Château de Morès

Just outside Medora, North Dakota stands a twenty-six room chateau built in eighteen eighty-three by a French aristocrat named Antoine de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Morès. He arrived in the Badlands with a fortune and a grand plan: build a meatpacking plant in the Dakota Territory, slaughter cattle here rather than shipping live animals east, and undercut the Chicago beef trust. He founded the town of Medora, named for his American wife, and built a refrigerated rail-car operation that briefly shipped dressed beef east by rail.

The venture collapsed within three years. The cattle market turned, the railroads sided with Chicago, and the Marquis lost millions. He left in eighteen eighty-six, the same year his neighbor Theodore Roosevelt also gave up on his Badlands ranches.

The chateau and the ruins of the packing plant still stand as a state historic site.