and that's just the beginning really of the complexity of the thing we call a human being. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> next, roger di silvestro describes theodore roosevelt experiences as a rancher in the badlands of the dakota territory before he was president. the author reports that president roosevelt's time on the ranch shaped his thinking on the american west and wildlife conservation. this is about an hour. >> our author today has previously confessed that he first became acquainted with our 26th president through the classics illustrated centennial publication called theodore roosevelt the rough rider. from that early moment in his youth our author was influenced by the character and philosophy of that vigorous and hearty

individual. like theodore roosevelt, roger l. di silvestro is both a naturalist and a writer. also there exists another common denominator between them, roosevelt understood the american west from having lived and worked in the american west. the same is true of mr. di silvestro. mr. di silvestro's knowledge of all of america is the product of a career that has taken him all over our country. he has lived in the bronx, in san francisco, and in many places in between. if it can be said that the later workings of theodore roosevelt can only truly be understood by understanding his time out west and his hiatus from politics then it can also be said that one might well understand this critical and understudied period of roosevelt's life through the lens of mr. di silvestro. here to discuss his work, theodore roosevelt and the badlands, a young politician's

quest for recovery in the american west is roger di silvestro. thank you. [applause] >> well, thank you for that wonderful introduction. it made me even somewhat interested in my own life. thank you, too, for showing up on such a retchedly hot and humid day. i know it's really tropical out there so i'm doubly happy that you were willing to weather that and come out today. my book about theodore roosevelt tells the story of personal tragedy and recovery. and we don't usually associate tragedy with theodore roosevelt. he was just ebullient for that, you know, especially as president. but i'm not writing about the iconic theodore roosevelt who made it to mount rushmore. i'm writing about a much younger man in his mid-20s who went west to run a cattle ranch in the badlands of dakota territory and what is now north dakota. close among the montana border.

he was in extreme west north dakota. he didn't just go west as horace greeley might have urged as a young man. he was compelled to go west. events forced him in that direction. and we will get to that. but before we head off into the badlands i want to give you a little brief background on theodore roosevelt. the roosevelt aficionados are probably going to be familiar with this, but i think there's some high points in his life that we need to touch on. he started life as a city kid in new york city. and he was a member of a social elite. the knickerbocker who were people who could trace their ancestry in america back to the dutch who arrived here in the mid-1660s. he was a fairly old new york family. his grandfather was one of the five richest men in manhattan. the family made their money on glass. they produced a lot of the window glass that new york city needed as it grew. they were also into banking and a lot of wise investments in new

york real estate. young roosevelt was an avid outdoors person almost from childhood and also an avid hunter he wasn't very healthy. he was sickly as a child. he suffered from asthma and from a stomach ailment that seemed to be related to stress. it was some type of interitis that would leave him sickened fillmore time. and this would pop up during times of stress but even during happy times. if he had too good of a time he would sometimes get sick to his stomach and have to go to bed for -- sometimes for days. in his autobiography which i quote in my book roosevelt wrote i was a sickly delicate boy, i suffered much from asthma and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where i could breathe. one of my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me when i was a very small person and of sitting up in bed gasping with my father and mother trying to help me. i'm sure all these years of

sickness as a child shaped a lot of his attitudes later in life. but when he was about 12, he started a strenuous physical fitness regiment that was designed to build up his chest and help him with his breathing and his asthma. and it didn't really relieve him of asthma or enteritis but he did become much studier and much heartier so in his teens he actually won a boxing championship at the gym where he worked out and he also took -- when he went to harvard, he took trips to maine, hunting trips to maine and he would hike around in deep snows and up mountain sides and so on. he was very rugged. he was still not a robust person. he was 5'8" and 140 pounds. when he was at harvard a doctor told him he had a weak heart and roosevelt pledged he would do the opposite of that. if we could go back to october

of 1883 we find 20-year-old theodore roosevelt in the badlands of dakota territory. we would see him around horseback oftentimes in pouring rain hunting for buffalo or american bison if you prefer that term. the bison were nearly extinct in north america at that time and roosevelt wanted to kill one before they were all gone which was the fairly typical attitude among sport hunters of that time. they oftentimes were almost in a race to kill the last of a species. so in 1883 one of the few places where bison still south of canada was in the badlands which is why roosevelt we want there. he hired a guy and he went three weeks riding around tracking down bison. during those weeks, roosevelt developed a kind of an infatuation for the badlands. this kind of weird land formations they have there. the remoteness of the area appealed to him. it was a rich grassland so that he knew that you could raise

