Dan Flores

Well, Dan, thank you.

Oh, you bet, Randall.

Thanks.

Along with Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt was the American president most fascinated with nature and with the American West.

And like Jefferson, Roosevelt transformed the region he loved.

I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West.

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How you create a new West and a new America.

He was a former president of the United States and might hold that office again.

He was also an internationally known sportsman and advocate of adventurous living whose demise would have caused shockwaves.

But descending the unexplored Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt, in early 1914, Teddy Roosevelt was injured and ill and had watched his great South American adventure with legendary explorer Candido Rondon almost disintegrate in the Brazilian jungle.

No novelist could have written the scene better for him.

We've reached a point where some of us must stop, he told his son Kermit.

I feel I am only a burden to the party.

It was classic Theodore Roosevelt, a romantic hero who, despite his fame, was willing to sacrifice himself for his companions.

The party had none of it, of course, but the incident is a window on the characteristics that led Theodore Roosevelt to the life of accomplishment and adventure he created.

Few things Teddy Roosevelt ever did were easy.