 I wanted to spend some time doing two things. I want to talk about this journey that Theodore Oso made in 1903 across the country. And he came through North Dakota on that journey. But I also am doing it, in a certain sense, to showcase the digital treasures that we're starting to collect here at Dickerson. We're in this relationship, as I said earlier, with the Library of Congress. And I have the great joy of giving to go up the Library of Congress from time to time and decide what's next. We have certain appropriations per annum for the next 20 or so years. And we have to decide how we want to spend those digitization funds. And I've been very interested in getting films of Roosevelt. And if you were here last year, we've showed that extraordinary film that I discovered that was done by Herman Hagegaard in 1919. Just months after TR's death, Hagegaard came out here. That film will be a centerpiece of next year's National Theodore Roosevelt Association meeting. We're remastering it and making a documentary film about Herman Hagegaard and the making of that film. And when I was last at the Library of Congress to talk about the next steps, I wanted photographs from the 1903 journey. And you'll see some of them. They're absolutely extraordinary. But there's a book on this subject by Richard Ellis called Presidential Travel from George Washington to George W. Bush. And it's really a fascinating book about the history of presidential travel. Some presidents did travel much, Thomas Jefferson. Some presidents traveled a fair amount. George Washington was one of them. James Monroe was one of them. And some presidents have traveled incessantly at Theodore Roosevelt, as you might expect. It was one. And there are two journeys that we've sort of been talking about today. One was the journey he made in 1906, the first president ever to leave this country during his tenure in office. One he would either went to Panama. And another one was in 1903 when Roosevelt traveled across the United States. This is a photograph I'll come back to from that journey. We're fortunate in that news photographers were assigned to that journey. Leslie's Weekly was a prominent weekly. It's important for that era, say, as Life Magazine was to the 1950s. And they had the capacity to produce photographs. And photographers were sent. There were stenographers, newspaper men followed the journey. And so this was one of the best publicized presidential journeys in American history. And just to get right out of it, here are the statistics. 14,000 miles, 25 states, none of the south, by the way. 150 towns. He gave five major policy addresses. 262 speeches, most of which we have in one form or another. And he was traveling in a seven car presidential train. I'll show that to you. The purposes of the trip of vacation was to use a very, very hard worker. And when the congressional session was on, Roosevelt worked really like a demon. He also, at this is a point when presidents really were not, according to American tradition and protocol, permitted to campaign for their reelection. They did, of course, but they had to do it so much slyly. And McKinley famously didn't campaign at all. He just stayed on his porch at Canton, Ohio. And groups would come to him. And he would then receive them. But it was thought to be un-dignified for a sitting president to do much, by the way, of overt campaigning. So a year before, 1904, the number Roosevelt wants to be re-elected in the worst possible way. He wants to be elected in his own right. He goes on this immense trip. It was effectively a campaign trip. And it was enormously successful in that matter. And to reconnect with the West, which was always a really important part of Roosevelt's sense of himself. And Roosevelt is a term that's used in cultural studies, that there was something called renaissance self-fashioning. In the renaissance, people actually decided what character they wanted to present to the world. And they fashioned or refashioned themselves in that manner. If ever there was a person who deliberately refashioned himself, it was Theo Noroso. And that refashioning occurred right here on the frontier in Western North Dakota. Those were the ostensible purposes of the trip. He also had a whole range of things that he needed to do. Dedicated libraries, a statue of McKinley in San Francisco. Wherever he went, if it coincided, he would help the groundbreaking of a new museum or a new veterans affairs building and so on. Once the public knew of his trip, and it was very well planned out long in advance, all series of events that probably would not have been attended by any significant national figures suddenly were attended by PR. So everywhere he went, he had a very elaborate set of rituals and public ceremonies. But those are the purposes of the trip. Here are the results for trip. He was in a certain sense, as you'll see in a minute, America's first rock star president. And the crowds that came out to CTR in small places like Lincoln, Nebraska, or grand eyes of Nebraska were just overwhelming. It was the greatest phenomenon of a political figure traveling the country in American history. The only rival that he had in that era was William Jennings Bride at the height of his powers in the Chicago movement. So one was that it was a successful campaign trip. Another was, and the more important one, there were two more important issues. One was that he saw California and the West Coast for the first time. Roosevelt had never been on the