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Why Did Roosevelt Choose the Badlands of Dakota Territory and Not Somewhere Else? Three reasons. First, he had made the acquaintance in New York of a man named Commodore Henry Gorringe, a retired naval officer. Gorringe was the man who brought Cleopatra’s Needle (the 71-foot, 200 ton ancient Egyptian obelisk) to New York City in 1880. In 1883, Gorringe had purchased the abandoned Cantonment on the western edge of the village of Little Missouri with the idea of making it a hunting lodge. Roosevelt met Gorringe in May, 1883, at the Free Trade Club in New York. Gorringe invited Roosevelt to join him in a trip to the Dakota badlands in the late summer of 1883. Roosevelt accepted the invitation. But for unknown reasons Gorringe backed out of the trip at the last minute. Roosevelt decided to go anyway. Second, the Little Missouri River Valley was comparatively easy to get to. All Roosevelt had to do was take the train from New York to Chicago, switch to the Northern Pacific to St. Paul, Bismarck, and eventually the village of Little Missouri. It was, by Nineteenth Century standards, an easy five-day railroad journey. Roosevelt could get right to the place he wanted to go by rail, without any need to make connections with a stage line, or hire someone to guide him to a place remote from the transportation infrastructure. Had he wanted to hunt in the Black Hills, for example, he would have had to endure a long stagecoach ride from Bismarck or Cheyenne. The hunting grounds of Dakota Territory were right outside the Northern Pacific depot, such as it was. Third, there was a Dakota badlands boom in 1883. In 1871, Hiram Latham had published Trans-Missouri Stock Raising; the Pasture Lands of North America; Winter Grazing. James S. Brisbin’s The Beef Bonanza; or How to Get Rich on the Plains was published in 1881. New York, Paris, and London newspapers had been reporting a buzz of activity on the northern plains. Suddenly it was fashionable for aristocrats on both sides of the Atlantic to have a cattle ranch somewhere in those parts of the American West recently wrested from American Indians. In 1883, the first great rush of Texas longhorns reached northern Dakota Territory. Roosevelt himself had chosen to hunt in Dakota Territory after conversations with Howard Eaton of Pittsburgh, and Gorringe of New York. Roosevelt ventured to one of America’s last frontiers in 1883, but it was far from obscure in the elite social circles in which Roosevelt traveled. Where Did Roosevelt Stay When He First Arrived in the Badlands? Roosevelt arrived on the train about 3 a.m. on the night of September 7-8, 1883. The train stopped in the village of Little Missouri, sometimes called Comba, on the west bank of the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt spent the rest of that first night at the Pyramid Park Hotel. The next day he managed to hire the reluctant Joe Ferris to serve as his hunting guide, borrowed from the formidable and shifty-eyed E.G. Paddock a rifle strong enough to kill a buffalo, and traveled seven miles south of Little Missouri in a buck wagon to the Maltese Cross Ranch, also known as the Chimney Butte Ranch, occupied by William Merrifield and Ferris’ brother Sylvane. There he spent his second night in the badlands (September 8). Although Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris were not at first impressed by the New York dude, they gained some appreciation when he insisted on sleeping on the floor rather than displace them from their beds. For the rest of his buffalo hunt, Roosevelt headquartered at the cabin of Gregor and Lincoln Lang, recent Scottish immigrants who were managing the investment of an English capitalist named Sir John Pender. Lang’s cabin (the first of three the Langs occupied in the badlands) was located at the mouth of Little Cannonball Creek, just north of Pretty Butte, near today’s Marmarth, North Dakota. After a ten-day hunt, Roosevelt returned to the Pyramid Park Hotel on the nights of September 22-23, 1883, before embarking for St. Paul and then New York City. Roosevelt did not actually take possession of the Chimney Butte Ranch headquarters until his return to the Little Missouri River Valley in June 1884. How Did People in Dakota React to Roosevelt? At first, of course, they were amused, skeptical, and sometimes derisive. Roosevelt cut a somewhat ridiculous figure with his designer buckskins and his Tiffany’s knife, his falsetto voice and Harvard accent. He sensed this himself. In his Autobiography, he wrote, “When I went among strangers I always had to spend twentyfour hours in living down the fact that I wore spectacles, remaining as long as I could judiciously deaf to any side remarks about ‘four eyes’ unless