The Dude from New York: Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands

In September of eighteen eighty-three, a twenty-four-year-old New York state assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt stepped off the Northern Pacific train at Little Missouri, a rough cattle depot about thirty-five miles west of where Dickinson would soon stand. He had come to hunt bison before they were gone. He left two weeks later having purchased a stake in a cattle ranch.

Roosevelt was grieving. His mother and his young wife Alice had both died on the same day in February of eighteen eighty-four, and the New York social world felt suffocating. He threw himself into the Badlands. He bought the Maltese Cross Ranch on the Little Missouri River south of Medora and later established the Elkhorn Ranch, his true retreat, about thirty-five miles north. He worked alongside his hired hands, learned to rope and brand, spent weeks at a time in the saddle, and wrote dispatches about the western life for eastern magazines that made him famous.

Dickinson was Roosevelt's nearest real town of any size. He came in to file cattle paperwork, pick up mail, and in eighteen eighty-six he delivered a Fourth of July oration from a Dickinson hotel that was reprinted widely in eastern papers. He wrote later that the Badlands years had made him physically and morally. Without them, he said, he would never have become president.

The terrible winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighty-seven killed perhaps sixty percent of the cattle on the open range across the northern plains, a catastrophe that wiped out Roosevelt's investment and ended the era of open-range ranching. He returned to New York politics, but the landscape never left him. As president he would sign into existence five national parks, eighteen national monuments, fifty-one federal bird reservations, and one hundred fifty national forests. The Badlands he had ridden as a young man became Theodore Roosevelt National Park in nineteen forty-seven, a memorial not to a battlefield but to the land that built a man.