Medora sits in the far west of North Dakota, close enough to the Montana line that you can be there in fifteen minutes. Interstate 94 runs along the edge of the plains for hours and then, without much warning, drops into the valley of the Little Missouri River and the country falls apart into buttes and coulees. Medora is down in that hole. Fewer than 150 people live here year round, and the reason anyone comes is the national park on both sides of town.
Two wealthy young easterners arrived here in the same year, 1883, each of them convinced there was a fortune in Dakota cattle. One built a town, a slaughterhouse and a twenty-six-room house on the bluff above it, and was finished inside four years. The other lost most of a herd in a single winter and went home to New York. The town is named after the first man’s wife. The park is named after the second man. Everything else here is a footnote to that.
This was our second time through. We came once before, in summer, and wrote about the park itself — Roosevelt’s life, the two units, the bighorn and the wild horses — in that earlier post. This time we came in mid-May, which is a different park entirely: half the town still shuttered, half the North Unit road still gated, mud everywhere, and foals on the ground.
The Two Men Who Came to Medora in 1883
The Marquis de Morès
Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès, was twenty-four years old when he stepped off the Northern Pacific in the spring of 1883. He was a French nobleman, a trained cavalry officer and a famous duelist, and he had married Medora von Hoffman of New York. Her father, Baron Louis von Hoffman, was a banker. The banker’s money is what built this town.
The idea was not stupid. In 1883 the Chicago packers bought western cattle and shipped them east alive, and the animals lost weight the whole way and some of them died in the cars. De Morès proposed to cut out the middle of that: slaughter the cattle where the grass was, and ship chilled beef east in refrigerated railcars. He incorporated the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company in April 1883, put up a packing plant beside the tracks that could handle 150 carcasses a day, and named the town that grew around it after his wife.
He built the chateau the same year — twenty-six rooms of frame construction on the bluff, looking down on the plant, the tracks and the town. Medora came out from New York in the spring of 1884 with two small children and a household staff. She hunted, she painted, and by most accounts she liked it here more than he did.
It came apart fast. Drought thinned the range and there were never enough finished cattle to keep the plant running. Eastern and Chicago dealers would not handle his beef, and he had no way to force them to. His stagecoach and freight line lost its bid for the mail contract, which was the only thing that would have made it pay. And he was, by his own family’s admission, an amateur. The plant shut down in November 1886. The family left that fall and never lived here again.
What happened to him afterward is stranger than the ranching. He went back to France and became a political agitator, known there for antisemitic politics that got him arrested more than once, and in June 1896 he was killed in the Sahara while trying to raise a force against the French colonial administration. He was thirty-eight. All that is left of the packing plant is the brick chimney, which stands in a small park at the edge of town. The chateau is still up on the bluff and is now a state historic site.
Theodore Roosevelt in Dakota
Roosevelt came off the same railroad on September 8, 1883. He was twenty-four as well, a New York State assemblyman with bad eyes and asthma, and he had come out to shoot a bison before there were none left to shoot. It took him two weeks of rain and mud to find one. Before he went home he had put money into the Maltese Cross Ranch, also called Chimney Butte, seven miles south of the railroad.
The bison he came for were nearly gone by then. The northern herd collapsed between 1881 and 1883, and the last commercial hunts on this range were finishing while he was standing in it. The animals in the park now are not survivors. In 1956 the park brought twenty-nine bison up from Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska and turned them out in the South Unit; by 1962 there were 145, and ten bulls and ten cows were moved north to start the North Unit herd. Elk went the same way — shot out of this country by the late 1800s and put back on March 13, 1985. Bighorn were gone by the early 1900s, killed by hunting and by diseases that came in with domestic sheep, and restoration here began in 1956. Nearly everything large you see in this park was carried in on a truck.
We keep running into this. The bighorn we photographed in Custer State Park earlier on this same trip descend from animals trucked in from Badlands National Park, whose own herd started with twenty-two sheep brought up from Pike’s Peak in 1964. The West looks wild and most of it has been restocked.
On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt’s wife Alice and his mother Mittie died in the same New York house within hours of each other. Alice had given birth two days before. He wrote a cross in his diary and under it, “The light has gone out of my life,” and then he came back out here. He returned on June 9, 1884, and started the Elkhorn Ranch about thirty-five miles north of Medora, on a bottom where two elk antlers had been found locked together.