it became evident that my being quiet was misconstrued and that it was better to bring matters to a head at once.” To Henry Cabot Lodge, he provided a somewhat comic picture of himself, on August 12, 1884. “You would be amused to see me, in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” In the course of their ten-day buffalo hunt in 1883, Joe Ferris realized that there was something indefatigable in Roosevelt’s character. Ferris said, “I liked him from the start. He struck me as a quiet sort of man, easy to get along with.” Scotsman Gregor Lang realized Roosevelt’s greatness in the week of late evening conversations he had with TR about ranching, the West, and American politics. When Roosevelt and Joe Ferris finally drove north towards the village of Little Missouri, carrying the head of Roosevelt’s buffalo in Ferris’s buckboard, on September 22, 1883, Gregor Lang turned to his son and said, “There goes the most remarkable man I ever met.” The Roosevelt who arrived in the badlands in September 1883 was a very different man from the one who returned to civilization in 1887. Little Missouri rancher Frank Roberts said, “He was rather a slim-lookin’ fellow when he came out here, but after he lived out here... his build got wider and heavier... he got to be lookin’ more like a rugged man.” Upon Roosevelt’s return to life in the East, one of his Harvard classmates wrote, “I recall my astonishment the first time I saw him, after the lapse of several years, to find him with the neck of a Titan and with broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bred, slight young friend I had known earlier.” But the greatest praise Roosevelt received from a resident of the Little Missouri River Valley came from Lincoln Lang. It was like a scene out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel. From his bed in the cabin, young Lincoln listened to his father and Roosevelt talk deep into the night. Undoubtedly he drifted off before the conversations were finished, but he heard enough to form a lifelong judgment of Roosevelt. In Ranching with Roosevelt, he wrote, “It was listening to those talks after supper in the old shack on the Cannonball, that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us, and not for a chosen few.” How Much Land Did Roosevelt Actually Own in the Little Missouri River Valley? None. He squatted on many thousands of acres, some surrounding the Maltese and some surrounding the Elkhorn ranch headquarters. Roosevelt paid taxes on his capital investment in the cattle industry, but he never owned an acre of Dakota property. Most of the inhabitants of the badlands during this period actually owned no land. It was open range, recently taken from its Indian claimants, not yet deeded out under the Homestead Act (1862), the Timber Culture Act (1873) or the Desert Lands Act (1877). Most of it was owned by the government of the United States. Some of it comprised the gigantic swath of land (40,000,000 acres) granted to the Northern Pacific Railroad as incentive to build the transcontinental rail line, not yet disposed of by the NP. When the Marquis de Mores began to obtain actual title to acreage in the badlands, he was regarded as a nuisance who was violating the unwritten code of informal land tenancy. In 1884, Roosevelt paid someone, perhaps a hunter, perhaps an existing rancher, $400 to extinguish a rival claim on the Elkhorn site. This was not a means of actually buying land, but rather of pre-empting an existing squatter. In the book he wrote about his ranch experiences, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 1885, Roosevelt acknowledged that squatter cattlemen did not hold legal claims to the lands on which they grazed their herds. “The cattle-men... keep herds and build houses on the land; yet I would not for a moment debar settlers from the right of entry to the cattle country, though their coming in means in the end the destruction of us and our industry. For we ourselves, and the life that we lead, will shortly pass away from the plains as completely as the red and white hunters who have vanished from before our herds.” In other words, Roosevelt acknowledged that when farmers with valid land deeds entered the western reaches of Dakota Territory, squatter ranchers would have no choice but to acknowledge the newcomers’ superior claims and withdraw from the land. In the meantime, as Roosevelt wrote in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, a rancher was by custom entitled to a swath of land four miles upriver and four miles downriver from his headquarters and indefinitely in a perpendicular direction. How Much Time Did Roosevelt Actually Spend in North Dakota? A little over a year total. His significant residencies were spread over a four-year period