The original and unsurpassed cowboy president – though the quartet’s only Easterner, and a New Yorker to boot – was not only an ardent hunter and all-round outdoorsman. The “damned cowboy” (as the Republican Party boss Mark Hanna derided the vice president elevated to the top job when an anarchist assassin killed William McKinley) was also a skilled naturalist and fervent conservationist, as well as a peerless presidential creator of wildlife refuges, national forests, national monuments and national parks. Small wonder that the cover of Otis Graham’s Presidents and the American Environment (2015) shows him at Glacier Point during his 1903 trip to Yosemite.
The pervasive campfire aroma of Roosevelt’s larger-than-life persona is reflected in book titles such as David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback (1981), Sarah Watts’sRough Rider in the White House (2003) or Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt(2005) – the latter about the near-fatal, post-presidency voyage up Brazil’s Rio da Duvida that proved to be the last major adventure before 1919, when the man who’d survived countless scrapes met a rather unmemorable end, from a blood clot in his sleep. Roosevelt was the sort of person of whom it was easy to imagine that he, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Revenant, would have survived a mama grizzly’s mauling, a roller-coaster ride down a raging, frigid river, and a night inside a dead horse. After all, as Michael R. Canfield recounts in this new account of Roosevelt’s relationship with the outdoors, in 1912, in Milwaukee, he pressed on with a scheduled campaign speech despite having just taken an assassin’s bullet in the chest, proceeding to speak for over an hour, as the bloodstain gradually spread across most of his shirt (the bullet was never removed).
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