 I've been wanting to hear from Roger D. Silvestro for a very long time. I first knew his work from The Shadow of Wounded Knee, The Untold Story of the Indian Wars, which was published in 2005. There's a little Roosevelt connection in that because of his long antagonism with Nelson Miles, but his more recent book, This One, which I very strongly urge you to buy and read, Theodore Roosevelt and the Badlands, came out this last spring, and of course we in North Dakota were just breathlessly waiting for it. Some of us, most of us felt, well, what new is there to say, and boy were we wrong. This is a major new examination of Roosevelt's time in the American West, particularly in the Badlands of Dakota. It leans on, but goes much deeper than Herman Haggadorn's pioneering work, Roosevelt and the Badlands. Roosevelt features new scholarship, more recently discovered documents, and it has a very final chapter assessing what Roosevelt gained, how he was transformed by his time out here. I just want to read you one short paragraph from this book to give you a sense of how well it's written. This is from page 253, 254. Roosevelt also benefited from the egalitarian nature of the West. Putnam said, if there was a democratic leveling in the Badlands, it was not a leveling in the realm of character or capacity, but in detachment from the past. No man carried an advantage out here because of his father, nor a disadvantage. The freshness of a Western morning symbolized each man's new start. DeSobestro goes on one measure of the role that the Badlands played in Roosevelt's political success can be found in the commentary left by his friends and relatives, Corrine Roosevelt, Robinson, wrote of her brother's ranching years, quote, no period of the life of Theodore Roosevelt seems to be quite as important in the influence which it was to bear upon his future usefulness to this country as was that period in which as man to man he shared the vigorous work and pastimes of the men of that part of our country. And finally, Bill Sewell, his ranch manager from the Elkhorn, said, I call the West God's country for an undoubtedly saved Theodore Roosevelt's life and reason. Please welcome Roger DeSobestro. Well, it's very good to see all of you here, and I want to thank you for sharing your time with me and my story about Theodore Roosevelt, which I think I can assure you won't be particularly troublesome. I'm going to talk about why Roosevelt came West, the cultural milieu he found himself in when he got here, how he adapted to it, and then the effects it had on his later life and his career. Now, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when Roosevelt adopted the role of an active rancher in what is today the Badlands, only 30 miles west of where we are right now. He came out here, as was pointed out earlier, in September 1883 to hunt buffalo, which were very nearly extinct, and he wanted to get one, shoot one, before they were all gone. And I mean, this was true. That's what a lot of people in this era were trying to shoot the last of things before they were all gone. And because the bison had been so heavily hunted, they were very skittish. Almost all adult bison at this time actually had bullets in their bodies from previous encounters with hunters. So it took Roosevelt a good two or three weeks to bag a trophy bull, the head of which is now hanging at Sagamore Hill. You can still see this animal today, or it remains at any rate. So during that time he was out here, when he wasn't hunting bison, he was investigating the cattle industry to see if maybe this would be a good investment because cattle at this time in the 1880s were kind of like tech stocks in the 1990s. People thought, you know, you could put some money in there and it would be an easy investment, a quick profit. The editor of the Madora newspaper, who was A.T. Packard, his picture is over here in a buffalo coat. And there's also a photo of him with his wife standing in front of the newspaper office. He wrote in his newspaper, The Badlands Cowboy, that if you were willing to invest $20,000 in a thousand head of cattle, inside of seven years you would have a net profit of $160,000. That's an eight-fold increase in your investment in seven years. So this looked pretty good to Roosevelt. And against the advice of his uncle James, who was more or less his financial advisor, Roosevelt put $14,000 into starting a cattle herd in the Madora area. Actually, Madora wasn't even there at that point. But he hired a couple local fellows to manage his stock and he set up this herd, wrote them a check. Then he went back to New York City. I'm losing my photo here. Anyone know what I need to do to get there it is? He went back to New York City into his wife Alice. Now I think the date on which there to Roosevelt, the specific date on which he started down the path to actually living out here in The Badlands, was February 13th, 1884. On that particular day he was in Albany, New York. He was an assemblyman in the New York state legislature. He was in his third term, in his first term, he was the youngest man ever elected to that office. By his third term he was a rising star in New York state politics. He was also the author of a well-respected book on the naval battles of the War of 1812 between Britain and the U.S. So he was quite a successful fellow. He was wealthy. He had inherited over $200,000 when his father died a few years earlier. And he was