Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| of the East, and from the hunting-trail of the wilderness, wherever the spirit of adventure had sent young men out with the rifle to hunt big game or to engage in the outdoor sports that train mind and body to endure uncomplainingly the hardships of campaigning. The Rough-Riders were the most composite lot that ever gathered under a regimental standard, but they were at the same time singularly typical of the spirit that conquered a continent in three generations, eminently American. Probably such another will never be got together again; in no other country on earth could it have been mustered to-day. The cowboy, the Indian trailer, the Indian himself, the packer, and the hunter who had sought and killed the grizzly in single combat in his mountain fastness, touched elbows with the New York policeman who, for love of adventure, had followed his once chief to the war, with the college athlete, the football player and the oarsman, the dare-devil mountaineer of Georgia, fresh from hunting moonshiners as a revenue officer, and with the society man, the child of luxury and wealth from the East, bent upon proving that a life of ease had dulled neither his manhood nor his sense of our |