Bully for the badlands

Tribune staff reporter

THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK, N.D.--One morning, a herd of bison--40 strong--clattered down the scenic drive that winds through the North Unit. They forced my car off the road and into a ditch.

During the previous few days that I had spent at the South Unit, I saw only one buffalo up close. Now I had seen more than enough.

But I get to look back on the episode as a hairy badlands adventure--the kind of thing Theodore Roosevelt probably would have embellished even further in one of his frontier journals.

The three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park--one unit is the site of Roosevelt's main ranch--offer more theatrics than a newcomer might expect. It hardly ranks with headliners like Yellowstone and Yosemite. Yet a sense of wonder comes through: Colorful badlands streaked with bands of pink, blue, gray and yellow appear abruptly in a context of velvety green grass--miles of grass, knee-high and lush. Animals--not only bison but feral horses, elk, mule deer, white-tailed deer and even a few North Unit longhorn cattle and bighorn sheep--all roam freely in a landscape of prairie and oddly shaped rock formations.

The brute scenery got that way as the Rocky Mountains were growing up 60 million years ago. Ancient streams carried residues of volcanic ash and eroded materials far out into what became known as the Great Plains.

The most dramatic badlands in what is now North Dakota occurred about 20 to 30 miles east of the Montana line. The North and South Units of the park stand 50 miles apart, with the Roosevelt ranch site somewhat in between. Those park units protect a portion of North Dakota so it looks the way the eventual 26th president might have seen it when he first arrived in 1883, six years before the Dakota Territory became two states.

Roosevelt came West looking for adventure and "the strenuous life." He sought big game, hoping to bag the largest land mammal in North America. But he discovered that the bison population had been all but wiped out by all the hunters who preceded him. It took Roosevelt 13 days to hunt down and kill his first bison, and soon after he began to understand that the wilderness already suffered from irresponsible hunting, ranching, farming and mining. Still, he developed an interest in the cattle business and became a partner in the purchase of the Maltese Cross Ranch, about 7 miles south of what later was established as the South Unit of the park.

In 1884, Roosevelt returned to North Dakota, mourning both his first wife and his mother, who had died on the same day that year, Feb. 14. He threw himself into cattle ranching and the outdoor life, keeping his partnership in the Maltese Cross and starting a ranch all his own, the Elkhorn.

His cabin from the Maltese Cross Ranch once had been exhibited on the Capitol grounds in Bismarck, and other places, but it's been given a permanent home behind the South Unit visitor center.

That was where the future president lived during his early years out West. Later, he built a place of his own, but it has not been so well preserved. Those who venture out to the remote Elkhorn Ranch site find fragments of building foundations and a couple hundred acres of raw North Dakota landscape. Even so, National Park Service officials consider the Elkhorn Ranch site an essential part of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

"It's not so important in the sense that they can see something," explained Bruce Kaye, the park's chief interpreter. "There's the grove of trees, the actual site where Theodore Roosevelt put his second home, the principal home as he called it, his home in the badlands.

"You can see a couple of the foundation blocks that outline this 30-by-60-foot ranch house. But the significance is more in the feeling that the area exudes, knowing that Theodore Roosevelt spent time there. It's the environment that helped to mold his thinking about what might be good for our country. It enabled him to put thoughts together. It's where he wrote a portion of the speech he gave in Dickinson on July 4, 1886.

"So already, even at that time, this young, 29-year-old rancher in the badlands in the 1880s can see that we need to take care of our cultural and natural resources.

"He said in the speech, `It is incumbent on us here today to so act throughout our lives as to leave our children a heritage for which we will receive their blessings and not their curses.' To me, that's pretty powerful stuff."

High winds prevented me from taking the dirt road out to Elkhorn. I figured it would have meant driving 35 miles and back through a dust storm. Still, the presence of Teddy Roosevelt could be felt all over Medora, the town closest to the South Unit entrance, and in the grasslands and badlands flanking the Little Missouri River. Cattleman Roosevelt came to Medora for supplies. At the Medora station he caught the train that would take him back to Albany and his seat in the New York legislature.

Small museums around town preserve the artifacts of 19th Century badlands living. The one in the park visitor center contains a lot of Roosevelt paraphernalia, from spurs to rifles to campaign posters.

Out back, in the Maltese Cross cabin, park volunteer Daniel Chapin showed me the neat little kitchen with its iron stove and hefty utensils. Most of the furnishings in the cabin were not really Roosevelt's, but they came from that period and still evoke his presence.

"He wasn't much of a cook," Chapin said. "He tried cooking rice one day and the pot started overflowing and soon every pot in the house had rice in it. His friends came around, saw the mess and ordered him never to cook again. That was fine with him."

In the little parlor, Chapin pointed out the writing desk and rocking chair that really did belong to Roosevelt. At the desk, he wrote letters, speeches, diary entries and part of "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman."