cattle in this area and also there was the hunting. the dakotas were one of the last places where you could still find most of america's big game animals and shoot them. so before returning home, roosevelt wrote a check for $14,000 and turned it over to too two men that he met up there and told them to buy some cattle for him and put them loose on the land that they claimed as their own. and they would manage these cattle for him and take a share of his profits. he was pretty trusting in this. he told the men if i didn't trust you i wouldn't give you the money. how do you know you can trust us? i just do. >> at that time a lot of easterners invested in cattle. but roosevelt thought he found a way to make money quickly and without any risk. so -- now his uncle james roosevelt who was his financial

advisor told him that cattle were really a shaky deal and he should avoid it and roosevelt forged head consequently when he returned home to new york city after his hunt in 1883, he was a rancher or a cattleman. now, he was at a good point in his life at this moment. in late 1883, his career was going well. he'd gotten himself elected to the new york state assembly at the age of 23. making him the youngest person who ever held an office there. he became one of the leading politicalit politicalit politicalites. he was a reform politician. he was part of a group of young -- mostly young politicians who were trying to root out the corruption that plagued people, you know, both the national -- i'm sorry. both the state and local levels. he was an anticorruption candidate because he was wealthy there was the sense that he couldn't be corrupted. so he quickly became kind of a hero. as a matter of fact one of his colleagues said of roosevelt, we hailed him as the dawn of a new era. he was our ideal. political success wasn't the only thing going for him in

december 1882 when he was barely 24 his first book was published. it was the naval history -- history of the naval war of 1812. it was the first of about 40 books that he would write in his lifetime and it sold three editions within three years. it became a college textbook in several schools and it could be found in every vessel in the u.s. navy because it was required to be there by regulation he was already something of an accomplished author although the book itself was pretty boring and then there was alice his wife. and this is really the heart of the story here. she was a cousin of one of his harvard classmates and he first met her at her home outside of boston in 1878 when he was a junior in college. alice was a member of the wealthy banking family in the boston area. she was quite a beauty. a relative described her as having golden hair and dove gray eyes. she stood her 5'7" which only made her an inch of theodore roosevelt. she was so bright and entereteck that her family called her

sunshine. they was quite athletic. she won tennis tournaments and she was literate. she and theodore roosevelt had matching taste in literature and they liked the same poets including longfellow and who wrote his favorite poem. and he pursued her for well over a year. she kept encouraging him and discouraging him. and at times he disparaged of ever winning her. he got so overwrought that in autumn of 1879 and in the winter of 1879 he would not go to bed he is wander around the snowy woods of cambridge, massachusetts, overnight thinking about her. one of his so fellow students he called up -- he contacted roosevelt's family and said you better come down here and talk to him. he's flipping. and roosevelt himself would later say he was nearly crazy during the year that he was pursuing her but finally in january, 1880 after much pleading on his part she agreed

to marry him and he wrote in his diary -- and during -- i focus on this period in my book and i quote extensively from his letters to her and hers to him that are quite emotional. but he wrote in his diary that if loving alice with my whole heart and soul can make her happy, she shall be happy. so there we have roosevelt in 1883. he's a rancher and a political power. he's an author and he's married to a woman he deeply loves and she's pregnant with their first child. so everything is good for theodore roosevelt at this time. but as people have been saying for thousands of years, fortune is fickle. on the morning of february 13th, 1884, roosevelt was in albany at the state assembly and he received a message saying he was now the father of a little girl. and later that afternoon, he received another message saying that his wife wasn't doing very well and he should come home. so he got on the train and headed back to new york city on a very foggy night and he didn't get home until midnight. he went to his mother's house which is where his wife was

staying during the final weeks of her pregnancy. and he knocked on the door and his younger brother, elliott, who would one day be the father of eleanor roosevelt answered the door and said immediately there's a curse on this house. not only was roosevelt's wife gravely ill but so was his mother and within the next 14 hours both his mother and wife died. his wife while he held her in his arms. his mother died of 5 for identification at the age of 48 and his 22-year-old from kidney failure. it was wright's days. the days leading up to the funeral roosevelt was in a daze and about this time he wrote in diary for joy and for sorrow my life has been lived out. he really thought it was over for him. he was never going to love again and he was probably never going to be happy again and he concluded that the only way to escape from this grinding grief was activity. it was a lot of hard work so he went back to albany and he threw himself into a lot of political work. he produced a document that was something like a million pages

