The Cowboy and Gamesman
Following the death of his wife Teddy removed numerous pages of his diary in which he had written of her before marriage and of their life together. He burned the many letters they had exchanged. He consigned their infant daughter to the care of his sister and returned to Albany following the funerals, determined to bury himself in his work as an assemblyman. He was an effective and progressive member of the Assembly, and became noticed as a rising star in the New York Republican Party. He served in the Assembly for three consecutive terms, 1882, 1883, and 1884.
The presidential election of 1884 was a divisive one for the Republicans, with more progressive members of the party unhappy with the nomination of James G. Blaine as their candidate for president. Several of the Republicans split from the party and coalesced as a group called the Mugwumps, and Roosevelt supported this faction to a degree but refused to split from the party nominee in the national election. Blaine was defeated in the election by Grover Cleveland and Roosevelt, still grieving over the death of his wife, withdrew from politics and went west.
The Roosevelt family owned a ranch in the Dakota’s but Teddy went to a new location and built another, which he named Elkhorn, in late 1884. Teddy taught himself to ride, and although the local ranchers and their hired hands at first treated him with derision as an eastern dude (with a New York accent polished by years at Harvard), he gradually earned a grudging respect, as much from his tenacity as from anything else. He learned to rope cattle, and to hunt in the North Dakota hills. He wrote three books on the subjects of hunting and ranching, extolling the “manly” qualities they produced in their practitioners.
Even in the open fields of North Dakota Roosevelt was not able to completely divorce himself from politics and the organization of special interest groups. He convinced his fellow ranchers to join an organization called the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, a joint effort for the ranchers to consider mutual concerns actions for conservation. Roosevelt operated his ranch as a for profit institution, as did all of the ranchers in the area, making them competitors as well as neighbors, and getting competing businesses to work together for the common good was no small task.
The winter of 1886-87 was one of the most severe ever to hit the United States, with extreme cold and heavy snows which resulted in the loss of livestock for ranchers across the plains states. Roosevelt’s ranch was particularly hard hit, and he suffered financial losses which in today’s money would have been about $1 million. During his time in North Dakota he made several trips home, and in late 1886, with the winter destroying his herds of cattle, he went home to remarry.