married to Alice, who as you can see was quite a lovely young woman, and she was about to have their first child. So she was living with his mother at their house, at his mother's house on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. So on the morning of the 13th Roosevelt is enjoying this really quite successful life. It must have seemed like a charmed life. And he received a telegram saying that Alice had given birth to their first child, a little girl that they would name Alice. So in the state assembly there were congratulations all around. But later in the day he received another message saying that Alice wasn't doing as well as they thought she should be, and he should come home immediately. So he did. He went home. He got to the house at around 10 p.m. And his brother answered the door, his brother Elliot, and he said, there is a curse on this house. Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too. And Elliot was right. By the afternoon of the next day, which was Valentine's Day 1884, Alice, who's only 22 years old, died of kidney failure. And Roosevelt's mother, who was only 48, had died of acute typhoid. Now Roosevelt was devastated. You can see him here in a somewhat happier time. This is when he was at Harvard. You notice the mutton chops and so on, which he splurged at that time. They were already a little bit passe, but he was really dressed in the height of style. He was something of a dandy. And Alice, of course, is the woman sitting to the left in the front of the group. Somewhat happier days for him. So he was devastated, really, by this double loss. And his family was very worried about his mental state, because he appeared to be numb. He was dazed. He looked lost. And he vowed that he would never marry again. He would never love again. He said that when Alice died, this woman that he sometimes called wifey, and other times called my little pink wife, which was my favorite name for her, he thought, I will never love again. All the joy in my life has been spent, and the light in my life has gone out. But he needed something to do. And what he decided to do in the wake of this tragedy was come out here to the Badlands. And he gave up his political career, if only temporarily. And he headed to the Badlands in June of 1884. He was going to engage in the two R's, ranching and writing. He was hoping to make a career writing books and magazine articles and so on, in which he succeeded in doing. And then, of course, there was the ranching matter, which was proved to be a little less successful. But anyway, let's take a quick look at the cultural world he landed in. This was a male-dominated society out here. There were very few women on Western Frontiers. And Medora was definitely a frontier town. It was only three or four months old when Roosevelt arrived in June. And the only women that were found in towns like this tended to be those who hung around in the saloons. They were professional women, very old profession. And the men were quite young. The average age was 23, 24 years old. Roosevelt himself was 25 when he got out here. So he fit in with the age group. The particular problem with that age group is that in almost any society, the most violent demographic is men in the ages of about 18 to 30. There's some evidence that if we locked up all men that age, all males that age, we could reduce violent crime by something like 85%. And these were the guys who were out there in the West, dominating the West, and they all had guns and knives. And for recreation, they went to saloons. And they hung out with the women, and they gambled. And this was just an environment that was inviting violence and fights and jealousies. There was a strong sense of honor on the frontier. The cowboys got drunk. They liked to ride through town shooting off their guns. We see this in movies, but it was real. They actually did that sort of thing. The result of this is that a resident in a frontier town at that time was 40 times more likely to be murdered than was a resident of an Eastern city. One resident of Madura said, yes, I ran into lots of shooting scrapes. Pretty nearly all of the quarrels took this course before they ended. Now the ranching community was divided into two very unequal segments. There were ranchers like Roosevelt or Cattlemen, and there were the cowboys. The cowboys worked for the ranchers. The ranchers owned the cattle, they owned the horses, they owned the buildings that were associated with the ranch. The cowboys usually owned their clothes and their weapons, and maybe a saddle, and maybe a saddle horse. Most of the horses they rode for work were owned by the ranchers themselves. The ranchers were usually older guys, 30s or 40s, some of them were married, so they were a little more settled down than the cowboys. But Roosevelt was a great fan of the cowboys. In one of his books on ranching, he wrote, they are as hardy and self-reliant as any men who ever breathed. Paral and hardship and years of long toil broken by weeks of brutal dissipation that would be hanging around in saloons. Draw haggard lines across eager faces, but never dim their reckless eyes nor break their bearing of defiant self-confidence. Now that was a romantic vision of the cowboy and not everyone shared it. The Cheyenne daily leader in 1882 called cowboys foul mouth, blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, and utterly corrupt, which is pretty unequivocal and not