Roosevelt didn’t begin life all that auspiciously. “Teedee” was a sickly child, his body weakened by asthma. It was his father who decided that he was not going to raise an invalid. Roosevelt was encouraged to swim, to take long hikes, to do everything he could to build up his body. He was picked on by bullies, who took advantage of his weakened condition, so he asked his father to get him boxing lessons. They worked pretty well. By the time he entered Harvard, he had the body and reactions of a trained athlete, and before long he was a member of the boxing team. It was while fighting for the lightweight championship when an incident occurred that gave everyone an insight into Roosevelt’s character. He was carrying the fight to his opponent, C. S. Hanks, the defending champion, when he slipped and fell to his knee. Hanks had launched a blow that he couldn’t pull back, and he opened Roosevelt’s nose, which began gushing blood. The crowd got ugly and started booing the champion, but Roosevelt held up his hand for silence, announced that it was an honest mistake, and shook hands with Hanks before the fight resumed.
It was his strength of character that led to his developing an equally strong body. His doctor, W. Thompson, once told a friend: “Look out for Theodore. He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll ever say he’s tired.” In 59 years of a vigorous, strenuous life, he never once admitted to being tired.
Roosevelt was always fascinated by Nature, and in fact had seriously considered becoming a biologist or a naturalist before discovering politics. The young men sharing his lodgings at Harvard were probably less than thrilled with his interest. He kept a number of animals in his room. Not cute, cuddly one, but rather snakes, lobsters, and a tortoise that was always escaping and scaring the life out of his landlady. Before long most of the young men in his building refused to go anywhere near his room.
Roosevelt “discovered” politics shortly after graduating Harvard (phi beta kappa and summa cum laude, of course). So he attacked the field with the same vigor he attacked everything else. The result? At 24 he became the youngest Assemblyman in the New York State House, and the next year he became the youngest-ever Minority Leader. He might have remained in New York politics for years, but something happened that changed his life. He had met and fallen in love with Alice Hathaway Lee while in college, and married her very soon thereafter. His widowed mother lived with them. And then, on February 14, 1884, Alice and his mother both died (Alice in childbirth, his mother of other causes) twelve hours apart in the same house. The blow was devastating to Roosevelt. He never mentioned Alice again and refused to allow her to be mentioned in his presence. He put his former life behind him and decided to lose himself in what was left of the Wild West.
He bought a ranch in the Dakota Bad Lands…and then, because he was Theodore Roosevelt and couldn’t do anything in a small way, he bought a second ranch as well. He spent a lot more time hunting than ranching, and more time writing and reading than hunting. (During his lifetime he wrote more than 150,000 letters, as well as close to 30 books.) He’d outfitted himself with the best “Western” outfit money could buy back in New York, and of course he appeared to the locals to be a wealthy New York dandy. By now he was wearing glasses, and he took a lot of teasing over them; the sobriquet “Four Eyes” seemed to stick. Until the night he found himself far from his Elkhorn Ranch and decided to rent a room at Nolan’s Hotel in Mingusville, on the west bank of the Beaver River. After dinner he went down to the bar — it was the only gathering point in the entire town — and right after Roosevelt arrived, a huge drunk entered, causing a ruckus, shooting off his six-gun, and making himself generally obnoxious. When he saw Roosevelt, he announced that “Four Eyes” would buy drinks for everyone in the bar — or else. Roosevelt, who wasn’t looking for a fight, tried to mollify him, but the drunk was having none of it. He insisted that the effete dandy put up his dukes and defend himself. “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” muttered Roosevelt, getting up from his chair. The bully took one swing. The boxer from Harvard ducked and bent the drunk in half with a one-two combination to the belly, then caught him flush on the jaw. He kept pummeling the drunk until the man was out cold, and then, with a little help from the appreciative onlookers, he carried the unconscious man to an outhouse behind the hotel and deposited him there for the night. He was never “Four Eyes” again.
The dude from New York didn’t limit himself to human bullies. No horse could scare him either. During the roundup of 1884, he and his companions encountered a horse known only as “The Devil”. He’d earned his name throwing one cowboy after another, and was generally considered to be the meanest horse in the Bad Lands. Finally Roosevelt decided to match his will and skills against the stallion, and all the other cowboys gathered around the corral to watch the New Yorker get his comeuppance — and indeed, The Devil soon bucked him off. Roosevelt got on again. And got bucked off again. According to one observer, “With almost every other jump, we would see about twelve acres of bottom land between Roosevelt and the saddle.” The Devil sent him flying a third and then a fourth time. But Roosevelt wasn’t about to quit. The Devil couldn’t throw him a fifth time, and before long Roosevelt had him behaving “as meek as a rabbit”, according to the same observer. The next year there was an even wilder horse. The local cowboys knew him simply as “The Killer”, but Roosevelt decided he was going to tame him, and a tame horse needed a better name than that, so he dubbed him “Ben Baxter”. The cowboys, even those who had seen him break The Devil, urged him to keep away from The Killer, to have the horse destroyed. Roosevelt paid them no attention. He tossed a blanket over Ben Baxter’s head to keep him calm while putting on the saddle, an operation that was usually life-threatening in itself. Then he tightened the cinch, climbed onto the horse, and removed the blanket. Two seconds later, Roosevelt was sprawling in the dirt of the corral. A minute later, he was back in the saddle, and five seconds later, he was flying through the air again, to land with a bond-jarring thud! They kept it up most of the afternoon; Roosevelt climbing back on every time he was thrown, and finally the fight was all gone from Ben Baxter. Roosevelt had broken his shoulder during one of his spills, but it hadn’t kept him from mastering the horse. He kept Ben Baxter, and from that day forward “The Killer” became the gentlest horse on his ranch. Is it any wonder that he never backed down from a political battle?
Having done everything else one could do in the Bad Lands, Roosevelt became a Deputy Sheriff. And in March of 1886, he found out that it meant a little more than rounding up the town drunks on a Saturday night. It seems that a wild man named Mike Finnegan, who had a reputation for breaking laws and heads that stretched from one end of the Bad Lands to the other, had gotten drunk and shot up the town of Medora, escaping — not that anyone dared to stop him — on a small flatboat with two confederates. Anyone who’s ever been in Dakota in March knows that it’s still quite a few weeks away from the first signs of spring. Roosevelt, accompanied by Bill Sewell and Wilmot Dow, was ordered to bring Finnegan in, and took off after him on a raft a couple of days later. They negotiated the ice-filled river, and finally came to the spot where the gang had made camp. Roosevelt, the experienced hunter, managed to approach silently and unseen until the moment he stood up, rifle in hands, and announced that they were his prisoners. Not a shot had to be fired. But capturing Finnegan and his friends was the easy part. They had to be transported overland more than 100 miles to the town of Dickenson, where they would stand trial. Within a couple of days the party of three lawmen and three outlaws was out of food. Finally Roosevelt set out on foot for a ranch — any ranch — and came back a day later with a small wagon filled with enough food to keep them alive on the long trek. The wagon had a single horse, and given the weather and conditions of the crude trails, the horse couldn’t be expected pull all six men, so Sewell and Dow rode in the wagon while Roosevelt and the three captives walked behind it on an almost non-existent trail, knee-deep in snow, in below-freezing weather. And the closer they got to Dickenson, the more likely it was that Finnegan would attempt to escape, so Roosevelt didn’t sleep the last two days and nights of the forced march. But he delivered the outlaws, safe and reasonably sound. He would be a lawman again in another nine years, but his turf would be as different from the Bad Lands as night is from day. He became the Police Commissioner of New York City.