 Good morning everyone. Good morning and welcome to the first full day of the sixth annual Theodore Roosevelt Symposium here on the campus of Dickinson State University. We are very glad that you're here. I want to just make a couple of announcements before I introduce our president, Mr. Costin, but before that I want to read a letter from Senator Kent Conrad. I want to acknowledge that the mayor of Dickinson, Dennis Johnson, is with us this morning. He will not be speaking this morning, but you will hear him later this afternoon at the statue dedication on the the lawn of the Stark County Courthouse. We also have students here, high school students from several surrounding communities, and I want to particularly welcome you and thank you for coming and joining us. That's really important to us. Students from Beech, North Dakota, from South Hart, from Richardson, and from Hebron, thank you for being here. I know you can't stay for all of this, but we have an exciting special program for you in other spaces on the university campus, and we all know that you'll have to get up at some point and leave, so thank you for being here, and I hope that this is an important stimulation to you and that when you think of the college you might attend that you consider Dickinson State University. This is the sort of thing that we do here and we're glad you're in our in our presence. Let me quickly read this letter from Senator Kent Conrad. He so wanted to be here. He called me last week and said that he was intending to come, but pressing legislative business concerning agriculture in Washington, D.C. kept him away, but he sent the following letter, October 28th, 2011. Greetings to the members of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, the Roosevelt family, and our guests from across the nation. Welcome to North Dakota. This is Dickinson State University's sixth annual TR symposium, and the Theodore Roosevelt Association's 92nd annual meeting. Each of your organizations are contributing to a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the tremendous legacy of one of our most remarkable presidents. This legacy will also live on through the creative efforts of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. The Center has already created tremendous excitement and enthusiasm around this annual symposium. Your work to assemble Roosevelt's documents into a free and searchable on-live archive is an important contribution to our nation and its great tradition of presidential libraries. I understand that the launch of the digital library is scheduled very soon and I congratulate you on reaching this significant milestone. To everyone assembled for this symposium, I am pleased to have you visit and I hope that as you travel through Dickinson, Madora, and the Little Missouri River Badlands, you experience a taste of what inspired and transformed Theodore Roosevelt during his time here. I extend my best wishes for a successful symposium and annual meeting. Sincerely, Kent Conrad, United States Senate. So thank you, Senator Conrad. Before I invite D.C. Costin, our president up, I just want you to look around at these photographs. These are from our collection. Thanks to our relationship, our partnership with the Library of Congress and Harvard, I hope you'll go up and study them, and particularly, look at the high resolution. We're trying to digitize the Roosevelt papers with state-of-the-art technology and at the highest resolutions that are currently in use around the United States. We'll, of course, continue to update as technologies change, but of the 165,000-plus documents that we currently have digitized here, we'd selected just a handful for you to take a look at to get a sense of where we're headed. And if you have time for just a little, go over to that four page letter written by Theodore Roosevelt on September 8th, 1883. He wrote it the morning after his arrival in the Badlands on the night of September 7th, 1883. He wrote it to his wife, Alice. It begins, Dear Wifey. And it's his first impression of Western North Dakota. It's his first real impression of the American West. And it's a fascinating document. It was made available to us by our friend Wallace Daley of the Houghton Library at Harvard University. And then these photographs, of course, you see TR in 1903 at Yosemite on that 14,000-mile working vacation that he took in the spring of 1903. And here is Roosevelt in a New York studio, playing the cowboy in 1885. And this photograph, this panorama, which we're immensely proud of, is of the painted canyon scenic overlook just west of Bellefield North Dakota. We wanted to create this ambiance for our discussion of Theodore Roosevelt and the American West. Now, let me invite the president of this institution, DC Costin, to come forward and greet you. We're so glad you're here, President Costin. Good morning. As the train stopped in Little Missouri, Dakota Territory, about 3 a.m. Saturday morning, September 8, 1883, a somewhat frail, Harvard-educated, almost 25-year-old young man from the Eastern United States disembarked. He had come to shoot a buffalo. Now, I suspect that Theodore Roosevelt, having come to shoot a buffalo, really had no sense and no idea that this was the start of a set of adventures that would truly transform his life and ultimately have profound effects on the history of our nation, ultimately including having his visage literally carved in a stone, in stone about 275 miles south of here. Over the next several years in the North Dakota Badlands, as he ranched, hunted, led efforts to organize cattlemen, apprehended thieves, all those adventures, indeed living what he called the strenuous life, Roosevelt physically became the robust person we often see depicted. He also developed the confidence in himself that coupled with his education and formidable intellect, forced a leader who was bold, daring, and fearless, whether leading troops into battle, seeing through the completion of a canal in the malaria-infested isthmus that dramatically changed world commerce or any of his other accomplishments that you know so well. I'm reminded of something I learned from my high school mathematics teacher, Mr. Harry Swofford. Mr. Swofford at one time talked to us that there are two kinds of scents. There's book scents and there's horse scents and neither is of much value without a good dose of the other. I rather imagine that Roosevelt came with an incredible dose of book scents to North Dakota, but in a real sense and in a real way he got a heck of a dose of horse scents while he was here and that helped forge who he became. During this symposium you will be learning from a slate of distinguished scholars and authors much more about those times that Roosevelt spent in western North Dakota and their impacts on his life and indeed what it ultimately meant for our nation. Theodore Roosevelt's heritage is felt every day at Dickinson State University through the Theodore Roosevelt Center, through the honors leadership program here that is called the TR Scholars Program and in