 When we presented our proposal to the Theodore Roosevelt Association to host them, we wanted to do, to host you. We wanted to do something that involved the American West of course, why come out into the heart of that West and not talk about it, but we wanted to make sure that we weren't just rehashing the same old story that everyone has heard a thousand times about Roosevelt and the Badlands. And so, fortunately, Roger's book came out just about this time and so it presents this opportunity to sort of rethink, revisit, decide what the new evidence suggests to us and so on. So, we assembled this panel, let me just quickly introduce the people we have here. This is Doug Ellison. Doug Ellison is the bookseller from the Western Edge Bookstore in Medora. If you're going out there, you'll have a chance to see it. It's one of the great independent bookstores in the American West and it happens to be in the little village of Medora. He's also the mayor of Medora and a historian and author, so he wears literally many hats and in the documentary film you'll see tomorrow morning about the Hagridorn film made in 1919, he's also a talking head wearing a beautiful black cowboy hat. So welcome, Doug Ellison, we're glad you're here. I assume Medora's not having a crime spree in your absence. I haven't heard of it. And this is Valerie Naylor who is the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. She has very strong roots in North Dakota and since 1999 has been the superintendent out at this most extraordinary of Roosevelt related national park, so Valerie, we're glad you're here. Doug, let's start with you. You heard Roger D. Sylvester, you had a chance to read the book. I guess what I'm asking you is what do we know, what don't we know, what are we learning that from the release of new documents and new material, where are Roosevelt's studies and the Badlands at the moment? Oh, it is on. Yes. Okay. Well as Clay indicated, thank you all by the way, as Clay indicated, Roger's book is very timely. I think before Roger's book came out, Hagridorn was kind of the default story of Roosevelt and the Badlands and as I heard Roger's saying, I was kind of in and out the back, so I didn't hear all of Roger's talk unfortunately, but Hagridorn has some problems in his storytelling. His research, as you noted, his notes are very good, very inclusive. He did spend time out here, he interviewed people who knew and worked with Roosevelt, so he had the potential to tell a great story, but as was said, he got a little carried away and made Roosevelt a little too godlike, I think. Roger I think has rectified that with your research and your book. It's a much more balanced, truthful account and it's a new standard, I think. You cannot ignore Hagridorn obviously, but I think Roger has put forth a new standard, a new springboard that future writers on Roosevelt and the Badlands will start from. There's always new information, new material, at least I found that when I do research. There's always new things turning up and this project that DSU is doing is, I mean, that's still in progress, right? So who knows what's going to turn up yet from the archives, but again, it's a new standard, a new springboard to study and interpret Roosevelt's life out here in the Badlands. And before I turn to Valerie, I just want again to point to the letter on the left, on my left, your right, Roger, your footnotes are an extraordinary resource in addition to the text itself, but at some point you happened into the Houghton Library and found those 16 letters between TR and his first wife Alice and they've never been published before so far as I know. They've never really even been used in other people's works on Theodore Roosevelt. When I saw them, the hair stood up on my arms, I was so thrilled, it's like discovering a mother load of something that you always wished were there and had never seen. You must have had a thrill when you found those. Yeah, I really did because I looked at these, now I'm not, as I said, I'm not an historian and I can't even really claim to be a Roosevelt scholar in the sense of knowing his whole life. I focused on that ranching years, but when I saw these 16 letters, I thought I haven't seen these anywhere. There wasn't anything there I could recall being quoted and I think I would have known, at least have recognized or sensed that I had seen these before and I did not. And so I thought, I think these are a new addition to the collection. So I thought, well, I think I fell into something really wonderful here. And I was always interested in the emotional story with Roosevelt. My publisher initially wanted me to focus on how his experiences in the Badlands fed into his conservation work later on. And I think they wanted that because as a professional conservationist it makes it more marketable. But I was always much more interested in his personal story here and this tragedy with his wife. So I find these letters and they're just packed with emotion. So I typed