TR's Badlands: The Places That Made Him

One full day for the first three stops · two days if you want the Elkhorn · all within about 40 miles of Medora

Theodore Roosevelt came to the Dakota Badlands in September 1883 to shoot a buffalo. He stayed, on and off, for the better part of a decade — and he left a different man. “I never would have been President,” he said later, “if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota.”

This is a route through the places that did it. Some you can walk into. One of them is gone, and the going is the point.

Two visitors on the trail at Painted Canyon Overlook, with layered badlands buttes stretching to the horizon under a bright sky

Stop one: Painted Canyon

Roosevelt arrived by train in the dark and got his first look at this country the next morning. He was not immediately charmed — he called it “a chaos of peaks and plateaus.”

  • Painted Canyon Overlook, just off I-94 at Exit 32, is the fastest way to understand the landscape he was reacting to: bands of rust, grey and ochre cut hundreds of feet down into flat prairie.
  • Seasonal visitor center, restrooms, and a short rim trail.

30–45 minutes · 15 minutes east of Medora

Historic photograph of the Maltese Cross Ranch cabin, a low log house with a shingled roof, with a team of horses and two mounted riders in front

Stop two: the Maltese Cross

Within days of arriving, Roosevelt bought into a cattle operation seven miles south of Medora. The Maltese Cross was a working ranch, and the cabin was a working cabin — a one-and-a-half-storey house of ponderosa pine, unusually fine for the country.

  • The cabin still stands. It has been moved, and now sits behind the South Unit visitor center in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where you can walk through it.
  • Inside are his writing table and travelling trunk. It is a small room, and it is worth standing in.

30–45 minutes with the visitor center · in Medora

Pictured: the Maltese Cross cabin in its working years. Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

Historic photograph of the corrals and low ranch buildings at the Elkhorn Ranch, standing on open bottomland with a line of trees and bluffs behind

The Elkhorn, then

On 14 February 1884, Roosevelt’s wife and his mother died in the same house on the same day. He went west.

The Elkhorn was the ranch he built afterward, thirty-five miles north of Medora on the Little Missouri, deliberately remote. He called it his “home ranch.” He wrote three books there. He rode, worked cattle, served as a deputy sheriff, and by his own account put himself back together.

  • The photographs are what survive: the low ranch house, the corrals, the cottonwoods along the river.

Pictured: the corrals at the Elkhorn. Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

The Elkhorn, now

Nothing is left. The buildings were dismantled and hauled away; the foundation stones sit in the grass where the house was. It is a meadow with cottonwoods and a view of the river.

That is what makes it worth the drive. Standing on the empty ground with the photograph in your head is the closest you will get to what this place did to him.

  • A unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, about 35 miles north of Medora on gravel roads.
  • Check road conditions with the park before you go. The last stretch is unpaved and can be impassable when wet. High clearance is a good idea.
  • No services, no water, and often no cell signal.

Half a day round trip from Medora · this is the second day of the itinerary