Theodore Roosevelt's 1884 Diary
A pocket diary for 1884, about 2½ by 3¾ inches, holds the most famous page Theodore Roosevelt ever wrote. On February 14, the day his wife and his mother died, he drew a large X and wrote one line: “The light has gone out of my life.” The original is on view at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Every page is here to turn, read and search.
February 14, 1884
In early February 1884, T.R. was 25, a member of the New York State Assembly, and about to become a father. On February 13, in Albany, he learned that his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to a daughter the night before. A second telegram followed: Alice was failing, and his mother, Martha “Mittie” Bulloch Roosevelt, was gravely ill in the same house on West 57th Street in New York City.
Slowed by dense fog, T.R. reached the house late that night. His mother died of typhoid fever at about three o’clock in the morning on February 14. Alice died that afternoon of Bright’s disease, an illness of the kidneys. On the printed page for Thursday, February 14, T.R. drew a heavy X and wrote: “The light has gone out of my life.”
Read the full story in The Double Tragedy: February 14, 1884.
Theodore Roosevelt's 1884 pocket diary on view at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, open to February 14. (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Papers)
T.R.'s diary entries for February 16 and 17, 1884. (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Papers)
What he wrote
Two days later T.R. returned to the diary. Across the pages for February 16 and 17 he set down the story of his marriage. “I wooed her for over a year before I won her,” he wrote. He recorded his daughter’s birth, Alice’s death “in my arms,” the burial of his wife and mother together at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and the christening of the baby as Alice Lee Roosevelt.
He ended with a line as stark as the X:
For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out
Theodore Roosevelt, diary, February 17, 1884
Back to the Badlands
After February the pages stay blank for almost four months. In June, having left his infant daughter in the care of his sister Anna, T.R. went west to the cattle ranch he had bought the year before in the Dakota Badlands. His entry for June 9 reads:
arrived at my cattle ranche (“Chimney Butte Ranche”) on the Little Missouri,
That ranch is better known as the Maltese Cross. Its cabin now stands behind the South Unit visitor center of Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora.
Through June, and again in November and December, the diary becomes a hunter’s log: antelope, grouse and deer, rides through snow with his ranch hands Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow, and readings of 20 degrees below zero. At the back of the book he listed ranch photographs and kept a tally of the season’s game. To see where he rode, visit the Elkhorn Ranch.
T.R.'s diary for June 9, 1884, the first entry after February: his arrival at the Chimney Butte, or Maltese Cross, ranch. (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Papers)
How the diary reached the Library of Congress
The baby christened Alice Lee Roosevelt grew up to be Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She inherited the seven pocket diaries her father kept from 1878 to 1884, and in 1958 she lent them to the Library of Congress for its exhibition marking the centennial of T.R.’s birth. Over the next few years she turned the loan into a gift; the 1884 diary became a permanent part of the Library of Congress collections in 1960. It joined the Theodore Roosevelt Papers, the great mass of letters and papers T.R. himself had given to the Library of Congress.
To protect the small leather volume, researchers have worked from a microfilm copy since the 1960s. The Library of Congress now offers full-color, high-resolution scans of every page, and those scans are what you turn in the diary above.
Before and after 1884. All seven of T.R.’s pocket diaries, 1878 to 1884, are on the shelf in the diary explorer above. Choose a year to read his Harvard days, his courtship of Alice Lee, their wedding, his first months in the New York State Assembly, and the log of his 1884 hunting trip to the Bighorn Mountains, which he kept in the blank pages of his 1883 diary. The earlier volumes come from the Library of Congress microfilm, in black and white.
See it in Medora
The diary is on view in the Library’s galleries, open to the page for February 14, 1884. Plan about three and a half hours to see the Library, and check hours before you go.
Read more
- “The Light Has Gone Out of My Life”: Theodore Roosevelt’s 1884 Pocket Diary in Full Color, by Michelle A. Krowl, Unfolding History, Library of Congress
- The 1884 diary in the Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress
- All of T.R.’s personal diaries, 1878–1884, Library of Congress
- Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt
- The Double Tragedy: February 14, 1884
- Research at the Library
Diary images: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Papers.