so many other ways. During coffee breaks and as you go to lunch today down at the Student Center I invite you to go to the left as you leave here and walk down to the concourse that's between this building and the Stockson Library. There is a display of the clues that were prepared for this week's Theodore Roosevelt scavenger hunt at Dickinson State University to introduce our students to the wonderful set of treasures that there are at this institution that celebrate Roosevelt. I think you will be amazed at how many things are there and it depicts the artwork, the programs and other things that are here. Dickinson State drawing on Roosevelt's legacy has been bold and daring as he was in the creation of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. What a dream for what many view as a small regional school sitting way out on the prairie to undertake digitizing and cataloging the writings, papers, documents, photographs of our nation's 26th president with the intent to make these works widely available both for scholars and for those whose avocational interests lead them to want to know more about Roosevelt. How wonderful it is that Harvard University, the Library of Congress and the U.S. Park Service have become partners with Dickinson State in this venture. Later today you will hear about the great progress to date on this project and get a preview of the treasures that are forthcoming. Another daring Dickinson State dream to have an endowed chair here dedicated to studies about Theodore Roosevelt. Supported initially through a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dickinson State and the Dickinson State University Foundation are well on the way to securing the funding necessary to establish this chair and to being in position to recruit a renowned scholar for this role. Again you will hear more about this during the symposium. And yet another bold initiative to host a symposium like this in Dickinson, North Dakota. Thanks to all of you for accepting Dickinson State's invitation to be here. We are especially honored that the Theodore Roosevelt Association accepted the invitation to hold its 92nd annual meeting in conjunction with this symposium. Thank you President Roosevelt has a little ring to it doesn't it. President Tweed Roosevelt of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and Executive Director Terry Brown for accepting the invitation and coming here. With the association we look forward to us to exploring additional shared goals and initiatives during these days together and indeed in the months and years ahead. I hope that you are taking in the full spectrum of events in the next few days. The presentations here, the unveiling of the Roosevelt statue this afternoon at the Stark County Courthouse, the symphony this evening, the trips to Medora and the Badlands. Indeed you're getting a preview here, getting a feel for the breathtaking beauty and ruggedness of that land will deepen your understanding of how this region shaped Roosevelt's life. By being here may your life be touched in the ways that Roosevelt's was and indeed we hope to touch the lives of students at Dickinson State every day. I want to say a special thanks to two people who have been tireless in organizing this program on your behalf. One is Clay Jenkinson who is the Roosevelt scholar in residence at Dickinson State. Clay, thank you for your leadership and what you have brought here and in all the things that you do and to Sharon Kilzer who's the project director for the Theodore Roosevelt Center. They have brought great passion and care in preparing for you a time that is that will be most enjoyable as well as a deep time of learning. Now I could go on and on however it's the group of speakers after me from whom you've come to learn. Welcome to Dickinson and to Dickinson State University where the West begins. Thank you. Thank you so much Dr. Costin we're so glad you're here with us and I just want to echo something you said. We appreciate of course Sharon and I appreciate your thanks but this is such a labor of love. Imagine Dickinson State University creating an initiative to digitize all of Roosevelt's papers and our partners are institutions infinitely more well-known and distinguished than this one. The National Park Service is a full partner, Harvard University is a full partner, the Library of Congress and others and in some limited little way we are going to be able to do something that not any one of those great institutions can do because we're going to have all of Harvard's TR papers but also the National Park Service and the Library of Congress and we're going to have all the Library of Congress Roosevelt related papers but also Harvard and so we're going to create a comprehensivity that will be matched nowhere else. The foundation of it of course is these great wonderfully curated and conserved collections at other institutions but we will be electronically knitting them together in a way that has never previously been possible. So just to take a single example if Roosevelt wrote 500 letters to Henry Cabot Lodge and Lodge wrote 600 back to Roosevelt they may be spread over five repositories. We can re-nip them electronically so that there is a continuous sequencing of something that a scholar previously would have had to go to four or five institutions to a mass and you'll be able to search this collection 24 hours a day whether you're in Saratoga, New York or Sri Lanka free with a search engine. It's not just an amazing achievement it's a revolution and we are not the founders of that revolution but we're thoroughly glad to be one small part of the digitization of American culture so believe me it's hard work but it is amazingly satisfying to be part of this project and you know if Roosevelt had a primary home on Long Island his secondary home certainly was the Badlands of North Dakota and so what better place to put the digital archive of Theodore Roosevelt then in the Badlands that he so loved so thank you. I thought last night was an outstanding beginning to our symposium Dr. West gave one of the most remarkable talks I've ever heard it was kind of troubling I had a hard time sleeping thinking about some of the things that he said it didn't put our hero in the best possible light as a young man some of Roosevelt's early intellectual associations were thoroughly conventional of the zeitgeist of his era he overcame most of them and he became a serious and nuanced mature thinker and policymaker but I thought it was an extraordinary way of setting the table and what was so remarkable for me you don't know of course what people are going to say until they say it but Dr. West never fails to be amazing but what I was hearing was a setup for Roger's talk and a setup for Ted White's talk and a setup for Patricia Limerick's talk and Simon Cordary's like all of the talks were sort of implied or being already teased out and the amazing things that he was saying and although we may disagree with some of what Dr. West concluded he set the table in just the way you want in a keynote.