“Do you know what chapter in all my life. . . looking back over all of it. . . I would choose to remember, were the alternative forced upon me to recall one portion of it, and to have erased from my memory all other experiences?  I would take the memory of my life on the ranch with its experiences close to nature and among the men who lived nearest her.” ~~ Roosevelt to Senator Albert Fall ~~

Theodore Roosevelt visited western North Dakota for the first time in September 1883.  He came to hunt a buffalo.  He fell in love with the rugged and isolated badlands of the Little Missouri River Valley, and established two ranches near the new frontier town of Medora.

Roosevelt spent part of each year in North Dakota between 1883 and 1887, the year of the great blizzards and cattle die-off, after which he curtailed much of his ranch activity and took a less personal role in ranch management.The Dakota Territory frontier appealed to Roosevelt for its beauty, its melancholy starkness, and its status as one of the last true frontier regions in the United States. He saw his time in Dakota as a total immersion in the frontier dynamics that he, along with his friend Frederick Jackson Turner, believed were the formative experience in shaping the American character. He wanted to live in the manner of his heroes Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and George Rogers Clark.He sought cowboy adventures, and he found them in Dakota Territory.

In this section of our site, you will find photographs, maps, Roosevelt quotations, illustrations, and a series of short essays about Roosevelt in the badlands.