Theodore Roosevelt and ‘The Virginian’

Modern western American fiction has many masters such as Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig. But they all build on one iconic but now largely forgotten book: "The Virginian" by Owen Wister, published in 1902. Set in Wyoming in the 1890s and featuring the first iconic American cowboy, "The Virginian" tells a timeless story of good triumphing over evil, love and respect over hate and mistrust. Wister was a college friend of Theodore Roosevelt, who helped edit the book.

"The Virginian" mirrors the story of Roosevelt: an East-coast tenderfoot toughened-up -- in many ways saved -- by his harsh and rugged adventures in the Dakotas in the 1880s. The metamorphosis of "The Virginian" cowboy and his tenderfoot friend reflects Roosevelt's own transformation from indiscriminate hunter of animals with questionable family values, to a protector of wildlife and the father of our national parks.

Young Theodore Roosevelt dressed in deer skins, posing with a rifle in an 1885 portrait.

Roosevelt Flees Tragedy and Finds Redemption

As a boy, "Teedie" Roosevelt was the proverbial 98-pound weakling with debilitating asthma and poor eyesight. Thanks to a strong and encouraging family and his own incredible drive, he transformed himself into a vigorous and intellectually perceptive outdoorsman. By the time Roosevelt started college, he had "made" his body and was in excellent physical condition; he loved to box and revered camping, hiking, hunting and fishing.

Listen to his words at 18 during a backpack trip to the Adirondacks: "Perhaps the sweetest bird music I have ever listened to was uttered by a hermit thrush. It was while hunting deer on a small lake, in the heart of the wilderness. ... [S]uddenly the quiet was broken by the song of a hermit thrush; louder and clearer it sang from the depths of the grim and rugged woods, until the sweet, sad music seemed to fill the very air and to conquer for the moment the gloom of the night; then it died away and ceased as suddenly as it began. Perhaps the song would have seemed less sweet in the daytime, but uttered as it was, with such surroundings, sounding so strange and so beautiful amid these grand but desolate wilds, I shall never forget it." (Edmund Morris, "Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," 66.)

After graduating from Harvard in 1880 at 21, TR began his meteoric rise. By the time he was 23, he had been elected to the New York State Assembly; by 25 he was the state minority leader. On Feb. 13, 1884, he received the joyful news that his wife Alice had delivered a baby girl, their first child. Then it all came crashing down.

Several hours after his daughter's birth, a second telegram came: His wife was dying as was his mother. They both died the next day, on Valentine's Day. Shattered, Roosevelt fled to the Dakota territory, north of Medora, where he lived for most of the next two years, virtually abandoning his baby daughter.

During these years, the New York City tenderfoot transformed himself into a Dakota cowboy, all the while seeking solace and adventure. Roosevelt's biographer, Edmund Morris, notes that the words -- lonely, melancholy, monotony, deathless -- "became obsessive parts of Roosevelt's vocabulary." ("Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," at 264.) But as before, TR made himself into a stronger, tougher man. Edmund Morris writes:

"He spent whole days in the saddle, riding as many as seventy-two miles between dawn and darkness. Sometimes he rode on through the night, rejoicing in the way 'moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the plateaus and glance off the windrippled blades as they would from water.' His body hardened, the tan on his face deepened, hints of gold appeared in his hair and reddish mustache. 'I now look like a regular cowboy dandy, with all my equipments finished in the most expensive style.'" ("Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," at 275.)

By October 1886, Roosevelt had moved back to New York, resuming his responsibilities to his daughter and marrying his childhood sweetheart. He would soon serve as the assistant secretary of the Navy, Rough Rider colonel, governor of New York, vice president, and upon McKinley's assassination in September 1901, our youngest president. Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909, and died only 10 years later at age 60. But he never forgot the Dakotas and his days of salvation and growth as a cowboy.

