The Most Badass U.S. President and His Many Insane Exploits

If you've followed this website, our YouTube channel, or BrainFood Show podcast very long, you know one of our favorite historic individuals is Theodore Roosevelt- among countless other reasons to be admired, a man who enjoys a reputation as one of the most terrifyingly badass individuals to ever hold the office of leader of a nation, with countless stories detailing his cartoonishly manly exploits. For just a small sample to start, at one point while he was living as a rancher, some thieves stole his boat in the middle of an ice storm. Given the rather dangerous weather conditions, you might think he'd just let them go. But this was Teddy Roosevelt and it was the principal of the thing. He states, "In any wild country where the power of law is little felt or heeded, and where every one has to rely upon himself for protection, men soon get to feel that it is in the highest degree unwise to submit to any wrong…no matter what cost of risk or trouble. To submit tamely and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense, in a place where self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one’s own under all circumstances rank as the first of virtues." Thus, he spent the next three days building another boat so he could track the thieves down and take his original boat back. Once done, it took him a few days of searching, but using his prodigious skills as a master tracker, he managed to find and capture the men. However, ultimately the river became too frozen over to continue to the nearest town that way, so instead he sent his ranch hand companions home and marched the thieves on foot, alone for 40 hours straight to town. During this trek, he did not bind the thieves' in any way as he felt sure they'd suffer from frostbite if he did so. To keep them from overpowering him while they trudged along through the frozen wasteland, he simply kept a gun trained on them and, while they slept during rest periods, he kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy's then relatively recently published Anna Karenina. It's also noteworthy here that because of the weather conditions, the fact that he was in hostile territory in the middle of nowhere, and escorting a trio of criminals who would have killed him without hesitation if he'd given them the chance, he was within his rights to simply execute them on the spot and go home, something the vast majority of lawmen of his era would have done. Roosevelt, however, felt they deserved a trial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices