Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
and tea, and my bed-roll, and started off. At the blasted pine I looked
round, and as I could see him in camp, I left his rifle there. I then
traveled till dark, and that night, for the only time in my experience,
I used in camping a trick of the old-time trappers in the Indian days. I
did not believe I would be followed, but still it was not possible to be
sure, so, after getting supper, while my pony fed round, I left the fire
burning, repacked the mare and pushed ahead until it literally became so
dark that I could not see. Then I picketed the mare, slept where I was
without a fire until the first streak of dawn, and then pushed on for a
couple of hours before halting to take breakfast and to let the little
mare have a good feed. No plainsman needs to be told that a man should
not lie near a fire if there is danger of an enemy creeping up on him,
and that above all a man should not put himself in a position where he
can be ambushed at dawn. On this second day I lost the trail, and toward
nightfall gave up the effort to find it, camped where I was, and went
out to shoot a grouse for supper. It was while hunting in vain for a
grouse that I came on the bear and killed it as above described.
When I reached the settlement and went into the store, the storekeeper
identified me by remarking: "You're the tenderfoot that old Hank was
trundling, ain't you?" I admitted that I was. A good many years later,
after I had been elected Vice-President, I went on a cougar hunt in
northwestern Colorado with Johnny Goff, a famous hunter and mountain
man. It was midwinter. I was rather proud of my achievements, and
pictured myself as being known to the few settlers in the neighborhood
as a successful mountain-lion hunter. I could not help grinning
when I found out that they did not even allude to me as the
Vice-President-elect, let alone as a hunter, but merely as "Johnny
Goff's tourist."
Of course during the years when I was most busy at serious work I could
do no hunting, and even my riding was of a decorous kind. But a man
whose business is sedentary should get some kind of exercise if he
wishes to keep himself in as good physical trim as his brethren who do
manual labor. When I worked on a ranch, I needed no form of exercise
except my work, but when I worked in an office the case was different.
A couple of summers I played polo with some of my neighbors. I shall
always believe we played polo in just the right way for middle-aged men
with stables of the general utility order. Of course it was polo which
was chiefly of interest to ourselves, the only onlookers being the
members of our faithful families. My two ponies were the only occupants
of my stable except a cart-horse. My wife and I rode and drove them, and
they were used for household errands and for the children, and for two
afternoons a week they served me as polo ponies. Polo is a good game,
infinitely better for vigorous men than tennis or golf or anything of
that kind. There is all the fun of football, with the horse thrown in;
and if only people would be willing to play it in simple fashion it
would be almost as much within their reach as golf. But at Oyster Bay
our great and permanent amusements were rowing and sailing; I do not
care for the latter, and am fond of the former. I suppose it sounds
archaic, but I cannot help thinking that the people with motor boats
miss a great deal. If they would only keep to rowboats or canoes, and
use oar or paddle themselves, they would get infinitely more benefit
than by having their work done for them by gasoline. But I rarely took
exercise merely as exercise. Primarily I took it because I liked it.
Play should never be allowed to interfere with work; and a life devoted
merely to play is, of all forms of existence, the most dismal. But the
joy of life is a very good thing, and while work is the essential in it,
play also has its place.
When obliged to live in cities, I for a long time found that boxing and
wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and
attractive form. I was reluctantly obliged to abandon both as I grew
older. I dropped the wrestling earliest. When I became Governor, the
champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and
I got him to come round three or four afternoons a week. Incidentally
I may mention that his presence caused me a difficulty with the
Comptroller, who refused to audit a bill I put in for a wrestling-mat,
explaining that I could have a billiard-table, billiards being
recognized as a proper Gubernatorial amusement, but that a wrestling-mat
symbolized something unusual and unheard of and could not be permitted.
The middleweight champion was of course so much better than I was that
he could not only take care of himself but of me too and see that I was
not hurt--for wrestling is a much more violent amusement than boxing.
But after a couple of months he had to go away, and he left as a
substitute a good-humored, stalwart professional oarsman. The oarsman
turned out to know very little about wrestling. He could not even take
care of himself, not to speak of me. By the end of our second afternoon
one of his long ribs had been caved in and two of my short ribs badly
damaged, and my left shoulder-blade so nearly shoved out of place that
it creaked. He was nearly as pleased as I was when I told him I thought
we would "vote the war a failure" and abandon wrestling. After that I
took up boxing again. While President I used to box with some of the
aides, as well as play single-stick with General Wood. After a few years
I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young
captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed
the little blood-vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight
has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should
have been entirely unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better
to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop
boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.
