 My name is John Brudwig, and I'm the director of the Theodore Roosevelt Honors Leadership Program here at Dickinson State. I'm also co-chair of the planning committee for this year's symposium. We have a wonderful lineup for you, nationally acclaimed scholars, expert panelists with diverse viewpoints in the areas of conservation. We're so pleased that you are here with us tonight, and we want to get this party started. Fifty years ago, Dickinson State University hosted the centennial celebration of Theodore Roosevelt's birth. Fifty years in the future, today, we are hosting a symposium to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt's birth. He has been part of this area for a long time, and people who grew up here take great pride in the connections with Theodore Roosevelt to this area. So it is fitting tonight to welcome back to kickstart this symposium, the 26th President of the United States, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt. I don't know about you, but I feel as fit as a bull moose. I feel as strong as a hickory nut. And if it were not so late in the evening, and if you did not have pressing business to attend to, I would urge us all to adjourn and hike to Bellefield. Yes, I come tonight not to speak the doctrine of ignoble ease, but rather of the strenuous life. Now, may I digress for just a moment? I have been told that the planners of this event have become a little alarmed about a snow storm that may be coming. And that events on Saturday, which were originally planned for the National Park, have been moved inside a cafe. May I speak freely? I regard you as sissies. If you do not like wind and snow, you should not live in a place as wild and rugged as this. Let me tell you that when I was here, we suffered all that nature could give us. We did not always enjoy it, but we took it in a manly fashion. In my autobiography, which I wrote in 1913, I addressed a long paragraph to the time I spent here in Dakota. Do you know what I said? I want you to listen. I said it was still the wild west in those days. The west of Owen Wister's stories and Frederick Remington's drawings. It was the west of the wild Indian and the buffalo hunter and the soldier and the cow puncher. We led a free and hearty life with horse and rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun when the wide plains wavered and shimmered in the heat. And we knew the freezing misery of riding nightguard around the cattle during the late fall roundup in the soft springtime. The stars shone glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep. And in the winter, we rode through blinding blizzards in which the driven snow dust burnt our faces. There were, to be sure, monotonous times when we walked the beef cattle and the trail herds hour after hour at the slowest of paces. But there were minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampede or drove the cattle through rivers treacherous with quicksand or brimmed with running ice. We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst. And we saw men die as they worked amongst the horses and cattle or fought in evil feuds with one another. But for all of this we felt the beat of hearty life in our veins and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living. I want to say to you, apropos of your Saturday retreat, shame on you. You must not shrink back from the struggle of the world. All great nations have been warring nations and all great men have a little of the wolf in them. I urge you to get back in touch with the wolf. Now, I want to speak very briefly about something that occurred in my second term as president. As you know, I was an accidental president because of the assassination of William McKinley. But in 1904, I was re-elected in my own right by the largest majority in the history of the electoral college and the largest plurality up till that time in American history. In 1908, as I began my last year of the presidency, I called the first ever National Governors Conference. Think of that, there had never been a National Governors Conference in the history of this republic. I called the first one ever for May 13 through 15, 1908 and the subject was conservation. More than 330 people attended. All nine justices of the Supreme Court, 41 of the 46 governors of this country. Congressmen and senators, and may I just digress to say it would be so much easier to govern this country without Congress. But that's another question for another time. Scientists, foresters, range management experts, foreign diplomats, more than 300 of the most extraordinary leaders in this country gathered in the east room of the White House for the first ever National Governors Conference. And I gave a 50-minute address, a short one, and here is essentially what I said. The United States has become the greatest country on earth for two reasons. The quality of our character and the great abundance of our natural resources by consuming our lead and copper and timber and water in a runaway way we have risen from our small agrarian beginnings to become the most extraordinary industrial nation on earth. It has been a price worth paying for our place in the world's arena. But now, as the 20th century begins, we begin to see depletion of those great resources, lead, copper, iron, coal, even oil. And we must begin to wonder if we can sustain our national progress and enterprise in the face of such depletion. We must find new coal seams and new beds of gold and copper and iron, but those are, in some respects, finite resources. We are fortunate to have two non-finite resources, our timber supply and our water. And I have watched with deep chagrin the drawing down of our great national forests. I have watched the fouling of some of our waters. And I urged these governors and all of the others who were there to think more seriously about conservation. I said, I have said this before, but conservation is the most important issue in America today with one exception, the moral fiber of our people. We must get serious about this. Now let me, as I close, just list a few of my achievements as the 26th president of the United States. When I became president, there were five national parks. I doubled that number to ten. And one of those new national parks was right here in my beloved North Dakota. It wasn't the one west of here, it was Sully's Hill up near Devil's Lake. It's since been demoted. Five parks I inherited, I doubled the number to ten, and more than that I brought scientific management to the parks that we had and helped to prevent the commercial exploitation of Yosemite and Yellowstone and others. I wanted them to be preserves where man can be raw and can have the experience of Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone even in the 20th century. I added 150 million acres to the national forest, much of it by executive order. I signed the National Antiquities Act and I designated the first 18 national monuments including my beloved Devil's Tower in Wyoming. I signed the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902 to make the desert bloom and I designated the first 28 of those projects, one of them up near your Williston. But here is something I did all by myself. I am a great lover of birds and I was greatly disappointed to learn that hat hunters, feather collectors, were depleting some of the best birds in the continent including the egrets and the pelicans to adorn ladies hats. What a frivolous use of a pelican. I learned of an island in the Indian River in Florida, Pelican Island, that was famous for its egrets and pelicans and they were about to be snuffed out by these game butchers. And so I called in my Attorney General Philander Knox and I said to him, is there any law on the books of this country that would enable me to designate a federal bird sanctuary? Do you know what he said? No, sir. I said, let me ask a more interesting question. Is there any law in our federal code that would prevent me from naming a federal bird sanctuary? He said, no sir, there is not. I said, I do declare it. And by executive order alone, I named the first of our federal bird sanctuaries, now in your time called National Wildlife Refuges. And before I left the presidency in 1909, I designated 50 more. Two of them here in Dakota, Chase Lake and Stump Lake in short. During my seven years and 171 days as the President of the United States, I set aside 230 million acres of our national domain to protect it in one way or another against adverse economic development and cruel extraction. 230 million acres, that's half the size of Mr. Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase. No president can meet that record. But arguably the most important thing of all was this governor's conference because it brought the nation's leaders together and for the first time the entire nation began to talk systematically about conservation of our resources, wise, sustained scientific use. It led to a national conservation commission led by my friend Gifford Pinshow. And I believe that it had a longer impact than almost anything I did in the course of my presidency. Now, I close by reminding you of the speech I gave right here in Dickinson on the 4th of July, 1886. Do you know that I gave the first ever 4th of July oration here? I was invited by Dr. Victor Hugo Stickney after whose child this building is named to come here to give a 4th of July speech. And I did it. And here's what I said. It comes directly to the point. I said, like all Americans, I like big things. Big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields and railroads and herds of cattle too, big steveships and factories and everything else. But with the bigness of this continent, its great rivers like the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Missouri, its stupendous plains here in Dakota, its mountain ranges, the resource base that we uniquely have in the world, this national bigness of America calls on us for a bigness in the American character. If we do not create a national society with a bigness of soul as big as those mountains and rivers and plains, then we will have squandered the greatest birthright ever given to man in the history of this planet. Do you understand? America is exceptionalist because we have advantages that no other nation has ever had. We have Daniel Boone. And we have the Rocky Mountains. And we therefore must rise to a higher claim of civilization. And it all begins with conservation. Now, let me introduce the president of this university, Dr. Richard McCallum. God bless you.