Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| in the roots of the sage-brush, and looked straight at me with that strange, sullen, evil gaze, never shifting or moving, that is the property only of serpents and of certain men; while one or two coiled and rattled menacingly as I stepped near.” |
| Fit setting, that kind of a landscape, for a man who had come out of the sort of fight he had just been in, and lost. Many of those who had fought with him went out of the Republican party and did not return. Roosevelt had it out with the bucking bronchos on his ranch and with the grizzlies in the mountains, and came back to fight in the ranks for the man he had opposed and to go down with him to defeat. He had come to the bitter waters of which men must drink to grow to their full stature—his most ambitions defeat, that of the Mayoralty campaign of 1886, was yet to come—and, according to his sturdy way, he looked the well through and through, and drank deep. |
| There stands upon a shelf in my library a copy of the “Wilderness Hunter,” which he gave me when once I was going to the woods. On the fly-leaf he wrote: “May you enjoy the |