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.
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