really praise. One Montana rancher's wife recalled, nobody then thought of them as romantic. They were regarded as a wild and undesirable lot of citizens. On the other hand, they were kind of fun. There was an Englishman who came out to Colorado in the 1860s, remembered, he wrote a memoir called The Tender Foot in Colorado, and he talked about standing one night in a small town as a cowboy came thundering by and his horse shooting off his guns. And on a horse next to him was a young woman wearing only a chemise. And the Englishman looked at this site and he thought to himself, this is life with a capital L. So into this world comes Theodore Roosevelt, stepping down from a train in Medora in June of 1884. And just what was he like then? Well, we've already had some speakers allude to what he was like. He looked quite sickly and pale. And many people who met him at that time out here remarked that he didn't look very well. He had suffered from asthma most of his life and he'd had a chronic stomach ailment that sometimes incapacitated him for days. One cowboy who met him at that time said, you could have spanned his waist with your two thumbs and fingers. He stood about five foot eight and he was a very gaunt 135 pounds. His family was so worried about his health that they actually wrote to one of his hired hands and asked the hired hand to send in reports occasionally to let them know that Theodore was doing all right. He was also very depressed, which was of course the key reason that he came out west. Now, we also know that Roosevelt, in addition to being sickly and just not really engaging people at first sight, also decked himself out, as you can see here. Oh, this by the way, this was his baby Alice. And when he went west, he left her with his sister Anna and that's his sister Anna there. Now, Roosevelt, and we have this picture here and this one here pops up everywhere. I think this probably appeared on the covers of more Roosevelt books than any other single photo. But he's really decked out here in sort of arch cowboy style. He has the seal skin chaps, which were in the proper shotgun variety. They weren't the big sort of batwing chaps that were worn in other parts of the country. These were more typical of what people wore up here. They were seal skin, but actually chaps weren't that popular in this area because there wasn't that much tall cactus to worry about. He had his gun with the ivory handles with his initials on them. His spurs were embossed with his initials. He had a great hat. It has a flat crown, you'll notice, which was also typical of the Northern Plains. In the Southwest, it would have been more of a peaked hat. And he also had this knife, which was made for him, a hunting knife made for him at Tiffany's. And my guess is that there weren't many cowboys out in Madora who thought when they needed a new knife, I think I'll drop down to Tiffany's and see what I can come up with. So when the cowboys met him, they saw him as sort of overdressed. And that was the sign of a ranked tender foot. And then to make matters a little bit worse, he bought himself, he had made this suit of buckskin, the pants and the tunic. And I guess on Sunday, we'll be visiting the location of the house where the woman lived who made this suit for him for about $100. And for Roosevelt, this hunting gear had great symbolic value because it was what Daniel Boone and David Crockett wore and it was the sign of the wilderness hunter. And in wearing it, when he put that on, he was really putting on the guise of the wilderness hunter, of the type of person who made America what it was. But for some local ranchers, they tried to talk him out of it because they said, when that gets wet, it's not gonna do you any good. And but as one rancher said, he had to have it. And so he had it. He did some other things too that struck the cowboys as a little odd. When he traveled, when he was on the trail, they always brought along an inflatable rubber pillow. And he always carried a razor and toothbrush, which he used daily, at least daily, which was something else that was kind of alien to the cowboy community. But there was even more to come because the topper of it all was, of course, his glasses. Cowboys simply didn't wear glasses. They saw it as a sign of weakness. And so his glasses frequently got him into difficulties. But there was another side to Roosevelt that the Midorans couldn't really see. He was a man of stamina. And he had started out working on his physical health as a child. He was very sickly with his illnesses. So he was used to struggle. And he was used to pushing himself pretty hard. He also was a fighter, quite literally. He'd taken years of boxing lessons and he had won a championship at the gym where he worked out in his teen years. And he also boxed at Harvard, though the outcome of the matches there was a little bit disputed. But the Badlands people soon began to sense that maybe they were underestimating him based on his physical appearance. And of course, the episode that really triggered their new understanding of him is a famous story, which I'm sure all of you have heard, but maybe not all of you, so I'm gonna repeat it anyway. One evening, he'd been riding all day looking for some stray horses, apparently. And he rode across the border into Montana and he needed a place to stay. It was cold out. And he managed to go into a saloon where a fellow was shooting off. He had a