long and he just kept a horrendous pace up and he also got involved in national politics. he was head of the new york delegation to the republican national convention that year and he led the fight to keep james g. blaine a former u.s. senator from maine. he tried to keep blaine from winning the nomination because blaine formed corruption. my book details that campaign a little. i tried not to go into too much detail on the things that are covered in most other books. but i do talk about that if you want more detail on it. but at any rate blaine did win the nomination and roosevelt was somewhat dismayed but nevertheless this brings us to a major turning point in roosevelt's life. a period from which he emerged much more as the theodore roosevelt that the world knows today. practically the moment the gop convention ended he got on a train and headed back to the badlands and he opened that he could settle down in the west, run his ramble, become a writer,

forget his sorrows and mend his health. now, why he chose the badlands is another question. the badlands was in the area of the last frontier which would be closed or declared closed only six years later. the badlands gave roosevelt a chance to actually live on the frontier and to be a pioneer like his heroes daniel boone and davy crockett and so on. and it would give him a chance to hunt because of all the big game which i suspect was a wonderful distraction from the depression that was haunting him at this time. and it gave him a rugged life with a lot of fresh hope so there was hope that he could recover his health and on the side, ride books and he did, in fact, write several books while he was out there and established himself as an author. now, before we go on with roosevelt, let's take a look at the badlands environment of that time. at that time was june 8th, 1884, that's when he arrived there. he got off a train in medora to go to territory, which is a

brand-new town. there were about 100 buildings there. it had only been sustained, the town about 4 or 5 months earlier. there were about 300 residents of this town permanent in transient residents. and this included miners and lumberjacks, former buffalo hunters and ranchers and former cowboys. rambling in the dakota badlands was unlike any cattle operation today. it was open range ranching which you may be familiar with. just as roosevelt did. ranchers would just buy a bunch of cattle and turn them loose along the little missouri river in this case. and the cat wool just roam around like wild animals and there was no fences and a rancher would build a house and there would be some headquarters and some outbuildings and that was the ranch and the ranchers didn't own the land. they were squatters. the land actually belonged to the federal government or to the american people and to the railroads. and, in fact, a rancher to applied for title for his land was kind of seen as suspect. why would he do that. and putting up a fence is absolutely taboo.

so this was the wide open west. and twice a year, of course, the ranchers would have to round up all their cattle and brand them so they could tell who -- you know, it's the only way of knowing whose cattle were where. and they would ship off some of the cattle to market. the roundup was a big -- almost a festival, one of the few times these folks got together in any numbers because usually they were scattered across these ranches. the men who worked the cattle range would be divided into two classes. there were cattlemen and ranchers like roosevelt who owned cattle and there were the cowboys who work for the ranchers. they were employees. contemporaries in the 1880s took a dim view of the cowboys. they were called foul mouth, drunken lecher us and utterly corrupt and it's hard to be more negative than that. roosevelt, though, cowboys were just terrific and he roman sized them in his book ranch life on

the hunting trail he wrote cowboys were hearty and self-reliant of any men who ever breathed with keen eyes that look all the world straight in the face without flinching as they flash out from under the broad breamed hats. he thought they were better than the mechanics and the workmen of the great cities. whom he thought shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath. this is a quick aside, there was a british fellow who came out to colorado in the 1860s and he claimed that he came from one of the sleepiest towns in wes ex, england and he saw a cowboy riding in town shooting off his gun probably drunk and alongside was a young woman wearing only a sha-meese and he thought this is life with a couple l so some people really like this whole thing. >> with the exception of some of the bosses and the ranchers the cattle owners, the average age of the cowboys in the 1880s was 23 or 24. and there was little on the way

of local law enforcement there. and many of the men carried guns and knives and looked for entertainment in saloons so you're mixing weapons, booze and young men which is a perfect combination fillmore civil society, i'm sure. so it may come as no surprise -- actually it is surprising that if you lived in a cowtown you were 10 to 40 times more likely to be murdered than if you lived in new york city or boston at that time. part of the process was, you know, these people had an exaggerated sense of honor and if you insulted somebody even slightly, he'd just blow you away or try to. roosevelt himself -- again this is a little aside and i don't want to run over but this is a cool story this roosevelt was discouraged to carry a gun. he was told don't bring your guns to town because there were people around town who were really good with guns and the editor told him if you bring a gun they will try to kill you

