What if . . . TR’s wife hadn't died?

No Rough Rider? No president?

“The light has gone out of my life.” Twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt wrote these words in his diary on Valentine's Day in 1884. Above them he made a large black X.

Roosevelt was responding to the worst thing that can happen to a young man in love. The object of his affections had died. Alice Lee had enchanted Roosevelt from the moment he met her while a college student at Harvard. She was the sister of a college friend. He wooed her and won her, and after his graduation they were married.

Roosevelt had had an awkward childhood. Often sick, nearly friendless, he had lived in a world of books and his imagination. His father challenged him to build his physical and moral strength by engaging in vigorous and sometimes risky activities. By the time he left his New York City home for Harvard, he was beginning to come out of his shell.

Yet his social skills remained wanting. And when Alice stole his heart, he scarcely imagined that she might one day reciprocate.

Against all odds she did. The day she agreed to marry him was the happiest of his life, he confided to his diary. Until, that is, she told him she was pregnant with their child. From that moment his happiness knew no bounds.

Roosevelt had started on a political career. He represented his New York City district in the state legislature in Albany. He was in Albany when he received a telegram saying that Alice had delivered a baby girl. Roosevelt passed out cigars and accepted the congratulations of his fellow legislators.

Just hours later, though, a second telegram arrived. Complications had developed. He must return to New York City at once.

The train ride south from Albany was agonizing. What was wrong? He had sometimes worried that his happiness was more than any man deserved. Was the cosmos catching up with him?

He arrived and was greeted by his brother with news that Alice was in grave danger. As it happened, his mother had fallen ill at the same time. He spent a long night going from the bedside of one to the side of the other.

Nothing could be done for either. The death of his mother caused him sorrow. But the death of Alice meant the end of happiness, of hope, of the life he had planned for them together. This was the light that had gone out of his life.

Roosevelt fled the scene of his tragedy. The previous summer he had taken a hunting trip to Dakota territory. Dakota’s badlands — deeply eroded hills and canyons — had intrigued him. Now they offered a refuge where a man who felt utterly lost might seek solace in the solitude of nature.

During the course of months, the pain in his heart gradually dulled. He tried his hand at herding cattle. He rode with the local cowboys, took part in the roundup, and exhausted himself with long days in the saddle that ended in thankfully dreamless sleep.

When winter came, he returned to New York. But only for a visit. He thought of himself now as a man of the West. He had read enough history to realize that the American West was where generations of his predecessors had gone to remake themselves. And so the West had remade him.

Months and years passed. A historic blizzard changed his mind about being a permanent resident of Dakota. He fell in love again and married Edith Carow, a friend of his sister. He re-entered politics in New York.

But he carried with him a western sensibility. No longer merely a man of the big city, he was an emblem of the frontier, of that most distinctive part of the American experience. When war came with Spain in 1898, he mustered a regiment of cowboys. They went off to war as the Rough Riders and made Roosevelt famous for commanding them.

His fame translated into nomination and then election as governor of New York. A squabble with the boss of the New York Republican party caused him to be kicked upstairs into the vacant vice presidency of William McKinley. McKinley's assassination in 1901 made Roosevelt the youngest president in American history.

Roosevelt wasn't one to underestimate his native talents. He believed he was as well qualified to be president as anyone not named Washington or Lincoln.

Yet he also understood the role of chance and accident in life. He realized that the western persona he adopted made him more popular than he ever would have been had he not gone west.

He still thought of Alice, not least because the daughter she bore him, also called Alice, was growing up to look like her mother. His heart still twinged when he recalled that terrible Valentine's Day.

Yet he recognized that the tragedy had altered his life in a way which opened opportunities he wouldn't have had otherwise. The light hadn’t gone out forever. And when it went back on, it illuminated a path he hadn’t imagined before.

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