In July 1886, a young Theodore Roosevelt gave his first major public speech in Dickinson, North Dakota, after Dr. Victor Stickney, who had patched up Roosevelt's feet following the boat thieves' episode, asked him to deliver the Independence Day address. Dickinson celebrated the holiday enthusiastically, with one witness recalling that people were so caught up in the parade that bystanders kept joining it until no one was left watching. As the third speaker of the celebration, Roosevelt spoke in his characteristic high voice, identifying himself with his listeners and hinting at the larger future before him as a young man from New York who called Dakota Territory home. He declared that he was at heart as much a westerner as an easterner, praised Americans' love of big things such as parades, forests, mountains, wheat fields, railroads, cattle, factories, and steamboats, and insisted that honesty, bravery, truthfulness, and intelligence mattered more than owning all the railways and grain elevators in the world.