 So, again, welcome. I have this great distinct pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker. He's an old friend of mine, and I think this is the fifth time that Dr. West has come to a symposium that I've had the joy of hosting. And he's a much awarded, widely sought speaker. Elliott West earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Texas, his PhD from the University of Colorado. He joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas in 1979. Two of his books, Growing Up with the Country, Childhood on the Far Western Frontier, and The Way to the West, Essays on the Central Plains, received the Western Heritage Award, and more recently his masterpiece, The Contested Plains, Indians, Gold Seekers and the Rush to Colorado, shown here. He received five awards so far, including the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize and the Penn Center Award. His most recent book, which is for sale here this week, is The Last Indian War, The Nez Perce Story, published in 2009. Dr. West has been awarded the University of Arkansas Teacher of the Year Award and the Carnegie Foundation's Arkansas Professor of the Year Award. In 2001 he received the Baum Faculty Teaching Award, and if you can imagine, in 2009 he was one of three finalists as the outstanding teacher in the United States. This book, Contested Plains, is not about Theodore Roosevelt. He does not appear in the index. But this is one of those books that is a life-changing book. You only read a handful of books in the course of your life that you say, oh, that book changed the way I thought about something really important, and this is one of them. And Dr. West's thesis, if I can try to characterize it just in a paragraph, is that even before Lewis and Clark and Zebulin Pike and others got here, the West had been transformed by the trade of metals, by horses, by diseases brought over by Euro-Americans, by dynamics of pioneer culture and westward expansion. And so when Lewis and Clark arrived at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in October of 1804, they thought they were discovering something, but in fact that landscape and the people who lived on it in the flora and fauna were already undergoing a rapid, extraordinary, and even revolutionary transformation. This is one of those pivotal books that you must read if you want to understand the Great Plains or the American West. I want to read just one passage, not from this book, but from an essay that Dr. West wrote about Lewis and Clark, which is my own field, in an essay called Finding Lewis and Clark by Looking Away. Dr. West really set the tone for what his keynote address is meant to do for all of us. He says, when we find an intriguing subject, we naturally are drawn into its flow of events. If its details are especially interesting and full of puzzles, we get caught up in chasing every lead into every evidentiary cranny. With that, we tend to lose sight of our subject's wider arena, which leaves us facing an annoying paradox. The more we concentrate on what we study, the less we understand. It's my hope that you can make us understand Theodore Roosevelt and the American West in a new way. Please welcome Dr. Elliot West. Well gosh, thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. Thank all of you for coming. Thanks for the invitation here. I've been to Dickinson once before. That's because it was the end of the day and I wanted dinner. So I stopped here. But it's a wonderful chance to be here. What a wonderful facility here. And what a wonderful chance to meet and to talk and learn something more about this part of the country and this extraordinary man. As Clay said, he and I worked together several times before. So when he emailed me asking me if I would like to take part, specifically to lead off this conference, pretty quickly, I think I said, sure, I'd love to do that. This was on email. I pressed send and within seconds I thought, what have I done? This is a conference on Theodore Roosevelt and the West and it's true. I've taught and written about the American West but Roosevelt, it's the Roosevelt part of it that was a problem to me. Because in no sense of the word, a Roosevelt scholar, he's a man that fascinates me and has for many years. I have on my office wall a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt. I managed to purchase an autograph. T Roosevelt it says and I sort of framed it below it. Turns out they're pretty cheap because he wrote a lot of them. He had a lot of them. But in any case, he sees someone that I've followed and tried to learn as much as I can about over the many years. But I cannot say by any stretch of the imagination that I am an authority on this and here I am at a conference on this. Not only that, a conference with Edmund Morris. Holy cow. A conference for 35 years now. I've taught a course called The West of the Imagination. It's a course on the western popular culture. I first taught it when I taught in Texas. And the first time I taught it, one of the books that I read preparing for it was G. Edward White's Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience. It's one of those books that Clay was talking about. A friend of mine puts it, it rearranges your mental furniture. And it made me understand something about the western popular culture that I've never really understood before. And so here I am at a conference with someone who I've been following and admiring now for decades. So, you know, what the world do I have to say about this? What I can do, I think, is to try to bring something to this conference from some of the things that I've learned about the west during these years, to bring Roosevelt into it as best I can. You know, one thing you can say, I think, without question, is that the story of Fedor Roosevelt in the west is such a story. Such incredible appeal to it. It has this kind of almost mythic rhythm to it. It begins, really, following his first hunting trip out here. It begins, of course, in tragedy, profound tragedy. It proceeds through adventure, some comedy, a kind of an odyssey, a kind of a time of trial out here in the west. And it ends with him returning a kind of a story of redemption, almost in political terms, almost a resurrection. So it's one of these sort of classic, classic stories. And as Clay mentioned, it's one of those stories that we get so caught up in. So caught up in that sometimes we miss the larger significance of it. We're so caught up in its humanity, so caught up in its drama. And especially, of course, because we know where this guy goes. We know where he goes. He goes back, he's still such a young man. And then he will proceed over the years to become