Theodore Roosevelt spent the better part of three years (1883-1886) living in the badlands of Dakota Territory. He first ventured to the Little Missouri River country in 1883 to kill a buffalo. He was twenty-five years old. Before he lugged his shaggy trophy back to New York, Roosevelt invested $14,000 in the cattle business. In 1884 he returned, invested in a second ranch, and decided to make Dakota his permanent or semi-permanent home. Between 1884 and 1887 Roosevelt threw himself—sometimes recklessly--into the strenuous life in what is now western North Dakota.

Roosevelt came to Dakota for two reasons: to bag a buffalo, and to recover from the severest emotional trauma of his life. On February 14, 1884, the two most important women in Roosevelt’s world died simultaneously: Roosevelt’s mother Mittie, who died of typhoid, and his child bride Alice Lee, who died of Bright’s Disease (kidney failure) just two days after giving birth to her first child, the famous Alice Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was successful in both of his quests. When he shot his first buffalo in late September, 1883, he was so dee-lighted that he did an impromptu “Indian war dance” around the corpse and fished a $100 bill out of his pocket to give to his exhausted guide Joe Ferris. And though the emotional scars of the death of his first wife Alice never fully disappeared, Roosevelt recovered his spirit in Dakota. The light had not, as he feared, gone out of his life forever. In fact, in 1885, on one of his periodic returns to New York, he fell in love with his childhood sweetheart Edith Carow. They were quietly married in London on December 2, 1886. Thereafter they shared thirty-three years together in one of the most successful political marriages in American history. It was highly satisfying in the personal arena, too.

North Dakotans love to invoke Roosevelt as a kind of favorite son and they cling with a certain desperation to his later statement, "I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota." In the state’s mythology Roosevelt is principally remembered as a Rough Rider who led volunteer troops up San Juan (actually Kettle) Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (July 1, 1898), and as a man’s man who brought a delightful bluster to whatever he did. Bully. This is true as far as it goes, but it represents a pretty narrow portrait of a widely extraordinary man: the readingest President, the writingest President (150,000 letters to Jefferson’s 22,000; forty books to John Quincy Adams’ eighteen), the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, one of the greatest political reformers in American history, an earnest advocate of women’s rights, the adumbrator of the New Deal. And so on. The time has come for North Dakotans to revise their mythology on Roosevelt and to see him less as a Rough Rider than a towering intellectual and man of action who lived among us for a time and came to believe that we could only sustain our lives in the West through significant restraint of our extractive tendencies.

There is no reason to doubt Roosevelt’s statement that July 1, 1898, the day he stormed Kettle Hill in Cuba, was “the great day of my life.” But it was only one day in a 61-year life of dizzying activity. As the twenty-sixth President of the United States, Roosevelt chiefly distinguished himself as a peacemaker. Most historians believe that he helped to postpone World War I by a decade through his efforts to maintain the balance of power in Europe and eastern Asia. He won the Nobel Peace Prize (1906) for his mediation in the Russo-Japanese War. He conceived the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine—that if we really intended to prevent Europeans from meddling in western hemispheric crises, the United States would have to supervise Central and South America in times of political instability. He declared that he would rather swallow a porcupine backwards than annex troubled Caribbean islands like the Dominican Republic.

It is true that Roosevelt probably would not have become President were it not for his time in the American West. His famous pronouncement is not really about North Dakota, whose “west” is a tiny patch of badlands out on the Montana border. In a sense, the Little Missouri River Valley is North Dakota’s Montana. The rest of the state is principally Jefferson’s America—family farms, small towns, Midwestern civility, a land of Norwegian respectability, not a haven for Roosevelt’s “harum scarum” cow boys and desperadoes.

Theodore Roosevelt learned five essential lessons during his sojourn in the American West.