"The Virginian"

Wister was from Philadelphia and met Roosevelt at Harvard. In 1885, while Roosevelt was in North Dakota, Wister was in Wyoming, taking detailed notes of the cowboy lifestyle and lore. In 1894, Wister wrote a short story for Harper's Weekly in which a Wyoming cowboy stops the inhumane treatment of a horse and flogs the abuser. This cowboy, never named, becomes the main character of "The Virginian."

The book starts with the narrator -- referred to later as a tenderfoot but never named -- arriving by train in Wyoming in the 1890s. Looking out his window, he sees a gang of cowboys trying to rope a renegade bronco: "I noticed a man who sat on the high gate of the corral, looking on. For he now climbed down with the undulations of a tiger, smooth and easy, as if his muscles flowed beneath his skin. The others had all visibly whirled the rope, some of them even shoulder high. I did not see his arm lift or move. He appeared to hold the rope down low, by his leg. But like a sudden snake I saw the noose go out its length and fall true; and the thing was done. As the captured pony walked in with a sweet, church-door expression, our train moved slowly on to the station, and a passenger remarked, 'That man knows his business.'" (17-18.)

The cowboy turns out to be the unnamed Virginian, escaping a stifling life in the south for the freedom and potential of the west. Initially the Virginian barely tolerates the intruder but gradually they become friends as the Virginian shows and teaches the Tenderfoot about the ways of the west. Like Roosevelt, the Tenderfoot begins to understand and appreciate the plains and prairies, all the while growing his skills and confidence.

You need to read "The Virginian" (it's tough to find but worth the effort), and so I won't spoil the wonderful story. But it is remarkable how the prose holds up after 120 years, ringing fresh and enticing. Through a collection of anecdotes about the plains cowboy and western life, "The Virginian" explores and embraces the vision and values required by the new American West with the closing of the western frontier. These anecdotes also reflect Theodore Roosevelt: His ever-present perception of animals, birds and plants and his growing appreciation of the need to conserve America's endangered natural resources.

Animals in "The Virginian" are revered and taken as needed not sport. When he spies a river otter shaking water from its fur and rolling in the sand, the Virginian observes "I am like that fellow ... If I could talk his animal language ... he would say to me: Come and roll on the sands. What's the use of fretting? What's the gain in being a man?" (354.) And when a neighboring rancher buys a fine cow pony and proceeds to whip it unmercifully, noting "You've got to keep them afraid of you," the Virginian offers to buy the horse. (223.) When the rancher beats the exhausted animal after a long chase, the Virginian warns him "I'd let that hawss alone;" with the warning unheeded, "vengeance like a blast struck." (226-27.) The abuser is "stamped into the dust."

Like Roosevelt in the Adirondacks and the Dakotas, Wister celebrates the Wyoming scenery and landscape with spare words yet stunning imagery. On the wedding night of their wilderness honeymoon, the Virginian and his bride ride through a forest:"She looked, and saw the island, and the water folding it with ripples and with smooth spaces. The sun was throwing upon the pine boughs a light of deepening red gold, and the shadow of the fishing rock lay over a little bay of quiet water and sandy shore. ... He pointed upward to the high mountains which they had approached, and showed her where the stream led into their first unfoldings.

"'Tomorrow, we shall be among them,' said he.

"'Then," she murmured to him, "tonight is here?'

"He nodded for answer, and she gazed at the island and understood why he had not stopped before; nothing they had passed had been so lovely as this place."(350.)

By the 1902 publication of "The Virginian," the days of the plains cowboys and cattle drives had ended; the ranges were fenced and closed. In his introduction, Wister writes that the Wyoming horseman "will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. [But] he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning."

"The Virginian" spawned a rich genre of Western fiction and inspired a popular TV series. It defined the archetype western cowboy/lawman -- think Gary Cooper in "High Noon" -- taciturn, vigorously potent, morally unimpeachable and thoroughly American. If you're an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt or love a good cowboy yarn, you should read TR's favorite novel, "The Virginian." 