arguably the most significant, I think certainly the most revelatory figure in the United States of his time. And it somehow is rooted right here in this part of the plains. Such a story. But it's so easy once we get caught up in this story to miss the larger context of it. So that's what I would like to talk about a bit this evening, to try to put this story in a bit of a larger context, the context of the west, the context of America. As I said, I don't know. There are lots of things I don't know about Roosevelt. Plenty of things I still don't know about the American West. Plenty of things that frankly baffle me about it. But there are three things that I know for certain. I know, number one, that in the 1880s when Theodore Roosevelt was out here, the United States, this country, was well on its way to becoming in essence a new nation, a transformed nation. I would argue to this evening that the United States by the opening of the 20th century was in effect a different country from what it had been even 50 years before. Different in so many ways. Different physically, of course, starting in the 1840s with the expansion to the Pacific Coast, adding 1.2 million square miles to it. Different in its economic arrangements, in its economic landscape and contours. Different in its human makeup, who the Americans were. Different in its definitions of citizenship. Different in its, the power and the relationship of the federal government to the regions and the states and the individuals in this country. A new nation, essentially a new America. And in the 1880s as Roosevelt was out here, that was underway. I know secondly that the American West that Roosevelt visited was coming in itself, came into focus as a distinctive region in this country. And this western region would play, was playing, an absolutely critical part in the making of this new America. The two things were absolutely intertwined. And finally, and as part of this of course, as the West came into focus as a region, it was becoming what no other region is. It was the special playground of the popular imagination. Something about the West that has caught the imagination of the people of this country and of the world. We talk about Westerns. Westerns, right? Nobody talks about Southerns. Where God knows, Midwesterns. But Westerns, you know, Westerns. One of the true, one of the few, along with the detective story I think, one of the, one of the two cultural exports of this country to the rest of the world. And finally, of course, there's Roosevelt himself. And while there's so much that I don't understand and don't know about Roosevelt, I know one thing about him. And that is that Theodore Roosevelt had this uncanny knack for feeling the pulse of the American people. This uncanny ability to somehow sense what a considerable portion of his nation were feeling, what their aspirations were, what their anxieties and their fears were. He was in touch, in touch with the American public in a way that very, very few people ever are, certainly politicians. And this of course is, this is the ultimate coin to the realm for a politician to be able to do that. I ask my classes sometimes. For all of the presidents who have really not done much during their administrations, a lot of those guys have ended up popular, come up with a lot of names for that. Plenty of presidents have done a lot and ended up unpopular. But how many presidents have we had who have been extraordinarily active and ended up as popular or more popular than when they went in? That's a gift. And you can count them on about, I think, three or four fingers. I think Jackson. I think Theodore's cousin, Franklin. I think most recently Reagan probably. But certainly among those was Theodore Roosevelt. He must be the only, only national politician who had to actively quash an effort to nominate him for president. Right? That's pretty unusual in 1912. So what I'd like to do this evening is to try to bring those three points together and to look a bit, to speculate a bit about this remarkable, brilliant young man on his sojourn out west in these pivotal years in his life as he was feeling his way toward those values and beliefs and attitudes and perspectives that would guide him when he became the leader, the president of this new America. And to remember that as he did that, you know, he was searching for those values, finding those values, reaching out for them, feeling for them as he was living in. And thinking about and experiencing and writing about the American West. I'd like to do that by looking at two areas, two areas, two areas that we normally don't associate, I think, with the West of that time. Can we get the slide presentation up here? Thanks. We don't associate with the West at that time. But two areas, two topics, two questions that were of great concern to many people during those years. And interestingly, the same two areas of great concern to the American people today. They are, first, to use kind of a shorthand for it, one that was used back then, big business. That is the economic contours of this nation that we're developing in such a remarkable way during these years, specifically the rise of these sort of giant corporations, these powerful concentrations of capital that were so important and would become such an important part of focus of Roosevelt's presidential years. And secondly, to use another shorthand term, race or ethnicity, the changing nature of the American people and their racial and their ethnic background. Also, a question of great concern back then. And I think you've noticed probably a question of concern today, specifically back then and today, questions of immigration and what sort of challenges this great influx of new people into this country posed for us during those years. First, big business. These were years, the 1880s up to the turn of the century. These were years of extraordinary change in this country in that regard. Remarkably prosperous years. The United States was on its way to becoming what it remains today, that is the economic powerhouse, the 800-pound gorilla of the global economy. And that was happening on so many levels in this country. But for all of the good that was happening, that was raising questions for people, questions regarding the power now exerted by these concentrations of capital, these great new centers of power and capital that had such immediate and intimate impact upon people's lives. And yet we're beyond the control and beyond even the understanding of most individuals. How do we deal with that? What sort of questions does that raise? Well, Roosevelt, of course, as a president, would be addressing those kinds of questions. But when we look