Free The Everything Theodore Roosevelt Book by Arthur G. Sharp Page B

took over the task of raising young Alice, TR sought a way to forget his beloved wife. His way of coping was to erase her memory completely, an impossibility. Her memory would follow him wherever he went. Nevertheless, he tried to escape it.
    Not long after the funerals of Alice and his mother, TR left New York to try to forget Alice. The light may have gone out of his life, but it would come back on eventually. It began to gleam again in the Dakota Badlands.
QUIZ
    5-1 The “teddy bear” is named after TR .
A. True
B. False
    5-2 A city in North Dakota is named after one of TR’s close friends from college. Which is it?
A. Saltonstall
B. Welling
C. Minot
D. Moorehead
    5-3 Valentine’s Day was bittersweet for TR between 1880 and 1884. Why?
A. He could not find the appropriate card to express his love to Alice Hathaway Lee.
B. It was the day he announced his engagement to Alice and the day she and his mother died.
C. He did not like romantic holidays.
D. It was too close to Groundhog Day for his taste.
    5-4 Typhoid fever in New York State is:
A. quite common
B. completely eradicated
C. limited to children
D. rare
    5-5 It is still possible to leave messages of sympathy on Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt’s memorial .
A. True
B. False
    ANSWERS
    5-1. True
    5-2. C
    5-3. B: He announced his engagement to Alice on Valentine’s Day, 1880. She and his mother both died on Valentine’s Day, 1884.
    5-4. D: Only thirty to fifty cases of typhoid fever occur in New York each year. Most of them are acquired during foreign travel to underdeveloped countries.
    5-5. True: There is a website where people can–and do–leave such messages.

CHAPTER 6
    There Is a New Sheriff in Town
“It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West of Owen Wister’s stories, and Frederic Remington’s drawings, the soldier and the cowpuncher. The land of the West has gone now, ‘gone, gone with the lost Atlantis,’ gone to the isle of ghosts and strange dead memories … In that land we led a hardy life. Ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.”
    TR visited the Dakota Territory in 1883, which whetted his appetite for the area. In 1884, after his wife died, he moved there for two years to forget her. TR bought two ranches and immersed himself in the Western lifestyle. He learned a great deal about people’s ability to adapt to new circumstances and mended himself mentally, physically, and spiritually. After a disastrous winter ruined his business venture, TR returned to New York with a much healthier attitude about the western United States—and a renewed zeal for life.

TR’s First Trip to the Badlands
    TR’s 1884 trip to erase the memories of his deceased wife was not his first visit to the Dakota Territory. He had been there earlier under happier circumstances, most recently in 1883, when Alice was pregnant and he was looking for some diversion. He got the diversion and unknowingly took a major step in altering his life drastically.
    TR arrived in the Dakota Territory for the first time before dawn at the Little Missouri train depot on September 8, 1883. The timing was hardly auspicious. TR had left his beloved wife at home, he did not know anyone in the Badlands—and he did not have a horse. None of those factors bothered him.
    TR was a man who was used to adversity and well-equipped to deal with it. As far as he was concerned, adversity in the Badlands was no different than adversity in New York. As events turned out, he was right.
    One thing TR had in his favor was a pocket full of cash, which he used to induce Joe Ferris, a twenty-five-year-old hunting guide from New Brunswick, Canada, to help him. The rugged individualists in North Dakota may have distrusted Easterners in general, but they did respect the value of a dollar. Once TR secured Ferris’s assistance, he turned to his next goal: acquiring a horse.
    Joe Ferris wasn’t particularly helpful to TR at first. He was skeptical that the bespectacled, rather unfit looking