gun in each hand and he was shooting the guns and he had put some holes in the clock. This was like something right out of a Hollywood movie. And he told Roosevelt to buy some drinks, buy around the drinks for the house. This guy had been forcing people in the saloon to buy rounds all evening. People were kind of terrified of him. And Roosevelt just kind of laughed it off and tried to find a table where this fellow would leave him alone, but the fellow followed him and insisted on buying drinks. So Roosevelt said, well, if I have to, I have to. And he quickly punched this fellow several times and knocked him down. And on his way to the floor, the man hit his head on the bar and knocked himself out cold. So Roosevelt took his guns and the people in the saloon who are much happier now took the fellow and dumped him and shed behind the saloon the next day this fellow left town. Well, this was pretty brave of Roosevelt and the story spread rapidly throughout the Badlands and people started thinking, well, there may be more to this fellow than we realize. And it started to improve his reputation. I wonder too if his depression didn't play a role in this because depression can make a person careless about their physical well-being and that he may have just been in a state where he was sort of insulated from the danger, but that's idle speculation. It may be that he just really hated buying drinks for people. And maybe if the fellow had asked him to buy chocolates or something, everything would have been just fine, but it didn't turn out that way. But it really got Roosevelt's reputation off to a good start. But the real test for Roosevelt in this violent community was the roundup. The ranching that Roosevelt was involved in was open range, which many of you, I'm sure know, involved basically just taking a bunch of cattle and turning them loose on lands that belonged in this area to the railroads and to the American public who was administered by the federal government. We could say they were federal lands. So the ranchers were more or less squatters. They would turn their cattle loose, build some houses, and that was their ranch. Very few of the ranchers in this area got titled to the land, and those who did were looked at it a little bit of scant because people wondered, what are they up to? Why do they have to have title? Are they gonna try and control things? So basically, you had these cattle roaming wild, and they had to be rounded up every six months or so. And so the cowboys and the ranchers would get together all their hands, and all the ranchers from a given area would get together. And they would sweep through an area that might be 50 miles wide and 200 miles long, just straight down to Little Missouri, and they'd round up all the cattle they came to. And this was a great time for the cowboys because they led pretty lonely lives. And this was like the 4th of July that went on for about a month, well, two or three weeks at any rate. And they would engage in foot races and horse races and boxing matches, which seemed to me like a risky thing to get involved in, but they did, and Roosevelt himself was in a boxing match during one roundup. But it was also an environment where the pressure was really on because everyone worked really hard and they actually competed to see who could do the most work the fastest. And if you were fired during a roundup, it just ruined your reputation. It was probably something you would never recover from. You'd just have to leave the area. It was so, it was an important time. And it was a place where these men were taking the measure of one another. Now the first step in setting up a roundup was getting together, choosing horses that each man would ride. And each man had a string of about 10 horses that he rode during a roundup. Because the horse, they don't ride a horse for half a day a day and then give it two days off. And they also needed light horses for roping and heavy duty horses for going up and herding the cattle and gathering them together. So they had quite a variety of horses. And the men would draw straws to see who would pick first. And Roosevelt as a rancher had the prerogative of just picking the horses without having to go through this process, which meant he could pick the generalist horses. But he didn't do that. He drew straws along with his men, which really got him a lot of points with his ranch hands because it showed that he was willing to deal with them on an equal level. And Roosevelt did this even though he hated riding rough horses and he didn't like being bucked. And he said he'd rather sit on a hot stove than ride a bronc. And one of the horses he drew was a famous rough horse named Ben Butler. And one of my favorite lines as a cowboy described this horse, he said, he'd throw you so high that eagles could build nests on you. So that was just a great line, you know. And once Ben reared up and fell over on Roosevelt and broke his shoulder. And this was during the roundup and Roosevelt just had to deal with the pain because there were no doctors for maybe 200 miles. The doctor being Dr. Stickley, you know, whose daughter this hall is named after and who has a building named after him across the way here. So the cowboy's really respected the fact that Roosevelt rode the horses, you know, put up with the pain and the agony and so on. But their approval wasn't easy to win. In the all male environment, a newcomer had to