back to the 1880s and we asked the question, what was Roosevelt thinking about that sort of thing during these years? Where would we look? Where would we look? I think the first place would be here. This wonderful book, how many of you have read this book? This is something that every fan of Roosevelt has read, I think. I think you might say it's a delightful piece of work. It's full of wonderful stories. It's that distinctive writing style that he had at that time of his life. You can sort of feel the energy of this young man out there having a great time, sort of getting his legs back under him after those awful years in the East. But as you read this book, I think you don't have to look into it too far. You don't have to peel apart its parts too much to see Roosevelt as a man, again, much in tune with the people of his time and that Roosevelt was more than a little bit in love with the idea that the American West was the part of the country that was, you know, that was part of that older way of life, that older economy. And that in something like ranching specifically, we saw a way of life. We saw a way of making a living that was under siege. And the changes that were afoot back east, of course, would soon overwhelm this way of life. So his treatment of ranching in this book has that kind of nostalgic feel to it. It's full of stories about cowboys and what he calls frontier types out west, full of incidents like this one depicted by his, of course, close friend, Frederick Remington illustrating the book. In this book he writes about this way of life. The great free ranches with their barbarous, picturesque, and curiously fascinating surroundings mark a primitive stage of existence as surely as do the great tracks of primeval forests. And like the latter, they must pass away before the onward march of our people. And we who have felt the charm of life and have exalted in its abounding vigor, in its bold and restless freedom will not only regret its passing for our own sakes, but must feel also real sorrow that those who come after us are not to see as we have seen what is perhaps the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting phase of American existence. So this is Roosevelt's, the way he experienced ranching, the way he saw it. And he saw it not just as something that he took part in, but he saw this as a stage of American development. The ranchers themselves, I hear he's not talking about the cowboys, but the ranch owners are like themselves. He describes this way, ranching, that is these ranchers, ranching is an occupation like those of vigorous, primitive, pastoral peoples. Having little in common with the humdrum work-a-day business world of the 19th century, and the free ranchman in his manner of life, shows more kinship to an Arab shake than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman. So again, this is how Roosevelt sees this. And when he sees, when he puts this experience into the context of the changes in American life at that time, he sees this as sort of a last holdout of this older way of life, just on the edge of being overwhelmed by this new economic order of great, you know, of great economic power that is looming in the east and looking westward. Well, what really was going on then? Looking at this, certainly of course, in the day to day, in the day to day lives of ranchers and of cowboys, there was plenty of boldness and freedom, plenty of the kind of things that he is alluding to there. As of course there are today. Count as my friends, many friends across the west, ranchers, ranching families, who stay in that business exactly for those reasons, that sense of freedom, that sense of individuality, that sense of being in this uncommon way of life. That's all true. That's all there. But the fact is that ranching in the years that Roosevelt was experiencing it, ranching, if you step back a bit and look at it in this larger context, ranching was really one of the very best instances of the new economy. It was really a prime example of the new economic order, the new economic way of life that Roosevelt associated with the east. What was ranching after all? Ranching was one more of those examples of local enterprises giving way to this national and international economic order, just as cobblers were giving way to shoe factories in Maine, just as millers and mills were giving way to gigantic enterprises like Pillsbury's, Child Roller Factory, Flower Factory in the Midwest. Just as thousands of local breweries were giving way to the giants like Schlitz and Papst in Ann Houser Bush. So the local butcher was giving way to this now national enterprise that was created by those same kinds of forces that we associate with those better known examples, bringing together of supply and demand. The supply was down there in southern Texas and then later on the Great Plains, the demand up there in the northeast, bringing that supply and demand together by this revolutionary system of technology, the railroad system, far in a way, the largest and most extensive on earth, connecting the source down in southern Texas first to the Great Plains and then spreading the ranching system up through the Midwest, what we're seeing here of course is a specialization of regions that was such a primary part of this new economic order. All of this was coordinated by what I would argue is the most important breakthrough in the history of human communication, the Telegraph, which brought all of this together, which tied the whole system together, allowed it to operate on an international scale. All of this was modernity defined almost. This is what drove ranching. This is what gave the spark to create this new industry, and that's what it was. Historians call this the cattle raising industry, and it was an industry. It was an industry with its own factories. Slaughterhouses in places like Cincinnati, Chicago and Kansas City, basically beef and pork factories where the animals were slaughtered and the meat processed and then sent out over that same system of railroads. This then was the ranching industry. This was as prime an example, as I can think of, of the very kinds of systems that Roosevelt and others thought was back east and contrasted with the world that they were living in out in the West. Of course, there was so much in this way of life that did have that distinctive Western tone to it. Here is an illustration, of course, of Roosevelt's ranch. He wrote about this in Ranch Life. It was great affection talking about the house with its lovely veranda where he would sit in Daydream and watch the wind blow through the trees. I think he was meaning for us to look at this and to see this as a kind of a