Pacific Coast. He fell in love with California. You can imagine how easy that would be. But he also said in California that his previous principle of expansionism had been sort of bookish up until that time. And now that he actually saw the West Coast and realized in his body how far it was from Norfolk, and Boston, and Georgetown, it gave him a greater sense of the need for American expansion. And it certainly gave him a sense of the need to knit the country together with the two ocean may and, of course, the Panama Canal. So in a sense, that journey deepened his sense that America had an imperial mission in the world and a much more important one to protect our Western coasts and harbors and Hawaii from possible aggression. And so that experience of seeing the coast really deep in some of the principles that Roosevelt had been espousing for a long time. But the big one from my point of view is conservation. This is where Roosevelt saw the Grand Canyon for the first time. He went to Yosemite for the first time. He saw redwood trees for the first time. And you'll see from his responses that it was an overwhelming experience for him. It deepened his conservation principles. It added to his conservation agenda. For example, when he saw the Grand Canyon, he was so moved by it that he decided that when he got back to Washington, he was going to push to make it a national park. He was unable to accomplish that because that would require congressional action. During Roosevelt's presidency, he doubled the size of our national park system from five units 10. One of them in North Dakota sold his hill on the double plate. But he didn't accomplish nearly as much in that way as he would have liked to have done because Congress was reluctant. Speaker of the House Joe Kahn said famously, and I quote, not one cent for scenery. And so Roosevelt is up against a very skeptical and reluctant Congress. And so because he couldn't get the Grand Canyon designated as a national park, he did, for him, the next best thing. By an executive order, he designated it as a national monument. It immediately became the largest national monument at 828,000 acres. Exceeding by 825,000 acres, Congress's original intent, the original intent of the National Monuments and Antiquities Act, that it would protect very small parcels where there were Anasazi ruins or something of that sort. Five acres was thought to be about the right size for a national monument, so TR, names one at 828,000 acres, thus expanding the attention of Congress with respect to national monuments. But it later, as you know, graduated Grand Canyon into a national park. So the conservation impact on Roosevelt actually seen these wonders. And before I go on with that, let me just say a word about that. Today, I was this summer with my mother and some others in the troop on a cruise where we went to Egypt and we saw the pyramids and the Sphinx and it was magnificent. But in a sense, we had already seen them all of our lives because we've seen photographs of them, we've seen video, we've seen documentaries, we've seen A&E History Channel, you can get 3D examinations of them on the web. We live in an mediated world where everything is mediated and pre-mediated. And so in a sense, you never see anything fresh in our world because you've already seen it in high definition all of your life. That wasn't true in Roosevelt's time. When he saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, he probably would have seen some grainy newspaper photographs of it or some illustrations from Dutton or others. But people then didn't have the fund of mediated experience that we take for granted in our time. So it was easier to be overwhelmed by the sublimity of something than it is now when we're so used to this sort of mediation. To keep that in mind, it was a much more visceral and raw experience to see the Grand Canyon for the first time for him than it would be saved for my daughter. This is the most important document we have that describes that journey is a letter that he wrote to John Hay. John Hay is one of the most interesting men of the 19th century. He was TR Secretary of State until 1905, but John Hay as a young man, as a boy, had been one of Abraham Lincoln's private secretaries. So he had been private secretary to Roosevelt's principal presidential hero, Abraham Lincoln. He had served in one extraordinary capacity after the next all of his life and in McKinley's administration, he's named Secretary of State and he hangs on to serve that function for TR. He had a very interesting and complex relationship with TR, but eventually he sort of came to love and admire him. And as a young man, Hay had regarded himself as a man of letters. In fact, he participated in the massive multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, but he also wrote something called the Pike County Battle. The Pike County Battle is not read anymore, but they were a very important part of the literary history of the United States at the time. Hay, there were two things that make them interesting. One is that Hay was trying to pick up the vernacular of the frontier, much as Mark Twain was attempting to do, to really open his ear and listen to the speaking style of the American heartland and to try to get it down on paper. This was part of our cultural war of independence against Great Britain, but Twain and people like him were trying to take down the American sense of dialect and not merely continue along the lines of English novels, of