constantly prove himself. And Roosevelt recalled in his autobiography, when I went among strangers, I always had to spend 24 hours in living down the fact that I wore spectacles, remaining as long as I could judiciously deaf to any side remarks about four eyes unless it became evident that my quiet was misconstrued. He told one harassing Texan who called him storm windows to put up or shut up, which basically meant fight or be friends. And the Texan chose to be friends and they shook hands. And one of the witnesses to this, one of the cowboys said that after they shook hands, nobody said anything, but we was all thinking the same thing, I guess. We wanted to get up and shake his hand too. We were proud of him. So he was accepted by them. He had worked hard and shown that he was there to do the job. Now he did have some limitations. You know, he had bad eyesight, so he wasn't a good roper, but ropering also took years of practice. So nobody expected him to be too good at it. Well, one cowboy said that TR used to take his trick at anything he could do. He would grab a cow or calf and drag them right into the fire to be branded. He could rattle a calf as good as anybody. He used to be all over dirt from head to foot. Another cowboy from Adora said, no, he never shirked his duty. He was always there ready to do everything he possibly could. He wanted to do it, he tried to do it. One night during the storm, the cattle stampeded and stampedes were extremely dangerous. One Montana cowboy wrote a memoir in which he mentioned an incident in which the herd trampled a man on horseback, killing the man and his horse. And the only part of the man they could identify afterwards was his six gun. So this was dangerous work. But Roosevelt, when the herd stampeded one night, immediately got out of his bedroll, jumped on his horse and went off and rode for 10 hours trying to help control this herd. He came back to camp and took a fresh horse and he rode off again. And in all, he spent 40 hours in the saddle straight about a break and wore out five horses. So the cowboys by the end of the roundup thought he was a pretty good man. And later on, of course, he was made president of the Local Cattlemen's Association. And then when he tried to step down after a year or so, they insisted that he stay there. I think partly nobody else wanted to do it. But they also saw him as somebody really reliable and trustworthy and a man who could get a job done when it needed be. I'll give the final word on Roosevelt in the West to the man who served as captain of a roundup in 1885. He said, his glasses made him look kind of unusual. And I says to myself, here's one of them dudes from Carol's Dude Ranch come from the East to get over the taste for strong drink. But he wasn't no dude. I remember the other boys feeling that his glasses was against him. But I remember we all forgot about his glasses when we saw that he meant to play the game with no favors. So when Roosevelt headed home at the end of his first stint out there, he had changed physically. Newspaper reporters interviewed him along the way. And the Pittsburgh dispatch told its readers, what a change. Last March, he was a pale, slim young man with a thin, piping voice and a general looks of dyspepsia. He is now brown as a berry and has increased 30 pounds in weight. His voice is now hardy and strong enough to drive oxen. Roosevelt himself said in an interview, newspaper interview, I am as much of a cowboy as any of them and can hold my own with the best of them. I can shoot, ride, and drive in the roundup with the best of them. Oh, they're a jolly set of fellows, those cowboys. Tip top good fellows too when you get to know them. But Ranch Life for Roosevelt pretty much came to an end in the spring of 1887. He held on to his cattle after that to about 1898, selling off his stock when the Spanish-American War started and he went to Cuba to fight in the war. But really, his time as an active rancher was over by the spring of 1887. For one thing, he had recovered his emotional equilibrium and he had remarried. He married Edith, keep forgetting I have these photos over here. And this is the Elkhorn Ranch House. And of course, there will be a trip out to the Ranch House site. Tomorrow the house is no longer there, but it's still a cool place to see. And this is Edith, Edith Carrow, who was a childhood friend and was his second wife. Sorry about overlooking those photos. Edith wasn't the sort who was going to go live in a cabin out in the Badlands or anywhere else. So that alone put the end to his prolonged stays in the Badlands. Also, there was a series of blizzards in the winter of 1887 that just demolished the livestock in that area of the cattle at any rate. Some ranchers lost 90% of their cattle. Roosevelt lost about 65%. Oddly enough, horses tended to survive it. And cattle took a beating. So he wasn't sure he'd ever recover financially from this, but he could feel that that whole thing was winding down. Plus, he was getting back into politics. In 1886, the fall he ran for mayor in New York, he lost, but everyone expected that he would. So that wasn't a major shock. But he went on to have a career that I'm sure you all know the litany. He was chief of police in New York City, assistant secretary of the Navy, and a lieutenant colonel in the Army leading the Rough Riders in Cuba. He later, because of his success in the war, he went on to become the governor of New