4 True Stories That Prove Teddy Roosevelt Was the Toughest Person Ever
Two-term president, victorious military commander, devoted conservationist. These are just a few of the hats that Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt wore during his lifetime. For the record, he was also a supreme badass who stared death in the face on many occasions and belly-laughed every time (literally, in one instance). Here are four of his most remarkable, death-defying adventures.
HE TOOK DOWN AN ARMED COWBOY WITH HIS BARE HANDS DURING A BAR FIGHT
By 1883, Teddy was already weary about politics; he had recently lost a bid to become the nominee for Minority Speaker of the House, so he decided to head West for a little R&R. He constructed a log cabin near Medora, N.D., which was designed as a frontier retreat from his New York City residence ― and what’s a frontier retreat without some frontier shenanigans?
One evening, Teddy was entering a saloon in the nearby town of Mingasville when a drunken patron fired several shots at him. The cowboy then pointed his firearm at Roosevelt’s face, mocked him with the term “four eyes,” and ordered him to buy a round for everyone in the establishment. Teddy responded by laughing in the man’s face, then charging him and beating him senseless. The cowboy fired one more shot at “four eyes”, which missed completely; Teddy then pounded the man’s head into the wooden bar until he was unconscious.
Once the fracas was over, Teddy hauled his would-be assailant to a shed and locked him up until morning, but not before he presumably uttered some macho line like, “Bar’s closed”, or, “I think he’s had enough.”
HE NAVIGATED A FROZEN RIVER TO CHASE SOME BOAT THIEVES
Teddy spent the early months of 1886 at the Elkhorn Ranch, a North Dakota establishment located on the banks of the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt and his two hunting companions, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dew, purchased a “clinker-built boat” to ferry them across the frozen river. After a particularly unfruitful hunting expedition one morning, the men returned to the river to find their vessel had been cut from its rope and taken to parts unknown. A normal man might have lamented the loss of the boat, but
Teddy didn’t take kindly to theft.
So he, Sewall, and Dew spent the next three days building a boat from scratch. Once the makeshift boat proved navigable, the trio set off in search of the stolen clinker. Roosevelt’s account in his 1888 memoir, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, details a miserable pursuit:
“For three days, the three men navigated the icy, winding river among the colorful clay buttes hoping to take the thieves captive without a fight. A shootout was a concern, for Roosevelt noted that “the extraordinary formation of the Bad Lands, with the ground cut up into cullies, serried walls, and battlemented hilltops, makes it the country of all others for hiding-places and ambuscades.” However, Roosevelt was certain that the thieves would not suspect that he was in pursuit, for they had stolen virtually the only boat on the river. Roosevelt, Sewall, and Dow battled against the elements, too, enduring temperatures down to zero degrees Fahrenheit”.
They finally reached the trio of thieves, who were led by a man named Finnigan ― “a hard case” who “had been chief actor in a number of shooting scrapes”. Roosevelt and his men had little trouble overpowering the thieves and tying them up. But upon returning to the ranch with their quarry, they encountered an “impassable ice dam” that took them eight days to finally cross. Roosevelt entertained his freezing men and their bootless captives by reading from a copy of
Anna Karenina that he brought aboard; by many accounts, he watched the men for more than 40 hours without sleep. When the party reached land, Roosevelt performed his duties as deputy sheriff and arrested the three men, rather than ordering them to be hanged ― a progressive legal decision, in those days.
@Psychotropic Wanderlust