physical manifestation of this older order in contrast to the world that you would see back east, the kinds of elaborate mansions that you would see in the East like the breakers of Cornelius Vanderbilt in Rhode Island. In contrast to this, you would see ranch houses like these or J.P. Morgan's Brownstone in New York City contrasted with that or Andrew Carnegie's mansion in Manhattan contrasted with that. But looks can be deceiving. What were these places? What were these places? This was the headquarters of the Swan Land and Cattle Company organized in 1883, the year that Roosevelt came out on his first hunt, his first exposure to North Dakota. Its original investment about $3.75 million. A few years later, it was capitalized at $50 million. In time, it controlled something like 600,000 acres in Nebraska and Wyoming by far and away the largest ranch in Wyoming, which was dominated, of course, by ranching. The point here is that while you might look at those great mansions and contrast them with these simple structures and think that this is very different ways of life, this represented corporate ranching. These were gigantic international corporations. The Swan Land and Cattle Company, a great example of it. It's controlled by Scott investors. This one, this was the Matador Land and Cattle Company. Founded down in Texas originally, but spread up into Colorado, eventually into the Dakotas in Wyoming. This one was also financed by Scott investors. This is the one that had the famous manager, Myrtle McKenzie, a good friend of Othelia Roosevelt. McKenzie became a legendary figure on the Northern Plains and then left that to take the job as a managing a ranch, an even larger ranch, larger than any in the United States and in Brazil, reminding us that this was an international corporate endeavor. This one, the XIT Ranch. I think you've got a photograph of one of the cooks from the XIT out there in the hall. The XIT, of course, the largest ranch ever, at least in the 48 states. The largest ranch in the United States, in fact, was not in Texas, but in Hawaii, in large island Hawaii. But this was the largest of the 48 states. It also was founded back in the 1880s. About the time was Roosevelt was coming out here. This one was financed by the state government of Texas. They wanted a new capital building, so they offered 3 million acres in the Texas Panhandle for anyone who would agree to build them a new capital. Some Chicago real estate investors took them up on it. These men had made millions rebuilding Chicago after the Great Fire. And now they took up the offer from the state of Texas. They built the state capital. They sold bonds in Britain and Germany to finance this ranch in the Texas Panhandle that once at one time had 3,000 miles of barbed wire fence. The point, of course, is that the ranching that Roosevelt was taking part in, and these were the same years when he was coming out to the Dakotas, was in this way also a prime example of the new economic order. In this case, gigantic corporate concentrations of money were brought to bear on the land. And there's another way in which this ranching reflected these new trends. These large businesses also were often in partnership with the government. Kind of a give and take between these large pools of capital and the federal government. And ranching, when you think about it, there was another instance of this. The government was providing what was, after all, the fundamental fuel of ranching, grass, the public domain. Many of these large ranchers would buy up the land along the streams to control the water. If you control the water, you control everything. And then they would turn their catalogues on the free range, which was, after all, public land. So it was a partnership in this sense. The railroads that were so important to the emergence of ranching were an even more dramatic example of this, as the government provided absolutely almost unimaginable amounts of land to the railroads to construct these transcontinentals that then allowed industries, allowed businesses like these ranches to operate. It shows these land grants along the way here. Giving the instance an example of how much land we're talking about compared to the amount of land taken up by homesteads. Now homesteads, that was an instance of this older economic order. That's the kind of image that Roosevelt had and others had of western life. How much land in the government course was providing land for those folks, too. But comparatively speaking, how did they match up? By 1880, the government had given about 20 million acres. It had been proved up under homesteads. About for the railroads. 127 million acres. And there was still more to come. It's difficult to put your brain around how much land we're talking about here. A recent book by Richard White, a history of the new history of the transcontinental railroads. Puts it this way. He said, if you take all of the land given by the federal government to these railroads to build these western railroads and put it all together, it would be the third largest state in the union. Alaska, Texas, and then what he calls railroadiana. And no better example can be found for that than the Northern Pacific. The railroad that, of course, goes through, or used to go through, it's what the Burlington Northern now, through Dickinson, the Northern Pacific, that was the lifeblood, was the primary artery, economic artery for North Dakota. The amount of land given by the federal government to the Northern Pacific alone to this one railroad was more in the size of New England. And a little bit more to one company. To put that in perspective of North Dakota, can you see that little thin blue line over on the far left, a bit west of where we are right now? The amount of land given to the Northern Pacific would cover everything in North Dakota east of that line. The entire state of North Dakota, except for that little strip left. So, you know, ranching so much in the west that was allowed by this system of railroads was, you know, showed every one of those characteristics that we normally associate with the new economy, with the new American landscape. Ranching was one of the best examples of it that I can think of, and what's especially fascinating is that it was the first. And I think one of those other industries that we normally associate with this new economy really comes after ranching. It paved the way. It opened the way for this. It emerges after all, right after the Civil War at the very earliest moments of the Gilded Age. Now, what makes this fascinating to me, looking at this as a western historian and putting Roosevelt into this context is the fact that the young