Theodore Roosevelt's Dakota Years and What He Did Not Write About

Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the Badlands in September of eighteen eighty-three to hunt bison. He found almost none. The slaughter of the northern herd was effectively complete. The hide hunters with their long-range rifles had spent more than a decade reducing the North American bison population from an estimated thirty to sixty million animals to fewer than a thousand. Roosevelt bought into a cattle operation anyway, invested in what became known as the Maltese Cross Ranch, and spent portions of the next several years in these Badlands along the Little Missouri River.

He credited the Dakota years with making him the man he became. He wrote extensively about the landscape, the hunting, the ranching life, and what he called the strenuous existence of the frontier. His published accounts of those years are vivid and self-aware about some things.

They are largely silent about others. In the same years Roosevelt was romanticizing the frontier he was discovering, the Lakota people had been confined to reservations and stripped of the buffalo that had sustained their civilization for centuries. The military campaigns that made the Badlands safe for a Northeastern patrician to run cattle had concluded with the very destruction of the herds that Roosevelt was noting with disappointment. His conservation philosophy, which genuinely shaped the national park system, emerged from a landscape whose most significant ecological and human catastrophe was already accomplished.

The park that carries his name now maintains a free-ranging bison herd, restored from a remnant population. The restoration is real. So is what preceded it.