them out because Houghton has kind of a complicated system for photocopying things. And I put them into my laptop and I wanted to quote from them quite extensively. And the original draft on my book, which was probably almost twice as long as the book itself, because I always write long, I used those letters extensively, but then I realized there was kind of a repetition to them. But they really showed me, so I did use them in the book, but I didn't use them as much as I had it first intended. But it was just wonderful to get this new material. And it ties into the question on Hagedorn because Hagedorn himself, and I mentioned this on I think the prologue to my book, said later in the 1950s that when he wrote his book he didn't know the real story of Roosevelt and the Badlands. He didn't know that it was based on this tragedy involving Roosevelt's first wife. He didn't know that Roosevelt came west as an emotionally damaged person and that the Badlands was his avenue to recovery. And he said that was really the true story of Roosevelt and the Badlands. And so these letters fed into that, and that was also what I really wanted to deal with. So it was a great benefit. I think I just heard you say your original manuscript was half again at least as long. Yeah, I think my final manuscript was about 450 pages. And I think the original draft was about 750. And a lot of that mature, like there's a woman who's photo you see over here, Margaret Roberts, she fascinated me in her life. And it says on the little card there that her husband wrote off one day and never came back, which makes it sound like he abandoned her, but he didn't. He wrote off with something like a couple thousand dollars in his pocket. And I think he was going to go and invest it in cattle or something. And he never came back. And the thought was that he was probably held up and murdered for that money and she was left alone raising three children. And I had some wonderful detailed material. I knew the type of clothes she wore to dress to at local dances and so on. And I really was fascinated by her. So I had a lot of information under in the original draft of the book. But I realized it was intrusive, so I took it out. But it's probably on my website under a section on women in the West. I don't want to sound selfish, but would you be willing to deposit that original manuscript with us? I must have so many drafts of this, but yeah, I'd be happy to do that. Great, we'll talk later. This is great. Valerie Naylor, you're the superintendent of the park. You have a very mixed set of responsibilities, not primarily the historical reputation of Roosevelt, but it's in there somewhere. The park, as you know, began as a national memorial park to Roosevelt in 1947. Where do you think Roosevelt's studies are and where do you think they're headed? Well, I think it's great, if I may say, that Roger's book came out. I am a great fan of that book because it is a narrative account that is as accurate as it can be, in my opinion, and is well documented in research. And it's also very to the point and direct and very well written. And I'm not a historian at all. I'm a biologist and Roger also is a biologist, and maybe that's why I like the book because it's written with that type of scientific accuracy, which, as I think most of us agree, Herman Haggadorn's book was not. Before I move on, tell us a little bit about the new interpretive film that you have commissioned for your park. Yeah, we've just finished a new film. In fact, we haven't even approved it yet. It's just in the very final cut. And so we are going to be showing that on Saturday to anyone who has time from this group after the field trips. And we're very excited about that. There's a long version and a short version, and we would love to give you the sneak preview of the long version tomorrow in the Visitor Center. Nobody has even seen this particular version, including me. Because we just got it yesterday. So I've seen many versions, but the grand premiere will be a little bit later in the fall, but this will be the sneak preview tomorrow. So you'll be the first if you want to see it. So a wonderful account of the badlands and the importance of the National Park using Roosevelt's words. So I think you'll really like it. It's not a scheduled event for tomorrow, but it's an option for those who aren't going out to the Elkhorn. Yes, and I hope even those that are doing the other field trips can have an opportunity to see this film because it's beautiful. It's high definition, the original score narrated by Terry Tempest-Williams, so I think you'll like it. Roger, when we talked a couple of weeks ago about this panel, I said, would you be willing to make a list of the things that you have brought into your volume that have either not previously been available or have been scattered and not brought under one cover? Yeah, I actually did. Thank you. Yeah, well, of course, Hagedorn was writing very close to the time that these things happened. So