What he mostly did at the Elkhorn was work cattle badly and write well. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman came out in 1885 and Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail in 1888, and eastern readers could not get enough of them. The Dakota that most Americans of that generation imagined was substantially a Dakota that Roosevelt described to them.
The Winter of 1886–87
The summer of 1886 was hot and dry and the range was badly overstocked, because everybody had read the same optimistic arithmetic about free grass. Then came the winter that plains ranchers still call the Big Die-Up: snow in November that never left, a January blizzard that buried the feed, and temperatures that sat far below zero for weeks. Cattle drifted into fencelines and coulees and died standing. Across the northern plains ranchers lost somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of their herds.
Roosevelt’s outfit was in the middle of it. “I shall never make good my losses,” he told one of his ranch hands. He held an interest in the Dakota cattle until 1898, when he sold the last of it to Sylvane Ferris of Medora, but the ranching life ended that winter for him the way it ended for most people here.
Both men lost their money in the same place at the same time. De Morès left angry and went looking for a fight. Roosevelt left with an argument. He had watched the bison disappear, the elk disappear, the bighorn going, the grass eaten to dirt and then a winter that killed what was standing on it, and he never stopped citing it. As president from 1901 to 1909 he put roughly 230 million acres under federal protection — five national parks, eighteen national monuments, 150 national forests, and the first federal bird reservations. “I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” he said later, and he said it more than once.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park
How a Failed Ranch Became a National Park
Roosevelt died in January 1919, and North Dakota started arguing about a memorial to him almost immediately. Nothing happened for sixteen years. In 1935 the land here was made the Roosevelt Recreation Demonstration Area, part of a Depression program that bought up worn-out farm and ranch ground and rebuilt it; Civilian Conservation Corps crews did much of the early work, and some of their stonework is still standing in the North Unit.
In 1946 it became the Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge. In 1947 Congress made the South Unit the Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park, which is the only National Memorial Park the country has ever had. The North Unit was added in 1948 and the Elkhorn Ranch Unit later. It did not become a national park until November 10, 1978 — the same day, and by the same act, that Badlands National Park in South Dakota got its own promotion. Today the three units total 70,446 acres.
What the Badlands Are Made Of
The rock here is Paleocene, roughly fifty-five to sixty million years old, and it was laid down when this was a hot swampy floodplain draining the rising Rocky Mountains. There are two formations. The lower one, Bullion Creek, is yellowish sandstone, siltstone and mudstone — the pale bands. Above it sits the Sentinel Butte formation, grayer and browner, with beds of volcanic ash and bentonite that blew in from eruptions far to the west. All of it is soft. You can dig most of it with your hands.
The dark seams are lignite, which is brown coal — the buried peat of those swamps, never cooked hard enough to become anything better. Lignite catches fire. Lightning will do it, and so will its own slow oxidation where air reaches an exposed seam, and once lit it can burn underground for years or decades. Where a seam burns it bakes the clay above it into a hard red-orange brick. Locally that is called scoria; geologists call it clinker, since true scoria is volcanic. Those rust-colored caprocks and bands are where the ground was on fire. North Dakota still mines lignite by the millions of tons a year, which is the same coal, from the same formations, a little further east.
The badlands themselves are young. The Little Missouri used to run north to Hudson Bay until a glacier shoved it aside and sent it east to the Missouri instead, a much steeper route, and it has been cutting down through this soft rock ever since. The whole landscape is the river’s spoil.
Cannonball Concretions
These are the oddest thing in the park. Mineral-rich groundwater seeping down through the porous sand finds a nucleus — a shell fragment, a bit of wood, a pocket of different chemistry — and cements the sand grains around it, layer on layer, the way a pearl grows. The result is a sphere of hard rock sitting inside soft rock. Then the river and the rain take the soft rock away, and the spheres are left standing on pedestals, or rolled loose down the slope. Some are the size of a grapefruit and some are bigger than a truck tire. The North Unit has a signed Cannonball Concretion Pullout where a whole hillside of them is coming out at once.
The Little Missouri River
The Little Missouri rises in northeastern Wyoming, clips the corners of Montana and South Dakota, and swings north and then east across North Dakota to meet the Missouri at Lake Sakakawea. It runs through all three units of the park. It is not a big river by any measure, and in a dry month you can walk across it, which is exactly the point: everything you are looking at was carved by that.
