Theodore Roosevelt was born in the heart of New York City in 1858, the second of four children. He has been characterized as a sickly child but he was actually energetic, although he did suffer from severe asthma attacks. At 11 years old he was able to hike the Alps with his father, stride for stride, and later took up boxing after being pummeled by two older boys. By the time he was in his late teens he was a robust physical specimen and his asthma attacks were far less frequent.
Though Roosevelt was homeschooled and didn’t attend one of the proper prep schools, he went off to Harvard University at age 18. His father, whom he loved and admired greatly, told him to take care of his morals and health first—and then his studies. He took his father’s advice to heart and not only seems to have been a paragon of moral rectitude, but also was a top performer on the varsity rowing and boxing teams. He also excelled in the classroom, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and finishing in the top 12 percent of his class. His achievement was all the more impressive because his father had died two years earlier.
With the inheritance Roosevelt received he could have settled into a life of indulgence and indolence. Instead, he entered Columbia Law School in the fall of 1880. At nearly the same time he married the love of his young life, Alice Lee. After a year at Columbia, the political bug bit him and he was elected to the New York Assembly. He was in his second term when tragedy struck. His wife gave birth to a daughter on Feb. 12, 1884, but two days later his mother died of typhoid fever and his wife of kidney failure. The double blow left Roosevelt devastated. For a time he threw himself into political work with a vengeance, but he soon decided to seek solace in the frontier West.
Roosevelt had first experienced the West on a hunting trip to Dakota Territory in 1883. He roughed it on several hunts, enjoying himself immensely. He also bought a ranch, the Maltese Cross, and stocked it with cattle. Now he was returning to his ranch, not for a visit but to settle. It would be these years in the West that contributed mightily to shaping him into the man America would come to admire—a man who was part cowpuncher, which helped make the cowboy a symbol of our country. Without his time and experiences in what was still the Old West, Roosevelt would not have organized the Rough Riders, not have led the charge up San Juan Hill, and not have become president. The general public today knows next to nothing about this period in his life and textbooks generally dismiss his Western years in a sentence or two.
In June 1884, Roosevelt got off the Northern Pacific Railway at the town of Medora, founded only the year before by a French nobleman turned rancher, the Marquis de Mores, and named for his wife. At the western edge of Dakota Territory near the border with Montana Territory, Medora was in the heart of the Badlands. Despite the name and its rugged terrain, the Badlands had thousands of acres of grasslands, especially in the valley of the Little Missouri River where the town and several cattle ranches developed. (Read more.)
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