When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little
chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and
wrestling. A young fellow turned up who was a second-rate prize-fighter,
the son of one of my old boxing teachers. For several weeks I had him
come round to my rooms in the morning to put on the gloves with me for
half an hour. Then he suddenly stopped, and some days later I received a
letter of woe from him from the jail. I found that he was by profession
a burglar, and merely followed boxing as the amusement of his lighter
moments, or when business was slack.
Naturally, being fond of boxing, I grew to know a good many
prize-fighters, and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached.
I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against
prize-fighters. The only objection I have to the prize ring is the
crookedness that has attended its commercial development. Outside of
this I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class
sport, and I do not regard it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be
conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing. But this is true
of football games and of most other rough and vigorous sports. Most
certainly prize-fighting is not half as brutalizing or demoralizing
as many forms of big business and of the legal work carried on in
connection with big business. Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal
development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find
vent. When I was Police Commissioner I found (and Jacob Riis will
back me up in this) that the establishment of a boxing club in a tough
neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-fighting
among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous
gangs. Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all,
but they had to have some outlet for their activities. In the same way
I have always regarded boxing as a first-class sport to encourage in the
Young Men's Christian Association. I do not like to see young Christians
with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle. Of course boxing
should be encouraged in the army and navy. I was first drawn to two
naval chaplains, Fathers Chidwick and Rainey, by finding that each of
them had bought half a dozen sets of boxing-gloves and encouraged their
crews in boxing.
When I was Police Commissioner, I heartily approved the effort to
get boxing clubs started in New York on a clean basis. Later I was
reluctantly obliged to come to the conclusion that the prize ring had
become hopelessly debased and demoralized, and as Governor I aided in
the passage of and signed the bill putting a stop to professional boxing
for money. This was because some of the prize-fighters themselves were
crooked, while the crowd of hangers-on who attended and made up and
profited by the matches had placed the whole business on a basis
of commercialism and brutality that was intolerable. I shall always
maintain that boxing contests themselves make good, healthy sport. It
is idle to compare them with bull-fighting; the torture and death of the
wretched horses in bull-fighting is enough of itself to blast the sport,
no matter how great the skill and prowess shown by the bull-fighters.
Any sport in which the death and torture of animals is made to furnish
pleasure to the spectators is debasing. There should always be the
opportunity provided in a glove fight or bare-fist fight to stop it when
one competitor is hopelessly outclassed or too badly hammered. But the
men who take part in these fights are hard as nails, and it is not worth
while to feel sentimental about their receiving punishment which as a
matter of fact they do not mind. Of course the men who look on ought to
be able to stand up with the gloves, or without them, themselves; I have
scant use for the type of sportsmanship which consists merely in looking
on at the feats of some one else.
Some as good citizens as I know are or were prize-fighters. Take Mike
Donovan, of New York. He and his family represent a type of American
citizenship of which we have a right to be proud. Mike is a devoted
temperance man, and can be relied upon for every movement in the
interest of good citizenship. I was first intimately thrown with him
when I was Police Commissioner. One evening he and I--both in dress
suits--attended a temperance meeting of Catholic societies. It
culminated in a lively set-to between myself and a Tammany Senator who
was a very good fellow, but whose ideas of temperance differed radically
from mine, and, as the event proved, from those of the majority of the
meeting. Mike evidently regarded himself as my backer--he was sitting on
the platform beside me--and I think felt as pleased and interested as if
the set-to had been physical instead of merely verbal. Afterward I grew
to know him well both while I was Governor and while I was President,
and many a time he came on and boxed with me.
Battling Nelson was another stanch friend, and he and I think alike
on most questions of political and industrial life; although he once
expressed to me some commiseration because, as President, I did not get
anything like the money return for my services that he aggregated during
the same term of years in the ring. Bob Fitzsimmons was another good
friend of mine. He has never forgotten his early skill as a blacksmith,
and among the things that I value and always keep in use is a penholder
made by Bob out of a horseshoe, with an inscription saying that it is
"Made for and presented to President Theodore Roosevelt by his friend
and admirer, Robert Fitzsimmons." I have for a long time had the
friendship of John L. Sullivan, than whom in his prime no better man