The South Unit
The South Unit starts at the edge of Medora, which makes it one of the easiest national parks in the country to get into — you can be at the entrance station five minutes after leaving the campground. The scenic drive loops up onto the prairie, along the rim, and back down into the breaks, with prairie dog towns and pullouts most of the way.
The Wild Horses
When the park fenced its boundary in the 1950s, a number of local ranch horses ended up on the inside. For the next twenty years the Park Service treated them as trespass livestock and tried repeatedly to get rid of them. Policy changed in the 1970s, and the horses were kept deliberately, as a living piece of the open-range ranching era the park commemorates. They are one of very few free-roaming horse herds anywhere in the National Park System, and the only one in the northern plains.
They have been contested the entire time and they still are. In the winter of 2021 the park began work on a Livestock Plan and Environmental Assessment covering both the horses and the small longhorn herd in the North Unit. The draft released in the autumn of 2023 included alternatives that would have removed the horses from the park entirely. The reaction was enormous — tens of thousands of public comments, opposition from the governor, and bills and letters from North Dakota’s congressional delegation. On April 25, 2024, the park announced that it was terminating the Livestock Plan and the Environmental Assessment, and said the information gathered would inform future management. The horses stayed. There is still no replacement plan.
Mid-May is foaling season, and that is the single best argument for coming when we did. Several bands had new foals with them, close enough to the road that a long lens was more than enough. They are wild in the legal sense and in every practical sense, and the park asks for a hundred feet of distance, which is not a lot to give them.
Pasque Flowers
The pasque flower is the first thing to bloom out here, often while there is still snow in the draws, and by June it is gone. It is a buttercup, not a crocus, despite being called the prairie crocus almost everywhere on the northern plains. The whole plant is covered in fine hairs that trap a layer of warm air against it, and the cup-shaped flower tracks the sun across the sky and focuses the heat into its own center, which is warm enough to matter to an early insect looking for somewhere to sit. It is also, as it happens, the state flower of South Dakota, which we had just driven out of.
Prairie Dogs and Magpies
The black-tailed prairie dog towns are impossible to miss and they are the busiest thing in the park. The burrows are what make them matter: burrowing owls nest in abandoned holes, and so do rattlesnakes, cottontails and a long list of insects, and the black-footed ferret — which very nearly went extinct — eats almost nothing else. We photographed burrowing owls in a prairie dog town in Badlands National Park, which is the same relationship in a different state.
The black-billed magpie is the other constant. It is a corvid, as smart as a crow, and that tail is more than half its total length. Magpies follow big grazing animals for the insects they stir up and for whatever dies, which is why you see them around the bison and around the parking lots in roughly equal numbers.
The North Unit
The North Unit is about an hour’s drive north of the South Unit, up U.S. 85 toward Watford City, and it is a different experience for one simple reason: almost nobody goes. The scenic drive runs fourteen miles out to the Oxbow Overlook and back, and when we were there half of it was still gated and would not open until Memorial Day. Crews were working on the road. The formations in the North Unit are taller and more dramatic than in the South, and the CCC stonework at the River Bend Overlook is worth the stop on its own.
The wildlife is much the same as the South Unit and easier to see for the lack of traffic. The grouse is a female sharp-tailed grouse. The males of this species gather on traditional display grounds called leks in April and May, stamp their feet fast enough to blur, spread their tails, inflate purple air sacs on their necks and turn in circles; the females walk through the whole performance looking unimpressed and then choose. Most of the mating on a lek goes to a very small number of males.
The deer are mule deer, which you can tell from the ears and from the way they move — a mule deer bounds with all four feet hitting at once, a gait called stotting, while a whitetail runs flat and fast with the tail up. The turkey is a wild turkey, which is not native this far north and was introduced to North Dakota as a game bird. The young bison at the waterhole was one of a long line of them coming down to drink.
Staying in Medora in Mid-May
Medora is almost entirely a tourist town — hotels, shops, bars and restaurants along a few short blocks, plus the Medora Musical amphitheater up on the hill. In mid-May maybe half of it was open. Most businesses wait for Memorial Day, and the Musical does not start until June. If you want the town at full volume you have to come later. We were happy to have the park mostly to ourselves instead.
