Theodore Roosevelt and the Badlands

He arrived for the first time on September eighth, eighteen eighty-three, a twenty-four-year-old New York assemblyman who had come to North Dakota to shoot a buffalo before they were gone. He found the Little Missouri badlands, that burnt-orange and ivory landscape of eroded buttes and cedar-dotted draws in the far west of the state, and something changed in him. He bought a cattle ranch, the Maltese Cross, later a second ranch he called Elkhorn, and spent significant time in the Dakota Territory between eighteen eighty-three and eighteen eighty-six.

It was hard, physical, often dangerous work. He chased horse thieves down the Little Missouri in an open boat in March, frostbitten, covering nearly a hundred miles of river. He wrote about the landscape with a clarity and intensity that his later political prose rarely matched.

The badlands themselves are a geologic curiosity: ancient flood plains cut by millions of years of erosion into a maze of buttes and coulees, their layers banding from the black of lignite coal to the white of volcanic ash to the red of burned clinker, the coal seams that caught fire underground, sometimes centuries ago, and baked the clay above them brick-red. Roosevelt biographers note that the ranch years built the physical confidence and outdoor temperament that defined his later conservation legacy. He returned to Washington eventually, but he never entirely left the badlands behind.

When he signed the Antiquities Act in nineteen oh six and began designating national monuments, the intellectual source was partly this landscape. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, established in nineteen seventy-eight, is named for the president whose years in this landscape shaped his conservation ideals. The badlands made the conservationist.