Of the many forces that shaped Theodore Roosevelt the warrior, the hunter, the statesman, the historian, none was more important, none more enduring than the frontier experience. As an impressionable youth, Roosevelt followed his fertile and far-reaching interests from the confines of New York politics to the open range of stock raising, then on to the intellectual frontiers of history. In the process, this son of the East became one of the nation's foremost exponents of the values, ideals, and culture of the American West.