English literature. And secondly, Hay sort of had a slightly ironic nostalgia for the small town values of the heartland. There's a slight condescension in the way that he describes the virtues of these small Midwestern towns, but there's also considerable affection. And so he was famous for having written that set of poems in his youth. When Roosevelt wrote this letter, he wrote it after he got back from the journey. The journey began on April 1st, 1903, and it ended on June 5th, 1903, and then on August 9th, a couple of, a few weeks later, Roosevelt wrote about a 12-page letter to John Hay describing a treasure. And the reason that this is important is it's a rich and wonderful document, as you'll see, I'll quote a little bit from it, but also, Roosevelt was trying to write to Hay in the manner of the Pike County Valley, with a nostalgia for Middle America, with an affection for small town virtues, with a certain level of irony and condescension, and you'll see that that colors this letter. This is one of the documents from the Theater Roosevelt Center. This is from the Library of Congress. The letter was tight, so he undoubtedly dictated the letter to a stenographer. This letter you can find in the edition of Theater Roosevelt's correspondence by Helping Morrison, and it looks like any other edition of presidential correspondence, but look at how much more interesting it is when you see the actual document. Roosevelt, after it was typed up, went through it, crossed some things out, wrote some things in, added a piece here and there, and this is the type of the document. It gets even more interesting when we use handwritten documents. I'll just show you what he says here. This is one of the things you can do with digitization. He's talking about how he goes out and sees these wonderful Americans who believe in this country, who believe in him, and they're glad to see him, and he's glad to see them, and then he pencils in, and it's quite possible that they will suddenly champion some scoundrel like Nelson Myles, as they're a special hero in representative. He was involved in the quarrel with Nelson Myles. Nelson Myles was an Indian fighter, involved in the Philippine War, and he and Myles came to loggerheads over a number of issues, including the massacre of Wounded Knee, and so Roosevelt sort of steps out of his letter about his trip to write this little assault on Nelson Myles. It seems more fun when you can see it as written into the margins than when you just read it in a transcript, because of course, in a transcript, no effort was made to show it in some marginal adaptation. Here's President McKinley. Remember, Roosevelt becomes president on the death of McKinley. Here he's shown with the 25th president, Roosevelt very much wants to be elected in his own right, which is the main reason for the trip. Here he is in his office. These are the pictures from the Library of Congress that we've just received, based on the 1903 journey across America. Here he is working in his office before the journey. Here's the train that he took. Now today, we have Air Force One. This is the way you want to travel if you can. The engine, a baggage car, the Atlantic, which was a club car, the Gilsie, the diner, the Senegal, carried reporters, photographers, photographers, the Texas for the YBF staff, and then the 70-foot Pullman in Asia, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, a dining room, private kitchen, state room, and then the rear rail platform so that Roosevelt can walk in speeches. He couldn't get talks at every place they went, and so for example, in North Dakota, he gave a speech in Fargo. He gave a talk in James Town, but he made remarks in places like Driscoll or Steele or Amanda, just where you get on the back of the train and speak for five minutes and off they would go. This is the train. I just love this set of pictures, but I'm gonna show you now. This was the actual seven-car presidential train. It wasn't like Air Force One, something that was owned by the United States government. It was leased or loaned to Roosevelt by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Here it is, somewhere probably in Idaho. Here's a slightly closer look at it. Here it is from another angle. Here it is inside a cruise when the local people decorated it for the president. That's probably, I think, William Lowe, Roosevelt's private secretary. It's close up again with Lowe. No? Okay, good. Here's the platform. Speaking off the back of the platform, baggage car, Atlantic, Gilsey, Senegal, Texas, Elysian, that's where PR slept. There it is, blown up a little. Here's the first phase of the journey from April 1st to April 8th. It took him through the Midwest to the portal of Yellowstone National Park. He gave five, on this journey, he gave five major policy addresses. The rest were just talks and speeches, many of them spontaneous, but five had been written and planned well in advance. And they were, as part of this campaign, swinged into the country, they were written to explain his policies and to champion his policies for the American people. And they were then printed pervaded, not only in local newspapers, but in national newspapers all the way. In Chicago, he spoke about the Monroe Doctrine on April 2nd, and Milwaukee on the third trusts in the economy, and St. Paul on the fourth tariff policy. Remember last night, we heard that trusts in the tariff policies were ultimately related, as part of his economic reform. And Sioux Falls on April 