to put a force under his command to organize the hunting and pioneering business of Central Africa, and perhaps make history. He was, I believe, deeply moved by this offer; and long afterwards he told a friend that no honor ever paid him had impressed and tempted him like that which he received from the poachers of the Lado Enclave.”
—John Boyes
THE COMPANY OF ADVENTURERS
The date was January 8, 1910.
***
Roosevelt walked to the door of the tent, then paused and turned back to face Boyes.
“A force, you say?” he asked thoughtfully, as a lion coughed and a pair of hyenas laughed maniacally in the distance.
“That’s right, Mr. President,” said Boyes, getting to his feet. “I can promise you at least fifty men like ourselves. They may not be much to look at, but they’ll be men who aren’t afraid to work or to fight, and each and
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