THEODORE ROOSEVELT

(1858-)

HEODORE ROOSEVELT is an example of a type of American justifying the experiment of democratic government on a large scale. He is a man of good family and private fortune, well educated and of high character, who has devoted his abilities and energies to practical politics, and has risen steadily as a public servant by reason of his probity, intelligence, and force. His keen interest in his own country has led him to make frequent hunting trips in the West, where he owns a ranch and has made himself an authority on hunting; and he has studied the conditions of that civilization, and then written books concerning it. This interest in the West has extended to its history, and has produced a capital historical survey of the stirring dramatic development of the Western States: much of the material upon which the account is based being drawn fresh from government archives, and involving painstaking independent labor. Mr. Roosevelt's other writings-historical, biographical, or of the lighter essay sort-are robustly American in spirit, and enjoyable in point of style. He is a vigorous personality, whether in life or literature.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The son's

Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York city, on October 27th, 1858; and is the son of a successful business man and philanthropist of the same name, well known and honored in that city. uncle was R. B. Roosevelt, also distinguished as politician and author. Theodore the younger was educated at Harvard, being graduated in 1880. He at once interested himself in local politics; and became a New York State Assemblyman 1882-4. The latter year he was a member of the National Republican Convention; in 1886 a Republican candidate for mayor of New York; in 1889 he was made a United States Civil Service Commissioner, serving until 1895, when he became president of the New York Board of Police Commissioners,holding this position until 1897, when he accepted the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Mr. Roosevelt began to publish books as a young man of twentyfive. His Hunting Trips of a Ranchman' appeared in 1883; other books in the order of their publication are -'History of the Naval War of 1812' (1885), the lives of Thomas Hart Benton (1887) and of Gouverneur Morris (1888) in the 'American Statesmen Series,' 'Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail' (1888), 'Essays on Practical Politics (1888), 'The Winning of the West' (fourth volume 1895), History of New York City' (1891), and 'The Wilderness Hunter' (1893). This is a considerable literary baggage for so young a writer. His papers descriptive of his hunting and camp life are very readable; but Mr. Roosevelt's most important work has been the presentation of different phases of the American historical development. His studies on the naval war and the New York municipality are done in the true spirit of scholarly investigation. Most comprehensive and valuable of all is his The Winning of the West'; in which he tells the story with admirable freshness, grasp, and a sense of the drama underlying the evolution of the Western States. His taste for and experience in the adventurous overcoming of material difficulties, and the rough-and-ready life of the open, have led him to select sympathetically a fine subject, which he has treated in a way to re-create the past, and make this series very acceptable for its clear, vivid sketches of pioneer conditions out of which the West has sprung. What interests Mr. Roosevelt, here and in his biographies, is the development of American personalities and of the American idea from all manner of untoward environment.

Mr. Roosevelt, because of his stalwart independence and aggressive honesty in political life, has become a hero with those who are striving for the purification of American politics. He has been a strong force for good; and his books reflect these same qualities of vigorous thought and worthy ideals. His sturdy Americanism is to be felt alike in his acts and words.

THE INDIANS OF THE NORTHWEST

From The Winning of the West.' Copyright 1889, by G. P. Putman's Sons

THE

HE Wyandots, and the Algonquins who surrounded them, dwelt in a region of sunless, tangled forests; and all the wars we waged for the possession of the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi were carried on in the never-ending stretches of gloomy woodland. It was not an open forest. The underbrush grew, dense and rank, between the boles of the tall

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trees, making a cover so thick that it was in many places impenetrable,- so thick that it nowhere gave a chance for human eye to see even as far as a bow could carry. No horse could penetrate it save by following the game trails or paths chopped with the axe; and a stranger venturing a hundred yards from a beaten road would be so helplessly lost that he could not, except by the merest chance, even find his way back to the spot he had just left. Here and there it was broken by a rare hillside glade, or by a meadow in a stream valley; but elsewhere a man might travel for weeks as if in a perpetual twilight, never once able to see the sun through the interlacing twigs that formed a dark canopy above his head.

