Roosevelt, much as he understood the character of the Western man, was even more interested in and sympathetic to the Western woman. It was on the prairie that Roosevelt learned the doctrine which he afterward preached, that “the prime work for the average woman must be keeping the home and rearing her children.” When with his men on the ranch he listened by hours to their accounts of the charms and virtues of their sweethearts, while from his own close observation he acquired a knowledge of the homely virtues of the women pioneers of the plains that led him to show small sympathy in later years with the idle, luxury-loving women of the big cities. In his description of frontier types Roosevelt pictured how the grinding work of the wilderness drives the beauty and bloom from a woman’s face long before her youth leaves her. She lives in a log hut chinked with moss, or in a sod adobe hovel; or in a temporary camp. Motherhood comes and leaves her sinewy, angular, thin of lip and furrowed of brow. She is up early, going about her work in a dingy gown and ugly sunbonnet, facing her many hard duties, washing and cooking for her husband and children; facing perils and hardships and poverty with the courage her husband shows in facing his own hard and dangerous lot. She is fond and tender toward her children. Yet necessity dictates that she must bring them up in hardihood. One of the wives of Roosevelt’s teamsters, when her work prevented her giving personal care to her flock picketed them out, each child being tied by the leg with a long leather string to a stake driven in the ground and so placed that it could not get into a scuffle with the next child nor get its hand on breakable things. Independent and resourceful as the frontiersman became in contact with the desolate prairie, his wife was no less similarly developed. Roosevelt met one of these women living alone in her cabin on the plains, having dismissed her erring husband some six months previously. Her living she earned by making hunting shirts, leggins and gauntlets for neighboring cow-punchers and Indians, and every man who approached her cabin door was made to walk the straightest kind of line. The West had its lewd women--as have our big cities today--but Roosevelt testified that the sense of honor and dignity of the average plainswoman was as high as that found in the centers of culture. In the cowboy balls, to which men and women flocked from the surrounding towns, the greatest decorum was observed, and those behaving unseemingly were banished and punished with typical cowboy celerity and vim.