Roosevelt, you know, with his adventures out in North Dakota buys into this. This is the way he sees it. And yet, if we follow him ahead, follow him ahead, we see this same man as president grappling with this new economic order. Wrestling with exactly those kinds of concentrations of power that we see exemplified in the ranching of his early years. I wonder sometimes whether he looked back as a mature politician, looked back from his presidential years as he's wrestling with people like Morgan and others on the railroads in particular. And I wonder if he ever thought about that, you know, that in fact in his younger years, he had been squarely in the middle of this process in some of its earlier stages. In any case, I think putting this in this larger perspective, we can see Roosevelt as the man who is after all the first president of the new America to begin to come to grips with this question that is still very much with us today, what should be the relationship between the federal government and these concentrations of business power. There are a few issues in American politics today as pertinent and as hot as that one. And we can look back here and we can see, I think, a glimmering, an early glimmering of exactly that question in the life of this remarkable man. The second question, as I said, it was race. And I use that, as I said, as kind of a shorthand. What I'm really talking about here is the human perspective of the United States. As it moved into this extraordinary time, as it moved through this extraordinary time, it was on its way to being this new America, this transformed America. I think it's arguable that the United States between, let's say, 1850 and 1910, 1860, let's say, 1860, the time of the Civil War in 1910. During that short half-century, the United States changed in its human makeup relatively more than in any other comparable time in our history. Think about that. Beginning, of course, with emancipation. Now, African-Americans have been here for 300 years. But the American citizenry in 1865, suddenly 4 million persons of color were introduced into American citizenship. By that time, we had expanded to the Pacific, which meant that the American embrace was now around tens of thousands of Indian peoples. Indians out west, unlike those of the East, unlike the Cherokees and the Delaware's and the others, these Indians, these people, had never had the slightest exposure to American institutions. The Gold Rush brought, you know, made California easily the most polyglot, the most extraordinary collection of humanity from across the globe to be found in any place, any place on earth at that time. And then, of course, what was foremost in the minds of so many people, this surge of immigration from Europe, the so-called new immigration. Immigrants coming now increasingly from Southern and Eastern Europe rather than from the British Isles and the British Isles and elsewhere. So this country, you know, between say 1860 and 1910, just in its human face, you know, was radically transformed. That was also part of the new America. And that, like the questions around big business and economics, that preyed upon the thinking of the American people. It bothered a lot of people. It bothered Theodore Roosevelt. Where would we look to get Roosevelt's ideas on this? Specifically in the case of the West. Well, we begin, of course, with Indians. He didn't write a lot about Indians. He does have a chapter in ranch life on Indian-white relations and on Indians generally. He claimed to be in that, in other words, he claimed to be something of an authority on Indians. But in his writing about them, he sort of falls into the typical cliches of the time. He sees good Indians and bad Indians. At one point, he says that the Nez Perces differ from the Apaches as much as a Scott Laird does from a Calabrian Bandit. This, of course, as far as I know, comes from a man who had never seen either a Nez Perce or an Apache. But, again, the point here is that he's, you know, this is a very common trope of that particular period. And yet, even though there are good guys like the Nez Perce and the Pueblos and the Cherokees, for the most part, when Roosevelt and we're, again, please remember, this is the young Roosevelt. This is the Roosevelt of the 1880s. When he writes about Indians, they typically falls into this sort of common, these common descriptions of sort of backwards, savage people who have no inherent right to the land because they're not using it properly and who then must give way to this new order. He continues to speak of them in that way even as president when he referred to the directionists in the Philippines. If you read his comments on that very often, he will call them Apaches and Comanches. Sometimes you get the impression that he was really irritated that the western Indians had surrendered before he got out there so he could fight them, so he sort of projects them out there to the across the Pacific. In a letter in the 1880s, written from his time out here, a letter that you see quoted fairly often, he wrote, I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe 9 out of 10 are and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely in the case of the 10th. He also wrote on the Sand Creek Massacre in his biography of Thomas Hart Benton. I and Clay mentioned a book in that book I researched the Sand Creek episode very closely and this was not a pretty story. Roosevelt wrote of this massacre he said, while there were certain objectionable details on balance he said it was as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever happened on the frontier. Again, this is the early the early Roosevelt and again, this is common, this is the common take of that day. There's nothing in that that you couldn't say about so many other writers of that particular period. The main cause of concern in this question of the changing face of the new America for folks however had not to do with Indians, but with the new immigration with these new groups of folks coming into this country. There's some pictures of the Hedotsas here since North Dakota. Much greater concern where folks like this flooding in through the East Coast. People who were coming from, as I said from Southern and Eastern Europe. People who for many of the old stock Americans those who had been here for many generations those sort of long tailed families of the East. In particular those of Roosevelt's lineage of his social class. This was disturbing. These were people with who spoke in strange languages. People who practiced questionable religions. People who lived by strange and exotic customs. People who smell strongly of garlic. And this was again there was