Forging a President by William Hazelgrove

Author:William Hazelgrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621575580
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2017-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

19

THE REFORMER AND THE RANCHER

1886

Theodore’s father had been done in by Tammany Hall bosses when he became the Collector of Customs for the port of New York. President Hayes had made the appointment, but Boss Conklin decided his fate and deemed he would never be confirmed. The “collectorship row” went on for months and months, and Teddy made a connection between the stomach cancer that killed his father and the corruption that was Tammany Hall. In Albany, young assemblyman Roosevelt was a staunch reformer who ultimately found himself on the wrong side of things when he went against his own party and became a pariah. But when Roosevelt saw injustice, he became magnetized to the iron bar of right. What better place to bring out this sword anew than in the West where the cattle industry, while bustling, was also hopelessly disorganized and unruly.

Raising cattle depended upon cooperation. It was customary for a rancher’s cattle to range freely and feed on other people’s land, including that of other ranchers. It was only through a community “roundup” that all the cattle were brought in and sorted out according to brand. Big ranchers could and did take advantage of small ranchers and were perfectly capable of having a “private roundup” and shipping other ranchers’ cattle to market as their own, and there was nothing anyone could do.

Enter Theodore Roosevelt. After working on his house for several days, he set out for the Maltese Cross ranch with Dow and Sewall. Of course, he did it in a blinding snowstorm, as he later related to his sister: “It was late at night when we reached the Merrifield’s and the thermometer was twenty degrees below zero. As you may imagine, my fur coat and buffalo bag have come in very handily. I am now trying to get up a stockman’s association, and in a day or two, unless weather is too bad, I shall start up the river with Sewall to see about it.”1

Roosevelt quickly became the mounted politician of the West, stopping along the way at various ranches to convince fifteen or twenty men to join the new organization he proposed. Sewall and Dow accompanied “the boss” as they crossed the plains. Apparently, it worked. An editorial appeared in the Bismarck Weekly Tribune on December 12. “Theodore Roosevelt, who used to be a great reformer in the New York Legislature but who is now a cowboy, pure and simple, calls a meeting of the stockmen of the West Dakota region to meet at Medora, December 19th, to discuss topics of interest, become better acquainted, and provide for a more efficient organization. Mr. Roosevelt likes the West.”2

Roosevelt slowly brought parts of his old life into the new, almost as if he were renovating himself, keeping some parts but discarding others. Certainly, the new life of the cowboy rancher was the core of the new man, and now he was hanging the ornaments he chooses; a personage but not yet a personality. Meanwhile he was building up to another hunting trip, but there was ranching still to be done in winter.

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