and to prove his point the editor had one of the local gunman and they threw two cans up in the air and the gunman put five holes in each can before he put the can to the ground. and roosevelt thought -- he would check them in with the editor of the newspaper when he was in town. so you have this pretty violent region going on here, life was pretty raw, but it wasn't necessarily raw enough for theodore roosevelt. the ranch that he set up outside of medora during his buffalo hunt was only 7 miles south of town and it was on one of the main trails so he got sick of people stopping in, and he established another ranch 30 miles north of medora way out in the middle of nowhere and that's where it still is today. the ranch is gone but that site is still very remote. it's all dirt roads out to it. and it takes about an hour to get there. it seems like three days. that ranch he called the elkhorn

ranch. and he put some cattle out there and in both ranches he had managers who took care of his cattle for him. he didn't really -- i mean, you know, he was a rancher and he did work on the roundups and he would occasionally do work around the ranch but mostly he was interested in writing and hunting. and he in a way could interpret hunting as a form of ranch work because he would shoot deer and so on to provide meat for that's mean. there was never ate cattle they ate mostly wild game and roosevelt spent most of his time hunting and he took long trips out to montana and wyoming to hunt grizzly bears and elk and so on. mountain goats. and then he would write books about this and he made quite a bit of money on it and he made frequent trips home to visit his family so he never stayed in the badlands more than four months at a time. during the three years or so that he was ranching he spent a total of about 360 days out there just coming and going.

foster a man was unlikely cowboy material was theodore roosevelt in 1884. his new york accent was even grating to new yorkers. it was kind of a snob accent. and also, you know, that set him apart immediately among the cowboys but then also as i said he wasn't a man of much stature weighing under 140 pounds and he also had some ex sixtee things the cowboys couldn't understand. he shaved every day and brushed his teeth every day and he also slept of his head on top of a rubber pillow and he had an inflatable pillow that he took with him and he had a rubber bathtub shipped out to him so he could take baths but that wasn't even the end of it. he also had some special soap that he liked and he would send -- he would ask his sisters to send him large quantities of this special soap that he wanted

'cause he didn't want to have to use castillian soap. and to top it all off he wore glasses -- cowboys did not wear glasses and that was considered a real sign of weaknesses. and if all that weren't enough, he bought himself a fringed suede suit, you know, which is what he's wearing on the cover of the book here and that was, of course, of him a major symbol. that's what daniel boone wore and so he was on the frontier and he had this fringed outfit and he also had a knife made for him at tiffany's and he had guns that he had, you know, ivory handles put on with the initials put on him and you can imagine going to tiffany's to order a knife but this is roosevelt. and so one cowboy when he met him at this time said roosevelt was a slim anemic looking fellow dressed in the exaggerated style which was considered indisputable style of a unique tenderfoot when you run around

guys with guns and knives you don't want to be ranked a tenderfoot and you wanted to be a man among men and a chance to prove himself popped up again and again as you can imagined again in that environment and he proved himself very well. arguably the most important incident of this sort -- i talk about several of his interactions with people and his most famous one took place as montana where roosevelt stopped in one night after he'd spent the day riding around looking for some lost horses and he checked into a hotel and he went into the hotel saloon and he was immediately confronted by a man with a gun in each hand who had been drunk and had been shooting holes in the saloon clock. and the -- he also was intimidating everyone in the forcing people to buy drinks so when roosevelt came in and he called roosevelt four eyes and told him it was time to buy a round of drinks for everyone in the place and roosevelt tried to avoid the guy and he went to take a table behind the stove where he hoped he wouldn't be seen and the fellow said buy a

under roof drinks so roosevelt stood up and said, well, if i've got to, i've got to and roosevelt was a trained boxer. so what he felt to do was bunch the lights out of this guy which he did. he socked him three times in the jaw. the man fell backwards, his guns went off and the fellow hit his head on the bar and knocked himself senseless. so roosevelt took his guns and the patrons in the bar who were probably much happier now than they were before roosevelt showed, took this fellow and dumped him in a shed behind a saloon and the next day the fellow jumped the freight and left town. this story immediately spread all over the area and roosevelt -- you know, people began thinking he may be a pretty cool guy after all even though he wears glasses and has kind of a weird suit. and so that started to help his reputation a lot. i mean, i found interviews with folks who knew him back then and they said that was the stepping-off point for him in the west but he also proved himself in tamer ways. he worked side-by-side with the