York. And as a reform politician, he caused so much problems for the Republican Party that they decided to put him off someplace where no one would ever hear from him again. And they made him the vice presidential candidate when McKinley ran for office for re-election in 1900. Well, McKinley won, but then he was assassinated in Roosevelt in late 19, in September of 1901, became the youngest man ever to serve in the White House. Now, in later years, as we know from other speakers, Roosevelt would say that if he hadn't spent time ranching in the West, he never would have been president. You know, the famous 1910 lineup in Fargo. But even before that, in 1905, when he was traveling through Yellowstone National Park with the famed naturalist John Burroughs, he told Burroughs the same thing. He said, and this is a quote from John Burroughs, his ranch life had been the making of him. It had built him up and hardened him physically and it had opened his eyes to the wealth of manly character among the Plainsmen and cattlemen. Had he not gone West, he said, he would never have raised the Rough Riders Regiment. And had he not raised that regiment and gone to the Cuban War, he would not have been made governor of New York. And had not this happened, the politicians who not unwittingly have made his rise to the presidency so inevitable. In later years, Roosevelt would ride at the Badlands. I owe more than I can ever express to the West. And of course to the, and this of course means to the men and women I met in the West. Now, Carlton Putnam, I was actually gonna use the same quote here from Carlton Putnam, so I'll spare you hearing it again. But Carlton Putnam wrote a biography of Roosevelt's early years. It really should be a classic. It's just a wonderful book. And he felt that, you know, Roosevelt did in fact learn sort of a democratic leveling out in the West. He concluded that the various influences of the West contributed much to Roosevelt's future political success and that his own estimates of their importance may not be exaggerated. Now, one measure of course of the Badlands, of the role the Badlands played in Roosevelt's political success is in fact found in the commentary of his friends. And one of Roosevelt's friends was William Roscoe Thayer, who knew Roosevelt from his earliest term in the State Assembly. And he believed that the West quote, imparted to him also a knowledge which was to prove most precious to him in the unforeseen future. For it taught him the immense diversity of the people and consequently of the interests of the United States and gave him a national point of view in which he perceived that the standards and desires of the Atlantic States were not all inclusive or final. And a last observation comes from George Shiras, who is a wildlife photographer and a friend of Roosevelt's. He said quote, the radical change in his surroundings when as a young man he became a Western ranchman undoubtedly affected his subsequent career to a marked degree. Though he entered the West with the shell broken, meaning emotionally, he emerged as the advocate of the strenuous life and with a better and more sympathetic understanding of those influences affecting the American people in their widely separated homes and occupations. Toward the end of his life, Roosevelt told a friend that if he had to give up all his memories except one, the one he would hold onto would be the memory of my life on the ranch with his experiences close to nature and among the men who live nearest to her. And I wanna close with a little story, it's kind of a vignette really, that I think shows graphically Roosevelt's relationship to the West. While campaigning for the vice presidency in 1900, Roosevelt visited the Dakotas by rail and he made a lot of whistle stops and he drew large crowds, large crowds wherever he appeared, shaking hands with voters from the train's rear platform. On September 12th, shortly after a campaign stop, he sat on the rear platform as the locomotive chuffed westward toward Madura in the Badlands. His arms rested on a brake handle, his chin on a wrist and his gaze on the prairie that rolled gently to all horizons. At some point he asked a porter to keep visitors away and he shut the platform door, remaining alone outside. A member of his campaign staff came looking for him and found the porter blocking the door. The governor don't want to see nobody for a while, the porter said, and for at least an hour, Roosevelt was left to solitude, to the West and to whatever imperishable memories he found there. And that's where we'll leave him. A vigorous man of 41, soon to be president and at the moment immersed in a favored past. I guess we'll move on to questions. Thank you. Let me just give a kind of a program note. Some of the students are gonna have to leave here in a moment. We're gonna almost effortlessly transition to this panel so people will get a chance to ask you more questions then. But one thing I just wanted to say apropos of Carlton Putnam. Some of you probably know his book, Theodore Roosevelt, The Formative Years. It was the first volume of what was going to be a projected two or three volume major study of Roosevelt. We're also unhappy that he never went on to do it because that volume is one of the best ever about the early life of Theodore Roosevelt. And one of the things that Dickinson State is doing with Harvard is looking at dictophone belts. When Carlton Putnam