In the rocking chair, he would talk current events with the same enthusiasm he showed on the floor of the New York Assembly, where he served from 1883 to 1886. "He would come out here for a month at a time, or a couple of weeks, never full time," Chapin said. "He'd get involved in debates out here, either politics or local things, and he'd start on one end of the room and rock himself to the other side, he'd be so active and involved."

A national park grew out of Roosevelt's association with North Dakota, only because a lot of people did a lot of maneuvering. After Roosevelt's death in 1919, admirers looked to establish some kind of memorial, but initial efforts to designate some lands in North Dakota as a national park fell short.

It wasn't until 1947 that the site was officially designated as Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park, the only such park in the National Park System. Local and congressional leaders from the region kept pestering for full-fledged national park status, and that was achieved when President Jimmy Carter signed the name change into law on Nov. 10, 1978, and included 29,920 acres of the park for preservation as national wilderness.

"The park honors Roosevelt's conservation efforts and his legacy," chief interpreter Kaye explained. "There are a lot of natural and cultural resources here. When he became president he was able to act upon the feelings he developed here. He set 18 national monuments aside; he signed into law five national parks. He established a host of bird refuges and game reserves that eventually became part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"While he was president, Congress established a law called the Antiquities Act that gave the president the authority to set land aside. The entire world benefits from these parks. And today we hope that people who come to this park can maybe experience some of the feelings that Theodore Roosevelt felt and see some of the scenery that he saw."

I certainly saw the magnificence of the badlands and the bison--well, them I could hardly avoid. Off in the distance, from one park overlook, I caught a glimpse of the wild horses that seem to thrive in the South Unit. Roosevelt observed horses too. They were released or escaped from ranches, and some became the ancestors of the horses who roam freely through the park today.

"We call them feral, rather than wild," said another park volunteer, Brandon Paynter. "The last wild horse died off in this area about 10,000 years ago. Any horses that you see today are descended from horses brought over by Europeans, most of them Spanish."

To get even more technical, the National Park Service designates its 150 feral horses as a "historic demonstration herd" because horses, although not indigenous to the land like elk or prairie dogs, were on the scene during Roosevelt's time.

When the economy went sour and hay too expensive, ranchers would shoo their surplus horses into the wild. Tractors and trucks took over the chores , thereby rendering beasts of burden redundant.

"Horses become feral very easily," Paynter noted. "They like it a lot. There are no predators in the park. The horses are big, they're strong and there's not much to trouble them out here."

I also saw horses--domesticated, saddled or harnessed--on the streets of Medora, the town closest to the South Unit entrance. It's the sort of charmingly self-conscious burg where visitors can take carriage and stagecoach tours or saddle up and ride around the neighborhoods and countryside on their own.

In 1883, the Marquis de Mores, a French count, arrived in the territory by way of New York with the idea that he would raise cattle and slaughter them before shipping the beef east in refrigerator cars.

He quickly established a town on the east side of the Little Missouri and named it after his New York socialite wife, Medora. They built a hilltop chateau overlooking the slaughterhouse and some distant badlands ridges. The chateau remains, open to the public and operated by the state. Mores' slaughterhouse chimney still stands, near the South Unit entrance, but his business died quickly. Tough meat from grass-fed cows could get a bit ripe if the ice in the refrigerator cars melted too soon. Therefore, discriminating meat-eaters shunned his product.

Medora still thrives, living out its historic legacy. The "Medora Musical," a summertime extravaganza, is known throughout the West. A nightly Pitchfork Steak Fondue (yes, steak cooked by dipping it in hot oil) is considered one of the best of its kind.

As I wandered through Medora one afternoon, I heard a voice booming, a man speechifying. I turned a corner and saw President Theodore Roosevelt standing on a bunting-draped balcony at the Rough Riders Hotel. He wore a derby hat, a frock coat, a vest. He peered at a gathering crowd through wire-rimmed glasses, and he shouted out his commitment to wildlife, the land and the legacy of nature pristine that all of us should leave our children.

"I never would have been president if it had not been for my experience in North Dakota," he declared.

The people in their shorts, sandals and T-shirts set aside their ice cream cones and clapped their hands. Then they wandered off to shop for souvenirs or scramble over the playground with its frontier-style toy buildings.

I hung around long enough to see Roosevelt, coatless now, leave the hotel and drive away in a red GMC van. Locals informed me the man was Ray Anderson, a star of the "Medora Musical." He also presents an afternoon one-man show called "Bully" at the Medora Community Center, and, by all accounts, bully it is.

To me, he represented an aspect of a national park region that I had only vaguely imagined before I arrived. It seemed anonymous then--more rocks, more water, lacking a distinguishing characteristic like Old Faithful or El Capitan. But as I walked the trails, admired the scenery, encountered the buffalo herd and soaked up the history, I realized that Theodore Roosevelt National Park offers more surprises and little pleasures than you can shake a big stick at.

E-mail Robert Cross: bcross@tribune.com

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