Meanwhile he had been hammering away at corruption in New York, and had secured the passage of the act making the offices of the county clerk, sheriff, and register salaried ones. He had been chairman of the committee to investigate the work of county officials, and, as a result of that investigation, offered the bill which cut off from the clerk of the county of New York an income in fees which approximated $82,000 per annum; from the sheriff, $100,000, and from the register also a very high return in fees. From the county offices to the police was not far and Roosevelt was agitating an investigation and reform in the guardianship of the city when he left the Legislature. After the convention, to which he went uninstructed, but in favor of the nomination of Mr. Edmunds against James G. Blaine, his health failed. The deaths of his wife and mother had been a severe shock, for Mr. Roosevelt is a man of the strongest personal attachments. He turned aside from public life for a time and went West. He had been a lover of hunting from boyhood, and when he decided to spend some time in the wilds of Montana, he took up the life as he found it there. On the banks of the Little Missouri he built a log house, working on it himself, and there turned ranchman, cowboy and hunter. He engaged in one of the last of the big buffalo hunts, and saturated himself with the life of the West. His trips in this and later years were not alone confined to this section of the West, and his courage, intelligence, and companionable nature made him a name which in later years drew to his standard thousands of cowboys, among whom his name had come to mean all that they admire, and all that appeals to their natures. The love and admiration was not one-sided, for Mr. Roosevelt came to regard these hardy, open-hearted, plain-spoken guardians of the wilderness as the finest types of manhood. In these years and between 1886 and 1888 Mr. Roosevelt was also busy on much of his literary work. The most important of his works—“The Winning of the West,” a history in four volumes of the acquisition of the territory west of the Alleghenies—required an enormous amount of research. On its publication it leaped at once into popularity, and soon acquired a reputation as a most reliable text-book.