| dc.description.abstract | Following the deaths of his first wife Alice and his mother Martha in 1884, a bereaved Theodore Roosevelt turned for inspiration to the American West, to the bleak and storied Badlands of Dakota that symbolized his personal sense of desolation and loneliness. During his days as a rancher and hunter in the West he also completed a lifelong struggle for physical strength. Equally as important was the mental transformation he underwent as a result of his contact with the frontier. An impressionable young man in search of national meaning and personal fulfillment, he followed his fertile and far-reaching interests from the open ranges of stockraising to the intellectual frontiers of history. And by 1889, no longer an anemic youth whose lungs had been racked with asthma, the muscular and robust Roosevelt had matured both in body and mind and had prepared himself to advance to the front lines of history where he could project his recently evolved ideas and ideals onto the national and international stages. Of the many forces that shaped Theodore Roosevelt, the man and the President, none was more important, more enduring than the frontier experience. Although an Easterner by birth, background, and education, during his years in Dakota he grew to embrace many attitudes, values, and ideals that were distinctively and identifiably Western in origin. His experiences and observations on the frontier altered and molded his conception of America's past, and his interaction with the primitive conditions of the Western wilderness influenced profoundly his vision of the nation's future. His pioneering history of the trans-Appalachian frontier, The Winning of the West, and his groundbreaking interpretation of the American experience in terms of westward expansion clearly influenced the genesis and evolution of the landmark Frontier Thesis later advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner. His belief in Manifest Destiny grew directly from his interpretation of the westward movement. His acceptance of strength as the greatest of virtues--the origins of the "Big Stick" policies of his presidency, his sensitivity to the natural environment, to the conservation of the nation's receding wilderness regions, the preservation of wildlife and the protection and perpetuation of forest reserves, the reclamation of arid lands, the safeguarding of mineral resources, the renewal of the soil, and the harnassing of the waterways of the West: all may be traced directly to this experience on the frontier between 1883 and 1889. | |