I don't think he had quite the perspective that we would know on the West because so much of it would have been commonplace to him. And one of the things I was trying to do in my book was not just tell Roosevelt's story, but use Roosevelt's story to tell this panorama of the West and to talk about the open range ranching and the final days of the frontier, which really came to an end here in North Dakota. As a teen, I worked on a ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills, and I have a real affinity for that particular lifestyle. And before I went out to the ranch, I actually read Roosevelt's books on ranching to give me some idea of what I might encounter, even though I was going out there 80 years later. And I found that a lot of what he talked about was still true. I also, as I mentioned, was very much into the emotional issues of the story. Because I'm not in the story, and I wasn't looking for the political roles and so on that Roosevelt played. And I play down politics quite a bit in my book because that's pretty much been done to death in the many, many books that have been written about Roosevelt. I read somewhere out there something like 16,000 books on Abraham Lincoln. And Roosevelt is the next most written about president. So it's difficult coming up with something new on him. And I just tried to stay away from the political issues and stick very close. I skirted over them. I would mention them almost in synopsis because I wanted to stick with the badlands and with the emotional issues he was going through, such as his tremendous guilt when he realized he was in love with Edith Carroll and wanted to marry her so soon after his wife had died. And I think that these personal stories really tell us a lot about the individual. I think it tells us a lot about Lincoln to know that he was deep in love with Ann Rutledge, who died young and Lincoln suffered a great loss there. And similarly, I think it tells us something about George Washington that he was quite infatuated with his best friend's wife. And you wonder, well, what does the story of that relationship or semi-relationship have tell us about Washington? And I think the whole tragedy of Roosevelt and the loss of his wife is just really elucidating about the young man that he was and what he turned into. And as I said, I do try to recreate Roosevelt's world. Now there's another book I really liked about his younger years, which was written by Lincoln Lang. I think it was with Roosevelt in the Badlands. And that's a really terrific book because Lincoln Lang, he was an engineer and he wrote a very nice book. He saw Roosevelt as something of an ideal, but he didn't, I don't think, idealize him. And he also talked a lot about the ranch country out here. I think it was a very successful book. But again, he didn't focus as strictly on Roosevelt as I did. So he often went on tangents and talked about his family life and so on. I really think my book in some is the first narrative book since Hagedorn's that is focused on this material, at least as well-documented as this one. And I really, in the process of writing this book, you begin to feel you know these people. There was a man named Hellroaring Bill Jones who used to ride his horse across the railroad bridge out in Medora with a train behind him. And it was just something he did for excitement. He was really kind of a maniac. And there was Bob Roberts who owned the saloon, had a pet bear, and they used to take this bear to the trains when the trains came through town and use it to scare the tourists. And you know, they would have men wrestle with a bear. And you begin to get this feel for that time and you begin to feel almost as if you live there. So when I visited Medora, I felt, you know, I'm looking at thinking, well, there's the trestle or the replacement of the trestle that Bill Jones used to ride across, you know. And I felt like these were almost memories from my own life. And in writing the book, I was trying to recreate that world so that maybe the reader, if I was successful in my writing, would have that same feeling. And so I very much in my book wanted to tell it a good story in a narrative and appealing way that Roosevelt fans would respect for its accuracy and that people who know nothing about Roosevelt might enjoy just because it was such a great story. Just one last question that I'm gonna turn to the audience and see what questions you have for any or all of the panelists here or anything you want to ask about Roosevelt in the Badlands. This is a great opportunity because Doug knows a lot about it. Valerie knows a lot about it. Of course, Roger has just written about it. But in terms of the sources, the foundation sources for any understanding of Roosevelt in the Badlands, we've all been talking about Hagridorn and how he's kind of a mixed blessing, but he nevertheless is central to any understanding of Roosevelt. And especially those notes that he wrote, which are now at the Houghton Library at