cowboys and the ranchers and he worked very hard. and, you know, this was an area where you don't built a reputation on your family name or your social connections or your wealth. it was based on how you performed as an individual. and roosevelt performed very well. on his first roundup, the cowboys really began to have a good impression of him. on that first roundup about 60 cowboys spent five weeks riding for 200 miles down the little missouri river valley scooping up all the cattle they could find for 50 miles on each side of the river. and they were also driving -- there were several thousand cattle and they were also driving along several hundred horses because if you had 60 riders you needed about 6 to 10 horses per person to do this work. and so there was a lot of work involved in just herding these animals along. the cowboys soon noticed that roosevelt was extremely tough. he could ride all night long and then the next day ride another hundred miles. the next occasion he rode for 40

straight hours and wore out 40 horses before he himself took a nap. the cowboys really admired his willingness to pitch in to the extent he could. he wasn't a good roper because that takes almost a lifetime of practice and his eyesight wasn't very good but they recognized that he could do -- that he did what he could. and one of the tougher ranch foreman's said that four eyed maverick has sand in his craw aplenty which was a high praise in the west here. you want sand in your craw. now, the effort he put into ranch, he transferred. what a change. last march avenues pale thin man with a thin voice and a general look of dispepia he's brown as a berry and increased 30 pounds in weight the voice is hearty and strong to drive oxen. he was also losing the eastern accent which they thought was a good idea but the badlands wasn't a complete success but he

still suffered emotionally over alice's death. he told one of his ranch managers in regard to alice he was beyond any healing and his ranch manager said, who had also lost his we've recently, started to console roosevelt and roosevelt cut him off and said now, don't talk to me about time will make a difference. time will never change me in that respect. of course, we know that's not a good idea to say never and always. but roosevelt had no intention to remarry. he felt that do remarry within months and even years after his wife's death would be a sign of kind of ethical and moral collapse and a real lack of fidelity. and this idea was as much a product of his times and his social class as it was of himself but he still had a serious temptation that he had to teal with and this was a slim woman and her name was edith karo. he had known her since they were both little kids. they'd grown up together and when he was in his teens, he

even proposed to her more than once and she turned him down. or at least that's what she said later. and it's probably true. edith was also a friend of roosevelt's sister anna. anna was the sister whom roosevelt left his daughter, his baby girl when roosevelt came to new york he would stay with his sister on madison avenue because he didn't have a house at that time. edith would sometimes stay overnight at anna's house so roosevelt said well, listen warn me if edith is going to be show up because i won't -- i'll make sure i'm not there. well, one day, there was no warning and he arrived at anna's house and he stepped inside and here came edith walking toward him down the main staircase. this is probably an early october 1885, barely a year and a half after alice died. so they struck up a conversation and a relationship progressed really quickly and by quickly, i mean, the six weeks later he proposed to her and she accepted.

so after that, you know, he felt -- he felt very guilty this whole betrothal really ate at him and he would pace around saying i have no constancy. and they kept their wedding secrets quiet and they were so secret that anna didn't know it and me planned to get married in england where they could avoid the press and the "new york times" in august 1886 when roosevelt was out in the badlands published a story saying that he was engaged to edith karo. and there's a little side story to this because anna immediately wrote an incensed letter to the "new york times" letter and said, apologize and retract it. that's not true at all because she didn't know and the "new york times" did retract the story when she sent -- you know, the news of this development to roosevelt, you can imagine his chagrin because. he had to contact anna and tell

her, well, guess what, i am engaged, you know. and he said no one will reproach me as much as i will for having gotten engaged and it's my fault, not edith's don't blame her. but apparently the wedding was not a big political setback because the republican party ran him for the mayoral candidacy in new york in 1886. it was a three-way race. and no one really expected roosevelt to win. or i should say the republican party to win. and there were a lot of machinations involved which are in the book but i won't go into it right now. but roosevelt did lose the election. and shortly after that, he headed to england and he and edith got married so the question now what's he going to do with the ranch? well, edith wasn't the type of women who would live in a log cabin in frontier but nature kind of took over. i'd just been giving a five-minute warning so i'm going to breeze through some of this. the price of cattle really collapsed and so roosevelt knew economically it just wasn't

tenable anymore and then came the winter of '86, '87 when the blizzards struck and drifts built up 100 feet deep along the little missouri river. temperatures fell to minus 40 degrees fahrenheit. and by spring, 75% of the cattle in the badlands were dead. roosevelt lost about 65%. some lost 95. so he knew that it was pretty much over but at any rate, his political career was revising and he was going to probably give up the ranching thing anyway. ..