between September 7, 1883, and December 5, 1887. In 1883, he spent approximately 21 days in the badlands. In 1884, he made four trips to Dakota (and the Big Horn Mountains) for a total of approximately 73 days. In 1885 he made two sustained trips to his Dakota ranches. The total appears to have been 87 days that year. In 1886, he made one long and a number of shorter visits, totaling approximately 133 days. The period between March 19 and July 8 was his longest sustained visit to the Little Missouri River Valley. In 1887, after the disastrous winter, Roosevelt made two visits to his western ranches. The first, April 9-20, reminded him of just how much he and every other rancher had lost. The second, between November 1 and December 5, 1887, was a hunting trip. The total for 1887 is approximately 45 days. The total for all of these visits, between 1883 and 1887, comes to something like 359 days. Roosevelt continued to visit the Dakota badlands to hunt almost every year until 1896. Thereafter, he visited North Dakota six more times, always to advance his political agenda, and never for more than a couple of days. He last visited the badlands on October 6, 1918, just a few months before his death. For some reason, Roosevelt was sensitive about the amount of time he spent in Dakota Territory. Although he was incapable of lying outright, he frequently exaggerated when describing his exploits, and for some reason he led the world to believe that he had spent more time in Dakota than he actually did. In Fargo in 1910, Roosevelt said, “It is twenty-seven years since I first punched cattle on the Little Missouri, where I lived for the major part of seven years, and off and on for nearly fifteen years.” How Much Actual Work Did Roosevelt Do Among Cattle? More than you might think. He wanted desperately to be accepted by the ranchers and cowboys of the American West, so he threw himself unhesitatingly into the life of the range. He refused to consider any labor beneath his dignity, however dirty, dangerous, or unpleasant it was. He never complained, never willingly called attention to himself, never was first in the grub line or last up in the morning. Because his eyesight was so poor, Roosevelt never became adept with the lasso. His horsemanship was more dogged than graceful. He tended therefore to do the most basic work of the roundup, riding the perimeter of the herds, often doing both day and night shifts, and wrestling calves to the ground for branding. On one occasion he was in the saddle for forty hours straight, on five different horses. Before that marathon work stint was over, Roosevelt helped stop a stampede. He participated in the first-ever general roundup in the Little Missouri River Valley in June 1884. In 1885 he participated in the spring roundup for 32 straight days, along with 60 other men, more than 300 horses, and thousands of cattle. In five weeks he rode more than a thousand miles up and down the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt rode whatever horse was put in front of him. He was frequently thrown by the wild ones. He broke ribs and the point of his shoulder in the course of his roundup adventures, but he forced himself never to miss a work call. Lincoln Lang recalled that Roosevelt once drew a mean bucking horse. He “gave us all an exhibition of the stuff he was made of.... He had his grip and like grim death he hung on... hat, glasses, sixshooter, everything unanchored about him took the count. But there was no breaking his grip.... he stuck.” Roosevelt’s account was more comical. “I rode him all the way from the tip of his ear to the end of his tail.”
One long-time cowboy concluded, “That four-eyed maverick has sand in his craw a-plenty.” To his closest friend Henry Cabot Lodge, he wrote, “I have been three weeks on the roundup and have worked as hard as any of the cowboys... Yesterday I was eighteen hours in the saddle— from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m.—having half an hour each for dinner and tea. I can now do cowboy work pretty well.” In 1886 Roosevelt wrote, “We breakfast at three every morning, and work from sixteen to eighteen hours a day, counting night guard; so I get pretty sleepy; but I feel strong as a bear.” Roosevelt did all this hard and dangerous work without complaining, but he also read a good deal during leisure moments, and he listened carefully to the stories, the poetry, and the songs of the cowboys who rode night guard. Later in his life, he encouraged the folklorist John Lomax to record as much cowboy culture as possible. In fact, Roosevelt wrote the introduction to Lomax’ 1910 book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Is it True that Roosevelt Commissioned a Badlands Seamstress to Make Him a Buckskin Shirt?