nothing unusual in Roosevelt in this regard, but these were issues, these were questions that bothered people of that particular background. Roosevelt and Roosevelt was no exception. Most I think best known in his attitudes and his writings were his professions of what he called race suicide. He was of course famous for saying that it was the absolute duty of every proper American family to produce as many children as possible. The duty of every American male he said was to work, fight, and breed. And he talked about the warfare of the cradle. He said the old stock Americans have got to keep up, got to keep up with these newer folks who were coming in and are producing so many children. As president I just learned this in doing this researching working on this talk. 1906 1906, president Roosevelt in his address to congress proposed a federal amendment to bring federal control over marriage and divorce in this country. This of course has a very contemporary touch to it. This is the very thing that is being proposed. In this case we have a question of course of same-sex marriage. Wouldn't you have loved to hear his thoughts on that? I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure where he would come down on that question. He also later in his life proposed two of my favorite of his proposals. One of them, that the federal government should give certain economic preferences to parents with three or more children. And my absolute all-time favorite, the salaries of public officials should be gauged by how many children they had. In other words, if you're a public official and refuse to produce children you'd never get above the lowest pay level. On the other hand I have five children. I think it's a terrific way to approach salaries. So this was a man then who really up until the end of his life was expressing to a degree these sorts of concerns including a control of immigration in 1894, an article in the forum, article True Americanism. He said we need much more drastic laws on immigration that now exist. We need to sort of clamp down on this immigration and control it. And there was a case of his friendships. At this time there were those who took these ideas of concern over the new immigration to remarkable extremes. And it's not a part of our history these years that we are especially comfortable with, most of us. But there were those who said that who came up with racial theories of Aryan supremacy and who were what they call themselves race scientists and who were in favor of eugenics, that is of sort of breeding controls in this country to make sure that the right sorts of Americans were born. This was probably the best known of them, Madison Grant. But there were really three of them Henry Fairfield Osburn who was the director of the New York Museum of Natural History John Merriam. These were these were the big three of the American eugenics movement. And of these three, the first two, Grant and Osburn, were close friends of Roosevelt and lifetime correspondence with them. They exchanged dozens of letters with them. Many of them on these particular topics. Grant in particular was probably the most important of these. And Grant was the author of the book that really was kind of the Bible of this whole movement. The Passing of the Great Race. When this book came out, Roosevelt immediately ordered a copy read it at Sagamore Hill and wrote to his friend Grant. He said, this is a capital book in purpose, in vision, and grasped by the facts that our people most need to realize. That all Americans should be sincerely grateful to you for writing it. This was blurbed on the back of the book for future editions. Now, again, let me emphasize. These ideas, while we find them uncomfortable and in some cases bizarre, this was the air that many people were breathing at the time. The folks of Roosevelt's crowd of his world, this is a very common very common idea. Don't take the idea that he was that unusual in this. He was pretty much especially the younger Roosevelt. Pretty much along the lines of so many of so many others. What does this have to do with the West? How do these people relate this to the West? And here is where as a Western historian this gets kind of interesting. Because when these folks with these concerns looked westward, they saw the West as kind of the last bastion of the true Americans. The old stock Americans. Just as they were looking westward in the economic changes of the time and seeing the West as sort of the last stand of this earlier, simpler order. In this case, they were sort of riding off the East, the Atlantic coast, as you know already hopelessly overwhelmed by these changes in putting their faith out West. Now as far as I know, Roosevelt himself did not ride or did not ride extensively along those lines. What we can say, we can say for certain is that others very close to Roosevelt did. Certainly. His two closest friends who were like Roosevelt in love with the West and doing so much to create this image of the West that was emerging in the latter part of the 19th century. Certainly they shared these beliefs, no one more so than this man, Frederick Remington, who wrote in the early 1890s that as I can find a quote here, yes. He said that this part of America was sort of the last bastion for these folks. And he said that when the time came, he would take his Winchester down from over the mantle and would proceed to killing these foreign swarms who were coming in from the Atlantic coast. This is perhaps best summed up by a man named William Jackson Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs, when he wrote back to his wife his vision of the West. He said, we shall have out West a new and better civilization. Only may the people never get as thick as on the eastern seaboard. We shall surrender that briny border as a sort of extensive castle garden to receive and filter the foreign swarms and prepare them by a gradual process for the coming into the inner temple of Americanism out in Colorado. Well, that was the kind of idea then that you would hear among these fellows. Grant was certainly, Madison Grant was certainly a believer there. So was Remington. As was Owen Wister, Roosevelt's other close friend who was caught up in the same idea. Wister's the Virginia which of course is dedicated to his friend Theodore Roosevelt. Wister's Virginia can be read and often has been read as a kind of a hymn to the sort of the old stock, the best of the old stock America of the east that saves itself by going out to the west. The Virginia, the cowboy coming out west and then marrying the New England school marm from the northeast, Molly, the best of those two older worlds out in the west saving