degrasse rants were destroyed by too many cattle and horses were being killed off. he set out to protect habitat and protect wildlife, and they did so with a lot of confessing and they still exist today that organization. as president had a lot to do with the creation of the wildlife refuge system and the national parks system marty existed but he added five more parts to it. now, in his later years, roosevelt asked a friend rhetorically to guess what one part of his life including his role as new york city police commissioner and state legislator and federal service commissioner and assistant secretary of the navy, a war hero, a governor and the u.s. president, what one role in his life that active life of his, would he want to remember if for some reason he were compelled to have all but one of his memories erased? interesting he would even think

of that. he answered himself. i would take the memory of my life on the ranch with his experience as close to nature and among the men who lived there. i have had to breeze through on this and just touch some of the high points covered in the book and actually i like to think you want read it in half hour and that is time ahead. if you have any questions i would certainly be glad to answer them. [inaudible] >> yes, i skimmed past that because of the time constraints but he did go back and forth to see his daughter, but at first he would write letters home to anna and not even mention her. it was almost as if he didn't want to even think about her and gradually she starts to appear in his letters. there'll be some phrase where he will say how is she doing? her name was alice and for a while it seemed like he was reluctant to call her alice. interestingly, in terms of his first wife he never mentioned her again. when he wrote his biography she was not in it.

he never talked about her again. he obliterated her from memory, and one of his biographers said this is really kind of a pathology almost to be so extreme in his approach to dealing with her loss, and he didn't even tell his daughter about her. his daughter never heard a word about her mother from theodore roosevelt. she heard herded from anna, roosevelt sister. she never heard anything about her mother and she felt that was probably not good for her, herself either. that he turn her over to anna and when he married edith he told and that you can keep alice and edith said no. we will take alice, so roosevelt had to tell and that we are going to take her after also she was raised with his other children. she always knew she wasn't one of that set of kids. so i always felt that alice really got shafted and i think the memory of his wife was treated shabbily. that is the way he did it. anything else?

>> he lost almost all of his fortune in the badlands and then had to write a letter to -- . >> i don't think he lost all of his four fortune but he was definitely in financial distress. he lost about $20,000 at least, plus interest, and he did build a big house at sagamore hill which was in oyster bay new york. it is open to the public and you can see the head of buffalo he shot in 1883. it is on the wall out there. there were times he thought he had to sell the house and there were times when he thought about selling his favorite foxhunting horse and so on because he was financially strapped. he would occasionally in a letter say i've really have to do some writing and nixon money. and he did a lot of writing. he could get $1200 in 1880s dollars for a magazine story and i would say about $50 per dollar

by today's standards. but yeah, he was hurting after the debacle there in the badlands. anything else? >> his attitude towards the american indian at that time, -- >> when he was in the badlands one day he came across three or four indians and he immediately present they were going to attack him and he got out his rifle. i use that as a launching point to discuss roosevelt, so i talk about roosevelt in the indians which segue into talking about his whole editorial -- attitude towards race in african-americans and so on. but with the indians, his first response was to grab his rifle and when the indians road toward him he aimed at them and naturally they all backed off. one is ranch hands saw indians they would go over and talk to them and at one point some of

his ranch hands actually walked into a whole village of indians just to buy some things. so a lot of it i think was just roosevelt come in his head there was all this adventure and hostility going on and it was much more fun than thinking they were peaceful. this is just my opinion and i could be totally wrong. indians in that area were treated like -- and they were shot at. even though they were ostensibly the war was over for a number of years. consequently occasionally an indian would shoot back and one fellow was wounded by an indian at the time roosevelt was out there so you could argue, maybe he was right and maybe he would have been roughed up or they would have stolen his horse or something. his attitude, he said something as far as i'm concerned, nine out of 10 indians are -- he said i won't tell you that an indian is better off dead than alive but nine out of 10 cases that is

probably true and i wouldn't inquire too deeply into the case. and yet at the same time he once told an indian woman at the white house one of his regrets was he didn't have any indian led. so you think that is weird but he also had this idea that white people should marry with indians to wipe them out so you don't know what to make of all this. roosevelt fans ghetto -- annoyed with me for bringing this up but these were things he said. his attitude was probably very complex. he invited, george washington carver to the white house for dinner. booker t., booker t. washington to the white house and he was just trounced for that. he was just reviled for doing that. and yet at the same time when he ran on the bull moose party he tried to keep blacks from, you try he tried to limit their vote he does it would not have been well for him, you know. so, it is a very mick's bag.