On this second visit, Roosevelt asked Lincoln Lang, now 17 years old, to help him accomplish two goals. He wanted to kill an antelope and he wanted to obtain a genuine frontier buckskin shirt. Young Lang suggested that they ride east 25 miles to a ranch occupied by “Old Mrs. Maddox,” a woman who might make Roosevelt the shirt he wanted, and meanwhile keep their eyes open for a pronghorn antelope on the rolling plains east of the badlands. Lang rightly understood that antelope prefer open country to the badlands. Mrs. Maddox lived in the shadow of Black Butte on Sand Creek near today’s Amidon, North Dakota. She was a colorful character, and Roosevelt clearly found much to appreciate in her besides her skill as a seamstress. In his Autobiography, he described her as “a very capable and very forceful woman, with sound ideas of justice and abundantly well able to hold her own.” This was something of an understatement. Her husband got drunk and tried to beat her, but, as Roosevelt told the story, “She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter, and the admiring bull whackers bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of the ranch.” Given Mrs. Maddox’s temper, one hopes Lang persuaded Roosevelt not to explain to her his theory of the buckskin shirt. “The fringed tunic or hunting shirt, made of buckskin,” Roosevelt asserted, represented “the most picturesque and distinctly national dress ever worn in America. It was the dress in which Daniel Boone was clad when he first passed through the trackless forests of the Alleghenies... it was the dress worn by grim old Davy Crockett when he fell at the Alamo.” They arrived at the Maddox ranch just in time for dinner. According to Lang, Roosevelt and Mrs. Maddox hit it off. “Almost at once, she seemed to take a liking to Roosevelt, becoming quite chatty, which was unusual for her with strangers.” “After dinner she measured him for his suit, promising it in a couple of weeks.” Roosevelt commissioned his Davy Crockett shirt and Mrs. Maddox got it to him on schedule, sometime later in 1884. In his Autobiography he explained that he used the shirt “for years, [and it] was used by one of my sons in Arizona a couple of winters ago” (almost thirty years later). On the return ride that June day in 1884, Roosevelt managed to kill his first antelope, too. Lang said Roosevelt shouted “I got him! I got him!” He did his Indian war dance around the carcass, and impulsively offered his shotgun to Lang as a gift. Lang wrote, “Again and again he expressed satisfaction due both to my having been present to witness the occurrence and to my part in the undertaking. Nor was it mere empty talk. Before we left the scene he made that perfectly clear, handing me the surprise of my life in presenting me with a valuable shotgun which he had brought out from the east and which I knew was the only one he had.” Lang declined to accept the extravagant gift. Roosevelt and Lang made the complete round trip of fifty miles on their horses in a single day, probably June 15, 1884, stopping frequently, Lang reported, to enable Roosevelt to study the flora and fauna, ask scores of questions, and exclaim about the beauties of the Dakota plains. One was 26, the other 17 years old. Decades later Roosevelt remembered Mrs. Maddox and the shirt. Lincoln Lang remembered the young man who became the 26th President of the United States. Did Edith Roosevelt Ever Visit the Badlands? Yes. Roosevelt brought his second wife Edith, his sisters Bamie (Anna) and Corinne and her husband Douglas Robinson, a friend named Bob Ferguson, and his best friend Henry Cabot Lodge’s sixteen-year-old son George (Bay) Lodge to the Elkhorn Ranch in 1890, not quite one year into North Dakota’s statehood. The group arrived on the train well before dawn on September 2, 1890. Met by Roosevelt’s ranch supervisors Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield, the party repaired to Joe Ferris’ store to rest before making the long journey to the ranch, 35 miles north of Medora. Edith’s first impressions of North Dakota were not favorable. A rainstorm that Corinne called “one of the most frightful storms” she ever witnessed, soaked the traveling party as they exited the train and Edith’s dress was covered with a “glutinous slime” before she set foot in the depot. At first the stark badlands country struck her as godforsaken. The men rode horses to the Elkhorn Ranch and the ladies sat in a horse-drawn wagon. The party crossed the Little Missouri 23 times before they reached the ranch. According to Corinne, the wagon had to hurtle down one steep bank of the river in order to gain enough momentum to climb the bank on the other side. Corinne said nobody dared complain lest they disappoint Theodore. The Roosevelts reached