The Badlands & Teddy Roosevelt

I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.
–Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

After we left the north country on our summer road trip, temperatures rose into the 90s and 100s. I wasn’t prepared for the heat and dry air, but gas prices dropped from the Canadian six dollars a gallon to just over three, a plus since we continued churning along the sparsely traveled highways and backroads.
Montana’s prairies were a tapestry of wheat, oat, and hayfields and rich with deer, pronghorns, and eagles. After a few days, we reached the North Dakota Badlands and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Much like Mike’s Mesa in San Juan County or the badlands near Farmington, NM, North Dakota’s version seemed otherworldly with banded layers of rust, orange, and cream on the hills, mesas, and hoodoos, but with lush vegetation growing in the valley along the banks of the Little Missouri River. Teddy Roosevelt described them well.
“The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to hardly properly belong to the earth” (Theodore Roosevelt Quotes-U.S. National Park Service).
As a child, Roosevelt suffered from ill health, including poor appetite, headaches, congestion, fevers, near-sightedness, and severe asthma. Since he couldn’t join the other children playing games, he read voraciously.
In his autobiography, he said, “I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from chronic asthma, and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe” (Christopher Klein, Inside Theodore Roosevelt’s Gilded Age Upbringing, History.com).
Fortunately, his wealthy father could take him to those places. His father, one of Teddy Roosevelt’s heroes, was altruistic and spent a lot of money and time helping the poor.
He also founded New York City’s Natural History Museum and fostered his son’s avid curiosity about the natural world. As a result of his experiences, Teddy loved the outdoors, reading, and writing, and as a child collected at least 1,000 specimens for his own Roosevelt Natural History Museum, writing essays about his observations. He titled one, written when he was nine, “The Natural History of Insects.”
As he matured, with his father’s strong encouragement, Roosevelt threw himself into building his muscles and endurance, graduated from Harvard University, married, and entered politics.
In 1883, when he was 24, he traveled to the Dakota Territory to hunt bison. While there, he became interested in cattle ranching which at the time was a profitable business. Before returning to New York, Roosevelt invested $14,000 in the Maltese Cross Ranch and went into business with two other men.
However, his life changed dramatically on Valentine’s Day 1884. He was at the New York State legislature when he received a telegram to return home. Once there, he sat by his mother’s bed as she died from typhoid fever, and a few hours later sat by his wife as she died from kidney disease. Overwhelmed with grief, he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life” (Theodore Roosevelt, National Park Service).
After the legislative session ended, he left his infant daughter in the care of his sister and headed for the North Dakota Badlands. So intense was his grief that except for a eulogy he never wrote or spoke about his first wife again and destroyed every document containing her name.
In North Dakota, he immersed himself in the work of ranching, hunting, and keeping the law. He invested in another, even more isolated ranch, the Elkhorn, about 35 miles south of Medora where he spent most of his time although he often traveled back and forth from there to New York.
He wrote, “I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision...I enjoyed the life to the full” (Theodore Roosevelt Quotes).
However, the harsh winter of 1886-1887 ended his ranching ventures. With thousands upon thousands of cattle dying, the winter proved disastrous for all of the ranchers.
Eventually, Roosevelt sold his property at a great loss and returned to the East and politics, but his love for the badlands remained, and he continued to visit the area until just a few months before his unexpected death in 1919.
After the ranger checked our pass, handed us a map of the park, and warned us of the extreme heat index, we drove up the hill from the visitors’ center and stopped to watch a herd of bison meandering across a prairie dog town.
Later, another herd wandered down to the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt would have been pleased. Even though he’d hunted big game himself, he said, “The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world” (Theodore Roosevelt Quotes).
We explored the southern part of the park and in the sweltering heat, hiked to a coal vein that had collapsed, but once burned for years. Because of the heat, every step took effort.
I pondered Roosevelt’s efforts to overcome his limitations, the grief that catapulted him into the badlands, and how this strange land had helped shape his character.
I realized as we hiked, whether we know it or not, our own ability to overcome limitations, our griefs and hardships, and our beloved landscapes also help to shape who we become.