Roosevelt In The Bad Lands

A niece of mine recently sent me a text message asking what would be a good biography of Theodore Roosevelt to start learning about TR. I wrote back suggesting a couple, and then said “But if you want to know about Roosevelt’s time in North Dakota, read Herman Hagedorn’s “Roosevelt in the Badlands.” And then, just to refresh my own memory, I dragged out my copy. You could do that as well. It’s history-reading weather now. To get you started, let me share the opening of his introduction.

To write any book is an adventure, but to write this book has been the kind of gay and romantic experience that makes any man who has partaken of it a debtor forever to the Giver of Delights. Historical research, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of labors I have myself come to know something of the life that Roosevelt knew thirty-five years ago—the hot desolation of noon in the scarred butte country; the magic of dawn and dusk when the long shadows crept across the coulees and woke them to unexpected beauty; the solitude of the prairies, that have the vastness without the malignance of the sea. I have come to know the thrill and the dust and the cattle-odors of the round-up; the warm companionship of the ranchman’s dinner-table; such profanity as I never expect to hear again; singing and yarns and hints of the tragedy of prairie women; and, at the height of a barbecue, the appalling intrusion of death. I have felt in all its potency the spell which the “short-grass country” cast over Theodore Roosevelt; and I cannot hear the word Dakota without feeling a stirring in my blood.

Hagedorn spent a considerable amount of time in the North Dakota Bad Lands in the years shortly before and after Roosevelt’s death in 1919, doing research, with the former president’s blessing. Hanging on the wall in the Rough Riders Hotel in Medora is one of the president’s letters of introduction which Hagedorn carried with him when he visited here, one of those countless rare documents Harold Schafer collected as he was rebuilding Medora to share its amazing history with visitors from around the world.

Hagedorn finished his book in 1921 and it was greeted with much acclaim and enthusiasm. It begins with Roosevelt’s arrival in the Dakota Bad Lands to hunt buffalo in September of 1883. Here's Hagedorn’s description of the place Roosevelt encountered his first morning in the town of Little Missouri, Dakota Territory.

It was a world of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked gumbo, oozed beneath banks at his back, swung sharply westward, and gave the flat on the north a fringe of dusty-looking cottonwoods, thirstily drinking the only source of moisture the country seemed to afford. Directly across the river, beyond another oval-shaped piece of bottom-land rose a steep bluff, deeply shadowed against the east, and south of it stretched in endless succession the seamed ranges and fantastic turrets and cupolas and flying buttresses of the Bad Lands.

It was a region of weird shapes garbed in barbaric colors, gray-olive striped with brown, lavender striped with black, chalk pinnacles capped with flaming scarlet. French-Canadian voyageurs, a century previous, finding the weather-washed ravines wicked to travel through, spoke of them as mauvaises terres pour traverser, and the name clung. The whole region, it was said, had once been the bed of a great lake, holding in its lap the rich clays and loams which the rain carried down into it. The passing of ages brought vegetation, and the passing of other ages turned that vegetation into coal. At last this vast lake found an outlet in the Missouri. The wear and wash of the waters cut in time through the clay, the coal and the friable limestone of succeeding deposits, creating ten thousand water-courses bordered by precipitous bluffs and buttes, which every storm gashed and furrowed anew. On the tops of the flat buttes was rich soil and in countless pleasant valleys were green pastures, but there were regions where for miles only sagebrush and stunted cedars lived a starved existence. Bad lands they were, for man or beast, and Bad Lands they remained.

"Roosevelt in the Badlands" has gone through many printings, the most recent by the Theodore Roosevelt Nature and History Association, headquartered in Medora. You’ll find it for sale at the Visitor Center in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, The Western Edge Bookstore in Medora, and the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck, and for lending at most North Dakota libraries. It’s one of the best books ever written about a North Dakotan.