the eight-room, 30 by 60 foot cabin at noon on September 2, 1890. Edith cheered up, climbed a butte, chased prairie dogs, and rode a horse called Wire Fence. She laughed as Corinne attempted to “wrastle” a calf. Later, Roosevelt wrote gleefully to Edith’s mother: “I have rarely seen Edith enjoy anything more than she did the six days at my ranch... and she looks just as well and pretty and happy as she did four years ago when I married her—indeed I sometimes almost think she looks if possible even sweeter and prettier, and she is as healthy as possible, and so young looking and slender.” The Roosevelt party was not in North Dakota long. On September 9, 1890, they boarded the train again and ventured on to Yellowstone Park. At Yellowstone Edith was thrown from her horse and badly bruised. Roosevelt briefly worried that she might have broken her back. But Edith was made of some of the same stuff as her hyperactive husband. The party returned to Medora briefly on September 23, 1890, on its return trip to Washington, D.C. This was Edith’s only trip to the North Dakota badlands. It came at the end of Roosevelt’s main years of badlands experiences, and in a sense, served to close the curtain on that episode of his life. Why Did Roosevelt Get Out of the Cattle Business? Roosevelt left Dakota Territory for several reasons. He had considered making his living from ranching and writing in the wake of a series of setbacks in 1884. First, his wife Alice and mother Mittie died within hours of each other on February 14, 1884, in Roosevelt’s New York City brownstone. In the depths of his grief, Roosevelt wrote, “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.” Roosevelt had also suffered a severe political setback in 1884. The reform wing of the Republic Party had tried desperately to prevent the nomination of James Blaine of Maine as the party’s Presidential candidate. Roosevelt and his friend (soon to be his closest friend) Henry Cabot Lodge worked hard to promote the candidacy of George F. Edmunds of Vermont. When Blaine was nominated, many of the Republican Party’s severest reformists (called Mugwumps) bolted and determined to support the Democrat Grover Cleveland in the November election. Roosevelt and Lodge decided to hold their noses and support the Republican ticket. This brought denunciations from the progressive wing of the party and from many newspaper editorialists. In June 1884, Roosevelt had good reason to think his political career might be over. As time began to heal these wounds between June 1884 and the fall of 1886, Roosevelt’s motive for burying himself in the badlands receded. It was clear by the end of 1885 that he would be welcomed back into New York politics, and in 1886 he was recruited to represent the Republican Party in the mayoral election in New York City. Perhaps more to the point, Roosevelt fell in love in 1885 with an easterner, his childhood sweetheart Edith Carow. He had not expected to remarry at all, certainly not so soon. Victorian sensibilities mandated a prolonged mourning period. Roosevelt was embarrassed to acknowledge that he had fallen in love less than two years after the death of Alice. Marriage to Edith essentially ruled out a prolonged life in the Dakota badlands. The badlands years were the adventure of a single man. Marriage and family would draw him back to New York. Although he declared in Dickinson on July 4, 1886, that “I am, myself, at heart, as much a Westerner as an Easterner,” the fact is that Roosevelt was all of his life an easterner who spent some of his discretionary time in the West rather than the other way around. The disastrous winter of 1886-87 not only shattered any notion that Roosevelt was going to profit from the cattle business, but it damaged Roosevelt’s romance with the Dakota badlands. He was on his honeymoon in Europe when he learned of the devastating losses that he and every other rancher had sustained. As soon as he returned from his European honeymoon, Roosevelt made a trip to the badlands to inspect the damage. To Lodge, he wrote, “The losses are crippling. For the first time I have been utterly unable to enjoy a visit to any ranch. I shall be glad to get home.” Finally, Roosevelt had, by late 1886, accomplished what he had really intended. He had thrown himself unhesitatingly into the frontier life, overcome fears and inhibitions, bonded with average Americans and learned to respect them deeply, transformed both his body and his spirit, participated in what he took to be the quintessential American experience, and had a roaring good time in chaps and sombrero. His soul was too large to confine itself to just one experience or one arena, however satisfying. He had taken a transfusion from the Little Missouri River Valley that would