5th labor, and then in our own Fargo on April 6th, he gave a major policy address on the Philippines. Now, I don't know how the people in Fargo reacted to that. Pretty abstract topic for Roosevelt to be engaged in, but he wasn't really yet delivering it for that. He was delivering it for the National Press, and it would have been part of the excerpts that some of you guys would have been picked up by the entire American newspaper establishment. Then he crossed from Kota on April 7th in a single day. And he went to James down to Bismarck, Bismarck, Manda, and Manda, Dickinson, Dickinson, driver, driver, Madora. He had assisted on stopping in Madora. He only, he did get to Madora until, in the evening, it was 10 or 11 p.m., and everyone had gathered and waited for him. They hoped that he would stay longer. They had even brought his old horse, Manitou, to the depot in the hopes that the president would ride Manitou. It was his old favorite horse from his time out here, so it must have been a very ancient horse indeed. And, but when Roosevelt got here, he only had time for about 30 minutes. He shook a lot of hands and gave a very brief address, and then there's a famous photograph, there it is. It was taken in Madora of Roosevelt and all of these people that he had known from an earlier stage in his life. If I can find what he said here, at Madora, this is in the letter of John Hay, at Madora, which we reached after dark, the entire population of the Badlands, down to the smallest baby, had gathered to meet me. This was formerly my home station. The older men and women I knew well, the younger ones, had been a wild, toe-headed children when I lived and worked along the little reserve. I had spent nights in their ranches. I still remember meals which the women had given me when I come from some hard expedition half-famished and sharp-set as a wolf. I had killed buffalo and elk, deer and antelopes, some of them, with others I had worked on the trail, on the calf, on the beef, on the... We had been together on occasions which we still remember when some bold rider bent his death at trying to stop a stampede and riding a mean horse over quicksand. So some swollen river which we saw in the swim. They all felt that I was their man, their old friend. And even if they had been hostile to me in the old days when we were divided by the sinister hickory and jealousies and hatreds of all frontier communities, they now firmly believe they had always been my staunch friends and admirers. They had all gathered in the town hall, shown here, which was draped for a dance, young children, babies, everyone being present. I shook hands with them all and almost each one had some memory of special association with me which he or she wished to discuss. I only regretted that I could not spend three hours with them. When I left, they were starting to finish the celebration by advance. And so that's the background of this photograph, very important to the history of Madora. He really just breezed in and out for a photo op and Joe Ferris and Sylvain Ferris, his old friends and hunting partners, guys in ranch hands, had met him in Mandan and got him on the train. And he'd ridden from Mandan all the way to Madora with them and talked to old time, some of that's in this letter. When they got to Madora in Manitou, the horse was waiting for him. The secret service would not let President Roosevelt ride Manitou. And Joe Ferris thought that Roosevelt had sort of winded out that in the old days he would have insisted on getting on the horse, but this time he did not. Here he is in a closeup. Just one of the things I wanted to do with these photographs is to show you the quality of the digitization. We digitized them at a very high resolution so they can be blown up almost and definitely without pixelating. So we'll be able to use them not only at the Theodore Roosevelt Center but in future documentaries and publications of different sorts. We haven't reached the definitive level of digitization. I'm sure that this will change over time, but we have digitized the highest standards of our own time with the help of the Library of Congress. Then he gets to Cinema Montana at the gates of Yellowstone National Park on April 8th. And from April 8th till April 24th, he's in Yellowstone National Park with his friend John Burroughs. John Burroughs is a nature writer and a naturalist, a good friend of TR's. And TR had written to him saying, if you come join me for two weeks in Yellowstone, I will get rid of all my handlers and secret service agents and it'll just be us having a wonderful late spring camping and hiking experience. This is a great story about the next two weeks. John Burroughs wrote a wonderful account of it later in his life. Roosevelt wrote a account of it himself. Douglas Brinkley's new book, Wilderness Warrior, that's been out for about a year and a half now, has a long chapter on the Yellowstone community. And it's interesting because we now know that TR did not hunt while he was in Yellowstone National Park. He very much wanted to, but he didn't in the national, he had had some bad publicity from his bear hunt in the previous November in Mississippi. And he actually wrote a head before he came out here asking for hunting dogs to be assembled because he wanted to go mountain lion hunting. At that time, the policy of the Yellowstone National Park was to kill such predator species as mountain lions. And so TR thought that he could come out, have some successful mountain