Ranch is a National Treasure

The acquisition of the Eberts-Elkhorn Ranch by the U.S. Forest Service is a great moment for North Dakota, a great moment for the United States and a great moment for the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt never owned an acre in the Little Missouri River Valley. He was, as he freely admitted, an open range squatter in the last years before fences (and legal deeds) transformed the open range into fixed property.

In his 1913 autobiography, he says he “took hold of two cattle ranches,” the Maltese Cross, seven miles south of Medora (1883), and the Elkhorn (1884), 35 miles north of Medora. He regarded the more remote Elkhorn Ranch, which he chose personally in June1884, as his primary Dakota Territory home.

The Elkhorn was a large ranch, whose informal “boundaries” were set by the custom of the Little Missouri country. Roosevelt was “entitled” to a range that extended four miles upriver from his headquarters and four miles downriver, and from the river bed all the way out on both sides to the sources of the feeder creeks of the Little Missouri.

The original Elkhorn Ranch, what we might now call the “Greater Elkhorn Ranch,” thus extended eight miles along the Little Missouri (roughly south to north) and from 10 to 30 miles east of the river and an equal distance toward the west.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park manages just 218 acres on the west bank of the river, where the ranch house and outbuildings were located.

In other words, the national park, on behalf of all the people of the United States, owns and manages only the ranch headquarters, not the entire Elkhorn Ranch.

The sale of the Eberts Ranch to the U.S. Forest Service, and the sale of the adjacent Mosser Ranch to a private individual with a strong conservation interest, means that the viewshed from where the veranda of the Elkhorn Ranch once stood will be protected forever from adverse economic activity, from the formation of subdivisions or ranchettes and from resource extraction of a noisome variety.

In my opinion, the Elkhorn Ranch ought to be considered a national shrine – in the same short list that includes Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Mount Vernon and Monticello, the battlefields at Gettysburg and Shiloh, the Little Big Horn, the grave (if we can just determine where it actually is) of Sitting Bull and the location in Arches National Park where the great Edward Abbey parked his ranger trailer.

I love it that the Elkhorn Ranch is remote, a little difficult to get to, unserved by any tourist amenities (unlike Walden Pond) and entirely unimproved. There are no plans to rebuild the 30-by-60- foot ranch house. The signage at the site is minimal and tasteful.

Appropriately, when you go there you cannot see, but you definitely do feel, Roosevelt’s presence, and his reason for locating his ranch in that stretch of the river is immediately apparent.

In 1883, Roosevelt came to Dakota Territory to kill a buffalo. In the course of a buffalo hunt so difficult that it amounted to an ordeal, Roosevelt fell in love with the Dakota Badlands and impulsively invested $14,000 in the Maltese Cross Ranch. Or, as the late Stephen Ambrose put it, “He got his bull and lost his heart.”

In the late spring of 1884, Roosevelt returned to the Dakota Badlands a grieving and possibly broken man. After his wife Alice and mother Mittie died on the same day, Valentine’s Day 1884, Roosevelt returned to the Little Missouri River Valley to seek solitude.

That’s when he scouted downriver for a second ranch far from the traffic lanes near Medora and the Northern Pacific Railroad. With the help of Howard Eaton, he found what he was looking for 35 miles north of Medora, and he named the new ranch for the interlocked horns of two bull elk he found at the site.

Roosevelt wanted solitude, and he found it.

We all know that Roosevelt went on to become the greatest conservationist in American presidential history: national parks, wildlife refuges, 150 new national forests, federal game preserves and much more. The great bulk of this was done publicly – during his nearly two terms as president and often enough by executive order – but he played an important private role in the history of conservation, too.

Roosevelt learned at least two critically important conservation lessons during his Badlands sojourn. First, he recognized that the Little Missouri River Valley, like most of the arid West, was much more fragile than it seemed. He realized that the grass was being overgrazed, and he correctly predicted that under a perfect storm of conditions – drought followed by a very severe winter – disaster was likely to follow. It did, in the killing winter of 1886-87.

Second, Roosevelt got one of the last 2,000 or so buffalo in North America in mid-September 1883 and was mighty glad to display the head in his trophy room at Sagamore Hill for the rest of his life. But he realized that the majestic buffalo was in danger of extinction, along with other large mammals, unless humans worked in cooperation to sustain and rebuild the herds.

Roosevelt didn’t write much about conservation in the books and articles that he published about his Dakota years. They are about adventure and the intense glory of the vanishing American frontier and about his own transformation from eastern dude to authentic American cowboy. They are, in my opinion, the best prose that has ever been written about the Badlands of North Dakota.

Roosevelt understood the spirit of this place. All of his senses were on high alert. He was fully alive, completely present in a way that jumps off every page of his Dakota books and the magnificent Dakota chapter in his autobiography.

But almost the minute he got back to New York, he formed a friendship with one of his reviewers, George Bird Grinnell, and together, in 1887, they founded the Boone & Crockett Club, which played an extremely important role in the development of the modern American conservation movement.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the survival and revival of the buffalo owes as much to the Boone & Crockett Club as to any other entity, and that not only the existence of the national parks but the way we revere them as uncommercial sanctuaries for game and solitude owes as much to the Boone & Crockett Club (and therefore Roosevelt) as to the national government.

Even more to the point, Roosevelt’s Boone & Crockett Club pioneered the concept of hunters cooperating to maintain sustainable game populations for the long run – enlightened hunters as our best game stewards – that has an incalculable legacy in Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever and other conservation organizations.

Some of this conservation consciousness, surely, was born on the veranda of the Elkhorn Ranch. It is therefore fitting that the Boone & Crockett Club has played a key role in the U.S. Forest Service’s acquisition of the Eberts-Elkhorn Ranch.

The Elkhorn Ranch should be regarded as a national conservation shrine. More importantly, in my opinion, it should be regarded as a shrine to one of the most amazing men of American history, Theodore Roosevelt, who lived and learned and evolved here, and who, among other great achievements, went on to earn his place on the Rushmore of American conservationists, together with Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)

(c) 2007 Bismarck Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.