The Theodore Roosevelt National Park Stamp

Where Theodore Roosevelt is

Theodore Roosevelt, for people who count parks

He arrived in September 1883, a 24-year-old asthmatic assemblyman, and before the hunting trip ended he had bought into a cattle ranch. Five months later, on February 14, 1884, his wife and his mother died in the same New York house on the same day. Roosevelt wrote a large X in his diary and beneath it: "The light has gone out of my life." He came back to the badlands, built the remote Elkhorn Ranch on the Little Missouri, and spent much of the next three years riding this country.

The ranching failed; the education did not. The brutal winter of 1886-87 destroyed most of his herd along with everyone else's, and he eventually went home. But he had watched the bison all but vanish and the range degrade in real time, and he said later that he would never have become President had it not been for his years in North Dakota. As President he protected roughly 230 million acres of national forests, bird reservations, monuments and parks, a legacy that traces in a straight line back to this valley.

The park itself is a one-off. Truman signed it into being on April 25, 1947 as Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park, the only "national memorial park" ever created, and on November 10, 1978 Congress dropped the word and made it a full national park, adding a designated wilderness in the same act. It comes in three pieces: a South Unit at Medora, a North Unit some seventy road miles away, and, alone between them, the site of the Elkhorn Ranch: no buildings left, just foundation stones and cottonwoods, a place admirers treat as something like a shrine.

The badlands themselves are a young accident. The Little Missouri once flowed north toward Hudson Bay; ice-age glaciers blocked that route and forced it east into the Missouri, and the rerouted, steepened river has been slicing through soft sediments ever since. Seams of lignite coal in the exposed layers sometimes ignite and smolder for years, baking the clay above them into the red clinker (locally, scoria) that stripes the hills.

Official Theodore Roosevelt park site (nps.gov)

What lives in the badlands

Bison returned in 1956, when 29 animals were trucked in from a Nebraska refuge and released in the South Unit; the North Unit got its own herd a few years later. Hundreds now work the same bottomlands where Roosevelt hunted one of the last of the wild ones, and a bison jam on the loop road is the park's most reliable event.

Feral horses run the South Unit. Descendants of ranch stock, they are one of the very few free-roaming horse populations anywhere in the national park system, kept partly because open-range horses are true to what Roosevelt saw here in the 1880s. The North Unit answers with a small demonstration herd of longhorn steers for the same historical reason.

Prairie dog towns are the infrastructure. Their colonies clip the grass short, turn the soil, and feed or house much of the rest of the cast: badgers, coyotes, golden eagles, burrowing owls, rattlesnakes. Roosevelt found their squeaking maddening; the ecosystem disagrees with him.

The exposed layers hold an older fauna: the park contains one of the larger concentrations of petrified wood in the country, stumps of a swampy forest tens of millions of years old weathering out of the same slopes the bison graze. Elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep and mule deer fill out the modern lineup.

The Theodore Roosevelt designs

Painted Canyon Overlook

The badlands revealed all at once: banded slopes of gray, brown and clinker-red running to the horizon, from a rim you can reach directly off Interstate 94. It is many travelers' first proof that western North Dakota has been hiding this. The colors shift with every hour of light, which is exactly what a poster artist wants.

Bison in the Badlands

Twenty-nine bison were released here in 1956; their descendants now range both units in the hundreds, grazing the river bottoms and dusting themselves in the clay. An animal the park's namesake came to shoot before extinction took it, back on his own ranch country. As stamp subjects go, none carries more of the park's point.

Wind Canyon and Little Missouri River

A short ridge trail to a wind-carved notch above a huge slow bend of the Little Missouri, the river that cut the entire badlands after ice-age glaciers forced it into a new course. It is the South Unit's classic evening view, with bison often scattered on the far bank at sundown.

How to record your Theodore Roosevelt visit

Theodore Roosevelt, asked and answered