First, he recognized the essential commonality of human experience. Class divisions that he previously took for granted made no sense out on the plains of Dakota. Roosevelt was well aware, of course, that the western men he moved among were not as well educated as he was, nor as cultured. They did not attend opera. They could not pars Latin sentences or read the Niebelungenleid in the original German. Their grammar was colorfully imperfect. They were as unfamiliar with as they were unwelcome on the polo grounds of Long Island. But he realized in the West that while he was a master of the clubs and the social protocol of the eastern seaboard, he was noticeably substandard in skills that were essential on the frontier. He was not much more than an average shot. He was not an especially graceful broncbuster. He could not wield an axe as adroitly as his hired men. He knew, too, that their skills were essential to the basic business of life in a way that his own cultural achievements were not.

Roosevelt’s genius lay in his understanding that his privilege and high culture did not make him better than the men and women of Dakota—only different. Roosevelt’s experience in the American West had the cumulative effect of closing the seeming gap between himself and the common citizens of the United States. Roosevelt truly believed that he was merely a very energetic average man, that his enthusiasm and willingness to get dirty in the arena made up for his deficiencies both mental and physical. He did not regard himself as a gifted man. He was a typical American with a gift for sucking out all the marrow of life.

His portrait of Dakota cowboys was both realistic and heroic. “They are as hardy and self-reliant as any men who ever breathed,” he wrote. “Peril and hardship and years of long toil broken by weeks of brutal dissipation, draw lines across their eager faces, but never dim their reckless eyes nor break their bearing of defiant self-confidence.”

“A cowboy will not submit tamely to an insult, and is ever ready to avenge his own wrongs; nor has he an overwrought fear of shedding blood. He possesses, in fact, few of the emasculated, milk-and-water moralities admired by the pseudo-philanthropists; but he does possess to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation.” Roosevelt saw the men of the west as a rough corrective to the hyper-civilized and effeminate men he had known at Harvard and in his New York social circle—men like Henry James who could not wrestle a calf to the ground if their life depended upon it.

By the time he left the Dakota badlands, Roosevelt had learned to love average men and women. His love was genuine—not the easy demagogic rhetoric of professional politicians. Abraham Lincoln’s “common people” recognized Roosevelt’s love and respect, and they returned it in full measure. This was the source of Roosevelt’s great power as an American reformer. The professionals found him annoying—self-righteous, too boisterous, a grandstander, too earnest in his reforms, unwilling to deal—but average Americans gave Roosevelt an enormous vote of confidence which inspired him to stay in the arena and fight the good fight throughout his remarkable life.

Second, he became a true Turnerian. He agreed with Frederick Jackson Turner (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893) that the frontier had been the single most important factor in shaping the American character, that American democracy and key social institutions had been reinvigorated and renewed by the pioneers who carried their axes, hoes, Bibles, and Masonic Lodges beyond the line of western settlement.

Roosevelt understood that the advance of American civilization had exacted a heavy toll on wolves, bears, primeval forests, and of course on American Indian cultures. He was not, as some have alleged, unsympathetic to the Native American peoples who had been overwhelmed by the march of Anglo-Saxon civilization. But he consistently placed the conquest of Indian tribes within the dynamics of inevitability, and he argued, unapologetically, that the history of the world recorded the triumph of the strong over the weak. In a speech to the Naval War College, June 2, 1897, Roosevelt would say, “All the great masterful races have been fighting races, and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then, no matter what else it may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best. Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin, and a willful failure to prepare for any danger may in its effects be as bad as cowardice.” Roosevelt felt contempt for hand-wringing “philanthropists” who blamed white American civilization for doing what he regarded as the necessary, if sometimes brutal, work of world progress. Roosevelt wrote parts of several books during his time in the American West, including his magnum opus, The Winning of the West (four volumes). These books became vehicles for his own version of the Turnerian paradigm of American history.

