The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [211]
Just how much Roosevelt identified himself with the American West was evident at the send-off his regiment gave him on September 13. A bugle called, and all the Rough Riders dutifully assembled into formation. In front of them was a card table with a blanket draped over a bulky object. Roosevelt was inside his tent, writing letters, when the troop requested his presence outside; he immediately concurred. The First Volunteer Cavalry had a parting gift for their humane and courageous colonel. After some moving words, the blanket was lifted to reveal a bronze sculpture of 1895 by Frederic Remington, Bronco-Buster. (“Cowboy” was the western term for a cattle driver. A “bronco-buster” broke wild broncos to the saddle.93) Tears welled up in Roosevelt’s eyes, his voice choked, and he stroked the steed’s mane as if it were real. “I would have been most deeply touched if the officers had given me this testimonial, but coming from you, my men, I appreciate it tenfold,” Roosevelt said. “It comes to me from you who shared the hardships of the campaign with me; who gave me a piece of your hardtack when I had none; and who shared with me your blankets when I had none to lie upon. To have such a gift come from this peculiarly American regiment touches me more than I can say. This is something I shall hand down to my children, and I shall value it more than I do the weapons I carried through the campaign.”94
The Rough Riders had given Colonel Roosevelt the best gift possible. Remington’s bronze was far superior to a gold-plated pistol or signed group photograph. It summed up Theodore Roosevelt well: a fearless western cowboy, stirrups flying free, determined to tame a wild stallion by putting the spurs to it, a quirt in his right hand and a fistful of reins in the other. Like much of Remington’s finest pen-and-ink work, Bronco-Buster, his first venture into sculpture, was charged with kinetic movement and free-floating energy. At fast glance the horse, forelegs held high, practically jumps to life.95 Roosevelt had succeeding in transforming his sickly childhood in New York City into a frontier saga worthy of Captain Mayne Reid. “The men of the West and the men of the Southwest, horsemen, and herders of cattle, have been the backbone of this regiment,” Roosevelt wrote, “as they are the backbone of their sections of the country.”96 A Remington casting of Bronco-Buster is now permanently housed in the White House Oval Office as a table centerpiece. And in the Roosevelt Room hangs an equestrian portrait of T.R. as Rough Rider by the Polish artist Tade Styka.
After the Spanish American War, Roosevelt and his commanding officer, Leonard Wood, became close personal friends. Together the two veterans would hike Rock Creek Park discussing everything from immigrants’ assimilation into America to the intolerable sanitary conditions in Cuba. Sometimes they brought young people with them on these outings. “Colonel Roosevelt especially made these walks of the greatest interest to the children,” Wood recalled. “He transmitted to them something of his own keen interest in nature, his love of birds, his interest in woodcraft, and in a thousand ways attempted to instill in them an interest in and an understanding of God’s world as he saw it, to implement healthy tastes, and