Free Mr. Hornaday's War by Stefan Bechtel

a few hours earlier, in the same house, on the same day.
    Beside an enormous scrawled “X,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary on the day of Alice’s death, “the light has gone out of my life.” 12 He remained inconsolable and refused to talk about Alice, publicly or privately, for the rest of his life. His father had died at forty-six; his mother at forty-eight; and now his beloved Alice at twenty-two. The historian David McCullough wrote that for Roosevelt, “the sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life.” 13
    A year before Alice’s death, in 1883, Roosevelt had gone West to the territories with the intention of bagging a buffalo before they were all gone. It was a kind of boyish lark. He succeeded in shooting his first buffalo, and it made him so happy he did a crazy little war dance.“I’ve never seen anybody so happy about anything,” a friend of his said. He had his picture taken in a foppish Western outfit, holding a muzzle-loading rifle—Oscar Wilde in buckskins. He even took off his rimless spectacles for the picture, even though he was nearsighted and could barely see without them (he often had several extra pairs sewn into his clothes). But something else happened on that trip to the Dakota Territory. Once Roosevelt got a look at that wide-open country, with its molten sundowns, its totemic buttes, and the seeming limitessness of the sky, he liked it so well that he threw in with a couple of other men and bought a small operation on the Little Missouri called Chimney Butte Ranch. He bought a few cattle and horses and called himself a cowboy.
    He was enormously pleased with himself when he returned to New York to his pregnant wife, Alice, and the house he’d built in Oyster Bay called Sagamore Hill. But just a few short months later, his wife and mother were both dead, and he was inconsolable with grief. He was only twenty-six years old, but “for joy or for sorrow, my life has now been lived out,” he confided to his diary. 14
    Roosevelt began returning to the ranch in the Dakotas, sometimes four or five times a year, but now these visits no longer were merely youthful escapades. Those who knew him said that Roosevelt struggled to keep from sinking into a melancholy listlessness during this period. He withdrew from friends. He seemed distant and distracted. A man of action, he hardly seemed to know what to do. He threw himself into the bruising physical work of the ranch, into the West, into the possibility of oblivion in that enormous country. Now he seemed to be restlessly seeking a new life, some new purpose in his life, and even a new self.
    Roosevelt’s younger cousin, Nicholas, later observed that he “took obvious delight in the apparently pathological extremes” of his adventures in the Dakotas, “rides of seventy miles or more in a day, hunting hikes of fourteen to sixteen hours, stretches in the saddle in roundup as long as forty hours.” 15 He was embracing what he called “the strenuous life,” a manly life of physical extremes and great personal risk, which was perhaps also a way of avoiding too much introspection. 16
    In a sprawling country famous for transformations, and out of the bottomless grief of all his losses, Theodore Roosevelt began undergoing one of the most remarkable transfigurations in American history. Over two or three years, the effete, side-whiskered “Punkin-Lilly” ofthe Harvard Club and the Upper East Side morphed into a genuine Dakota cowboy—not the
dandy faux
cowpoke in the early posed photographs, but a lean and rangy cattleman, with a craggy, wind-burned face and a fighting physique. He had steeled his body and his soul to survive. He had been transformed by his grief. Alice Hathaway Lee was still there inside him, as she would always be, guttering like a radiant candle flame, but he chose never to mention her again, as if to do so might cause his rough-hewn cowboy