Defeated politically and running out of money after a ranch deal gone bad, Theodore Roosevelt began writing his epic history of the conquest of the American West in 1888. He wove a sweeping drama, well documented and filled to the brim with Americans fighting Indian confederacies in the north and south while dealing with the machinations of the British, French, and Spanish and their sympathizers. Roosevelt wanted to show how backwoodsmen such as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, followed by hardy pioneer settlers, won the United States the claim to land west of the Alleghenies. Heroism and treachery among both the whites and the Indians can be seen in his rapidly shifting story of a people on the move in pursuit of their manifest destiny. By force and by treaty the new nation was established in the east, and when the explorers and settlers pushed against the Mississippi, everything west of the river was considered part of that nation.
