Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| fill this tenderfoot “full of holes,” even though he did wear gold spectacles and fringed angora “chaps” when on a hunt. |
| And now that I have made use of my privilege to put things in as I think of them, let me say that brawling was no part of his life in the West. I thought of it first partly because of some good people who imagine that there was nothing else on the frontier; partly because it was a test the frontier life put to a man, always does, that he shall not be afraid, seeing that in the last instance upon his personal fearlessness depends his fitness to exist where at any moment that alone may preserve his life and the lives of others. There was room in plenty for that quality in the real business that brought him West, the quest of adventure. It was the dream of the man with the horse and the gun that was at last being realized. There was yet a frontier; there were unknown wilds. The very country on the Little Missouri where he built his log house was almost untrodden to the north of him. Deer lay in the brush in the open glade where the house stood, and once he shot one from his door. The fencing in of cattle lands had not begun. The buffalo |