Teddy Roosevelt: A president’s legacy in the badlands
MEDORA, N.D. (KFYR) - This weekend, North Dakota will welcome a permanent fixture on its plains—the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library—celebrating the life of Theodore Roosevelt, who first arrived here in 1883.
Roosevelt first visited North Dakota as a 25-year-old New York assemblyman. He planned to hunt bison, but most had been poached, and the species was nearing extinction.
Weeks later, before returning home, he invested nearly a third of his savings — $20,000 — in a ranch, intending to become a working rancher.
A year later, Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother on the same day. He returned to the Badlands and built a second, more remote ranch. Over the next three years, he spent time there hunting, ranching and writing. A harsh winter in 1887 killed his cattle and effectively ended his ranching run in North Dakota.
Later, he often credited his time on the plains as pivotal, saying he would not have become president without his North Dakota experience.
Roosevelt revisited the state several times, including in 1900 as he began his presidential campaign, again in 1903 as president, during a speaking tour in 1911 and once more in 1918.
Roosevelt’s connection to the Badlands reflected his love of nature and the outdoors. Throughout his life and career, he championed conservation.
No other president did more to protect public lands: He helped establish five national parks, 18 national monuments and 150 national forests, and he helped create the U.S. Forest Service. In total, Roosevelt protected land exceeding the combined size of Texas and North Dakota.
That legacy also made him the only president with a national park named for him: Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Roosevelt was drawn to the beauty of the Badlands, and the new Library aims to push guests to the outdoors, where they can experience the landscape as Roosevelt once did.
The library is intended to be a model of self-sufficiency — a project that can “live off the land” — echoing Roosevelt’s summers in the Badlands.
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