The Boy Who Grew Strong
Not in a Log Cabin
Theodore Roosevelt, unlike Abraham Lincoln, was not born in a log cabin. On the contrary, he was born to wealth and position in the City of New York.
He was reared in an elegant home and educated in one of the famous universities of the Country. He read law, but he had no need to practise a profession. His father had retired from business, and there was no occasion for the son to take up a business career.
But Theodore Roosevelt preferred for himself a life of toil—the strenuous life.
Ill-health was the first and greatest of all his disadvantages. “When a boy,” said he, “I was pig-chested and asthmatic.”
From earliest infancy he was called to battle with asthma. It lowered his vitality and threatened his growth. His body was frail, but within was the conquering spirit. He determined to be strong like other boys.
In this, he had the loving help of gentle parents. On the wide back porch of their home in the City of New York, they fitted up a gymnasium, where he strove for bodily vigour with all his might. Although at the start, his pole climbing was very poor, he kept trying until he got to the top. He would carry his gymnastic exercises to the perilous verge of the window ledge, more to the alarm of the neighbours than of his own family.
In the Wide Out-of-Doors
Summer was the season of Roosevelt’s delight. Then he ceased to be a city boy. At his father’s country place on Long Island, he learned to run and ride, row, and swim. And when the long sleepless nights came, the father would take his invalid boy in his arms, wrap him up warmly, and drive with him in the free open air through fifteen or twenty miles of darkness.
The boy had his father’s love of the woods and the fields. He studied and classified the birds of the neighbourhood, until he knew their songs and plumage and nests. He and his young friends could be relied on to find the spot where the violets bloomed the earliest, and the trees on which the walnuts were most plentiful, as well as the pools where the minnows swarmed, and the favourite refuge of the coon.
He was taken to Europe, in the hope that it would benefit his health, “a tall thin lad with bright eyes and legs like pipestems.”
When at last, he was ready to go to college, he had vanquished his enemy, ill-health, and was ready to play a man’s part in life.
“I made my health what it is,” he said later, “I determined to be strong and well, and did everything to make myself so. By the time I entered Harvard, I was able to take part in whatever sports I liked. I wrestled and sparred, and I ran a great deal, and, although I never came in first, I got more out of the exercise than those who did, because I immensely enjoyed it and never injured myself.
Busting Broncos
After leaving college, young Roosevelt entered politics. Finally, between legislative sessions, he surrendered to his impulses and started for the Wild West.
He left the train in North Dakota at the little town of Medora. The young visitor from the East, sought out two hunters and told them that he wished to go buffalo hunting with them. And he did so, though hunting the buffalo then was no fancy pastime.
It was, in truth, a rare chance to see the Wild West in the last glow of its golden age. Soon it was all to vanish and pass into the most romantic chapter of American history.
Before his first visit was at an end, he had become a ranchman.
The young master of Elkhorn Ranch, brave, outspoken, and always ready to bear his full share of toil, and hardship, was not long in winning the respect and hearty good-will of the bluff, honest men of the Bad Lands.
After only a little experience in ranching, he learned to sit in his saddle and ride his horse like a life-long plainsman.
But he never pretended to any special fondness for a bucking bronco; and a story is told of a trick played on him by some friendly persons in Medora.
He was in town, waiting for a train that was to bring a guest from the East. While he was in a store, the jokers placed his saddle on a notoriously vicious beast, which they substituted for his mount.
When he came out, in haste to ride around to the railway station, he did not detect the deception.
Once, he was on the horse’s back, the bronco bucked and whirled to the amusement of the grinning villagers. But to their amazement, the young ranchman succeeded in staying on him and spurring him into a run.
Away they flew to the prairies, and soon back they raced in a cloud of dust and through the town. The friend from the East arrived, and joined the spectators, who waited to see if the young squire of Elkhorn ever would return.
In a little while, he was seen coming along the road at a gentle gait. And when he reached his starting point, he dismounted, with a smile of quiet mastery, from as meek a creature as ever stood on four legs.
He had no use, however, for a horse whose spirit ran altogether to ugliness. When he first went West, he doubted the theory of the natives that any horse was hopelessly bad.
For instance, there was one in the sod-roofed log stable of Elkhorn, who had been labelled The Devil. Roosevelt believed that gentleness would overcome Devil. The boys thought it might, if he should live to be seventy-five.
After much patient wooing, Devil actually let Roosevelt lay his hand on him and pat him. The boys began to think that possibly there was something in this new plan of bronco busting.
One day, however, when his gentle trainer made bold to saddle and mount him, Devil quickly drew his four hoofs together, leaped into the air, and came down with a jerk and a thud. Then he finished with a few fancy curves, that landed his disillusioned rider a good many yards in front of him.
Roosevelt sprang to his feet and on to the back of the animal. Four times he was thrown. Finally, the determined rider manœuvred Devil out on to a quicksand where bucking is impossible. And, when at last, he was driven back to solid earth, he was like a lamb.
In this rough life of the range, the young ranchman conquered for ever the physical weaknesses of his youth, and put on that rude strength which enabled him to stand before the world, a model of vigorous manhood.
James Morgan (Arranged)