serve him for the rest of his life. But he was ready to return to the East. When Was the Last Time Roosevelt Visited North Dakota? October 6, 1918, just three months before his death. Roosevelt stopped in Bismarck and Fargo that day on a national speaking tour during the last days of World War I. His theme was “uncompromising Americanism” at a time when the government of North Dakota was controlled by farmer-socialists of the Nonpartisan League. Two thousand people gathered to glimpse the former President that Sunday morning in Bismarck. Roosevelt had not intended to speak, but NPL signs among the crowd provoked him to address them for a short time. He recalled his arrest of the boat thieves in 1886, said, “I owe more to the times when I lived out here and worked with the men who have been my friends than to anything else,” and urged the mothers of North Dakota to scorn peace talk until American troops “whip Germany to her knees.” His remarks in Fargo were very brief. He called for the unconditional surrender of Germany, and warned Dakotans not to be taken in by the current German peace offensive. The last time he visited the badlands was in April, 1911. He was beginning his run for a third term as President. His brief stop in Medora was unremarkable, but a previous stop in Beach led to local disenchantment. After expressing his surprise that Beach existed at all, Roosevelt warned the local ranchers that they should attempt to put no more than one cow on every twelve acres of such marginal grassland. For these words of caution, the once-revered Roosevelt was taunted by local citizens. One declared that Roosevelt was an anachronism, preferring nostalgia for a distant past to the grazing potential of the new century. Roosevelt’s last sustained visit to the Little Missouri River Valley came in 1896. He hunted at the Elkhorn Ranch. It turned out to be his last visit to the ranch. When a badlands visit was proposed in 1918 Roosevelt said, “It’s a mistake for one to hit the back trail after many years have passed. One finds things changed, the old picture destroyed, the romance gone.... It’s best that it should be so, but I don’t wish to see the place again. I’d rather try and remember it as it was.” The romance was over. How Did Roosevelt Become a Conservationist? Roosevelt was an avid naturalist from his childhood on. From an early age he studied all creatures great and small, kept specimens in the family’s ice box, mastered taxidermy, and he opened the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” in his room at the Roosevelt house on Broadway and Fourteenth Street. Although he killed more than his share of big game in the course of his life, he was at least as interested in the flora and fauna of America from an amateur scientist’s and nature lover’s point of view as he was in collecting trophies. Prodigious as was his kill list, he never failed to condemn the wanton slaughter of the wild animals. He had a particular detestation of what he called “game butchers.” During his badlands years, Roosevelt learned three essential conservation lessons. First, he learned that some animals, once regarded as so abundant as to be an inexhaustible resource, had actually declined in numbers to the point that their very existence was endangered. This was particularly the case with respect to the buffalo (bison). Roosevelt actually predicted that the buffalo would become extinct. Fortunately, and partly thanks to his efforts, his prediction proved to be erroneous. Roosevelt understood that without concerted efforts to preserve the last herds, preferably by volunteer organizations, but by government when deemed necessary, such creatures were likely to disappear forever. Roosevelt was not afraid to use government as a conservation tool. In fact, he became the greatest conservationist in Presidential history. Roosevelt saw such animals as the buffalo and the grizzly bear as not only intrinsically fascinating and worth saving, but he also realized that they symbolized both the health of what came to be called ecosystems and the frontier heritage of the American West. After killing one of the last of the great western buffalo herd in 1883, Roosevelt became a champion of the buffalo and, as President, helped to create several national bison preserves, including the National Bison Range in northwestern Montana (1909), and what was then Sully’s Hill National Park in North Dakota. Second, particularly after the disastrous winter of 1886-87 on the northern Great Plains, Roosevelt realized that it was quite possible for westerners, including well-meaning cattlemen, to exceed the carrying capacity of the lands on which they lived. Even before the killing winter Roosevelt warned that too many cattle had been crowded onto the