Boots RV Campground
Boots had 50-amp service, good water pressure, sewer and wifi fast enough to stream. There is no office, no check-in, no showers and no amenities of any kind, and the price reflected it. That suited us. The real perk was being allowed to wash the truck and the trailer, which happens about every three months on the road and always feels like a holiday.
A Red Fox in Camp
A red fox came through the campground one evening and stood there looking at us. It was the first one either of us had seen outside a zoo. The red fox is the most widely distributed wild carnivore on earth, found across most of the northern hemisphere and introduced to Australia, and out here it lives in the awkward position of being smaller than the coyote. Coyotes kill foxes, so red foxes in open country tend to hang close to buildings, campgrounds and towns where coyotes are less willing to go. A fox that seems oddly comfortable near people is usually a fox that has done the math. Mid-May is also when the kits are coming above ground, and a vixen with a den nearby will be hunting hard.
Wind, Rain and a Rainbow
We had a night of thirty-mile-an-hour wind with gusts to sixty and rain coming sideways, which is an ordinary spring evening on this part of the plains and an unpleasant one in a trailer. It ended with a full rainbow that was gone before the wide-angle lens could come out of the bag. Rainbows are always a forty-two-degree circle centered on the point directly opposite the sun, which means a low sun makes a tall, wide bow — and a tall, wide bow is exactly the one you cannot fit in the lens that happens to be on the camera.
The Blood Moon
There was a total lunar eclipse on the night of May 15, 2022, and I was able to capture it. The moon does not go dark in totality because Earth’s atmosphere bends a little sunlight around the planet and into the shadow; the blue wavelengths scatter out along that long slanting path and the red ones make it through. What is landing on the moon in that photograph is the combined light of every sunrise and sunset happening on Earth at that moment, refracted onto a rock a quarter million miles away.
We were surprised how quickly the moon came up and entered the shadow, and then how long totality seemed to last once it was there — and that second part was not an illusion. Totality ran eighty-four minutes and fifty-three seconds, the longest total lunar eclipse visible from nearly all of North America since August 1989. The moon was also a day and a half short of perigee, which is why the newspapers were calling it a super flower blood moon and why it looked a little larger than it had any right to.
Boots Bar and Grill
Owned by the same people as the campground, and a short walk from the sites. The food and the wine were good and the staff were friendly, which in a town where half the doors were still locked counted for a lot.
Planning a Visit to Medora and Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Mid-May is a trade. You give up about half the town, part of the North Unit road, and reliable footing — mud was the single biggest problem we had, and crews were still clearing roads. You get foals, pasque flowers, green grass, animals close to the road, cool temperatures and almost no other cars. We would take that trade again.
Painted Canyon. There is a visitor center and overlook right off Interstate 94 at exit 32, about seven miles east of Medora, and it is the single best five minutes you can spend here. We stopped. Even travelers who have no intention of entering the park should pull off there; the canyon opens up right below the parking lot.
Three units, not two. The South Unit is at Medora. The North Unit is about an hour north near Watford City and has its own entrance and fee station. The Elkhorn Ranch Unit sits between them at the end of gravel roads, and there is nothing built there — just the foundation stones of Roosevelt’s ranch house on a river bottom. We did not get to it this trip. Check road conditions with the park before you try, especially after rain.
Fees and passes. The park charges a standard entrance fee per vehicle, good for seven days and covering all units, and the America the Beautiful annual pass is accepted. If you are doing a run of western parks the annual pass pays for itself very quickly.
Dark skies. There is almost no light anywhere out here, which is why the eclipse photograph worked from a campground rather than a summit. If you are carrying a camera, check what the moon is doing before you come.
In town. The Chateau de Morès State Historic Site and the chimney of the packing plant are both worth an hour, and they make the park make a great deal more sense. The Medora Musical runs summers only. Fuel up in Medora or Dickinson; there is not much between here and anywhere.
Where this fits. Medora is an easy stop between the Black Hills and Montana, and most people give it a night. Give it three. The North Unit alone is a full day by the time you drive up, drive the road twice and drive back.
Medora is named for a woman who spent three summers here and never came back. The park is named for a man who lost most of what he put into this country and then spent the rest of his life arguing that places like it should be kept. The horses are still being argued over. The coal is still burning underground. It is a very small town with a great deal going on underneath it.
Next Stop
From Medora we turned back south and east into the northern Black Hills and Spearfish, South Dakota — limestone canyon, cold water and a fish hatchery that stocked half the region.
