The Self-Made Man

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There was another dimension of the young Roosevelt's determined embrace of vigor: his wholehearted encounter with nature, sometimes as a naturalist, sometimes as a hunter. It shaped his life and his enduring image. Nature provided the setting for his struggle to make himself strong, and it opened up a world of scientific discovery at the same time. Roosevelt always remembered the day during his boyhood when he was walking up Broadway and spotted a dead seal on display in a market. Fascinated by the animal, he went back to see it again and again and eventually took its skull home to study. It was the first of countless natural-history projects.

Roosevelt began to collect animal specimens, including fireflies and squirrels. He filled his notebooks with drawings and life histories of animals and insects, such as the common black ant, and then read Darwin and Huxley, who helped him ponder how Homo sapiens coexisted with the so-called lesser creatures. When the American Museum of Natural History unpacked 2,200 mounted creatures from the collection of the Verreaux brothers, French naturalists, the unabashed young Theodore donated his own mounted menagerie--a bat and 12 mice.

Delighted to see that his son loved nature, Thee took him camping and encouraged his interest in biology and dissection. Mittie was not so enthusiastic. Dead-animal stink and the reeking chemicals used to preserve hides upset the decorum of her parlor. But nature and the science of nature were the solace of Roosevelt's invalid childhood, a refuge where he could achieve intellectual mastery at a young age. Under his father's loving tutelage, T.R. fashioned himself into a naturalist whose specimens can be viewed in museums today; scientists later welcomed him as an equal into their debates about how to classify species.

When Thee died of cancer at age 46, Theodore, then 19, was overcome by grief, but within a year he fell in love with a Brahmin beauty named Alice Lee, who found his stories of hunting in the Maine woods charming. Just before they wed in the fall of 1880, he went West to hunt with his brother Elliott. He hoped life in a saddle and breathing the open air all day would build up his strength once more. On the trail, he fell in love again, this time with the American West.

By the time he graduated from Harvard, T.R. had made himself the most experienced outdoorsman in a class filled with the sons of wealth and comfort. And his fierce determination to make his life count for something larger than his own interests sent him into writing and politics and the study of history. Indeed, even as he settled into married life with Alice and attended Columbia Law School, T.R. turned back to nature. He eventually bought two ranches in the Dakota Territory, where he could raise cattle to sell to the Eastern markets and at the same time retreat for health-giving hunts when his life in the East permitted.

Thus began the pattern of his adulthood, to work fiercely in the East for the causes he cared about, writing and politicking, until he was so weary that he headed West to regain his health. Nature replenished him when he was depleted. When Alice died in February 1884, shortly after giving birth to a daughter who would share her name, T.R. headed to the Dakotas to find solace for his grief.