A Man As Big As The West

There’s a table in the dining room of Sheila Schafer’s house in Medora that has hosted many important and not-so-self important visitors to Medora in the last 45 years. It’s “a large round mahogany table with a heavy center pedestal and four supporting legs, each ending in a finely carved dolphins head.” That description is from Nellie Snyder Yost’s biography of Ralph “Doc” Hubbard, and those are Doc‘s words.

Doc was the historian Harold Schafer brought to Medora in Harold’s early days of rebuilding that town in the 1960’s. Doc served as museum curator for the Museum of the Badlands that Harold created as an attraction for visitors. The museum sat where the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame is today.

Doc, born in 1885, was a colorful character, a pretty good Indian and Old West historian, a dreamer who never prepared for old age. So it was given to Harold, the philanthropist, to take care of Doc, who lived into his early 90’s. There were some medical bills and transportation costs that Harold had his Gold Seal company pay while he just looked the other way. Not ungrateful, Doc from time to time gifted or sold items to Harold from the historical collection he had picked up along the path of his life. There wasn’t much in the way of record keeping, but Rod Tjaden, who managed the Medora operation for Gold Seal for many years, told me once that there was no doubt that Doc got the better end of the deal. Harold never took advantage of anyone in his entire life, but that was often a one-way street.

One of the items that Doc sold to Harold was the table that Doc’s mother had built for their home in East Aurora, New York, on the Roycroft campus. Now a National Historic Landmark, the Roycroft Campus was home to an artistic revolt in the late 1880’s in the United States against the societal changes and restrictions ushered in by the Victorian Age. It was founded by Doc’s father, Elbert Hubbard and it became a Mecca for master craftsmen and a gathering place for notable artists, authors, philosophers, and power brokers, according to the Roycroft website (view it here) and Yost’s book. The elder Hubbard later perished as a passenger on the Lusitania.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Sorry for the long introduction. In the last years of Doc’s life, in the 1970’s Yost, no spring chicken herself, came to Medora for months at a time and interviewed Doc. The book which resulted, Doc’s definitive biography, carries Yost’s imprimatur as author, but it is mostly a first-person narrative as recorded by Yost. It’s interesting. I have no doubt that most of it is true. Most of it. In her introduction, Yost writes:

“Doc has had a lifelong love affair with words. Frequently, during the interviews, he would use a good descriptive word, then pause to ask me how I liked it. Over the period in which we were engaged in writing the book, Doc wrote me many letters. Here, too, his pleasure in words was evident and his breezy anecdotes a delight, right down to the signatures: Old Confucius, Rocky Mountain Moses, Sagebrush Socrates.

“A sincerely modest man . . .” she continues, and she goes on telling about how she had to learn a bit of his history from others.

Okay, Okay, I’m getting there. Back to the table. I sat at the table in the Schafer home in Medora the other night and looked through the book. As I said, the Hubbard home at Roycroft became a gathering place for the famous of the last part of the 19^th century and the first part of the 20^th. Let Doc take over:

As I look back on it now, the names of some of the people who sat with us at that table come to mind as follows:

Susan B. Anthony, American suffragist leader

Carry Jacobs Bond, writer of “The End of a Perfect Day.”

Mrs. William Jennings Bryan, wife of the great American statesman

Maude Adams, fine American actress

Edwin Markham, beloved American poet, author of “The Man with the Hoe”

Edgar A. Guest, American poet, author of “The House By The Side Of The Road”

Stephen Crane, author of "The Red Badge of Courage"

John Burroughs

John Muir

Ernest Thompson Seton, writer, painter, Boy Scout leader

Rudyard Kipling

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American journalist and poet

Harriet Beecher Stowe, American writer, author of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin"

Isabell Irving, great English actress

Henry Irving, British actor

Ellen Terry, English actress

Eugene Field, American poet and journalist

Joel Chandler Harris, author, writer of Uncle Remus stories

Frank Bacon, actor and playwright

James Lane Allen, American novelist of Kentucky

George Washington Carver, American Negro botanist and chemist

Booker T. Washington, American Negro educator and author

Sherman Coolidge, Arapaho Indian, rescued from enemy tribe as a boy and named by an officer, a Coolidge relative

