Roosevelt's Dakota: Ranching Near the Badlands

About one hundred and fifty miles south and west of Minot, in the breaks of the Little Missouri River, a young New York assemblyman arrived in September of eighteen eighty-three to hunt bison. He was twenty-four years old, wore spectacles, and talked with what the cowboys considered an almost comical Eastern accent. His name was Theodore Roosevelt, and the Dakota Territory would change him entirely.

Roosevelt had come out on the Northern Pacific, which had reached this stretch of the Badlands only a short time before. He shot his bison, but he also fell in love with the land. Before he left he had put money into a cattle operation called the Maltese Cross Ranch near the hamlet of Medora. He came back in eighteen eighty-four after the death of his wife and mother on the same day in February, seeking, as he would later write, the strenuous life. He ran cattle, rode hard, served as a deputy sheriff, and once pursued boat thieves down the Little Missouri River in early spring, staying awake to guard the prisoners while he read Anna Karenina.

The cattle years ended after the catastrophic winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighteen eighty-seven, which killed about sixty percent of Roosevelt's own stock and wiped out many ranchers. Roosevelt returned east, eventually to politics, the Spanish-American War, and the presidency. But he credited the Dakota years with making him who he was. His conservation legacy, the national parks, the forests, the monuments, grew directly from what he learned in the Badlands.

The land he knew is now Theodore Roosevelt National Park. For anyone driving through the region around Minot, the Badlands country a few hours south is as close as you can get to the landscape that shaped a president.