i don't think with roosevelt you can say well he was this or that. he seemed to be whatever he was at the moment. anything else? >> did he ever, when he ran for presidency on his own or later, did he ever go back? >> yes, he did and in fact i closed the book up to the prologue with this. he did go back actually when he was running as vice president and again i think in 05, and he went back. he visited the folks he knew there. he picks people out of the crowd to come up on the stage with him and at one point in the journey he was crossing the dakotas and he went on the back of a train. there was just this place and he wanted to be seated alone. he had the porter closed the door and not let anyone see him. he sat there alone with his memories and marries thought that was a great image. but even up to six months before

he died he was in montana and he saw one of the old people that he knew from the ranch in this would have been in, i think it was november of 1918. he died in january of 1919 and he saw one of his old pals. he had the guy sure hotel room with him and so on. i went through a lot of his letters and the library of congress which is presidential stuff which was way after the period i'm dealing with. i did that because he kept in touch with a lot of people he knew around the ranch for years so right up until he died he was writing letters back and forth. in fact he promised them he was going to visit in 1919 for the roundup that summer but he died before he got there. anything else? >> we know so many presidents have shaped their image and been very conscious about it and even the cover for your book is such a dashing frontier, frontiersmen

image. can you talk a little bit about how conscious roosevelt was as shaping his image even in his early years? was he contemplating his return to politics and how this period would play into that? >> yeah, politically he kind of gave up his career and felt that his career was over because he had opposed james blaine and then later on he backed him. some politicians were really angry with him for backing blaine but roosevelt felt he had to -- you have to party loyalty. there is no point in having convention if you are not going to support the guy you want. said he decided to support lane after all. he thought that ready much killed his career, at least that is what he said. at the same time there were people trying to get them to run for congress so i'm not sure how much of that was his own drama. my career is dead but in fact you look at his life and you don't see evidence of that. even at this time that this photo was taken when he was

about 24 or 25 that he was still trying to come back to a political career and when he was in the dakotas and newspaper reporter said to him, you know you could be president some day. roosevelt said yeah, i could. he didn't treated as a surprise of the editor have this impression that roosevelt probably was already thinking about this at that time. he continued to be active politically. he campaigned for blaine and other candidates and so on and in terms of lineage he was an image conscious person. he told william howard taft don't ever let them and take a picture of me playing golf or tennis. one of the famous photos is roosevelt was well aware that was a great image. you will see a lot of pictures of roosevelt on a horse in the spanish-american war uniform and so on. the picture on the book was taken in the studio in new york. he got all suited up. he doesn't have his glasses on, and if you see the full picture you can see there is grass at

his feet and so on. he had these pictures shot for his first book about life on the ranch which he did after he had only had six months experience out there. so he was really pushing this image of i am this frontiersmen. if you read the stories that he tells in his books, you know what was really going on, he will give the impression that he was hunting buffalo all by himself and he did this on his own when in fact he had a guide with him who said okay shoot at buffalo where that yellow spot is behind his front leg and you will kill it. that is all missing from his account of it. so when the book came out, he was widely ridiculed for these photos of him in his suit. on the other hand, it was not uncommon for guys back then who had been out west to have the studio pictures taken of themselves and put them in books. it was really kind of a trend and he was part of it but still people liked it.

[inaudible] >> i talked at some length about his political decision and about new york politics at that time, because new york politics were terribly corrupt and the feeling was that people were losing tons of money and tax dollars because of the corruption but nobody cared because nobody bothered to take the time or pay attention to what was going on. there was a sense that -- there is always this story that roosevelt was getting into something unsavory but he had relatives who had served in congress and who had been senators. a senator if i remember correctly. these were other relatives and, but what he did was he was at the state level and not the federal level and i expect that is where he was considered a little unsavory. and, he knew that his family probably wasn't going to approve of this and i do quote some of his relatives saying that we just thought this was terrible and his father never would