Cowpokes, Roughriders and Teddy Roosevelt
Dispatch XVIII
A Vagabond Adventure
Continent # 1: North America
Sturgis to Medora
Day 54 - November 17-20, 2021
It’s a straight shot from Sturgis to Medora, North Dakota, the place that changed Theodore Roosevelt forever. We headed into the wind and hills as the sun grew low and shadows stretched themselves across the high plains. The wind was a constant companion, and had been for more than a week.
We arrived at twilight, and found the Rough Riders Hotel. Bruce, an ex-US attorney from Pittsburgh and serial traveler, had recommended it, and it was a beauty, the finest place in town. Not that there were many alternatives in Medora, population 121. It got the name Rough Riders because of its connection with Theodore Roosevelt, though, honestly, the link wasn’t really very direct. The original establishment began its life in 1885 as the Metropolitan, an ironic name for a hotel in the middle of the Dakota Badlands. It went through various iterations until J.J. Rozell, the proprietor at the time, renamed it The Rough Riders. Good marketing. Roosevelt had come through the town on a whistle stop in 1903 when he was running for his first full term as president. “The entire population … down to the smallest baby had gathered to meet me…,” Roosevelt said. “They all felt I was their man, their old friend; and even if they had been hostile to me in the old days when we were divided by the sinister bickering and jealousies and hatreds of all frontier communities, they now firmly believed they had always been my staunch friends and admirers."
The Original Rough Riders Hotel in the early 20th century. (Photo - The Medora Foundation)
The “old days” had to do with Roosevelt’s sojourn to the Badlands in the 1880s. Roosevelt, who was only in his 20s then, had lost his first wife Alice Lee in 1884, just two days after their first child was born. His mother, Mittie, had died 11 hours earlier of typhoid fever, February 14th.
Roosevelt was broken. He threw himself into his work as a New York state legislator, but frustrated with politics, pulled up stakes and headed to the Dakotas to salve his grief. He had been inspired to return after going Buffalo hunting in 1883. Maybe the wild west would be a good place to take a breath and try his hand at the cattle business, which was booming in that part of the world. He invested, built a ranch called the Elkorn near Medora and dug in. He roped and rode and hunted, and became pretty good at all of it. Cowboys and businessmen both became his friends. But in the brutally cold winter of 1886-87 he came face-to-face with the harsh realities of life in the west. The freeze wiped out his cattle herd and most of his competitors too. He lost half of his investment and returned to New York.
Theodore Roosevelt in 1885.
(Photo - Unknown New York Studio)
There were lessons, though. Roosevelt’s experience would influence his progressive and populist views as president and reinforced his passion for nature and conservation. During his presidency he changed the future of the American West. He reformed the Land Office, the Post Office Department and the Indian Service which had been cheating native Americans for years. He revolutionized the very idea of conservation in the country by creating the United States Forest Service. He signed five National Parks into law, created 18 new National Monuments, and altogether, he placed 230 million acres of land under public protection.
Many of the cowboys and cattlemen Roosevelt got to know in those days later joined him when he formed the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, later known as the Rough Riders. The United States had gone to war with Spain to win Cuban independence. The Rough Riders took Kettle and San Juan Hill and arguably made Colonel Roosevelt America’s most famous man in the process. He rode that fame all the way to the White House.
I’m not sure T.R. would have appreciated the 21st century version of the Rough Riders Hotel. It was newly renovated now, and not very rough at all, rebuilt and owned by the Medora Foundation which has been single-handedly resurrecting the town since the 1980s. Kara, who ran the hotel’s front desk was a lively, pretty young woman. She filled us in on details about the hotel and the town and everything it had to offer. There were cases of authentic rifles that Roosevelt might have used, photos and paintings of cowboys, wild west landscapes and a few decapitated moose and deer that gazed dolefully at the floor from the great arched lobby. Everything was wood and stone with a broad, richly carpeted staircase that led to our room. In between talking with us, Kara bounced between erecting a 20-foot-high Christmas tree and draping faux evergreen garlands along the spinnets and balustrades. Holiday music played in the background and flames leaped in the lobby’s big stone fireplace. I spent a couple of hours among the stacks paging through book after book on American history, cowboys and native Americans and felt completely at peace.
The library in the renovated Rough Riders Hotel. We enjoyed the library, but I’m not sure the deer did.
(Photo - Chip Walter)
The next day, Cyn and I headed outside and walked Medora’s main drag. In full sunlight it looked as though it had been dropped whole from a Warner Bros. studio lot, with its one and two story clapboard buildings lined up against the raw mountain cliff behind it waiting for a gunslinger to emerge. The town boosted my fascination with the sanitized west I recalled as a kid. Being a boomer, my boyhood brain had been filled with shows like Gunsmoke, Maverick, Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Bonanza, the Lone Ranger. It felt like half of TV was about the expansive, drama-filled world of those places beyond the Mississippi. I preferred actors like Steve McQueen, Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, to the Roy Rogers and Gene Autrys of the world, the one’s who played the rough, authentic characters in the movies. At least that’s how they looked to me.
