SOURCE: "Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes," in Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters, 1870-1900, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, pp. 78-87.

In the following essay, Klein discusses the figure of the cowboy as portrayed in various works by Roosevelt.

Imperialism was a principle. In his Foreword to the 1900 edition of his The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt would justify the invasion of Cuba in 1898 as an extension, to the east, of the western continental expansion which in turn, he said, "has been the central and all-important feature of our history." In the four large volumes of the book itself, 1889-1896, he had elaborated the theme of the inevitability of "race expansion," the most striking instance of which in all of time had been that of the English-speaking peoples. "It is, indeed," he had said, "a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of...