lion hunts in the park. He would be doing a favor to the park and having some satisfaction for himself. But when word leaked out that the president of the United States might hunt in Yellowstone, there was a national outcry. And so they had to cancel the hunt. And so he instead used the trip for natural history purposes. He actually spent days counting elk individually, doing a kind of elk census near Mammoth. And he did one Sunday go off alone. He said he needed five or six hours of community alone with nature. And the opinions had varied as to whether he took a gun with him on that lonely soldier. But the only animal he was known to have bagged that time in Deodoros National Park is a vole. He was sitting on a horse and he saw a vole, a mouse-like creature, from the horse he jumped down and gathered it up in his hat and squeezed it to death. And then sent it to Seahart Merrier with the evident naturalist saying that he thought that he had found a new subspecies of a vole. And he had. That's how duty works. And so the only creature that we know that John Harvested in the park was this vole and even the American public seemed to forgive that. There they are in the park. At the end of that journey, on the 25th of April, 1903, he dedicated the Ark to Darwin that many of you have seen that. And he made an extraordinary statement the grand jury of the Alistair and what he called the essential democratic philosophy of the National Park system. What he meant by that was this, that in Europe, pleasure gardens were owned privately and they became resorts of the rich and people of great privilege and average people were not permitted to fish in those places, to hunt in those places or to go to those resorts. But for Roosevelt in the United States, we're going to democratize these resorts of these places not with luxury accommodations for where we would go to refresh our spirits. And so the speech that he gave was about the essential small d-democracy of the American National Park movement. Here he is in another one of his characteristic gestures. This is a close up of that speech. This is what digitization looked like before we started our project. This is a digitization from the 1990s. You can see how it pixelates. And so what we're attempting to do with the Theodore Roosevelt Center is, as I said, to bring these images to their highest possible standard. This is, these are stereococon images. You see them, I've left them in their stereococon manner for the most part. People all remember these. They have that viewing system but this is the way they exist at the Library of Congress. Here he is on a horse taking the station. After that, after that two week magical sojourn and think of how much a president's visit to a place matters to a place. Here was the 26th president of the United States doing something that McKinley would have never done, that Chester Arthur would have never done, that Brotherhood Behaz would have never done. Roosevelt is going to a national park, bringing attention to this national park movement, then getting it right and not hunting in the park. There are photographers with him and editorialists and so on. By doing this, he greatly, he brought just the right attention to the national park movement of the conservation movement that was so dear to his administration. After that, he went backwards from Gardner, Montana through parts of Wyoming and South Dakota, through Nebraska, and he wound up with the St. Louis World's Fair. There was a St. Louis World's Fair that was celebrating the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, so it was called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and he gave a speech there. There are two really interesting things about that. Number one, he gave a speech praising the Louisiana Purchase, but doing so without ever praising Thomas Jefferson. He didn't like Jefferson. He thought Jefferson was a weak president. He thought Jefferson and Madison were the two weakest of the founding fathers. He felt that Jefferson had not only disarmed the country with his frugality and his anti-naval policy, but had made the war making each world inevitable by not having a solid defense system, and that Madison had been Jefferson's lackey and had continued those very policies. So he didn't like Jefferson for that reason. He didn't like Jefferson's strict construction. He didn't like Jefferson's pacifism or Jefferson's isolationism. He didn't like Jefferson's commitment to the limited government or his philosophy of states' rights. In short, he hated Thomas Jefferson. And it's kind of ironic that they have to spend eternity next to each other on that list. Because if Jefferson had known Roosevelt, believe me, he would have not hated Roosevelt, but he would have feared Roosevelt. And so two more unlikely best fellows on Mount Rushmore could not be found. But he went to this, and so he gave this speech in which he did praise the Louisiana Purchase, which he regarded as one of the greatest events in American history. And he made it clear that it was very un-Jeffersonian for Jefferson to do that. But secondly, more important to us, his cabin, the Maltese Cross cabin, which you could see tomorrow or any day, on the grounds of the interpretive center of Taylor Roosevelt National Park. That cabin has a long and interesting history. And after Roosevelt left North Dakota, the cabin was sort of set on tour around the country. At one point, it was on the fairgrounds in Fargo for a long time. Some of you may