He said afterwards that his ranch life had been the making of him. It
had built him up and hardened him physically, and it had opened his
eyes to the wealth of manly character among the plainsmen and
cattlemen.
Had he not gone West, he said, he never would have raised the Rough
Riders Regiment; and had he not raised that regiment and gone to the
Cuban War, he would not have been made governor of New York; and had
not this happened, the politicians would not unwittingly have made his
rise to the Presidency so inevitable. There is no doubt, I think, that
he would have got there some day; but without the chain of events
above outlined, his rise could not have been so rapid.
Our train entered the Bad Lands of North Dakota in the early evening
twilight, and the President stood on the rear platform of his car,
gazing wistfully upon the scene. "I know all this country like a
book," he said. "I have ridden over it, and hunted over it, and
tramped over it, in all seasons and weather, and it looks like home to
me. My old ranch is not far off. We shall soon reach Medora, which was
my station." It was plain to see that that strange, forbidding-looking
landscape, hills and valleys to Eastern eyes utterly demoralized and
gone to the bad,--flayed, fantastic, treeless, a riot of naked clay
slopes, chimney-like buttes, and dry coulees,--was in his eyes a land
of almost pathetic interest. There were streaks of good pasturage here
and there where his cattle used to graze, and where the deer and the
pronghorn used to linger.