GREENWICH, N.Y. — The United States’ 26^th president, Theodore Roosevelt, is remembered for being a great many things. A politician, a reformer, a conservationist, a manly sportsman, the Panama Canal builder, and a host of other things. For a brief period in his life rancher was another title that Roosevelt carried. For three years Roosevelt owned and operated two ranches in the Badlands of what is present-day North Dakota. While he only did this for a short period of time, the experience created a transformation within him that made him into the man he is remembered as today.

Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858 into one of the wealthiest and well-known families in New York City. Despite his family’s high status, young Theodore’s upbringing was not easy. He was often sickly as a child and suffered greatly from asthma and stomach issues. His father promoted physical fitness as a way to improve these issues, and hunting became a favorite activity of his.¹

It was hunting that first brought Roosevelt to the Badlands as a young man in September 1883. Invited to go on a hunting trip in the region, Roosevelt was hoping to bag a bison before they all died out as extreme overhunting had nearly driven them to extinction at that time. It was on this trip that he first encountered the cattle industry. The Cattle Boom had been going on since the late 1860s and it had reached the Dakota territory that year as cattle companies from as far away as Texas sought open range for their herds.²

Impressed by the area and the potential to make a profit in the cattle business, Roosevelt joined forces with two ranchers he met named Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris to become a part of the Maltese Cross ranch. He handed the cattlemen a check worth $14,000 for 450 cattle and then left for New York to return to his duties as a member of the New York State Assembly. By the 1880s it had become somewhat of a fad amongst wealthy Easterners and Europeans to invest in Western ranchers. The ranchers may not have surprised that a man like Roosevelt was buying in, but they were struck by his direct and trusting manner as Ferris recalled later, “All the security he had for his money was our honesty.”³

Before returning to Dakota Roosevelt’s life would change forever. Life had been going well as he was advancing in his political career and in February 1884 was cheered by the birth of his first child. However, things took a tragic turn just two days after his daughter’s birth. On February 14, 1884 his mother and his wife, Alice, both passed away, the former of typhoid fever and the latter of undiagnosed Bright’s Disease. The events left him in a state shock for several days, and his journal entry from that day simply has an X drawn and the sentence, “The light has gone out of my life.”⁴

Roosevelt returned to the Dakota territory in June 1884 and began to expand his operation purchasing more cattle soon after arriving. Like most cattlemen in the area Roosevelt was essentially a “squatter” on government or railroad-owned land. Ranchers had agreements with one another to only graze their cattle certain distances from their ranch houses.⁵ The Maltese Cross ranch was eight miles south of the town of Medora. Medora was built by and mostly owned by a French aristocrat referred to as the Marquis de Morès. The Marquis had big plans to create a cattle and meatpacking enterprise in the area pouring thousands of dollars into his ventures.⁶ Wanting more solitude Roosevelt sought to build a second ranch further from town and he found a place 30 miles north of Medora. This would be site of his home ranch called Elkhorn.

To build and operate Elkhorn ranch Roosevelt hired two hunting friends named Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow. Sewall and Dow were both from the backwoods of Maine, and had served as guides on hunting trips that Roosevelt had done in Maine while a college student. While neither had any ranching experience, he believed they were tough enough and clever enough to help him lead this venture. From the start Sewall was skeptical whether cattle ranching was sustainable in an area like the Badlands which in places more closely resembles the Grand Canyon than it does the prairies of the Great Plains. But the pair took to the task nonetheless. Roosevelt, Sewall, and Dow finished building Elkhorn in the late fall of 1884.⁷

The first year in Dakota was an education for Roosevelt in ranching and in the way of life in the West. He was an average rider and could not handle a rope well mainly due to his eyesight, so he did not make for the best cowboy. He would face the barbs of cowboys who called him “Four Eyes” or made fun of his non-cowboy manners or language. For instance, in one effort to corral some loose calves he told a cowboy to, “Hasten forward quickly there!”⁸ However, through his persistence and other feats of toughness he earned the respect of the cowboys. (Two feats that would be most remembered later are a bar fight in 1885 in which he knocked out a drunken cowboy who kept pestering him about his glasses, and a trip of vigilante justice in 1886 where he, Sewall, and Dow traveled down the Little Missouri River to capture and deliver to the sheriff a group of thieves who stole his boat).

