Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly, asthmatic boy whose father told him he had the mind but not the body, and after his wife and his mother died in the same house on the same day, he went west and ran cattle. As a child he had asthma attacks so bad that his father would take him out in a carriage at night to get air into his lungs. His father put it to him plainly: "You have the mind but you have not the body. You must make your body." A gymnasium went into the family house, and the boy set about building himself. In the summer of 1883 he went out to the Dakota Badlands, camped in the open, rode with the cattlemen on their roundups, and put $14,000 of his inheritance into cattle. On 12 February 1884 his wife Alice gave birth to their daughter. Two days later his mother died of typhoid in the middle of the night, and twelve hours after that his wife died in the same house. In his diary he drew a large cross and wrote: "The light has gone out of my life." He went back to the Badlands. He learned to rope and ride and live out on the range, and the work brought him back to life. Drought and blizzards wiped out most of his herd, and in 1886 he went home to New York, a different man from the one who had left. He always believed he would never have become President without those years in the West. In 1899 he gave a speech whose title became his creed, The Strenuous Life. His father prescribed a gymnasium for the body. The cattle country prescribed hard work for the grief. The boy who could not breathe at night went on to charge up San Juan Hill and become President.