even remember that it was on the grounds of the state capitol in North Dakota for years. But before that, it went to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1903. And it went to the Portland, Louisiana, or the Portland, Lewis and Clark Centennial in 1904. And what they did was take it apart and number all the boards, put it on a train, take it where it was going, reconstruct it. And then a plaque was put on it saying, this is Taylor Roosevelt's cabin from the Badlands of North Dakota. Here's what's so interesting about it. Roosevelt arrives to this World's Fair. He's very busy giving talks and so on. He actually meets Grover Cleveland there. They have some high-level meetings. They bring him in. It's not the only log cabin at this World's Fair. There's a Lincoln cabin and there's several others. And they take Roosevelt up to the Malkins Cross cabin and say, well, is this it? And Roosevelt said, oh, no, no, it doesn't really look like it. Then they had to bring in Sylvain Ferris and Sylvain Ferris and say, yeah, that's it, boss. Roosevelt said, yes, this is definitely it. But it was so quickly. We just talked about out of context. The cabin was so far out of context. And the roof had changed several times. The president of Roosevelt literally wasn't sure that he would see this cabin that was meant to be symbolic of his Western cowboy life. After that, Roosevelt goes back into the West across Kansas. I want to come back to this before we end, just for personal purposes. And goes to Denver. Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and over to the Grand Canyon, where he arrives on the 6th of May. After that, just to move the story forward, he goes to Barstow and Redlands and San Bernardino and Claremont in Los Angeles off the coast and winds up on the 15th of May at the portal of the Yosemite Park, where he spends four days with John Muir. John Muir is the preservationist. He's America's leading environmentalist of Samba, the Sierra Club. Roosevelt is a kid's show conservationist, which that's not quite fair. Roosevelt is a preservationist in some of his roots. He wants to preserve certain monuments in certain parts, but he is a conservationist with respect to most of the public lands and the public resources. And he and Muir have three perfect days in Yellowstone National Park. And you probably know these stories, but Muir offended Roosevelt early on by saying, Mr. President, when will you ever get over your infantile need to kill animals? If it had not been Muir, he probably wouldn't have gotten away with that. But Roosevelt later said that he was really disappointed in Muir because Muir did not recognize bird calls. He said, what kind of a naturalist is this? He knows his trees, but he doesn't recognize birds. And so there was some friendly competitiveness between them, but they slept out. Not intense, no handlers, no secret servicemen. They slept on ferns under the open sky. And on the third morning under El Capitan, they woke up covered with snow. I don't know if you've ever been in the wilderness when you literally wake up covered with snow, but it is not a very agreeable experience. But Roosevelt typically sat up in the snow and said, this is the best day of my life, which is the way I want you to respond tomorrow. Then having spent, so now he's in two of the five national parks and the two crown jewels of the national park system, then he goes up to Ashton and to Portland and to Coma and Seattle and over to North Port Elaine and Wallace and then down to Butte and Havana and back through Utah and around. The total journey is eight weeks, nine weeks, from April 1st until June 5th, 1903. The longest journey up till that time in presidential history. It turns out interestingly enough, you find out from Richard Ellis' book, Presidential Travel, that William Howard Taff of all people, he traveled even more extensively, including on a single journey than Roosevelt did during his presidency. That's completely counter-intuitive. You would never think that that's true of Taff, but Taff traveled even more on a longer single journey than this immense epic by Roosevelt. I won't go through all of this, but here it is, the complete itinerary, there's the interlude of Yellowstone, all these towns across America, every one, a reception committee, something to dedicate, gifts provided by the local people, speeches by local celebrities, seeing the brand new Carnegie Library, seeing the new museum, et cetera, et cetera. It was an exhausting journey for Roosevelt. So just get us out of there, there are the five major policy addresses, notice that he got them over with quickly so that after Fargo, which is in the first week, he could begin to relax a little bit more. Look at these crowds and these photographs, they're just stunning. Here's Rockford, Illinois, June 3rd. The American people were ready to see a man of this sort of celebrity, and they came out in just gigantic numbers. Here's Victoria, Kansas, a teeny little town. Here's Salina, another Salina. Here's a woman in Mojave, Abilene, Bender. Just look how tightly packed these folks are. Oh, here's St. Paul, this is my favorite. St. Paul, Minnesota, very early on. Look at this, this is a close-up. These two men, he climbed up a light pole, and he got a glimpse of the President of the United States. There had literally been nothing like it in American presidential history. And fortunately, the media was there. Photography was available, cheapening and more portable than it had ever