Harvard, which often tell a somewhat different account of the same incident from the one that's published in the book. But talk a little bit about Packard and the Badlands Cowboy. Yeah, the Badlands Cowboy was a newspaper that the Marquis de Marais started and he hired Packard to edit it. Packard's father was also a newspaper publisher and an editor and I think publisher. And so Packard came from that world. He was college educated. And there's a picture of the newspaper office over there. And it came out weekly and it was just a great resource. It was at the North Cut Historical Society. They had virtually, I think, every issue or at least almost every issue. So I read through all of those, looking for these little details about hunters who had come to town and shot 56 deer or something like this. And it was just those sorts of little details you just don't find anywhere else. Very few books are gonna get down to that level of detail. And it told the story of how Bob Roberts tried to get an Indian in town who was drunk at the time to wrestle with his bears. And the Indian wasn't that drunk. He was no way he was gonna wrestle with his bear. And so those little types of stories you just won't find elsewhere. So Packard put together a beautiful resource. Plus he was a pretty good friend of Roosevelt's because Roosevelt used to stop in at the newspaper offices for political discussions and so on. There was this little coterie of men that I think, I don't know if I came up with this phrase or if I found it somewhere, but that preferred the smell of printer's ink to gunpowder and they would go to the building and talk politics and so on. And Packard was a great gun control advocate. He wrote a lot of editorials saying we've gotta get guns off the planes because people are just killing one another to greater rate. And he cited an example in Texas when the ranchers were finally persuaded to outlaw guns on their, they forbid their hired hands to carry guns and the death rate dropped drastically for a year. And then the ranchers kind of let them go back to carrying guns again and the death rate shot up. No pun intended, but seriously. But Packard, when Roosevelt came to town and Roosevelt had these guns, which you can see. I think you have them at the visitor center, the handguns. We have some rifles and guns. And Packard told him, look, don't carry those guns, don't bring those guns to town because you're gonna encounter people here who are really masterful with a handgun. And as an example, Packard had a local gunman put on a little exhibit in which they threw two tin cans up in the air and this gunman put five holes in each one before they hit the ground. So Roosevelt was persuaded that yes, he didn't wanna have to come up against someone like this and so when he came to town, he would leave his guns at the newspaper office with Packard. And so there are a lot of these little details and Packard must have been a pretty good editor. His papers very witty, his editorials are well worth reading and it was just a great resource for me for just understanding the social milieu of Madora at that time. And of course, T.R. wrote a lot of letters from his Badlands years to Henry Cavett Lodge to his sister, Bami, to Corinne and to his wife, Alice. We are ready, yes, Susan, please speak up. Why here? Yeah, actually my book answers that question, I'm glad to say. I'd hate it if I had to say, I don't know. But Roosevelt gave a speech in New York City. It was a dinner speech and one of the other guests there was a man named Goring. And Goring was a former commandant, naval man in the Civil War. And he had recently gained some fame in New York by being the engineer who brought what they called Cleopatra's Needle, this huge monolithic stone from Egypt and set it up in Central Park. So Roosevelt probably knew who Goring was. And apparently he talked to Goring at this party. And Goring was planning to set up a hunting lodge in Pyramid Park. Little Missouri was actually the town at that time. Midora didn't exist. So there was a town out here on the other side of the river from Midora called Little Missouri. And the locals called it Little Miserie. And Goring bought a bunch of military buildings there. And as they turned that into a hunting lodge. So Roosevelt, meanwhile, his brother had been hunting in India and so on in the previous few years. And Roosevelt had gotten excited with big game hunting. And his brother had also hunted bison in Texas. The Texas bison were all gone by this time, though. So the last of the bison were up here in the northern plains and they were just straggling bands, you know. And Roosevelt talked to Goring and Goring said, well, why don't you go with me and we'll go out and hunt Buffalo out there in Little Missouri and stay at my lodge. And Roosevelt immediately took him up on this. And Goring, for some reason, no one knows why, dropped out of the plan. But Roosevelt stuck with it and he came out here on his own. Now another factor in this was