TR's Farewell to the Badlands
A Farewell from a Passing Train
In early October 1918, Theodore Roosevelt saw the Dakota Badlands for the last time. He was fifty-nine years old, worn down by illness, and grieving for his youngest son, Quentin, who had been killed in aerial combat over France that July. Traveling east by rail from Billings, Montana, where he had spoken on October 5, to Fargo, where he appeared the following day, Roosevelt passed along the Little Missouri and through Medora — the little town at the heart of the country that had shaped him more profoundly than any other place on earth. The train did not stop. As the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican noted that week, Roosevelt passed through Medora without stopping; the buttes and river bottoms of his ranching years slid past the car windows and fell away behind him.
He had first come to this country in September 1883, a young New York assemblyman in search of a buffalo, and had returned in 1884 to bury himself in ranch work after the deaths of his wife and mother on a single February day. The Badlands had rebuilt him. For the rest of his life, nearly every account he gave of himself circled back to Dakota: he often said that he would never have become president had it not been for his experience in North Dakota. Three months after that October pass-through, on January 6, 1919, he died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill.
In October 1918, gravely ill and grieving, Roosevelt passed through the Badlands one final time — the country where, he told a Medora crowd in September 1900, “the romance of my life began.” (Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
By the fall of 1918 he was weakened by illness and heartbroken over Quentin’s death that July — a shadow of the vigorous young rancher Dakota had known. (Wikimedia Commons)
The Last Stop: Five Minutes in 1911
Roosevelt’s last actual visit to Medora had come years earlier. On April 13, 1911, his westbound train paused at the Medora depot for about five minutes while he was crossing the country on a speaking tour. A crowd of townspeople gathered at the depot to greet the former president, and he spoke with them briefly from the train before it rolled on. It was the last time he set foot in the town.
He had made fuller stops before. Campaigning through Dakota as the vice-presidential nominee in September 1900, he told the crowd gathered at Medora, “I may say that here, boys, in this country of hills and plateaus the romance of my life began” — a line preserved in press accounts of the stop. He paused again as a sitting president in April 1903, on his great western tour, speaking to the assembled town from his train. The romance line captured what the Badlands had meant to him ever since the 1880s: not simply a chapter of his youth, but the place where, in his own telling, the rest of his life became possible.
What Had Changed in Medora Since the 1880s
The Medora of 1918 was dramatically different from the Medora of 1884. In the 1880s, the town had been a rough frontier settlement, an outpost in wild country where buffalo still roamed and Indians still lived on the surrounding plains. It had been a place at the edge of civilization, rough and dangerous and vital. In the three decades that had passed, civilization had moved in. The railroad had brought commerce. Fencing had divided the open range. The buffalo had been hunted nearly to extinction. The great cattle herds that had roamed the prairie had been replaced by fenced pastures and managed ranches.
Yet the essential transformation was demographic and cultural. The frontier had closed. The moment when a man could come West and remake himself through encounter with raw nature and raw frontier life had passed. The myth of the frontier—the myth that had been so essential to Roosevelt's self-understanding—was becoming history. The landscape remained. The buttes were as beautiful as ever. The river still flowed. But the possibility of renewal through frontier experience was fading.
The open range was long gone, the great cattle outfits vanished, and Medora had dwindled from a booming frontier town to a quiet railroad stop. (Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
What the Badlands Meant to Him
Roosevelt never made a secret of his debt to Dakota. Speaking in Fargo in September 1910, he told North Dakotans plainly that he would never have become president if it had not been for his experience in their state. The ranch hands, hunting guides, and neighbors of his Elkhorn and Maltese Cross years remained among his most valued friends for the rest of his life; he kept up correspondence with old Badlands companions to the end, and he returned to the region again and again in his books, from Hunting Trips of a Ranchman to his autobiography.
The Badlands were where the asthmatic young widower of 1884 had hardened into the man the country would come to know — where he had hunted, ranched, chased down boat thieves, and learned to hold his own among men who cared nothing for his name or his money. When he passed through in October 1918, gravely ill and mourning his son, that country held more of his history than any place outside Oyster Bay.
The man was near his end, but the country was unchanged — the same buttes and broad sky that had steadied him as a young man, and would outlast them all. (Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
A Spare and Fitting Farewell
There was no farewell speech in Medora, no last ride along the Little Missouri. The documented record of Roosevelt’s final encounters with the Badlands is spare: a five-minute stop at the depot in 1911, and a train that did not stop at all in October 1918. The sparseness is its own kind of elegy. The man who looked out at the buttes that October was three months from death, mourning a son buried in France, his once-inexhaustible body failing. The country beyond the glass was the same country that had received a grieving twenty-five-year-old in 1884 and returned him to the world remade.
The town he knew is gone, but the landscape is not. The buttes and river bottoms of his ranching years are preserved today within Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and Medora remains the gateway to the country he never stopped calling the making of him. In the end, the Badlands did not need a final visit; they had already given him everything he ever said they had.
Continue Reading
- The Badlands Experience — His transformative time in Dakota wilderness in the 1880s.
- The River of Doubt Expedition — The Brazilian expedition that damaged his health.
- The Death of Quentin Roosevelt — The loss that devastated Roosevelt in his final years.
- Death at Sagamore Hill — Roosevelt's death just months after this final visit.
- The "Man in the Arena" Speech — His philosophy of courageous engagement with life.
- Post-Presidency Timeline — Key events from 1909 through his death in 1919.
Primary Sources at the TR Center
The Theodore Roosevelt Center's Digital Library contains photographs, correspondence, and accounts from Roosevelt's Dakota years and his final visit to Medora.
- The Badlands — Historical and geographical information on Roosevelt's transformative Dakota experience.
- Medora, North Dakota — Information on the frontier town where Roosevelt ranched and hunted.
- Life Timeline — Chronological entry for his 1918 visit to the Badlands.
- Elkhorn Ranch — Details about Roosevelt's Dakota ranch headquarters.
From the Archives
Explore original photographs, documents, and illustrations related to this topic in the Theodore Roosevelt Center Digital Library.
Recommended Reading
- Theodore Roosevelt in the Dakota Badlands by Clay Jenkinson (2006). ISBN: 0-9786267-0-2
- Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (2010). ISBN: 978-0-679-60415-0