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29 CHAPTER THREE Picturing the West, 1883–1893 The foundation for Theodore Roosevelt’s image was his self-esteem. In his words, he had been a “sickly boy with no natural bodily prowess,” pampered by a household full of fussy women and dressed by them accordingly.1 He suffered from poor eyesight, asthma, and a quirk of speech that made him blurt out his words impulsively, which made him insecure and shy with his classmates. By the time he enrolled at Harvard, he was five feet, eight inches tall and weighed a scrappy 125 pounds. Although his colleagues in the New York State Assembly respected Roosevelt’s intelligence and dedication to purpose, they also regarded the fashionable junior assemblyman as effete and called him names like “Jane-Dandy” and “Punkin’ Lily.” The New York World called him “chief of the dudes.”2 Their criticism stung. But tenacity was Roosevelt’s long suit. Once he made the decision to adopt the “strenuous life” for the purpose of remaking the physical image of himself, he never turned back on that promise. Physical fitness would preoccupy his personal and public politics for the rest of his life. It was at this turning point, historian Sarah Watts points out, that Roosevelt found himself drawn to the overmasculinized culture of the West, acquiring “the bodily attributes of a robust outdoorsman that were becoming new features in the nation’s political iconography.”3 In 1883, he went on a buffalo hunt in the Dakota Badlands and killed a prime bull, which he celebrated by whooping up his own version of an Indian victory dance around its body. He was so taken by the experience that by the time he boarded the train to return to New York, he had invested in a ranch on the Little Missouri River, Dakota Territory.4 He had decided to make the West his personal proving grounds. The archive of images of Roosevelt during the 1880s is particularly rich because of his near obsessive attention to remaking his physical appearance. After he committed himself financially to his enterprise in the Dakota Territory in 1883, Roosevelt started his makeover as a rancher and Western hunter with a new wardrobe. He believed the adage clothes make the man, or, in his case, the ranchman and the hunter. The frontispiece to his first book on hunting, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman: Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains (1885), features a full-length portrait of Roosevelt dressed as a hunter either in late 1883 or early 1884 (see figure 4). Dressed in his fringed buckskins, a silk neck scarf, and a jaunty beaver-felt hat, Teddy carries his Winchester Model 1876 at port arms with his finger ready on the trigger. His oversized hunting knife, bought from Tiffany’s, is tucked into his cartridge belt. His posture is a frontier version of a minuteman: staunch and full of pluck. “You would be amused to see me,” he wrote his lifetime friend and confidante Henry Cabot Lodge in 1884 as he described himself in a “broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chapajaros 30| Chapter Three or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.”5 His vanity was self-deprecating. “I now look like a regular cowboy dandy,” he wrote his sister, “with all my equipments finished in the most expensive style.”6 Roosevelt posed for this and the other portraits for his book in a New York photography studio standing before a backdrop of a painted forest. He had his moccasins and his buckskins handmade to his fastidious specifications by a seamstress in the Dakotas.7 He looks less like a hunter on the Dakota plains than a self-conscious imitation of James Fenimore Cooper’s hero, Natty Bumppo, (the real “Deerslayer”), who appeared in the popular frontier novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales published between 1821 and 1847. The image Roosevelt constructed of himself was a blend of American frontier heroes, real and imagined, ranging from Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett to the Virginian, the hero of Owen Wister’s novel of the same name (Wister also went to Harvard, and he and Roosevelt were friends). By employing the iconic characters of the West, he insinuated himself into the literal and literary stream of American western history. Certainly the well-seasoned men who worked the Maltese Cross ranch in the Dakota Territory must have scratched their heads when they saw their new boss show up...

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