He was married September 23, 1880, to Alice Lee, daughter of George Cabot and Caroline Haskell Lee, of Boston, Massachusetts. She died in 1883, leaving one daughter. Miss Alice Lee Roosevelt. He studied law in the New York law school, became in 1882 a Republican member of the Assembly, the lower house of the New York state legislature, and he was reëlected for the years 1883 and 1884. He was chairman of the committee known as the Roosevelt Investigating Committee. His efforts to better the condition of the poorer classes of New York city began in the Assembly, when he took up the cause of the tenement-house cigar makers, and in visiting their miserable dwellings he received deep and lasting impressions of the need of betterment in the conditions which surround tenement workers. He became an ardent supporter of civil service reform at this time and introduced bills which bettered the government of New York city, in particular one of importance which transferred to the mayor that power of confirming appointments which had been in the hands of the aldermen.
In 1884 he was sent as a delegate to the Republican state convention; in June of the same year he was delegate-at-large from New York, and chairman of the New York delegation to the Republican national convention at Chicago. Leaving for a time political life with its heat and stress he bought the ranches "Elk Horn" and "Chimney Butte," in northwestern Dakota, and there lived in a log house in the almost unbroken wilderness, devoting himself to hunting and to free life in the open for two years, 1884-86. His health and strength were finally and fully confirmed by this open air activity which he thoroughly enjoyed. The years spent in this western ranch have have proved invaluable to the whole country, because they gave to Theodore Roosevelt such an intimate knowledge as few eastern bred men ever acquire of the life of our great West, of the need of irrigation for the arid plains of the West, and of the enterprising spirit and whole-hearted manliness of the typical western man. This has not merely made him popular with westerners, but has been of the greatest use to him in influencing and passing finally upon legislation for the development of the vast resources of the West—which is by far the greater part of that National Territory over which he presides. This warm appreciation of western spirit and life is vividly shown in his most important historical work, "The Winning of the West."