the Northern Pacific Railroad, which had only just recently opened a line. Only a few weeks before Roosevelt came out here, a special train had gone over the track, inaugurating the track. And former president Ulysses Grant was on board and they had flags hanging from the train and the whole thing. So this was a brand new line. So it was both, you know, Roosevelt's interest in hunting bison at the time combined with the fact that this was the last area where you could still find bison, combined with the railroads giving you access to it. And then of course, you know, Goring having this lodge up here. And those factors all just came together. And so that added up to his first Buffalo hunt. So it's just almost fortuitous. And then when he was out here, he had already invested in a cattle ranch in Colorado or in Wyoming. That was, yeah, in Wyoming. That was actually owned by some Harvard fellows he knew. And he put a little money into that. So he already had a precedent for that. So, you know, while he was out here, he started looking into the cattle industry. And so the one thing led to another. And so it was really, you know, he just sort of stumbled into the whole thing, I guess you'd say. I'm gonna ask Doug to say something in a minute, but it goes back to what Elliot West was saying last night. The industrialization of the infrastructure of the American West, the number of places where Roosevelt could literally have gotten a Buffalo at that time was small. The number of places that he could get a Buffalo where a transportation system could deliver him to the doorstep of that Buffalo was very small. And this was it, in a sense. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And when you read Roosevelt, you know, he'll hop on his train and he'll come out here and spend three or four, maybe six weeks here. And then he'll go back to New York and dabble in politics or something or talk to his publisher. And then he comes back out here. And it probably took four or five days to get here because trains in those, they'd made a lot of stops. If I remember right, in my book I mentioned, I think the train from Chicago to San Francisco made something like 200 stops. So it was a slow process. And he had to do a lot of transfers and so on. But still, railroads are relatively new. And I felt like I'm reading this that I'm reading about an 1880s jet setter, that he's just, it must have been, for a fellow born in the 1850s, this must have been just a revelation to suddenly have access to this train and just be able to hop on it and be out in this wilderness area. And a few days later, he's back in New York. And it gave this very modern jet-setty feel to what Roosevelt was doing. Go ahead. If I could just interject some trivia here. This came to mind when Roger was speaking. Five days, five and a half days before Roosevelt stepped off the train at Little Missouri, the current U.S. President Chester Arthur had been in Little Missouri. So that was a busy week for the little stop of Little Missouri. President Arthur had been in Yellowstone National Park and his presidential party came back east on the railroad and actually stopped at Little Missouri and disembarked. There's a newspaper account that President Arthur chatted with Lewis von Hoffman and his son-in-law, the Marquis de Morez, at the depot in Little Missouri and just, that was September 2nd. And on the night of the 7th and 8th, just within a week, a future U.S. President gets off the train at Little Missouri. So just some trivia. And between them, Ulysses asked Grant on the celebration. Apparently Grant was there about that same time. So, and say more about the Cantonmen. Goranj is a former naval commander. He wants to invest in a kind of upper market hunting lodge out in the Badlands. And Doug, where was the Cantonmen? What happened to it? The Cantonment was established in late 1879 to protect the railroad workers as they were grading and building the rails west to protect them against Indian attack. The Indian threat was still real. It was not as severe as it had been a couple of years before that when Custer went through on his way to Little Bighorn and all that. By 1879, most of the tribes had surrendered, but Sitting Bull had not. He was still in exile in Canada. Some of his braves would raid south across the border, even this far south. A couple of male carriers were killed on their route and so on. So, the Cantonment was established, I think in November 1879, abandoned in March of 1883. And it stood just west of where Madora is now. About halfway between Madora and the interstate exit to the west. And as often happened, a small town sprang up beside the army post and between the army post and the Little Missouri River, that's where the town of Little Missouri grew up. And this was all west of the river. Of course, Madora now sits east of the river. But it was never a large post, never had a flashy name. It was called Badlands Contown, under Contown and Badlands, you see it both ways. It