Roosevelt realized that he was one of the last Americans who would have the opportunity to engage in the full ritual renewal of the American West. That’s part of why he threw himself into ranch and cowboy life with such gusto. He understood that the Dakota Badlands were one of the last remnants of a once-continental frontier, and that he was fortunate to have ventured into that small but colorful cattle community just at the moment when it was undergoing the process that Professor Turner had described. This gave him great satisfaction, of course, but it also made him wonder what would renew the American character now that the frontier had been officially closed by the 1890 national census. Cuba, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines can be understood as offshore (and imperial) extensions of the frontier experience, but Roosevelt would increasingly come to see them as problematic approximations of the frontier rather than true arenas for national renewal. Roosevelt also believed that some significant renewal could be experienced in the National Parks and monuments, and that the character-building benefits of hunting could be sustained through such organizations as the Boone and Crockett Club and other conservation efforts.

Because he had left behind the hyper-civilized world of his birth and ventured voluntarily to the Turnerian frontier, Roosevelt believed that he understood what was truly at stake in the American experiment, that he had paid his dues in a way that most other political figures had (and perhaps could) not, and that he now possessed qualities of character and manliness that he regarded as essential to national leadership.

Third, Roosevelt learned how to write about the West. The trilogy of books Roosevelt wrote about his time in the West represent the finest prose he ever wrote. These were Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888), and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). Generally speaking, Roosevelt was not a great writer. He was a good and forceful writer, but he lacked the patience it takes to become a master prose stylist. Not only are his western writings the best things he ever wrote in a long life of incessant scribbling, but what he wrote about his experiences between 1883-1887 may constitute the finest prose ever written about western North Dakota. Somehow the West inspired him to lower the rhetorical volume and turn his great powers of concentration to the spirit of place instead. His description of late fall on the northern plains is unsurpassable. “It was a beautiful hunting day; the sundogs hung in the red dawn; the wind hardly stirred over the crisp grass; and though the sky was cloudless yet the weather had that queer, smoky, hazy look that it is most apt to take on during the time of the Indian summer. From a high spur of the tableland we looked out far and wide over a great stretch of broken country, the brown of whose hills and valleys was varied everywhere by patches of dull read and vivid yellow, tokens that the trees were already putting on the dress with which they greet the mortal ripening of the year.”

Fourth, he discovered conservation. Roosevelt came west to kill and ranch, but he soon realized that the American people had expressed too much violence towards the fragile landscapes and life forms beyond the hundredth meridian. He killed one of the last of what once had been an American buffalo herd of perhaps as many as 50,000,000 critters; then he realized that the few hundred buffalo that remained needed to be protected or they would go the way of the passenger pigeon. He invested in two ranches in the Dakota badlands and one in Wyoming, but—even before the disastrous winter of 1886-87—he realized that the cattlemen, including himself, had overgrazed the plains grasses in search of immediate profits.

Roosevelt came to understand that an unregulated West would soon be denuded of its wild creatures, its great trees, its stupendous grasslands. At the Grand Canyon in Arizona in 1908, President Roosevelt said, “We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children's children will get the benefit of it."

Although he never lost his lust for killing quadrupeds, Roosevelt went on to become the greatest conservationist in Presidential history. He doubled the number of National Parks from five to ten (including two in the Dakotas), tripled the size of the National Forest system, created the National Wildlife Refuge system (and designated the first fifty-one sites), created the National Monument system (and designated the first eighteen, beginning with Devils Tower in Wyoming). He signed the Newlands Reclamation Act (1902), designated the first twenty-four reclamation projects, and convened the first ever White House conference on conservation. He was the co-founder of the Boone and Crockett Club (1887). He camped out and corresponded with John Muir and John Burroughs, and helped to save Yellowstone National Park from adverse commercial development. He helped to create the professional civilian National Park Service. No President did more for the environment. One can only imagine what he might have done had he served a third term.

It was life on the ground in the West, not books, that taught Roosevelt that our natural resources have to be managed. He realized that individuals, including even ranchers and landowners, cannot be expected to restrain themselves in the pursuit of pleasure and profit. He came to understand that government needed to manage the national resource base to make it available for future generations, and to set aside portions of the most sublime landscape as permanent sanctuaries for wild things and human pilgrims who love the wild foundation of the American experience.