The town of Medora - population 121. It could have been dropped from a Warner Bros Studio set. On the right we visited the local post-office and said hello to Darlene and Karen, the women who run it. Here gear stood guard at the clothing rack. (Photo-Chip Walter)
When I saw the high plateau of rocky land behind the town I had to hike it. Burt Lancaster would have. Maybe Teddy himself had, or something like it. The mesa wasn’t gigantic, maybe 300 feet high, just a chunk of friable rock that splits the town away from the entrance to Roosevelt National Park beyond. You could take two ways up the mountain. One dusty, mud-caked path swung you by switchback to the top. The other did the same for a ways, but then, a short side route by rope ladder, maybe 120 feet, could take you to the top. Rain and storms had embedded part of the ladder in the dirt and turned parts of it into very steep steps. I started up, turning back only when I found purchase on small, short plateaus. Inside of 10 minutes I was at the top. It had probably eliminated 45 minutes of switching back.
The bluff above Medora and the steps you can climb to get to the top. And the view once you get there.
(Photos-Chip Walter)
The wind blew in sharp gusts and I stood in the immaculate air looking over the little town and the flat, almost moon-like landscape scarred by razory hills. I could imagine the prairie thick with bison long ago, and after they were annihilated, the thousands of cattle that roamed here before being herded to the Medora train spur to roll to their slaughter in Chicago. All of that was gone now. The big thing in Medora these days was its highly successful summer music festival which brought humans, not animals, by the thousands.
It turned out the walk up the bluff was easier than the journey back. Once I found the top, I couldn’t find the switchback trail that would return me to the bottom. I wandered too far, then descended through some other path which was taking me to a horse ranch. After several dead ends that took me to the edges of cliffs, I just cut across the scrub and brambles and found my way to a road a half a mile from where Cyndy was waiting patiently for me in the town.
“Where did you go?” Cyndy asked. “I saw you, and then you were gone.”
“I got lost.” I said. The ramble was interesting, but I had been gone over an hour. No self-respecting cowboy would ever have gotten lost here. My God, I wondered, what happens when we get to Patagonia or the Atacama Desert?
My struggle to back down the bluff. That’s my shadow below, with the sign: “Trail Closed.” On the right, before I disappeared, Cyn caught a picture of me at the top right (left of the bluff’s single tree).
(Photos Chip Walter and Cyndy Mosites)
For a cattle boomtown that prospered in the 19th century and then nearly disappeared in the 20th, Medora had unusual gifts to give. We made our way to the entrance of nearby Roosevelt National Park and sampled the largest herd of bison (not buffalo) that we had yet seen. They rambled around in packs of 10 to 30 and went wherever they pleased. We didn’t debate them. We hiked off the road in bitter wind into the Park’s interior. This was rough, unforgiving territory. I had read that the life of a cowhand was brutal work and you could see that if you lived and worked out here luxury would have been in short supply. There was nothing you could call lush, and fertility looked like fierce work. Yet it was majestic and the land was filled with wildlife: bison, fox, deer, prairie dogs and birds of prey swooping high. The hills, cracked open by time and a million seasons, revealed the caked layers of their geological history, folds of browns and reds and black below a trackless land shadowed beneath acres of the Rorschachian shaped clouds that swept overhead.
Hiking in Roosevelt National Park. A few American Bison doing what they do best. The badlands of Roosevelt National Park - unforgiving yet majestic. (Photos - Chip Walter)
Back in Medora, we knew we had to visit the Cowboy Hall of Fame. It was the “Center of western cultures and heritage,” according the to sign at the entrance and that suited us. It wasn’t MOMA or any of the Smithsonians, but an excellent and beautiful museum nevertheless. Jan, the warm woman at the front desk who loved the idea of our journey, gave us all of the background, and we wandered through, eyes wide. We regarded saddle fashioned especially for the U.S. cavalry and pony express and cowboys who drove cattle from Texas to Montana; learned the difference between the horses the US Cavalry preferred and the far hardier mustangs that most native Americans used. Photos and text relayed the hard life of men and some women who punched cows for a living and sometimes didn’t make it. We saw their gear and the food they ate — true vagabonds. And we got another taste of the complex relationships and cultural clashes between the plains Indians who were watching lands where they had lived as long as they could remember being overrun by an alien race. The museum was filled with stunning sculptures everywhere and we could have wandered for hours more but it was time to get on the road and make our way to iconic Devil’s Tower and onto Denver.
The Cowboy Hall of Fame and some of what it had to share. (Photos by Chip Walter)
On the way out I had somehow missed a statue of Teddy Roosevelt so we stopped to tip our hat to the man, and grab a shot before flatlining our way west toward the long border of Montana. (Should have gotten a selfie.)
(Photo - Chip Walter)
This is a series about a Vagabond Adventure - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.
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As of this Dispatch …
We have travelled 5100 miles, across four ferries, on five trains, visiting three World Heritage Sites, through 13 states, FOUR National Parks and memorials, one National Historical Landmark, and three Canadian provinces, in 29 different beds, and seen more prairie than your average herd of American bison.