been. There were newspapers and magazines that were able to print these things. There was enough prosperity in the news business that they could assign photojournalists to follow the President. He was just, and these were just a handful of literally hundreds of photographs from good show posters. He had guests along the way, John Burles. These are people who joined him at different times for parts of the journey and won't go through all of that. But this, when you saw those pictures, this is what he said in the same letter to John Hay. Wherever I stop at a small city or country town, I was greeted by the usual shy, self-conscious, awkward body of local committee men and spoke to the usual audience of thoroughly good American citizens, a term I can use in a private letter to you about being bought denagogy. That is the audience. That is the audience consisted partly of the townspeople, but even more largely of rough-coated, hard-headed, gawd, cinnally farmers, and hired hands from all the neighborhood who had driven in with their wives and daughters and often with their children from Canada 20 or even 30 miles around about. For all the superficial differences between us, down at bottom, these men and I think a good deal of life or at least have the same ideals. And I'm always sure of reaching them in speeches which many of my hard-working friends would think not only homely but commonplace. It's a beautiful sentence about this phenomenon of talking to these people. But the photograph that gives you the best sense of this is the one of the little town in Kansas, this one. These are the people that Roosevelt wanted to see and these are the people that he's describing in this famous paragraph. And it was right after this, and he said, well, they may be good Americans, but they're probably gonna be swept away by demigods like Nelson Miles too, if you think about it. So it wasn't all good news. He tired of this, but he would get up in the middle of the night to come out and greet people. Then he talks about the West, the difference between the Midwest and the West. On Sunday I struck some balls and began to get into the real West, the far West, the country where I worked and played for many years and with whose people I felt a bond of sympathy which did not be broken by very manifest shortcomings on either part. When he got to man that, he got out of the train and said, it's great to breathe this free air again. And he got into the sense of it. This is what Burrow said. He craved once more to be alone with nature. He was evidently hungry for the wild and the aboriginal. I'll skip the 20 said about Yellowstone Park. Here, just Amy Burrow and I've been talking about the gifts that he received. Here are the live gifts that he received. This is just a partial list of badger, two bears, a lizard, a horn toad and a horse. All these had to be in that seven car train. And then this is a very partial list of the other gifts. A gold goblet, a gold ash receiver. I guess that's an ash train. Gold base, silver copper base, a drinking cup, a copper and silver base, a large silver lovin' cup, and a miniature set of scales held up by the goddess. Justice, that's just a tiny list. Many of those gifts still exist at Sagamore Hill. And we're gonna get the photograph, we hope even in 3D so that they can be part of the Roosevelt collection. Here's Roosevelt. How much time do we have until we're done? Okay, let's go for five more minutes. Here's Roosevelt at one of the Redwoods at Santa Cruz. And this actually produced a famous moment because these Redwoods had labels on them. They were a whole different set of signs and labels. Some of them were advertisements for products. Some of them were tree names that had been given to the trees. Some of them said things like, holy, welcome Teddy, welcome to California. This offended TR, and he actually told the people of Santa Cruz that had defended him. Here's what he said. All of us desire to see nature preserved. Above all, the tree should not be marked by placing cards of names on them. People who knew that should be certainly discouraged. The cards give an error of ridicule to solemn and majestic giants. They should be taken down. I ask you to keep all cards off the trees or any kind of signs that will see to it that the trees are preserved, that the gift is kept unmarked. You can never replace a tree. Oh, I am pleased to be here among these wonderful Redwoods. I thank you for giving me this enjoyment. Preserve and keep what nature has done. Well, that's part of the story. We also know that he was so upset by this that he said, I'm not gonna give my speech until those pockets are gone. So he said, I propose we go off on a stroll. When I get back, we'll see if I give my speech. So the local people dutifully took down all the clackers. And when he got back, they were gone and then he gave a speech about this and said, these are our cathedrals. Europe has St. Peter's and Salisbury and Coventry and so on. These are our cathedrals and we need to treat them with as much reverence and respect as the Europeans treat theirs. And when he got to the Grand Canyon on May 6th, 1993, he had never been there before. This was an unplanned speech he stood there and he looked down at the chasm of the Grand Canyon and he said, what about the greatest words ever said of the Grand Canyon and words that should be the motto of all of our national parks. He said, leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. And so my point is that in