Great Plains, that the grasses had been overgrazed, and that any significant disruption of typical grazing conditions was likely to lead to an environmental and economic disaster. This was a key discovery: Roosevelt realized that for all of its ruggedness, the West was a fragile place. Third, Roosevelt realized that the once-infinite wilderness had been encroached on from all directions, and that only a small remnant of Daniel Boone’s primordial America remained. He came to believe that some few particularly magnificent, forbidding, or historically important places should be set aside forever as sanctuaries of the human spirit and monuments to the frontier experience. In other words, his later Presidential achievement of designating 230,000,000 acres of the public domain as federally protected National Forests, National Parks, Federal Bird Sanctuaries (National Wildlife Refuges), National Game Preserves and National Monuments, had roots in his experience in Dakota Territory. In short, Roosevelt came out of the badlands well aware that the American West was in danger. He realized that leaders (writers, politicians, philanthropists, activists) like himself needed to raise the consciousness of the American public about the threat to their national heritage. And he realized that government must play a role in protecting the natural environment from those who would skim it for easy profits. Roosevelt turned to government regulation not with alacrity, but out of necessity. Roosevelt’s first act was to collaborate with like-minded individuals to form a conservation organization, the purpose of which was to insure that his was not the last generation that would experience the joy, adventure, and spiritual renewal of wilderness hunting. In December 1887, Roosevelt invited a dozen influential animal lovers to dine with him at 689 Madison Avenue in New York. Chief among them was George Bird Grinnell, the editor of Forest and Stream, who had written a complimentary but not altogether uncritical review of Roosevelt’s Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. They discussed the idea of forming an organization of “American hunting riflemen” to work in the public and private sectors to preserve America’s natural resources, particularly big game. The Boone and Crockett Club was founded in January 1888. Its first president was Theodore Roosevelt. It was named for two of Roosevelt’s heroes, Daniel Boone (1734-1820) and Davy Crockett (1786-1836). Among other things, the Boone and Crockett Club played an important role in protecting Yellowstone National Park from adverse economic development in the 1890s. The club still exists today. It continues to promote ethical hunting, habitat conservation, and the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a conservationist not a preservationist. Guided by his tutor in resource management Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt believed that the nation’s goal should be to welcome economic activity, but to insist that it be done in a way that was sustainable for future generations, not extractive for short-term profits. Roosevelt agreed that some few sublime or fragile places should be set aside as inviolable forever, but most of the public domain should be open to maximum sustained yield of its trees, grasses, water, and other resources. Roosevelt admired the great preservationist John Muir, celebrated his uncompromising love of nature, and camped with him as President in 1903 in Yosemite National Park, but he did not always agree with Muir’s view that large portions of the West should be protected forever from human economic activity. How Close Did Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mores Come to Fighting a Duel? Not very close. Roosevelt and de Mores were very similar in some ways, and fundamentally different in others. Both were aristocrats from elsewhere who came to the badlands in 1883, invested significant portions of their net wealth, and left after a few years of adventure and economic loss. They both took themselves very seriously, and they both were more likely to gravitate to trouble than turn away from it. Roosevelt was much less wealthy than de Mores, but he lost a greater percentage of his net worth in Dakota than did the flamboyant Frenchman. He was also more modest in his idea of what profits the badlands of Dakota could be made to yield. Roosevelt was content to be a rancher. De Mores wanted to be the baron of the badlands. He built a slaughterhouse, purchased (or sponsored) most of the businesses in the village, which he founded and named after his wife Medora von Hoffman, and he entertained grandiose schemes to grow cabbages, transport fresh salmon from the west coast to Chicago and New York, and create a pottery industry