The Winning Of The West

The Winning of the West, Volume One From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776. Theodore Roosevelt was more than just the 26th president of the United States. He was a writer, historian, explorer, big-game hunter, soldier, conservationist, ranchman and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Drawing greatly from materials found in the archives of the American Government, Roosevelt has written a multivolume history of the border people. He writes in the Preface: For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we wandered was in the far West; and there were of course many features in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany forest a century before. Yet the points of resemblance were far more numerous and striking. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foothills of the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years previously build their log cabins beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies. The men who have shared in the fast vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.