Dan Flores

Maybe that is why he gloried so in challenge.

By sheer force of will, he turned himself from a weak, sickly adolescent into a hardy and robust Harvard undergraduate who boxed and hunted and eventually into a lifelong advocate of what he called the strenuous life.

That same determination marked his administrations as president of the United States, enabling him to enact major progressive social policies, central to which was the first comprehensive environmental program in American history.

Roosevelt's ideal image of an American was someone who knew the natural world, which was why conservation of an endangered nature was central to his accomplishments.

As with Thomas Jefferson, whose goals for the West enabled Americans to grasp its outlines, we shouldn't be surprised to discover a similar fascination with nature in the president who laid down America's and the West's environmental foundation.

But in contrast to Jefferson, who sat on his mountain in Virginia and imagined the West, Roosevelt experienced the West and the world firsthand.

Roosevelt was from one of the Eastern families of patrician elites so visible in the history of the West.

His birth in 1858 almost made him a Civil War baby, but as his mother was a Southerner, the Civil War and Reconstruction were always forbidden topics.

Nature, wild animals, and the West, on the other hand, were the focus of long discussions between Roosevelt's father, who was an early disciple of Darwin and a founder of the American Museum of Natural History, and an uncle who was a naturalist.

When he was only 10, Roosevelt's family toured Europe, and despite young Teddy's frequent attacks of asthma, he and his father climbed Mount Vesuvius.

Three years later, they were on a boat descending the Nile in Egypt, where with a new shotgun, Teddy shot and collected more than 100 birds for his own museum, as he called it.

In a situation of many options, Teddy did not surprise his family when he announced that he wanted to train as a naturalist.

Like a significant number, though not all, of nature-obsessed Americans, Audubon was one, so were George Byrd Grinnell and Aldo Leopold, Teddy Roosevelt and his interest in nature began in a boyhood of observing, pursuing, and hunting wild animals in wild country.

His yearning to make natural history a profession was officially abandoned at Harvard, though.

Teddy wanted a natural history career after the fashion of the great naturalists like Alexander von Humboldt or John James Ottoman.

He wanted to explore exotic locales and hunt and collect new species.

By his time at Harvard, natural history had become a Darwinian exercise of laboratory work.

Teddy and a fellow ornithology enthusiast instead worked on and published The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks.

And by his junior year, Roosevelt had decided that the professional natural sciences was not going to be his career.

Long interested in history and in writing, interest that turned out to be a way to explore and hunt and collect in the imagination, with a Harvard degree in hand, Roosevelt turned to a book project about how the American frontier had advanced from the eastern seaboard westward.