Medora, North Dakota

Medora is one of the most storied small towns in the American West. A French nobleman named Antoine de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, founded it in eighteen eighty-three and named it for his wife, Medora von Hoffman. The Marquis arrived flush with his father-in-law's money and a grand industrial scheme: he built a beef packing plant, a stagecoach line, and a chateau on the bluffs above town.

The whole enterprise collapsed by eighteen eighty-six, done in by bad beef prices, legal troubles, and the catastrophic winter that killed most of the region's cattle. That same winter of eighty-six to eighty-seven also tested a young former New York state legislator named Theodore Roosevelt, who had arrived in September of eighty-three to hunt bison and ended up buying two ranches nearby. Roosevelt later called his Badlands years the romance of his life and credited them with making him who he was.

The Marquis' chateau still stands. The South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park begins right at the edge of town.