The Gentleman Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands, 1883–1888

Epoch Times

11-05-2025

On Feb. 12, 1884, while serving in the state legislature in Albany, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) received a telegram from New York City that his wife, Alice, who was living in his mother's house, had delivered their first baby. He had already arranged to return home later that day when a second telegram brought news of the precarious state of Alice's health. Rushing back to Manhattan, he found Alice semiconscious and dying from Bright's disease and his mother, Mittie, stricken with typhoid fever. Both women died within hours of each other on Valentine's Day.
Though devastated by this double catastrophe, Roosevelt hid his innermost feelings from others, sitting stone-faced during the funeral service while so many around him were weeping. His diary, however, reveals the true state of his heart and mind. Though normally effusive, on this occasion he could only
He struggled through a session of the legislature and the
'Mako Sica'
Theodore Roosevelt during a visit to the Badlands of Dakota in 1885, after the death of his first wife. Photo by T.W. Ingersoll.
MPI/Getty Images
Long before the coming of white explorers, the Lakota people had called this territory '
As Americans pushed westward, the Dakotas became one of the battlefields with Native Americans, particularly the Sioux. In the late 1870s, with those conflicts coming to an end and, with the arrival of the railroads, cattle, and ranching became a focal point of the territory. In tandem with these developments, newspaper reports and the pulp fiction of the day were romanticizing cowboys and the Western life, attracting wealthy Easterners who purchased cattle and bought up vast tracks of land throughout the West, giving themselves an air of the exotic among their peers.
During these same years, living up to its name in a different way, the Badlands was a haven for outlaws and rough men, where disputes were often settled by gunplay rather than by a court of law.
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It was to this unruly land that Roosevelt traveled in 1883 to hunt buffalo.
The Badlands Helped Make America's Parklands
Roosevelt's trip west changed both the man and the history of the United States.
Rather than being put off by the craggy landscape and harsh climate, Roosevelt fell in love with the Badlands. He had made this journey in part to acquire a taste of the cowboy life, and the Dakotas gave him exactly what he was looking for. Impulsively, he made a large investment in the Maltese Cross Ranch, and a year later, following the deaths of his wife and mother, he moved to the Badlands and purchased more land and more cattle, establishing what he called the Elkhorn Ranch.
Despite his relative youth and inexperience, Roosevelt played a key role in the establishment of the
On the Fourth of July, 1886, Roosevelt also revealed the views of America he would later carry into the White House. He delivered his first major public address, now known as his 'Big Things'
A lone buffalo in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Western North Dakota. Roosevelt originally came to North Dakota in1883 to hunt buffalo.
Laima Swanson /Shutterstock
Roosevelt's Dakota years and his subsequent trips there eventually had vast ramifications for the rest of the country. As president, the hunter was also a conservationist. He helped rescue the buffalo, which were on the edge of extinction, and sought to preserve the American wilderness and forests by establishing some 230 million acres of parkland around the country. This '
President Theodore Roosevelt (L) poses with naturalist and botanist John Muir on Glacier Point in Yosemite, California.
MPI/Getty Images
Yet the knowledge he gained, especially those lessons absorbed during his early infatuation with the Badlands, would influence the history of the country in another way—or so Roosevelt believed. In a 1918 letter of appreciation to Professor Albert T. Volwiler, who had described those North Dakota years in an article, Roosevelt
When East Met West
Life in the Badlands shaped Roosevelt in a multitude of ways.
Still in his 20s during these years, he was young enough to be molded by the challenges of this place and its people. Concerned about his physical health since boyhood, he had fought off life-threatening asthma attacks, and, with the encouragement of his father, he had focused on physical well-being and exercise. His years in the American West pushed him even further in the direction of strength and fortitude. The cowboys and other ranch hands whom he supervised later testified to his abilities to endure the weather, to ride long hours in the saddle, to exert himself when they themselves were flagging from fatigue and hunger. For the first time in his life, he was doing truly hard work alongside hard men.
Moreover, those men were radically different from Roosevelt's friends and companions back East. Privately schooled, a graduate of Harvard, a member of New York's elite, and a budding politician, his company now consisted of a rougher crew. Their companionship enlarged his sympathies for the working class.
Other tests of manhood also came Roosevelt's way. In one incident, for example, a drunken and armed cowboy in a bar began to
The Stolen Boat
(L–R) Wilmot Dow, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Sewall at Elkhorn Ranch, circa 1886.
Public Domain
The incident most revealing of Roosevelt's character and which gained the widest attention among locals occurred in March, 1886. Three thieves
Three days later, they caught up with the surprised crooks, who were surprised again when their captors did not execute them on the spot. Roosevelt was an outspoken advocate for law in this territory, and so insisted they take the men to a sheriff for justice. For several more days, they battled the ice-cold weather, wet clothes, and lack of provisions before finally delivering the men to the sheriff in Dickinson, who was also surprised that the thieves were brought to justice rather than being shot out of hand.
These sorts of conflicts along with the daily trials of frontier living helped create the man who would become a police commissioner of New York City, the leader of the Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and a strong and vigorous American president.
From the Badlands to the Arena
Roosevelt's plans to become a Western rancher were short-lived. The
Yet those few years in the Badlands remained a large and vivid part of his life.
Perhaps Roosevelt was thinking of his time as a cowboy when, two years after leaving the White House, he spoke at the Sorbonne, an address originally titled 'Citizenship in a Republic,' which we know today as his '
A warrior both in Cuba and in the rough-and-tumble politics of his time, Roosevelt had become a man of the arena whose training ground was the North Dakota Badlands.
Col. Theodore Roosevelt, 1898, by B.J. Falk. Library of Congress.
Public Domain
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