came out here to interview people who were descendants of contemporaries in the 1950s, he was planning that book for the Centennial in 1958 and he met that deadline. He came out here, he was a pilot, in fact he owned Delta Airlines and he brought a dictophone belt which was a high tech recording device in 1953 or four and he recorded these interviews. Well they're sitting, they look like red taffy and they kind of fold over, they're beautiful actually and they're sitting at Harvard and I was there once and I looked at them and I asked Wallace Daley if we could find a way to digitize these. Would you let us, he said sure. So now we have done it and at lunch today, those who are coming to lunch we're going to play with our Harvard guests just a piece of one of Carlton Putnam's dictophone belts. It's an amazing recovery of actual voice from the 1950s by one of the most distinguished TR biographers. Right, yeah he was an amazing, run an amazing book, very readable. Mia, let me ask you a kind of question that comes out of something you said early in your talk that it's almost like a western or a dime novel some of these stories and of course Roosevelt's early reading during those asthmatic years sort of created this template. When you did research for your book, inevitably having to use Hagridorn as one of your principal sources, where's your ear on authenticity? When do you think, oh boy, that one sounds a little too dime novel. That might not be strictly speaking true. Yeah, that was probably my biggest challenge in dealing with Hagridorn was that Hagridorn really wrote kind of a hagiography. You know, it was a biography of Theodore as a godlike individual. And oddly enough, Roosevelt told Hagridorn, actually he told Bill Sewell, who was one of his hired hands, that he had given Hagridorn permission to interview various people that he knew out west. And he told Sewell, be sure and tell Hagridorn everything, you know, warts and all, just tell him the whole story. But Sewell in fact once said of Roosevelt that he was probably the greatest man since Jesus and maybe before. So, you know, I don't think Rosa was taking a big risk here. And Hagridorn wrote a biography that really was really praised Roosevelt. And he also changed the names of a lot of the people out here in Medora, I think, because of, you know, he was worried about libel issues. So that like Bob Roberts became Bill Williams, that sort of thing. So you have to kind of, you know, work your way through him, decipher the names. And then you'll occasionally get the sense that a story is just a little too laudatory. And it happened so often that I was actually not leery of using him, but I used him more as a roadmap. But what was really useful about Hagridorn were his notes at Harvard. More than his book, his notes were very useful. But do you have, some of the like, the story you told of the incident in Weebo, where Roosevelt walks into a bar, there's a gunslinger, he punches him, both guns go off. When you hear that story, you automatically feel skepticism rising in your, so what did you, how do you do something like that? Well, the Weebo story has a number of shortcomings, and one is that some people say the saloon was in a hotel and it was a two-story building, but in fact, there were no two-story buildings. There's the whole issue of whether Roosevelt would go into a saloon, and I go into this in a footnote in my book. And so again, I resorted to Putnam because Putnam seems very cautious and very thorough. And oftentimes, Roosevelt in his own writings would streamline a story. The famous story where he tracked down the boat thieves, you know. Roosevelt has two of the thieves coming in at the same time and they get the jump on them, but there's an earlier account written within days of the incident, which indicates that these men came in one at a time. So you have to tease out, even when Roosevelt's a source, you have to tease out, well, what really happened here? And oftentimes, I would have recourse to something like Putnam and see how he sorted it out. And oftentimes he seemed to agree with my own conclusion, so I thought, oh, well, we must both be right, you know. But it is, I mean, any of these things, you know, you have to wonder too about Roosevelt's experience with the Indians where he saw these two or three Indians out on the planes and he pulled out his rifle and held them off and chased them away. What do we make of that? When we know that his ranch hounds, for example, would just walk into a village with hundreds of Indians in it and, you know, start talking to them just out of curiosity to see what was going on. So I think Roosevelt himself was something of a self dramatist, you know. He was emotionally, a very emotionally intense man. If you read the letters in his wife exchange, some of which I quote in the book, and I don't think they've appeared elsewhere. I think they're a fairly new thing. And I wanted to quote them more extensively and I think they are on my website, which is there at arosevilleandthebadlands.com. There were just these tremendously emotional letters, you know, and his whole reaction to his wife dying, you know, the emotional impact of that was just palpable when you read the things he wrote about it. And so you sense this intensely emotional man and I think that sometimes materialized in his daily life where he saw much more drama than maybe really existed in a given situation. But, Roger, you