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The Marquis de Mores occupies a paradoxical place in the North Dakota consciousness. He lived among us only a brief time (1883-87), and he was as different from the overwhelming majority of Dakotans as it is possible to be, and yet he left a huge mythological imprint on the state. His 26-room “chateau” continues to look down upon the rest of us and the name “Medora,” which belonged to his wife and which he gave to the village he built, is as evocative a word as exists in the North Dakota vocabulary.
His centrality in North Dakota mythology far exceeds his historical importance or his merit. In almost every respect my grandparents and your grandparents did more for North Dakota than de Mores. They minded their own business, played by the rules, worked hard, formed realistic visions of what they could accomplish and did what they could to fulfill them. They treated the people around them as equals. Above all they persevered.
De Mores swashbuckled his way through life. He carried himself like a feudal seignior, and he distanced himself from all those—the vast majority—he considered common folk. His visions were grand but unrealizable and he bolted from Dakota as soon as it became clear that he could not accomplish his goals with money and will alone.
It was quiet, hard-working men and women, who chose not to call attention to themselves, who built North Dakota. De Mores was not one of them.
Theodore Roosevelt was also an aristocrat from another world, who lived among us for almost exactly the same length of time. What distinguishes him from de Mores is that Roosevelt did not try to distance himself from the cow boys and frontiersmen he encountered here. He got down in the dirt, wrestled cows, felled trees, stopped stampedes, turned his fists rather than dueling pistols on those who tried to bully him, and he did everything in his power to overcome not the people he met but his own privileged eastern education, style, and presuppositions. De Mores’ aristocratic bearing deepened in the badlands. Roosevelt’s ebbed away. It was his capacity to humble himself and come to terms with the common man in himself that makes Roosevelt a great man, and transformed him—here, at the Elkhorn Ranch!—from the eastern punkinlilly and four-eyed dude to the man who became President of the United States.
De Mores made terrible mistakes here. He was not an admirable man in a frontier democratic society. He is, in the world’s if not in North Dakota’s history books, a nonentity, while Roosevelt must be regarded as one of the greatest men who ever lived.
But I still find plenty to admire in de Mores. He said once that he was a man of great insight who instantly grasped situations that took others a long time to figure out. The problems he wrestled with here are, in fact, the perennial problems of Dakota. And though he did not succeed in overcoming him, his instincts were all correct. He was in many respects a man ahead of his time.
Take, for example, his main business venture, the slaughterhouse, the chimney of which still stands like a monument to his . . . er, ego near the entrance of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. De Mores’ idea was a good one. Instead of shipping live cattle off to slaughter in Chicago or beyond, why not slaughter them here and ship dressed beef to eastern markets? Since 60% of a slaughtered cow was at that time worthless, and cattle lost weight on the long journey to faraway abattoirs, de Mores reckoned that he could save shipping costs and preserve the quality of the beef by doing the processing here, taking advantage of the emerging technology of refrigerator cars.
Thus he was a pioneer in trying to overcome two perennial Dakota problems: remoteness and economic colonialism. The essential challenge of North Dakota has been to overcome its isolation from population centers, capital, and markets. De Mores’ attempt to use state-of-the-art technology to level the playing field is no different from recent attempts to wire the state for easy access to the information superhighway, so that human resources and intellectual capital grown here can compete equally with the same resources in major population centers. If, as Thomas Friedman says, the world is flat, North Dakota (in theory) has equal access to the profit centers of the world as does the research triangle in North Carolina or a techno-university in New Delhi. De Mores also understood that if we do the value adding here, rather than ship mere commodities to faraway markets, we keep more of the final sale price of any resource we have. This is a lesson North Dakota relearns every generation.
De Mores wanted to “connect” the badlands to a larger world. The Northern Pacific Railroad made that possible, but of course its owners lived elsewhere and were quite happy to exploit the isolated and politically weak plainsmen of Dakota. So de Mores created the Medora to Deadwood Stage Line, owned by himself, for the purpose of cornering the lucrative Black Hills freight and passenger market at a time when no direct rail line extended from Chicago, Denver, or Minneapolis to the gold fields of the Black Hills. De Mores understood the importance of connectivity. His stage line was just a very low-tech attempt to connect the backwater badlands to the world it wished to supply. Horse—boat—stagecoach—railroad—diesel truck—airplane—Fedex—now the internet. De Mores was as high tech an entrepreneur as the engineering of his time permitted.
De Mores also wanted to grow cabbages in the badlands, employing as fertilizer the offal from the slaughterhouse. Thus he would be turning those otherwise worthless byproducts of beef production into a vital ingredient of a related agricultural industry. This sort of zero-waste manufacturing is now a standard feature of well-run industrial systems.
His scheme to create a badlands pottery industry is being revived as the twenty-first century begins. He rightly understood that by turning badlands clays, which were essentially free for the taking, into finished pottery he was creating wealth in the purest sense of the term. He realized that North Dakota commodities (beef, grains, earth, coal, etc.) are heavy and therefore expensive to ship, but that when they are processed here they are much more profitable thanks to the value added in the field, not in faraway factories.
Probably his most forward-looking scheme was to ship fresh salmon from Portland to east coast markets. Today the best restaurants boast of their “fresh catch,” and happily explain to customers that the salmon or mahi mahi was just flown in from the coast that day or earlier that week. De Mores’ genius consisted of a triple insight. First, he understood the implications of the transportation revolution represented by the transcontinental railroads (in this case the Northern Pacific, completed in 1883, just in time). Second, he understood the novelty appeal of getting fresh salmon across the continent to dining rooms literally three thousand miles from the great Pacific rivers. In other words, he realized that scarce delicacies bring premium prices. Third, he saw half-empty trains pass through Medora from west to east every day, and realized that in getting fresh fish to Chicago and New York he did not have to invent the logistical infrastructure, but merely take advantage of a system already put in place by other investors.
These and other schemes reveal the genius of Antoine Amedee Marie Vincent Amat Manca de Vallombrosa. Had he been a nicer man, had he called himself Tony Manks instead of “the Marquis” and shaved off that ridiculous moustache, had he possessed infinitely better diplomatic skills, had he taken a lesson in democratic gumption from that other aristocrat Theodore Roosevelt, above all, had he shown more perseverance, de Mores might have shaped and not merely decorated the history of North Dakota. |
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