Fifth, Roosevelt learned that, out West, aristocrats have to prove their merit. In Boston or New York, a man of Roosevelt’s birth and wealth had automatic access to power, opportunity, and respectability. In those established centers of American civilization, working men and women were seen—when they were noticed at all—as uncouth beings who were lucky to be given work and who didn’t really count in the way American civilization thought of itself. Roosevelt was born into the upper class, and he remained something of a nob and a snob for the first half of his life. When Roosevelt arrived in the Dakota badlands, wearing thick spectacles and sporting designer buckskins and a knife specially made for him by Tiffany’s, he was regarded as a dude, a punkinlily, yet another in a long line of eastern carpetbaggers who come to the West to appropriate its romance without doing anything admirable during their brief visits.

The American West represented a reversal of the American class system. The eastern aristocrat was not only not granted instant status as the highest link of the chain of being in the rough lands of the frontier, but he had to pass through a period of strenuous probation if he wished to be considered worthy—much less equal. The West operated by a merit system, and nothing in the training of a man like Roosevelt had prepared him for the way in which merit was calculated in the cow camps.

Thedoroe Roosevelt was a man who insisted upon being taken seriously. It took a relatively long time, but eventually he managed to overcome his status as Four Eyed Dude by throwing himself unhesitatingly into frontier life. He never complained. He never quit work before others. He was always among the first to rise in the morning. He tried (perhaps in vain) never to call attention to himself. He did not eschew dirty, exhausting, or degrading work. He did not fret over his injuries. He stood up to bullies who sought to make fun of his easternness and his physical frailties. He shot grizzly bears while peering through his coke bottle glasses. He knocked out a drunken gunslinger in a saloon in Mingusville (today’s Wibaux, Montana). He tracked down thieves who stole his boat and then refused to hang them on the spot, though almost everyone who heard the story wondered why he had bothered to march such scoundrels overland to the sheriff in Dickinson at such cost to his rest and his feet.

One rancher said, “He was game to the core.” Another: “He was always right there ready to do everything he possibly could.” The young Lincoln Lang wrote, “Roosevelt asked for and received no favors… Invariably he was right on the job holding his own with the best of them.” Another observer said, “That four-eyed maverick has got sand in his craw aplenty. He’s sure a man to hold up his end.”

It was these lessons that Theodore Roosevelt learned in the badlands of Dakota Territory. His importance is not just that he was a famous person who happened to spend a few of his formative years in North Dakota. It is much deeper than that.

Years later Lincoln Lang recalled his first impressions of the young Roosevelt talking deep into the night with his father Gregor Lang north of today’s Marmarth,North Dakota. “It was in listening to those talks after supper in the old shack on the Cannonball that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us and not for a chosen few.” Roosevelt would have burst with pride to hear this. It’s hard to believe that there could be any greater praise than that.

On July 4, 1886 Roosevelt delivered a speech in Dickinson, North Dakota, in which he said, “Like all Americans, I like big things. Big prairies, big forests, and mountains. Big wheat fields, railroads, and herds of cattle too. Big factories and steamboats and everything else.” In the American West, he had become one of America’s big things. By now his body was as “tough as a hickory nut,” as he liked to put it. The asthmatic ninety-eight pound weakling was now as strong as a bull moose. Out on the plains of Dakota Roosevelt’s soul had grown even more dramatically than his body. After his fourth of July oration, Roosevelt rode the train back to Medora with the spirited young editor of the Bad Lands Cow Boy, A.T. Packard. As the train rolled through the stark countryside, and he listened to Roosevelt talk about citizenship, American ideals, and America’s place in the world, Packard suddenly predicted that Roosevelt would become the President of the United States. “If your prophecy comes true, I will do my part to make a good one.”

When he returned to New York in the fall of 1886, Roosevelt was prepared to take on the world.