know, there's a paradox here for you as a writer because of course your desire is to write a readable, entertaining, thoughtful, accurate book. And if your skepticism makes you step back from some of these world-class stories, you're leaving narratives on the floor that are irresistibly interesting. How did you negotiate with yourself? Well, generally I would work it out either in the tax store in a footnote. Like in some cases I would mention in the footnote but there is another version of this story, you know. One case was when Roosevelt killed his first mountain goat. His guide tells a story in a book he wrote called Roughing It With Roosevelt that is not at all what Roosevelt wrote. Roosevelt was much more low-key in what he said happened here. So I'm guessing Roosevelt was telling the truth because the guide was saying he killed this animal at like 450 yards and he did it with a single shot, you know, and that he had thought it would be impossible. When Roosevelt says it was 70 yards, you know. Well, I'm guessing that Roosevelt was probably the fella to go with here. But I will footnote that and give both versions, you know. Another case is in the famous duel with Damerace where Roosevelt thought that Damerace is the marquee who developed the town of Madura actually. It was named after his wife. He thought Damerace was challenging him to a duel. And you read the note from Damerace and you think, well, I don't know, I don't, probably not really. But I found a number of sources from people who knew Roosevelt at the time who also said that they didn't think that Roosevelt, that more race was challenging him to a duel. And that this was just sort of another example of Roosevelt kind of getting caught up in the drama. And so I discussed that in the text in the book. I'll say, you know, here's the story, but here's what other people are saying about it and here's what seemed to happen. And I try not to pass judgment on these things because I'm not a historian. I think of myself as a journalist and I'm trying to tell the story. I want to tell a narrative and create a world and I want to give you a sense of being out there with him. But at the same time, I think, you know, I have to call attention to some of these contradictions. And so I try to do that within the context of the narrative. Roger, let me ask you one last question. And if Valerie and Doug would start to assemble over here, we're just going to move straight into this. And if you need to leave, students, that's fine. Just be as pleased as respectful as you can when you go. But if you want to come up here, Valerie, and get seated. But in your book, I can tell you're troubled by the paradox of Roosevelt, the hunter. And you have that scene where you say, and you said it a little bit today, that the last of the buffalo already had bullets in them from failed hunting expeditions. And then you quote, I think, Hornaday, saying they're all harassed and skittish and they're being kind of worried to death even when they're not being killed. Then you say, here's this man who goes on to be one of the nation's great conservationists. It troubles you. So will you just wrestle a minute with this problem? Sure, in full disclosure, I'm a professional conservationist. I've worked in the conservation field for about 30 some years now. And so it's a subject that interests me a great deal and I know something about. And Roosevelt, of course, is one of the great idols of the conservation field. But he was in so many ways a contradictory individual. I mean, you can look at many examples. There's been the issue of race, for example, where he seems to go follow two different paths. And with the whole thing of conservation, Roosevelt did try to, he did want to shoot a buffalo before they were all gone. He also, several times, shot what he thought was the very last elk in the Madura area. And he had no compunction about this. He, when he went to the Bighorn Mountains, he shot, he and his other people with him shot five or six elk, supposedly for meat. But that's like, it was something like, probably a half ton of meat for three guys. And so, but at the same time, compared to other hunters of that era, he was actually somewhat restrained. Later on, in the 1890s, after he'd founded the Boone and Crocker Club, and the Boone and Crocker Club was working very hard to protect bison in Yellowstone, Roosevelt went bison hunting just outside the park in Idaho and killed a bull buffalo that probably was from the park originally. So you have all these odd contradictions. And my thought on it has been that there is this whole issue of, well, he was a product of his times. But we also think Roosevelt was a great man, and he has this face on Mount Rushmore, which should sort of support that idea. But he probably was a great man in terms of how he found what he did with conservation and so on. But this other side of it makes me feel that I wish he'd been just a little bit greater, that he had risen just a little more above his times, because I think that's what a great man does, is he writes as above his times. And if all we can say of people is they do this because they are a product of their times, then what does that suggest that people have no control? They just do whatever their times dictate. And I think there should be more than that for a great person. So I'm a little disappointed in them in some of those regards. Roger D. Silvestro. Thank you.