Young Theodore

Roosevelt got off the train about three in the morning, when it was still cold and dark. He was alone and he looked very little like the man he was to become. At most he weighed 135 pounds, "a little feller" with a wispy mustache and large, metal-rimmed eyeglasses. That he was the classic child of privilege, the very essence of the era's gilded youth by all appearances, escaped no one once day came and he made his presence known. There was something faintly comic about him. He talked in a thin, piping voice and with the swallowed broad a's of an upper-class New Yorker. Later, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he would immortalize himself along the Little Missouri by calling out to one of his cowboys, "Hasten forward quickly there!"

- From "Glory Days in Medora" in Brave Companions: Portraits in History by David McCullough