the old stock America. Wister later would write an article in American magazine called shall we let the cuckoos crowd us out of our nests. Cuckoos of course the birds occupy the nests of others and he said alien eggs are being laid in our American nest. Our native spirit is being diluted and polluted by organized minorities every hour of the day. Let us awake from the lethargy and take every step great and small time to keep our inheritance. So to these guys then to these folks the west just as to others the west was the you know the last stand of this older economic order. To these folks the west was the last stand of this older ethnic order and it must be saved protected for that. This as a western historian this has some fascinating and ironic wrinkles to it and it moves it takes us in some really interesting directions that to me you know will be unpredictable. For instance conservation. Roosevelt the famous conservation here is one area of course in which we associate theodore with the west saving our national forests The Boone and Crockett Club organized hard upon his time out here in North Dakota organized it a dinner soon after he got back. This club dedicated to the saving the dwindling populations of large game animals at west. The American Bison Society to save the animal that was so close to extermination Roosevelt the first honorary the first president of course of the Boone and Crockett Club Roosevelt the first honorary president of the American Bison Society the wildlife refuge system today established under Roosevelt's presidency. Organizations like the save the redwoods league all of these things we associate with Roosevelt and all of these things that and of course we applaud and see this as one of the great accomplishments but there was this interesting wrinkle to conservation that ties in believe it or not with these questions these questions of race here's Roosevelt standing in front of one of the redwoods out in California if you go out to California today to the redwood state park you might visit this tree it's called the Founders Tree it's a tree dedicated to the founders of the save the redwoods league over here to the right there is a plaque those founders and who are they? what are the three names of the founders on the plaque it's Grant Osburn and Maryam these men all three of these men Grant in particular were far better known in their earlier career as conservationists Grant in fact saw himself essentially as a conservationist and he saw a direct connection a direct parallel between conserving these dwindling resources out west these living resources that he considered so essential to what America was all about whether they were redwoods or bison or eagles or the other wildlife and in his own mind preserving conserving what he considered other essential elements of the true Americans that is those people of his particular ethnic background he was after Roosevelt stepped down from the Boone and Crockett Club it was Madison Grant who was the president, long running president of the Boone and Crockett Club Madison Grant was really the founding spirit behind the American Bison Society they turned the presidency of it to William Horaday a much better known man and of course the honorary president of this theater of Roosevelt but it was Grant really really who was the founder the first bison refuge out west in the Wichita mountains in Oklahoma was established as a forest preserve but then made one of the very first wildlife preserves it was there that the first bison were taken out were taken out and this was the brainchild of Madison Grant it was Madison Grant the eugenicist it was Madison Grant in the area and supremacist who saw this as just as important and directly related to that particular that particular concern very very odd bedfellows indeed and the first bison taken out west were to the Wichita refuge around the Bronx Zoo the New York Zoological Society that had been founded by among others, Theodore Roosevelt Madison Grant in Henry Fairfield Osburn well one thing you can say about this well again to reiterate what these guys did was to look west and to see the west then is this last refuge of the true Americans and turning back to the east then they looked at that part of the country and they said well you know it's pretty much a lost cause what Palmer called the briny coast of the east as opposed to the true America out west and once again as with this economic order they got it just about exactly backwards if you look at the question of all the states along the Atlantic coast which had the highest percentage of foreign born persons at the top of Massachusetts and New York about one out of every four persons in 1880 had been born outside of this country what if you went west what would you see those eight states out west all had higher percentages of foreign born persons than either Massachusetts or New York if you were to put them all together Massachusetts and New York that is the most ethnically that is the states in the briny coast of the Atlantic with the highest portion of those foreign swarms would rank ninth and tenth out west in terms of foreign born in terms of aliens in fact of all states and territories in all of American history the one that has had the highest percentage of persons who were either born outside of this country or with one or both parents born outside of this country that is the highest percentage of persons who were either first or second generation alien of all states and territories the one with the highest percentage has been North Dakota the opening of the 20th century 70 percent seven out of every ten North Dakotans in the latter part at the end of the 19th century had either been born outside of the United States or had one or both parents born outside the United States so in other words people like William Jackson Palmer and Frederick Remington if they wanted to escape the foreign swarms they needed to go to Massachusetts so this is a very a very strange situation where did Roosevelt stand on these issues as I said if you look at his writings again the younger Roosevelt we hear him saying these uncomfortable things frankly about Indians if we look at Roosevelt and the question of the racial makeup of this country we hear him saying things are really not that far away from the things that are being said by people like Madison Grant but look more closely look more closely here is where it gets interesting follow Roosevelt follow him just as we follow Roosevelt out of the bad lands to the presidency as it begins to grapple with this question of big business we follow Roosevelt through his adulthood into his years as president we hear the different