Roosevelt’s frontier-centered view of the United States found expression in The Winning of the West, his scholarly exploration of the “great deeds of the border people” in four volumes. It was history red in tooth and claw. Roosevelt showed little patience for the “statesmen of the Atlantic seaboard” who were congenitally “unable to fully appreciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in the west.” In his telling, not George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett—fighting Indians, hacking their way through the woods—were the true authors of the nation’s
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