This dense forest was to the Indians a home in which they had lived from childhood, and where they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own acres. To their keen eyes, trained for generations to more than a wild beast's watchfulness, the wilderness was an open book: nothing at rest or in motion escaped them. They had begun to track game as soon as they could walk; a scrape on a tree trunk, a bruised leaf, a faint indentation of the soil, which the eye of no white man could see,—all told them a tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their ears. With moccasined feet they trod among brittle twigs, dried leaves, and dead branches, as silently as the cougar; and they equaled this great wood-cat in stealth, and far surpassed it in cunning and ferocity. They could no more get lost in the trackless wilderness than a civilized man could get lost on a highway. Moreover, no knight of the Middle Ages was so surely protected by his armor as they were by their skill in hiding: the whole forest was to the whites one vast ambush, and to them a sure and ever-present shield. Every tree trunk was a breastwork ready prepared for battle; every bush, every moss-covered bowlder, was a defense against assault, from behind which, themselves unseen, they watched with fierce derision the movements of their clumsy white enemy. Lurking, skulking, traveling with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail that only a master in woodcraft could follow; while on the other hand they could dog a white man's footsteps as a hound runs a fox. Their silence, their cunning and stealth, their terrible prowess and merciless cruelty, makes it no figure of speech to call them the tigers of the human race. Unlike the southern Indians, the villages of the northwestern tribes were usually far from the frontier. Tireless, and careless

of all hardship, they came silently out of unknown forests, robbed and murdered, and then disappeared again into the fathomless depths of the woods. Half the terror they caused was due to the extreme difficulty of following them, and the absolute impossibility of forecasting their attacks. Without warning, and unseen until the moment they dealt the death stroke, they emerged from their forest fastnesses, the horror they caused being heightened no less by the mystery that shrouded them than by the dreadful nature of their ravages. Wrapped in the mantle of the unknown, appalling by their craft, their ferocity, their fiendish cruelty, they seemed to the white settlers devils and not men; no one could say with certainty whence they came, nor of what tribe they were; and when they had finished their dreadful work, they retired into a wilderness that closed over their trail, as the waves of the ocean close in the wake of a ship.

They were trained to the use of arms from their youth up; and war and hunting were their two chief occupations,-the business as well as the pleasure of their lives. They were not as skillful as the white hunters with the rifle,- though more so than the average regular soldier,-nor could they equal the frontiersman in feats of physical prowess, such as boxing and wrestling; but their superior endurance, and the ease with which they stood fatigue and exposure, made amends for this. A white might outrun them for eight or ten miles; but on a long journey they could tire out any man, and any beast except a wolf. Like most barbarians they were fickle and inconstant,-not to be relied on for pushing through a long campaign; and after a great victory apt to go off to their homes, because each man desired to secure his own plunder and tell his own tale of glory. They are often spoken of as undisciplined; but in reality their discipline in the battle itself was very high. They attacked, retreated, rallied or repelled a charge, at the signal of command; and they were able to fight in open order in thick covers without losing touch of each other-a feat that no European regiment was then able to perform.

On their own ground they were far more formidable than the best European troops. The British grenadiers throughout the eighteenth century showed themselves superior, in the actual shock of battle, to any infantry of continental Europe; if they ever met an overmatch, it was when pitted against the Scotch highlanders. Yet both grenadier and highlander, the heroes of

Minden, the heirs to the glory of Marlborough's campaigns, as well as the sinewy soldiers who shared in the charges of Prestonpans and Culloden, proved helpless when led against the dark tribesmen of the forest. On the march they could not be trusted thirty yards from the column without getting lost in the woods,the mountain training of the highlanders apparently standing them in no stead whatever,- and were only able to get around at all when convoyed by backwoodsmen. In fight they fared even worse. The British regulars at Braddock's battle, and the highlanders at Grant's defeat a few years later, suffered the same fate. Both battles were fair fights,- neither was a surprise; yet the stubborn valor of the red-coated grenadier and the headlong courage of the kilted Scot proved of less than no avail. Not only were they utterly routed and destroyed in each case by an inferior force of Indians (the French taking little part in the conflict), but they were able to make no effective resistance whatever; it is to this day doubtful whether these superb regulars were able, in the battles where they were destroyed, to so much as kill one Indian for every hundred of their own men who fell. The provincials who were with the regulars were the only troops who caused any loss to the foe; and this was true in but a less degree of Bouquet's fight at Bushy Run. Here Bouquet, by a clever stratagem, gained the victory over an enemy inferior in numbers to himself; but only after a two-days' struggle in which he suffered a fourfold greater loss than he inflicted.

When hemmed in so that they had no hope of escape, the Indians fought to the death: but when a way of retreat was open, they would not stand cutting like British, French, or American regulars; and so, though with a nearly equal force, would retire if they were suffering heavily, even if they were causing their foes to suffer still more. This was not due to lack of courage, it was their system; for they were few in numbers, and they did not believe in losing their men. The Wyandots were exceptions to this rule, for with them it was a point of honor not to yield; and so they were of all the tribes the most dangerous in an actual pitched battle.

But making the attack, as they usually did, with the expectation of success, all were equally dangerous. If their foes were clustered together in a huddle, they attacked them without hesitation,- no matter what the difference in numbers,—and shot them down as if they had been elk or buffalo; they themselves.