An excerpt:
On Valentine’s Day, 1884, when he was in his mid-20s, Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and wife both died. In his grief he sought refuge on a cattle ranch in western North Dakota that he had invested in the year before. To comprehend the depth of the place’s remoteness when he was there we have to think of vast stretches in Alaska or Nunavut in far northern Canada. And he could not have had a more improbable background for such an adventure, being Harvard educated and from a wealthy New York family. Yet to his enormous credit he dug in and stayed out on that strange land for much of the next three years.
And in the process he lost over half of his sizeable investment in the ranch due to the terrible weather for cattle. In spite of that, being out on that landscape changed him: “I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota…It was here that the romance of my life began.”
To read more of Scott’s article, click the image below:
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.