The Glory of Work and the Joy of Living

Theodore Roosevelt authored more than 30 books, more than any other president, and everyone should read some of them, including TR’s autobiography, from which the paragraphs below are taken. They're at the beginning of Chapter 4, “In Cowboy Land,” in which he recounts his adventures in the Badlands of Dakota Territory in the 1880’s.

THOUGH I had previously made a trip into the then Territory of Dakota, beyond the Red River, it was not until 1883 that I went to the Little Missouri, and there took hold of two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte and the Elkhorn.

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis," gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we led a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burned our faces. There were monotonous days, as we guided the trail cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of walks; and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brimmed with running ice. We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.

You can still buy the book, “Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography,” most anywhere. It was published by McMillan in 1913 and is still in print. Bartleby has put it online and you can go here if you just want to read the chapter on his time as a cowboy.

Clay Jenkinson has a very good biographical essay entitled “What Theodore Roosevelt Learned In The American West” at the Theodore Roosevelt Center’s website.

Of course, Roosevelt is the subject of many, many biographies. One of my favorites is “Mornings On Horseback” by David McCullough. McCullough recounts the first meeting between TR and Dr. Victor Hugo Stickney of Dickinson. Stickney treated Roosevelt’s blistered feet after he had just walked 45 miles through the muddy spring gumbo of western North Dakota to deliver three boat thieves to jail in Dickinson.

An excerpt:

“He impressed me and he puzzled me,” wrote Stickney years afterward, “and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability, and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier.”

TR was asked to give the Fourth Of July Speech in Dickinson that year (1886). McCullough prints a part of it, including this:

“It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is he way in which we use it.

“I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity; like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads—and herds of cattle too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we are to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as in the case of Europe; we rule ourselves. All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.”

On the train back to Medora later in the day, Theodore sat with Arthur Packard, the editor-proprietor of The Bad Lands Cow Boy, and remarked to Packard that he thought now he could do his best work “in a public and political way.” “Then,” responded Packard, “you will become President of the United States.”

Well, it was almost like Roosevelt saw that his ranching days in North Dakota were coming to an end. The following winter of 1886-87 was the fiercest on record in the Northern Plains. Most of the cattle on the open range died. We’ve had bad winters since, even in our lifetime, but in frontier days there were no tractors, front end loaders, bulldozers, and even helicopters, to get feed to starving cattle. So they starved. Roosevelt severely downsized his ranching operations and no longer stayed active in the business. He had lost most of his cattle, and in the end, a sizeable chunk of his inheritance. He continued to visit the Badlands until his death, mostly to hunt or for politics.

A good list of Roosevelt literature can be found at the website of the Theodore Roosevelt Center in Dickinson.

“Ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.”

Those are indeed some of the best words ever written about North Dakota.