didn't have a flashy name. Just a small post with, I think at most, 60 soldiers stationed there. But apparently there were some wild times with the residents of Little Missouri and the soldiers from the Contownment. And the place where Roosevelt spent his first night in the Badlands is on that photograph to my left, your right, the one nearest to Doug and the cameraman. That's the Pyramid Park Hotel, the two-story building there, where he went for the night of seven, eight. It's a little paradox for anyone writing about this because he actually arrived on the morning of the eighth, three a.m. or two a.m., but it's regarded as the seven, eight. And then that same second night he spent at the Maltese Cross original cabin on the Chimney Butte Ranch, to which we'll be going on Sunday. Other questions? Yes, here. What was it all said once that he saw men die by the deaths, and I was just curious if that was the first day and the second day? As I saw men die working among the horses and cattle or fighting in evil feuds with one another. Yeah, I don't know that quote. So it's hard to address that. And I don't doubt that he did, certainly during the Spanish-American War, now out on the ranch, and I'm trying to think of it, anyone. I don't recall any incidents where people died. Does anyone else? How about the stampede that you mentioned? As far, nothing that I read indicated that anyone died in the stampede. Now there was a fellow whose horse died. Apparently he was riding in the night and his horse ran into a tree. And it's because Roosevelt saw him during the night and then later on saw the man walking along carrying his saddle and he found out what it had. But I haven't heard of any violent deaths. Now, keep in mind that this was a violent period. And as I said, 40 times more likely to be murdered in one of these towns than in an eastern city. And it's quite possible that there were killings that just never really made the record because they were frequent enough. And then also you had the Cowboys playing games. The Bob Robert Saloon was right by the train station and the Cowboys would go into the saloon when a train showed up with passengers on it and they would fire off guns in the saloon and then carry a man out as if he'd been shot and taken behind the building and leave him there. He'd go back into the building and they'd do it all over again so that they gave this appearance of constant murders going on. But I haven't read of any actual, any killings. Doug, the line is from the chapter in Cowboyland in his autobiography and he says, we saw men die fighting evil feuds with one other. I'm guessing that probably is a reference to the Luftsemer. Can you quickly set up that? Sure. In June of 1883, a couple of months before Roosevelt arrived, the Marquis de Morres had been involved in his shooting at Little Missouri. The main genesis was a fencing dispute. The Marquis was actually the first landowner in that entire area. Everyone else was on public land. As we all know, Roosevelt never owned any land out there. He was on public land as were most of the ranchers. The Marquis actually bought land, both from the federal government, some from the railroad and proceeded to fence a good deal of it. And some hunters who were out there, Franco Donald was kind of the ringleader, had a couple of partners, Dutch Wonigan, and who's actually on the Hagedorn film and was interviewed by Hagedorn. And Riley Luftse were a couple of his young partners. And they made threats against the Marquis and they cut his fences saying it impeded their hunts and so on. And the Marquis was very new to not only the West, but new to America. And within three months of his arrival in Little Missouri, he and his men were involved in a shootout with O'Donald and Wonigan and Luftse, and Luftse was killed. And to just to quickly summarize, everyone on both sides was arrested. The nearest law was in Mandan, 130 miles east on the Missouri River. Billings County existed in name only. It was unorganized. So they had no lawmen, literally no lawmen out there. So the Morton County Sheriff from Mandan was responsible for Billings County. And anyway, the shootout happened. The sheriff did arrive, arrested everybody on both sides, took him back to Mandan to try and sort things out. The Marquis faced two preliminary hearings. It was released, was not charged. Finally, two years later in 1885, he was indicted for murder and did stand trial for murder and was acquitted. But back to Roosevelt. Roosevelt did mention the shooting a couple of times in his writings. Dutch Wonigan later worked for Roosevelt, which is why he was interviewed by Hagridorn later. So TR was well aware of what had happened out there and knew all the principles and so on. But the things did get a little wild there at times. There's a question here, yes? Go ahead. I heard that there's a quote about Peter Wallace and all the same, a lot of time horse in the bad land, his co-workers, hastened forward quickly. I heard this probably