on the banks of the Little Missouri. By the time he reached Dakota Territory in 1883, de Mores had already killed two men in duels. He was a crack shot. He exercised his duel-ing arm by lifting a specially weighted walking stick until it was parallel with the ground. Roosevelt was an aggressive man, and he had knocked men down in the pubs of New York, but he had never been involved in a duel. His eyesight was poor. He was a more persistent and dogged than precise shot with a rifle; with a pistol he was at a very decided disadvantage. Roosevelt and de Mores maintained cordial although somewhat formal relations with each other. Roosevelt occasionally dined at the “chateau” de Mores, and the Marquis and Marquise dined with the Roosevelts in New York City during this period. On at least one occasion de Mores dined at the Elkhorn Ranch. Still, they had found themselves in conflict a couple of times in the course of their badlands sojourns. De Mores had grazed cattle on Roosevelt’s Maltese Cross acreage in the autumn of 1884, and removed them only when TR’s ranch supervisors threatened to move the cattle themselves. Roosevelt chose for the location of the Elkhorn Ranch ground that de Mores claimed for himself. When de Mores protested, Roosevelt replied that all he found when he reconnoitered the site were carcasses of the Marquis’ dead sheep, and he did not think they could substantiate the Frenchman’s claim in court. De Mores bought cattle from Roosevelt at an agreed-upon price, then unilaterally lowered the price when Roosevelt drove the cattle in to the slaughterhouse in Medora. When Roosevelt protested, de Mores said the price of cattle had dropped in eastern markets and he could not afford to pay Roosevelt more than the market value of the herd. Roosevelt took his cattle home, and determined to have no further business dealings with de Mores. The so-called near-duel occurred in September, 1885. De Mores and his men had killed a man named Riley Luffsey in the spring of 1883, before Roosevelt ever set foot in the badlands. Although murder charges against de Mores had twice been dismissed for lack of evidence, in the fall of 1885 he was indicted for murder by a Mandan grand jury. Roosevelt’s friends and closest allies in the badlands were men who distrusted de Mores: especially Joe Ferris, Gregor Lang, and his son Lincoln. De Mores came to believe that Ferris had helped to round up witnesses against him at the time of the 1885 murder trial, and that Roosevelt was backing Ferris’ activities. De Mores was misreading Ferris’ actions (though not his attitude), and erroneously tying the indictment to what he regarded as increasing tensions with Roosevelt. This led to a now-famous exchange of letters. From his jail cell in Mandan, de Mores wrote Roosevelt on September 3, 1885:
When he received this letter, Roosevelt regarded it as threatening a duel. He asked his friend and ranch supervisor William Sewall to serve as his second, and his tentative choice of weapons was rifles at twelve paces. Roosevelt replied on September 6, 1885.
It seems clear in retrospect that de Mores was not threatening a duel, though he undoubtedly was putting Roosevelt on warning that he would not tolerate the New Yorker’s meddling in the trial. Roosevelt probably over-reacted to de Mores’ letter, in part because he was never one to back away from a fight, and in part because he knew de Mores’ penchant for settling disputes on the field of honor. After agonizing over the possibility of facing off against a man comfortable with violence, and of course an infinitely better marksman, Roosevelt decided that if a duel could not be avoided, he would choose rifles at twelve paces. Undoubtedly his logic was that rifles at such proximity would increase the likelihood that both men would be wounded or killed, and therefore de Mores might think twice before moving forward. Had he chosen pistols or swords, Roosevelt would have given de Mores a decided advantage. At any rate, de Mores immediately sent a conciliatory letter to Roosevelt, which Roosevelt chose to interpret as an apology. These short essays are excerpted from Clay Jenkinson's book, Theodore Roosevelt in the Dakota Badlands: An Historical Guide. The book was Dickinson State University's first publication in its Roosevelt initiative. To obtain a copy of the book, click here to purchase from the DSU Store or, click here to visit The Thomas Jefferson Hour® web site. |
Yes. Roosevelt met Gregor Lang and his son
Lincoln in September 1883 at the mouth of Little
Cannonball Creek, north of today’s Marmarth,
North Dakota. Nine months later, in June 1884,
Roosevelt returned to the Lang’s ranch to ask
Lang senior to help draw up a contract increasing
his investment in the badlands cattle industry.