Joe Jefferson, famous player of Rip Van Winkle

David Bispham, fine singer

Clara Barton, organizer of the American Red Cross

Captain Jack Crawford, poet

Richard Le Gallienne

Anne Besant, famous student of Sanskrit and other eastern languages

Anna Kathryn Green, popular mystery writer of that period

Ida Tarbell, popular writer, exposed the Standard Oil scandals

Mark Twain

Eugene Debs

Margaret Sanger, famous American advocate of birth control

Judge Ben Lindsey, well-known Denver juvenile court judge

Gutzon Borglum, American Sculptor, carver of the Mount Rushmore heads

Clarence Darrow, famous American lawyer

Sir Harry Lauder, Scottish comedian, singer, and writer

Andrew Rowan

Whew! Doc later qualifies the list a bit:

“Some of these, such as Kipling and Crane, were our guests at Roycroft before Mother had the table made, and some came to visit her after she moved to Buffalo and took the table with her . . .”

Still, it’s an impressive list of guests for a table now sitting in little old Medora, North Dakota. One of these days I’m going to sit down with Sheila and have her try to remember some who have sat at it since its arrival in Medora.

Doc lived long and traveled much. Among his other acquaintances, some fleeting, some long lasting, were Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jim Thorpe, Gene Autry, Owen Wister, Ben American Horse, (”last chief of the Teton Sioux Dakota Nation,”) Dan Beard, illustrator of Mark Twain’s books, and Dr. Charles Eastman, who, Hubbard says, was a witness to the Custer massacre as a young Indian boy and later became a doctor and treated the victims of the Wounded Knee massacre. Doc died in Dickinson in 1980, at age 95, and is buried in the Medora cemetery.

The book is “A Man as Big as the West” by Nellie Snyder Yost, published in 1979 by Pruett Publishing Company of Boulder, Co. It’s not one of the best books ever written about North Dakota, but it’s an interesting read. It’s out of print now, but still available from time to time from used booksellers. Doug Ellison at Western Edge Books in Medora says he still gets requests for it and has been thinking about having it reprinted. Ellison, also Medora’s mayor and a fine historian in his own right, was instrumental in 2009 in officially getting the street on which Hubbard lived in Medora renamed as “Doc Hubbard Drive.”

According to a story printed earlier this year by Kurt Eriksmoen in some North Daktoa newspapers, on May 14, 1983, astronomer Norman G. Thomas discovered a new asteroid in space that he named “Hubbard” in honor of Doc Hubbard. Doc would have liked that.

Ranching With Roosevelt: Part I

One of my favorite books (and a favorite of a couple historians I know as well) is Lincoln Lang’s “Ranching With Roosevelt.” Lincoln Lang was a boy when Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the Bad Lands in the early fall of 1883, living with his father (his mother had remained behind in Scotland until father and son had established a ranch) in a cabin at the mouth of Little Cannonball Creek on the Little Missouri River south of Medora.

Our copy of the book, published in 1926, came from an online bookseller some years ago, and we were delighted to discover when it arrived in the mail that the bookplate on the inside cover said it was a discarded copy from, of all places, the Panama Canal Library, book # 27678 (How about the irony in that?). A second plate carried the Panama Canal Library rules, which said, among other things, that it could be kept 14 days and if it was not returned in 14 days, the borrower faced a fine of 2 cents a day. It also still had the original library card pocket on the facing page, and it showed that its first return date was Nov. 9, 1926, and its last Nov. 24, 1958.

Lang’s descriptions of the Bad Lands, where he grew up, and life there, and anecdotes about the people who lived there, are among the most vivid I have found. I’m going to excerpt from his book a few times in the next few months, because they are Some Of The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota. To start, here’s his account of Theodore Roosevelt arriving at the Lang cabin in September 1883, Roosevelt's first trip to the Badlands, seeking to shoot a buffalo.

