Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Only one U.S. national park is named after a U.S. president. It is fitting that the person should be Theodore Roosevelt, and that the park bearing his name should be in the badlands of North Dakota. Roosevelt chose these badlands as his own. They also chose him, captured his spirit and dominated his outlook for the rest of his life.
He was not quite 25 years old when he first stepped from a Northern Pacific train onto the wooden platform of Little Missouri, Dakota Territory, a ramshackle frontier village that was known locally as "Little Misery." It was 3 o'clock in the morning of September 8, 1883, and as the train chugged off westward under the starry sky, Roosevelt stood alone in the sage-scented autumn chill.
He had come to shoot a bison. Not many of the great shaggy beasts remained since the railroad had stretched its tracks across the area, making it possible for commercial hunters to ship the heavy hides east by the carload. That very week, the Sioux from the Standing Rock Reservation, allowed one final hunt, were preparing to finish off the last big herd of 10,000. But Roosevelt, among the first eastern sportsmen to respond to recent publicity about this paradise for big game hunters, was determined to bag one for himself.
Joe Ferris, the guide at the log army barracks that had lately been converted into a hunting lodge, tried to explain the situation to the undersized, bespectacled young dude. It was like talking to the wind. So, since Roosevelt was willing to pay well for the hunt, the two men soon headed southwest in a wagon.
It would have been fairly easy in the wagon to cross the miles-wide stretches of grassland, where western wheat grass, blue grama, little bluestem, needle-and-thread, and buffalo grass grew intermixed with yuccas, prickly pears, and short yellow Indian paintbrushes, except that it would have involved descending or climbing occasional cliffs, and crossing broad canyons filled with tortuous badlands terrain. So they bumped along through the twisting gorges that border the bed of the Little Missouri River. These, too, were badlands, rugged, colorful mazes of canyons, cliffs, and pyramidal buttes that the river had carved out of the otherwise featureless plain, and it took several hours to cover a distance of about eight miles.
Though the steep-sided defiles made travel difficult, they brought variety to a monotonous sea of grass; and variety of terrain supported a variety of animal life. Besides the pronghorns and bison of the open plain, there were shy white-tailed deer in brushy gullies and riverside thickets, big-eared mule deer on sage-spangled hillsides, and Audubon's bighorn sheep, a subspecies that was to become extinct at the turn of the century.
It was growing dark when the wagon arrived at the log cabin of the Maltese Cross Ranch, where the two men spent the night. In the morning Roosevelt bought a horse and accompanied the wagon to another ranch house that was to serve as headquarters for the hunt. During the night foul weather arose, turning the badlands clay to slick gumbo; rain was to continue for many days, hampering Teddy's hunt but never dampening his ebullient spirits. Every morning Ferris protested that the weather was too bad for hunting, and every morning his client overruled him. Every evening they came back from long, hard, and often dangerous rides through deep badlands mud without having seen any sign of bison. Every night, while his exhausted guide slept, Teddy sat up talking with the ranch manager. Their conversations covered a wide variety of subjects, but Roosevelt kept bringing the focus back to the cattle business. He managed to learn a great deal.
He and Ferris did come upon some bison near the end of the sixth day. Not only did they fail to kill any, but one full-grown bull, over six feet tall and weighing more than a ton, came close to killing the hunters. There followed a miserable night on the soggy, naked plain, a night that became a grotesque nightmare when the horses ran away. After the mounts had been recaptured, the "four-eyed dude" earned his exhausted guide's everlasting respect and friendship when, with utter sincerity, he exclaimed through the broad, tooth grin that seemed a permanent feature of his mud-stained face: "By Godfrey, but this is fun!"