His contemporaries also remember that first year as a time of when Roosevelt would face bouts of deep sadness as he grieved his wife. He truly believed that he could not be happy again without her. He took comfort in the solitude of the area since in the West he was not a well-known figure like in New York. The barren and desolate features of the area also spoke to him as he felt they in a way portrayed how he felt.⁹

He was able to settle into the Western way of life though with some exceptions. He did regular ranch duties like riding the range to check for sick or strayed cattle, running errands in town, chopping wood, and hauling coal. But apart from these daily duties he also did a great deal of hunting and writing.¹⁰ His hunting expeditions could last a few hours to a few weeks with Roosevelt keeping a detailed (sometimes gruesome) tally of all the game he had shot. In evenings he would write about his experiences and from his time in the Dakota he would publish three books about life in the West.

The spring of 1885 Roosevelt saw some of his most intense cowboy action participating in the spring round-up. The yearly affair involved moving thousands of cattle and hundreds of cowboys on horseback participated. As with any endeavor T.R. threw himself into the work whole-heartedly riding for hours on horseback (on same days tallying close to 100 miles), wrangling cattle for branding, and taking night shifts keeping watch over the sleeping cattle during the dark. He again faced difficulty including a stampede at night, being thrown from his horse on two occasions resulting in a broken rib and a likely broken shoulder, and the usual macho jabs and games from other cowboys.¹¹

Yet Roosevelt was again able to prove himself and the round-up marked a turning point for him personally. When he arrived in Dakota a year earlier people remarked at how sick and thin he appeared. But by then he had transformed into a muscular and sturdy individual. When he made a return trip to New York in early summer of 1885 one reporter described him as “Rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of his health…”¹² His voice had even changed as his weak, asthmatic voice and been exchanged for one with a louder and heartier tone. Later in the year he had recovered somewhat in his grief and by the end of 1885 was secretly courting his childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow.

By 1886 the Roosevelt ranches had over 5,000 cattle between the two of them, however the ranches were never profitable and he grew increasingly concerned about persistent drought in the area. Sewall and Dow were looking to get out and Roosevelt wondered if he should as well. He would have his answer after the Winter of 1886-1887.

In what remains one of the worst winters on record in that area constant blizzards and temperatures that went as low as negative 50 degrees decimated cattle herds. People were shuttered indoors for weeks. Cattle died frozen where they stood or suffocated from the blowing snow and ice. Roosevelt lost about two-thirds of his herd and found a barren landscape littered with cattle carcasses when he came back from some time in the East in April of 1887.¹³

After the disastrous event he decided to sell his interests in the Maltese Cross ranch and gradually sell out the Elkhorn Ranch making sure his cowboys did not suffer losses. He had invested a total of $82,500 and in the end, he lost around $70,000 which would be somewhere around $1 million in today’s money. He would keep the Elkhorn Ranch and use it as a headquarters for future hunting trips, but his time as a rancher was finished.¹⁴

While Theodore Roosevelt’s ranching enterprise was financially unsuccessful, his time as a rancher in the Dakota Territory left a great impact on him. After the tragedies he suffered in 1884 Roosevelt was in a vulnerable place and the ranches provided him a space to escape and heal from his sadness. The hard work and rougher lifestyle enabled him to prove his mettle which he longed to do. It also renewed his health as the asthma and other issues that crippled him as a child would never again inflict him as badly.

The great loss of cattle in 1887, the dwindling number of wildlife, and the improper use of natural resources he experienced in the area propelled him to become the ardent conservationist he was and implement conservationist policies as president. The experience helped him as a politician as it sharpened his leadership abilities and enabled him to connect with men who came from a different world than he was used to. Years later Roosevelt would say, “If it had not been for my years in North Dakota, I never would have become President of the United States.”¹⁵