things we hear him change his view on this for example he writes to Henry Fairfield Osburn the eugenicist apparently Osburn we don't have the letter that Osburn wrote and was talking to him about the hopeless situation of Indians out west specifically talking about Oklahoma Roosevelt wrote back he said sir in my regiment in Cuba there were 50 men of Indian blood almost all of them mixed blood he said which of course was the ultimate horror for these eugenicists and this is admittedly a little up condescending but he says they behaved exactly like the whites and their careers since then have been exactly like the white men he goes on to say that he's received many delegations from Oklahoma and he says these people are perfectly civilized perfectly civilized he came around in fact to arguing to the problem of the Indian problem people see as Indian problem is interbreeding again breeding is the answer in this case he said mix the races mix the races and this will bring about the best of both the point to stress here on this question of race is that Roosevelt the maturing Roosevelt came to have this deep and abiding faith and the ability the power of simply living in this country to break down all of these racial and ethnic barriers and to produce a kind of a common American identity that is really what he came to believe and while he was concerned with these racial differences he said that's the answer that then is the answer we must bring all of these people together into this common American purpose that's the point he was making I think to Osborne about the Indians of Oklahoma there's a fascinating letter that he wrote to a journalist who had come across that quote that I read to you earlier I'm not saying that all Indians are good Indians or dead Indians but not understand that sort of thing this guy come across this letter and he asked Roosevelt permission to reprint it and the president wrote him back he said I must ask you not to publish that letter of mine about the Indians the reason is this that letter was written 18 years ago and it's 1885 extraordinary changes have taken place in the country of which I wrote during those 18 years for 18 years on the frontier in the older civilized regions and he went on to say that now there's been no violence out there and now in fact what we see out there is this magical process of Americanization with Indian peoples becoming part of this common of this common society and of course the Roosevelt the Roosevelt the president the way in which this was best exemplified was through politics and he ends his he ends the letter some of the Indians in North Dakota now not only vote but they actually go to political conventions astonishing he doesn't say which conventions suppose he had thought that they went to the Democrats they were on sort of a lower stage of civilization but they were moving up toward the Republican party so in other words what Roosevelt was expressing what he came around to express what he came around to embrace was the notion of what we would come to call of course the melting pot and this was about as far as you could get from those racial theorists in that day what he did even at the time that he was continuing his friendship with people like Madison Grant he was coming around to the notion that America is a place in which all of these peoples could over time become part of this common American experience of common American society the term melting pot has an interesting history it was coined by this man Israel Sanguil in this play that he wrote 1912 this phrase very quickly became part of the America vernacular and this idea of course the whole idea expressed in this play was the kind of thing that just drove people like Madison Grant and the other racial theorists exactly right up the wall the last thing in the world that they wanted was this kind of coming together of these peoples and this was the opposite extreme for him this was the man who wrote it he in fact was involved also in establishing Jewish colonies in the American plains something that would have driven Remington nuts and if you look and open up open up to its frontispiece beyond its frontispiece this is what you will see the play the melting pot is dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt in fact Roosevelt was a frequent correspondent the Sanguil as well as with Madison Grant and later in 1912 Sanguil wrote him a letter and said Mr. President you never think about this play that Roosevelt wrote him back sir indeed I do he said that this was a play as he put it that was among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life it expresses the great ideals which are just as essential for the native born as for the foreign born if this nation is to make its rightful contribution to the sum total of human achievement so what do we make of all of this I think a few points first what we see is this for one thing is this emerging America this emerging new America grappling with questions that are startlingly familiar to us today the question of the power of business the proper relationship of government to business to what extent should government regulate business the kind of questions that are very much a part of the political landscape today the question of the human makeup and specifically the questions of immigration and the changing nature of American society and the kind of challenges that that poses and how the government should respond to that this was part of the world that Roosevelt was going through what we see here is Roosevelt's west playing very unexpected roles in this very different from what we normally think of what was going out there the west in fact is a great place a great laboratory for studying so much of this finally we see this remarkable young man himself moving evolving from his young cliched views on these questions toward once that were far more complex far more nuanced than we they were before and far more I think reflective far more reflective of what the Americans were speaking were thinking generally and what Americans think today given all that I think the final most obvious point perhaps to make is that Roosevelt's west and Roosevelt have at least one thing in common they are both easily misunderstood they are both easily underestimated both are far too easily given to caricatures in fact both of them were far more complex far more subtle in their nature than we have given the credit for and we begin to understand that and begin to appreciate those complexities then perhaps we have something to learn about this new America about our America both the west and the Roosevelt shaped Soap or Family thanks very much thank you for some questions