Can dogs hike in Theodore Roosevelt National Park?

Open

Look at the tops of the buttes. Many of them wear a red cap, and that red is clinker, which people here call scoria: clay and sand baked into natural brick where a seam of lignite coal burned underground. This is Theodore Roosevelt National Park, named for a man who ranched in these badlands before he was president.

Before the park

People were in North Dakota long before any park, and archaeologists date artifacts elsewhere in the state to more than thirteen thousand years ago.

The Mandan and the Hidatsa hunted bison along the Little Missouri River. Two lodges where men likely trapped eagles in season still stand in the park. In the words of tribal elders, the buttes were home to many animal spirits, and people came to the badlands for vision quests as well as for the hunt.

The Mandan call themselves Nueta, the Hidatsa call themselves Hiráaca, and the Arikara are the Sahnish. The three govern together as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, from New Town on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The Garrison Dam later flooded their river bottoms, and whole towns, Elbowoods among them, went under or were taken apart.

Lakota bands pushed into western North Dakota in the eighteen hundreds. Lakota and Dakota people govern at Standing Rock, from Fort Yates. The Assiniboine, who call themselves Nakoda, the generous ones, held the country north of the Missouri and govern at Fort Belknap alongside the Gros Ventre.

Outsiders came with guns in July of eighteen sixty-four, when General Alfred Sully's troops attacked a large Lakota and Dakota village at Killdeer Mountain, where Sitting Bull was among the leaders. Warriors from that village harassed Sully's column through these badlands in August, a running fight called the Battle of the Badlands.

Making the park

A French aristocrat, the Marquis de Morès, arrived in eighteen eighty-three, founded a town and named it Medora, for his wife. His meat-packing business collapsed in eighteen eighty-six, and its brick chimney still stands east of the river.

Theodore Roosevelt stepped off a train here in September of eighteen eighty-three to hunt bison. He put fourteen thousand dollars into the Maltese Cross Ranch. On Valentine's Day of eighteen eighty-four, his mother and his wife died in the same house, hours apart. That June he started a second, more remote ranch, the Elkhorn, thirty-five miles north of Medora. The winter of eighteen eighty-six into eighty-seven killed about eighty percent of the cattle in the badlands, and more than half of his. Years later he said in Fargo that he never would have been president without his time in North Dakota.

In the Depression, drought and failed crops forced homesteaders to sell their land to the federal government, some for as little as two dollars an acre. North Dakota's congressman William Lemke led the fight for a park, and in April of nineteen forty-seven President Harry Truman signed the law creating Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park. In nineteen seventy-eight, President Jimmy Carter made it a full national park. It covers about seventy thousand acres, in three separate units.

One story

In March of eighteen eighty-six, thieves took Roosevelt's boat from the Elkhorn Ranch. Roosevelt and his two ranch hands from Maine, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow, built a new one and went after them.

After three days on the river they caught three men, led by a man called Redhead Mike Finnegan. Rather than hang them, Roosevelt walked them overland to the law at Dickinson. By the second day he had been awake for forty-eight hours, reading Anna Karenina and then a Jesse James dime novel he borrowed from Finnegan.

The walk to Dickinson was roughly forty-five miles. Finnegan and one partner got twenty-five months in the penitentiary at Bismarck, and the charge against the third man was dropped. Forty-five miles, to do it by the law.

Today

The park drew close to seven hundred thirty thousand visits in twenty twenty-five.

The live argument is the wild horses. Somewhere around two hundred roam the South Unit, and the park dropped its plans to remove them in twenty twenty-four. In June of twenty twenty-six the Senate passed a bill requiring a herd of one hundred fifty, and sent it to the House.

The South Unit's thirty-six-mile Scenic Drive reopened in November of twenty twenty-five, six years after part of it collapsed. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened in Medora on the Fourth of July, twenty twenty-six.

From the road, watch for bison, mule deer, prairie dogs and horses. This is Theodore Roosevelt National Park.