the course of this journey, like all great journeys, it's a journey of discovery and self-development. Roosevelt's conservation understanding of the nation was deepened by two weeks in Yellowstone, by three days with Muir in Yosemite, by this experience at the Redwoods in which he got angry uncharacteristically and demanded that they be treated more like Notre Dame and then by this experience of the Grand Canyon where he said, some places are so magnificent and so important to our sense of the soul that we have to preserve them and not allow humans to mar them. This is the kind of thing that upset him. Beautiful Redwood turned into a tourist gimmick. Here he is with a group of people at the Redwoods. I want to just go forward. I'll just quickly pass through these. I want to make one last point here. Evanston, Illinois. Winona, Minnesota, St. Paul. Minnesota, here's Crawford, Nebraska. Wherever he went, it was just a phenomenon. And we have hundreds of these. Cubo, Colorado. And everywhere he went, rough riders, if they happen to be around, showed up. They got special treatment. They got to go on the train, showed up the train if they needed to. He's dead, brother. At Hugo, they had a barbecue. They had one at Bismarck. He said that he got to Bismarck and it was dust. And they had an ox barbecued hole. And he said it's a little un-dignified for the president of the United States to get out and eat ox on a piece of wood. But I did it. Redwoods, California, Los Angeles. He was part of one of the first rose parades in LA. Claremont, where now Pomona College is. Santa Barbara, San Jose. It goes on and on and on. Here he is in the famous photograph from May 16th, 1970. I want to show you this last little picture here in a second, Sharon Springs, Kansas. I only do this for two reasons. One for Amy and one because my daughter lives in Sharon Springs, Kansas. It's a little town of 867 people and he happened to be there on May 3rd, a Sunday, 1903. And the only reason he was there is because he was trying to get to Denver, which is still really the only reason people go there. And he went to church and they didn't have a preacher, but they imported three preachers and he sat in the pew with two little girls who wanted to sit with him. And afterwards, he went back, he went on a horseback ride across the plains with two Kansas senators. And he came back and when he got back to the train, he was preparing to go on to Colorado. A little girl came up to him in a white dress and she said, Mr. President, do you think you would like a badger? And Roosevelt said, sure. She said, well, my brother Josiah caught one this morning. If you'd like a badger, I can go get it. Roosevelt said, great, go get it. So she was gone for two hours. She came back with a badger, a lot of badger. And Roosevelt took it on the train and he took it back with him to Washington and gave it to his children. And it lived for a while. You'll see the children were a little rough on it and it was a little rough on them. How do you obtain a badger? It eventually, of course, died. And now if you go to Sangamore Hill, there is a mounted badger. And Amy is not certain whether this is Josiah. In fact, it's her view, it probably isn't. But there is a mounted badger there that may or may not be Josiah. Here he is. This is a locally taken photograph of the President of the United States holding Josiah. He fed it potatoes and milk from a bottle all the way back to Washington, D.C. Remember, this is early. He still got six and a half more weeks of this thing. Here it is. There's a close up of Josiah. And here's what he said in this letter to John Payette. Among the rest, and this is in Sharon Springs, there was a little girl who asked me if I would like a baby badger, which she said her brother Josiah had just caught. I said I would. An hour or two later, the badger turned up and the little girl's father's wrapped some three miles out of town. The little girl had several other little girls with her all in pleads, starched, sun-daked bows and ribbon-tied pigtails. The badger was christened Josiah and became from that time an inmate of the train. Until my return home, here's the great final line. When he received a somewhat stormy welcome from the children and is now one of the household. The White House that Amy Barone showed you contained pets of this sort, including a live badger by the name of Josiah. It was a great journey for Roosevelt. It helped to secure his nomination and resounding reelection in 1904. The Pacific Coast deepened his understanding of America's two ocean-enabled responsibilities. But if there was one thing that came out of it that transformed the second half of his presidency, it was this greatly deepened conservation ethic that came from seeing Yellowstone John Burroughs, seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, seeing you have 70 with Muward and seeing the Redwoods, et cetera. So that trip was not only the longest and most ambitious presidential trip in history so far, but it transformed this country because as you know, by the end of his administration, Roosevelt had designated 230 million acres of the public domain as National Park, National Monument, National Forest, National Wildlife Refuge, et cetera. No president in history until Jimmy Carter had a record that extensive of conservation. And that conservation ethic was partly born on this journey and the Theodore Roosevelt Center now has the wherewithal to deepen our understanding of that journey. So, Sharon.