The Doctor and the Rough Rider (25 page)

The dude from New York didn't limit himself to human bullies. No horse could scare
him either.

During the roundup of 1884, he and his companions encountered a horse known only as
“The Devil.” He'd earned his name throwing one cowboy after another, and was generally
considered to be the meanest horse in the Badlands. Finally Roosevelt decided to match
his will and skills against the stallion, and all the other cowboys gathered around
the corral to watch the New Yorker get his comeuppance—and indeed, The Devil soon
bucked him off.

Roosevelt got on again. And got bucked off again.

According to one observer, “With almost every other jump, we would see about twelve
acres of bottom land between Roosevelt and the saddle.” The Devil sent him flying
a third and then a fourth time.

But Roosevelt wasn't about to quit. The Devil couldn't throw him a fifth time, and
before long Roosevelt had him behaving “as meek as a rabbit,” according to the same
observer.

The next year there was an even wilder horse. The local cowboys knew him simply as
“The Killer,” but Roosevelt decided he was going to tame him, and a tame horse needed
a better name than that, so he dubbed him “Ben Baxter.” The cowboys, even those who
had seen him break The Devil, urged him to keep away from The Killer, to have the
horse destroyed. Roosevelt paid them no attention.

He tossed a blanket over Ben Baxter's head to keep him calm while putting on the saddle,
an operation that was usually life-threatening in itself. Then he tightened the cinch,
climbed onto the horse, and removed the blanket. And two seconds later Roosevelt was
sprawling in the dirt of the corral.

And a minute later, he was back in the saddle.

And five seconds later he was flying through the air again, to land with a bone-jarring
thud!

They kept it up most of the afternoon, Roosevelt climbing back on every time he was
thrown, and finally the fight was all gone from Ben Baxter. Roosevelt had broken his
shoulder during one of his spills, but it hadn't kept him from mastering the horse.
He kept Ben Baxter, and from that day forward “The Killer” became the gentlest horse
on his ranch.

Is it any wonder that he never backed down from a political battle?

Having done everything else one could do in the Badlands, Roosevelt became a deputy
sheriff. And in March of 1886, he found out that it meant a little more than rounding
up the town drunks on a Saturday night. It seems that a wild man named Mike Finnegan,
who had a reputation
for breaking laws and heads that stretched from one end of the Badlands to the other,
had gotten drunk and shot up the town of Medora, escaping—not that anyone dared to
stop him—on a small flatboat with two confederates.

Anyone who's ever been in Dakota in March knows that it's still quite a few weeks
away from the first signs of spring. Roosevelt, accompanied by Bill Sewell and Wilmot
Dow, was ordered to bring Finnegan in, and took off after him on a raft a couple of
days later. They negotiated the ice-filled river, and finally came to the spot where
the gang had made camp.

Roosevelt, the experienced hunter, managed to approach silently and unseen until the
moment he stood up, rifle in hands, and announced that they were his prisoners. Not
a shot had to be fired.

But capturing Finnegan and his friends was the easy part. They had to be transported
overland more than one hundred miles to the town of Dickenson, where they would stand
trial. Within a couple of days the party of three lawmen and three outlaws was out
of food. Finally Roosevelt set out on foot for a ranch—
any
ranch—and came back a day later with a small wagon filled with enough food to keep
them alive on the long trek. The wagon had a single horse, and given the weather and
conditions of the crude trails, the horse couldn't be expected pull all six men, so
Sewell and Dow rode in the wagon while Roosevelt and the three captives walked behind
it on an almost nonexistent trail, knee-deep in snow, in below-freezing weather. And
the closer they got to Dickenson, the more likely it was that Finnegan would attempt
to escape, so Roosevelt didn't sleep the last two days and nights of the forced march.

But he delivered the outlaws, safe and reasonably sound. He would be a lawman again
in another nine years, but his turf would be as different from the Badlands as night
is from day.

He became the police commissioner of New York City.

New York was already a pretty crime-ridden city, even before the turn of the twentieth
century. Roosevelt, who had already been a successful politician, lawman, lecturer
and author, was hired to change that—and change it he did.

He hired the best people he could find. That included the first woman on the New York
police force—and the next few dozen as well. (Before long, every station had police
matrons around the clock, thus assuring that any female prisoner would be booked by
a member of her own sex.)

Then came another innovation: when Roosevelt decided that most of the cops couldn't
hit the broad side of a barn with their sidearms, target practice was not merely encouraged
but made mandatory for the first time in the force's history.

When the rise of the automobile meant that police on foot could no longer catch some
escaping lawbreakers, Roosevelt created a unit of bicycle police (who, in the 1890s,
had no problem keeping up with the cars of that era, which were traversing streets
that had not been created with automobiles in mind.)

He hired Democrats as well as Republicans, men who disliked him as well as men who
worshipped him. All he cared about was that they were able to get the job done.

He was intolerant only of intolerance. When the famed anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin,
Rector Ahlwardt, came to America, New York's Jewish population didn't want to allow
him in the city. Roosevelt couldn't bar him, but he came up with the perfect solution:
Ahlwardt's police bodyguards were composed entirely of very large, very unhappy Jewish
cops whose presence convinced the bigot to forego his anti-Semitic harangues while
he was in the city.

Roosevelt announced that all promotions would be strictly on merit and not political
pull, then spent the next two years proving he meant what he said. He also invited
the press into his office whenever he was there, and if a visiting politician tried
to whisper a question so that the reporters couldn't hear it, Roosevelt would repeat
and answer it in a loud, clear voice.

As police commissioner, Roosevelt felt the best way to make sure his police force
was performing its duty was to go out in the field and see for himself. He didn't
bother to do so during the day; the press and the public were more than happy to report
on the doings of his policemen.

No, what he did was go out into the most dangerous neighborhoods, unannounced, between
midnight and sunrise, usually with a reporter or two in tow, just in case things got
out of hand. (Not that he thought they would help him physically, but he expected
them to accurately report what happened if a misbehaving or loafing cop turned on
him.)

The press dubbed these his “midnight rambles,” and after a while the publicity alone
caused almost all the police to stay at their posts and do their duty. They never
knew when the commissioner might show up in their territory and either fire them on
the spot or let the reporters who accompanied him expose them to public ridicule and
condemnation.

Roosevelt began writing early and never stopped. You'd expect a man who was governor
of New York and president of the United States to write about politics, and of course
he did. But Roosevelt didn't like
intellectual restrictions any more than he liked physical restrictions, and he wrote
books—not just articles, mind you, but
books
—about anything that interested him.

While still in college he wrote
The Naval War of 1812
, which was considered at the time to be the definitive treatise on naval warfare.

Here's a partial list of the non-political books that followed, just to give you an
indication of the breadth of Roosevelt's interests:

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman

The Wilderness Hunter

A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open

The Winning of the West, Volumes 1–4

The Rough Riders

Literary Treats

Papers on Natural History

African Game Trails

Hero Tales from American History

Through the Brazilian Wilderness

The Strenuous Life

Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail

I've got to think he'd be a pretty interesting guy to talk to. On any subject.

In fact, it'd be hard to find one he hadn't written up.

A character as interesting and multi-faceted as Roosevelt's had to be portrayed in
film sooner or later, but surprisingly, the first truly memorable characterization
was by John Alexander, who delivered a classic
and hilarious portrayal of a harmless madman who
thinks
he's Teddy Roosevelt and constantly screams “Charge!” as he runs up the stairs, his
version of San Juan Hill, in
Arsenic and Old Lace
.