He attended his first primary in 1881, in the Twenty-first assembly district of New York. It was a gathering with little to charm the ordinary young man of aristocratic lineage and wealth, but Theodore Roosevelt had studied history with a purpose. He knew that through the primary led the way to political preferment, and he at once entered into the battle of politics, in which he was to prove a gladiator of astonishing prowess, routing and terrifying his enemies, but often startling his allies by the originality and recklessness of his methods.
The natural enthusiasm of young Roosevelt, his undeniable personal charm, and the swirl of interest with which he descended into the arena of local politics, made him friends on every side in a community where leaders are at a high premium, and within a few months the young college man was elected to the Assembly of the state from his home district.
His ability and his methods were in strong evidence at the following session of the Legislature. He proved a rallying power for the Republican minority, and actually succeeded in passing legislation which the majority submitted to only through fear and which his own party in the state would never have fathered had it been in power. Mr. Roosevelt was the undisputed leader of the Republicans in the Assembly within two months after his election, and he immediately turned his attention to the purification of New York City. This would have appalled a man less determined or more experienced. But the young aspirant for a place in history reckoned neither with conditions nor precedents. His success, considering the strength of the combination against which he was arrayed, was extraordinary. He succeeded in securing the passage of the bill which deprived the city council of New York of the power to veto the appointments of the mayor, a prerogative which had nullified every previous attempt at reform and had made the spoliation of the city’s coffers an easy matter in the time of Tweed and other bosses.
Mr. Roosevelt’s methods, it was cheerfully predicted by his political opponents, would certainly result in his retirement from participation in the state councils of New York, but this proved far from the case. Wherever Theodore Roosevelt has been thrown with any class of people, wherever they have come to know him personally, he has attracted to himself enthusiastic friendship and confidence. Theatrical though many of his acts have appeared, his honesty, his personal fearlessness, and the purity of his motives have not been questioned.
He became so popular that not only was he returned to three sessions of the Assembly, but his party in the state soon realized that he was one of its strongest men, and he was sent to the Republican National Convention of 1884 as chairman of the New York delegation.
Meanwhile he had been hammering away at corruption in New York, and had secured the passage of the act making the offices of the county clerk, sheriff, and register salaried ones. He had been chairman of the committee to investigate the work of county officials, and, as a result of that investigation, offered the bill which cut off from the clerk of the county of New York an income in fees which approximated $82,000 per annum; from the sheriff, $100,000, and from the register also a very high return in fees. From the county offices to the police was not far and Roosevelt was agitating an investigation and reform in the guardianship of the city when he left the Legislature. After the convention, to which he went uninstructed, but in favor of the nomination of Mr. Edmunds against James G. Blaine, his health failed. The deaths of his wife and mother had been a severe shock, for Mr. Roosevelt is a man of the strongest personal attachments. He turned aside from public life for a time and went West.
He had been a lover of hunting from boyhood, and when he decided to spend some time in the wilds of Montana, he took up the life as he found it there. On the banks of the Little Missouri he built a log house, working on it himself, and there turned ranchman, cowboy and hunter. He engaged in one of the last of the big buffalo hunts, and saturated himself with the life of the West. His trips in this and later years were not alone confined to this section of the West, and his courage, intelligence, and companionable nature made him a name which in later years drew to his standard thousands of cowboys, among whom his name had come to mean all that they admire, and all that appeals to their natures. The love and admiration was not one-sided, for Mr. Roosevelt came to regard these hardy, open-hearted, plain-spoken guardians of the wilderness as the finest types of manhood.
In these years and between 1886 and 1888 Mr. Roosevelt was also busy on much of his literary work. The most important of his works—“The Winning of the West,” a history in four volumes of the acquisition of the territory west of the Alleghenies—required an enormous amount of research. On its publication it leaped at once into popularity, and soon acquired a reputation as a most reliable text-book.
His hunting trips and his months of life among the men and the game of the West have supplied the material for a number of Mr. Roosevelt’s books, among them “The Wilderness Hunter,” “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,” and “Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.” His most noted work of recent years is “The Rough Riders,” being a history of the formation, the battles, career, and disbandment of the remarkable body of soldiers comprising the regiment which Mr. Roosevelt recruited largely himself, and of which he was lieutenant-colonel and colonel in the brief campaign in Cuba. His style is interesting and clear, and while the story is told in the first person, there is a simplicity of narrative and a cordiality of praise to all who seem to deserve.
Mr. Roosevelt’s more important works have been historical, but his writings have not been confined to this subject. He has contributed many articles to scientific magazines, particularly on discrimination of species and sub-species of the larger animals of the West. A species of elk is named after him, and he made known the enlarged Western species of a little insectivora called the shrew.