Temperate September days were now upon us. More and more acceptable were we finding the shelter of the cabin as the chill breath of the Arctic began to manifest itself in the increasing crispness of the lengthening nights.

Assembled in the cabin one evening, when about to sit down to supper, father having returned from town, we heard a rig drive up to the door. In the weirdly characteristic manner common to the region, already the looming, ascensional shadows of the night arising softly, stealthily, as if from their couches in the depths of a myriad labyrinthian water-ways, had merged into the single somber shadow of gray gloaming, paling to the westward in the wake of departing day.

Upon stepping to the door, I was enabled to distinguish the outline of a light wagon and team, together with a driver of bulky build sitting in the seat. To the rear, sitting on a pony with a rifle laying across the saddle in front of him, was a second individual of lighter build. Even before the booming hail “Hello Link” of the driver reached me, I had recognized him as “the power end of the pile driver,” my erstwhile boss, “Joe Ferris.” Just who his mounted companion might be, I could not tell. Evidently a stranger, but aided by the beam of light showing through the cabin door, I could make out that he was a young man, who wore large conspicuous-looking glasses, through which I was being regarded with interest by a pair of bright twinkling eyes. Amply supporting them was the expansive grin overspreading his prominent, forceful looking lower face, revealing a set of large white teeth. Smiling teeth, yet withal conveying a strong suggestion of hang-and-rattle. The kind of teeth that are made to hold anything they once close upon.

Father had stepped out past me to welcome our guests; whereupon, with my responsibilities to cook in mind, I re-entered and proceeded to include the newcomers in my supper preparations.

A few minutes later, father ushered the stranger into the shack.

“This is my son Lincoln, Mr. Roosevelt,” he said.

Then, somehow or other, I found both my hands in the double solid grip of our guest. Heard him saying clearly and forcefully, in the manner conveying the instant impression that he meant exactly what he said. That he was not merely passing out the ordinary stereotyped society phrase, which so frequently fails to ring true, I felt sure.

“Dee-lighted to meet you, Lincoln.”

I do not know if it was the direct, forceful manner of his speech, his sincere hearty grip, the open friendly gaze with which he regarded me, or something of all combined, that instantly reached for and numbered me among his friends. I did not know then, of course, that I was meeting one of the world’s greatest men; the man of destiny; a future and great President of the United States. But I didn’t need to. Young and all, as I was, the consciousness was instantly borne in upon me of meeting a man different from any I had ever met before. Just where the difference lay, I could not have told although in good time I would learn, but certain it is, right there and then, I fell for him strong.

More from this wonderful book at another time. I wish I could put the entire 367 pages in front of you. If you have taken a liking to Roosevelt, or the Badlands, or even just North Dakota history, buy this book for yourself for Christmas. Even if it is the only book you buy this year. You can buy it here. Or here. Or here.

Note: The exact location of Lang’s cabin, where Roosevelt headquartered in the days before he finally shot his buffalo that fall of 1883, is known today (although,unfortunately the exact location of where he finally shot the buffalo is somewhat a mystery--Roosevelt historian Clay Jenkinson is working on it). The Lang cabin was at the mouth of the Little Cannonball River due north of Marmarth, in the Limber Pine area of the Badlands. It’s on public land owned by the U.S. Forest Service and hard to get to by car (I’ve done it-I can admit it now-the statute of limitations has run out) but it’s a great stopover if you’re canoeing the Little Missouri north from Marmarth, and I’ve done that a couple of times. The cabin was a semi-dugout structure with a log front and sides and dirt floors, and the depression where the earth was dug out is still discernible. It’s a marvelous location. From what was likely the front stoop, you can throw a stone into either the Little Missouri or the Little Cannonball. You can feel the history there.