Manifest Destiny
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
A rollicking adventure starring a young Theodore Roosevelt
In 1884, Teddy Roosevelt's political career is dead in the water. A New York state assemblyman with eyes on national office, he finds his ambitions thwarted just months after his wife and infant daughter pass away. Frustrated by politics, he retires to the American West to ride, ranch, and hunt buffalo in the Dakota Badlands. Nobody tells him that the buffalo are gone.
He arrives in Dakota a greenhorn, awkward in the saddle and unused to Western clothes. But his aristocratic charm, natural intelligence, and love of nature impress the hardened frontiersmen, forming a bond that lasts the rest of their lives. When a wealthy French marquis threatens the pristine country he has fallen in love with, Roosevelt joins with the Dakotans to defend it. Before the presidency, before San Juan Hill, it was in Dakota that Theodore Roosevelt became a man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Continuing the resurgence of the literary western, this engaging historical novel opens in 1884. Theodore Roosevelt, with wife and mother dead, and a promising political career in ruins, arrives in the Badlands determined to become a rancher. Fighting an assortment of physical ailments and the scorn of ranchers and cowboys, he eventually earns the Dakotans' respect. The town of Medora is threatened by Marquis De Mores, a rich Frenchman who's building a cattle empire and willing to go to any lengths to do it--including murder. Roosevelt's sense of fair play prompts him to defend the smaller ranchers against De Mores's brutal assaults. The author claims everything in his book actually happened, but that may be a shortcoming, because everything makes the book too long, and certain events don't contribute to the story. Nevertheless, Garfield spins a satisfying yarn, having shrewdly recognized both a good story and a larger-than-life character named Teddy Roosevelt.
