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Before he ascended to the highest office in the land as the United States youngest president, Theodore Roosevelt, with illustrations by Frederic Remington, though a New York City man born and bred, was a devotee of the Old West. In 1888, he published this charming ode to the American frontier, from the rewarding hard work of a rancher on the open plains to the pleasures of hunting the big game of mountains high. Today, the inimitable prose and infectious enthusiasm of Roosevelts writing here serves as much to limn a unique aspect of the character of the nation as it sings an elegy for a disappearing way of life. Includes numerous illustrations by Frederic Remington. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Roosevelts Letters to His Children, A Book-Lovers Holidays in the Open, America and the World War, Through the Brazilian Wilderness and Papers on Natural History, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, and Historic Towns: New York Politician and soldier, naturalist and historian, American icon THEODORE ROOSEVELT, (18581919) was 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909, and the first American to win a Nobel Prize, in 1906, when he was awarded the Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. He is the author of 35 books.

In the summer of 1854, Longfellow wrote in his diary "I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful traditions as whole." What emerged the next year was "The Song of Hiawatha," a composite of legends, folklore, myth, and characters that presents, in short, lilting lines (who can forget "By the shore of Gitche-Gumme / By the shining Big-Sea Water"?) the life-story of a real Indian, who provides the focus for the narrative thread of this epic drama of high adventure, tragedy and conflict.The aim was not to tell a particular or specific story but to unite the strands of various Indian legends, to present a sympathetic portrait of many Native American tribes, and especially to disclose their profound relationship with the natural world. This when both government policies and an expanding, land-hungry population were just beginning their inexorable campaign of displacement and annihilation.The poem received a decidedly mixed reception. Our own "Boston Traveller" revealed its biases: "We cannot help but express our regret that our own pet national poet should not have selected as a theme of his muse something better and higher than the silly legends of the savage aborigines." Despite this, the poem entered into our canon of great narratives, and was revived again in 1891 when Remington, surely the most renowned artist of the West, provided with new pen and ink drawings.This handsome new, and freshly reset, edition (the only unabridged version in print) presents the full text, includes all 400 of the original Remington illustrations, and provides an index of the Indian names and their meanings.