in those passages where success attended him, it is fair to take note of the man's accomplishment. In the first place it must not be understood for a moment that he went to the ranch life in the Bad Lands because of reverses in his experience. He went there when he was twenty-six years old. He had already served three terms in the assembly of his State. His wife had died, and his mother-his sole remaining parenthad followed. He was come to the time for thought. And it is a curious phase of the man's career that he turned in this hour of retirement to the employment of those attributes with which his previous study had supplied him. He thought, and he wrote. And the nomination for the mayoralty, wholly unsolicited, made small disturbance in the course of his development. He had known the sweets of victory. He had supported the crushing burden of defeat. And he had found in the great plains of the Northwest the very experience of all others that could broaden and deepen his being. He gathered there the physical power which was to provide the basis for his labors later on. He was for the time near to nature; and in that communion he gathered a quality of wisdom and of strength

which nothing else could have furnished. Some of his countrymen knew the city, with all its multifarious environment. Some knew the country, and were narrowed in their range of vision, hampered in their view. But he was gathering the material and arriving at the view-point which should equip him for judging and weighing composite matters later on.

Some men are great in victory, but not so constituted as to brook reverses. Of these was Senator Conkling, of Mr. Roosevelt's own State. Some are developed while continually oppressed by adverse majorities. Of these was Mr. Henry George, who contributed to Mr. Roosevelt's defeat. But here was a man superior to the variations of fortune, and steadfast alone in his progress toward the one ideal. He stood for good government as much as in the days of his successes at Albany. He helped the nation to better citizenship by realizing a better Americanism himself. And in these years when failure confronted him he proved the metal that was in him more than ever he had done in the days of his most exuberant triumph.

ESTEEM OF HUNTERS, RANCHMEN AND PIONEERS— -"BUSTING"

BRONCHOS

ADVENTURES WITH WILD BEASTS THRILLING

FIGHT WITH A GRIZZLY.

The adventurous spirit was surely a part of Theodore Roosevelt's heritage; and when, after the completion of his college course, he felt that life had given him the world as the field of his activities, he naturally felt a desire for so much spice of adventure as prudence and good judgment would permit. Those were "piping times of peace." There was no war with which his country was concerned; and he was far from the type of fortune's soldier who makes the cause of distant peoples his vital concern. He could find too much of utility nearer home.

There were no gold-fields. In the busy years when the American Republic was gathering for the world-empire which has come to it later,

the man of adventurous spirit was hard pressed to employ his energies.

It happened in this period that great ranches were being established in the far Northwest. Before the Civil War the plains of Texas had been dotted with cattle. Little attention was paid to them until the latter days of that struggle. Then it was found that beef of any kind was rare and difficult to get. The herds of Texas became the commissary of two armies, and, when the war was over, sagacious men took the hint and began to engage in the cattle business. At first Texas remained the breeding ground. Ranchmen drove their young cattle north for three years of feeding before shipping them to market. But as the years passed they found the "range" taken up. The trail from the Panhandle of Texas to the pasture lands of the North had been strung with barbed wire of farmers; and the cattlemen had to find preserves of their own. That forced the development of the Upper Missouri country. And the coincident building of the Northern Pacific Railroad provided a means of reaching markets.

Scores of ranches were opened in that new country, lately wrested from the Indians. The

Marquis de Mores, a picturesque Frenchman, was one of those who took advantage of the fortune offered, and he spent a magnificent dot establishing the town of Medora, an abortive city crowned with the name of his wife.

Mr. Roosevelt, fretting at the irksomeness of the law as a study, realizing vaguely the greater career that was in store for him, cast his eyes to the one Eldorado which promised scope for his energy and fuel for those fires of adventure which burned within him, went to the "Bad Lands," and engaged in the life of a rancher. It was with no purpose of gaining wealth. While by no means one of the rich men of the nation, since wealth had come to be measured in millions, he had still no need to earn a competence. But there was a breadth and freedom, a romance and exhilaration in the prospect which attracted him.

So he established himself on the Little Missouri, and opened two cattle ranches. One was called "Chimney Butte"; the other "The Elkhorn." Here at intervals, for years, he lived a life of vigor and activity, developing those lungs that had suffered somewhat in the labor of study, and the living in cities; and wakened as