five, six years ago, presidential series on television, also a tape from the color, or in that horseback. How bailed of this is a comment that Peter was supposed to have made. What's the source of hastened forward quickly there? Well, I've seen that story told so many times and in so many sources that I presume it was true. And I think even Lincoln Lang, who was in his teens when Roosevelt first arrived out west, talks about it in his book. And the story is that Roosevelt was out, rounding up cattle, something along his lines, and he yelled to one of his men that this cow or whatever steer was getting away. And he said, hastened forward quickly there. So this became kind of a buzzword and apparently it spread throughout the bad land so that all over the place you would hear cowboys going hastened forward quickly there. And it became this catchphrase like from a Clint Eastwood movie or something. And that has the ring of authenticity to it. Oddly enough, I read this story in so many books that I didn't include it in my book. There's a real problem with Roosevelt that he's been so written about that you hate to just repeat the same stories and sometimes you just have to the shootout and the boat theft story and so on. But I actually left that sort of anecdote out of my book. But I do think it was true. I don't think it was made up. Because that whole idea that this spread throughout the bad lands and became a catchphrase just has just massive reality. If it's not true, it should be. Yeah, it should definitely should be true. Well, go ahead. Oh, we still use it in Medora today, right, Doug? Yes. I think there was said to be a drink in one of the saloons called the hastened forward in honor of this famous incident. And we're going to have to hasten forward here in just four minutes. So other questions? Yes, here. I was just wondering whether you don't... Yeah, there are two personal accounts that Roosevelt had with Indians. One on the Bighorn trip with Bill Merrifield. But I think he'd rather have you tell the story of the one where, oh, near the Kildere Mountains. Right, yeah. There was an incident where Roosevelt was out roaming alone up on the high prairie. He was up out of the bad lands of the... And he came across, I believe, was three Indians, I presume Lakota. And he saw them from a distance and they were coming toward him. So he immediately got off his horse and pulled out his rifle and aimed at them. And he says in his account of this that if you stand your ground at calm and aim a rifle at somebody, they're likely, even though they have a number, you're likely to take it seriously and retreat. So these Indians came a little bit closer and he told them, stay back, stay back. And they said, well, we're good Indians. We have a permit, which is a sad sign of the times that they actually had to have permits to travel off the reservation. And he noticed that one of the Indians was still coming closer and they asked him if he had sugar or tobacco or anything. And he said, he thought that if he let them get close, they might steal his horse or definitely rough him up. So he told them again, stand back, stand back, don't come any closer and he aimed his rifle at them. So they rode away and they were cursing at him in English at the time because he said something about the uttered curses that attested to their facility with English language. And so he felt that he had stood off these potentially hostile Indians. Now later on, when the boat thief incident where some men stole a boat that belonged to Roosevelt and Roosevelt and his two hired hands who were originally from Maine, they built another boat for him and they chased these fellows down and took them to jail. Well, after Roosevelt took the two men to jail and took the train back, his two hired hands from Maine continued floating down the river with a bunch of possessions they had gotten from these boat thieves. And along the way, they passed an Indian village, probably a few hundred Indians. And instead of seeing this as a hostile threat, they thought, well, let's go look at them. And they paddled their boat on over and they got out and they talked to these people and they asked them for sugar. And Bill Sewell, who is one of the hired hands, said, well, we had plenty of sugar with us so we just distributed the sugar to them and all this. It was like a mirror image of Roosevelt's experience with the Indians. And in an earlier incident, the same two men from Maine had visited another Indian village and they'd had buckskin suits made for them by the Indians. And they joked around with the Indians and so on. One of the Indians was making some comment about cutting Bill Sewell's hair, I think it was, and Sewell pretended he was gonna scalp the Indian. And, you know, so it was just this very chummy thing where it's for Roosevelt. And this is why I think he's kind of a self-dramatist. When Roosevelt sees Indian cell, boy, it's this great threat and I have to pull out my rifle. When the other people saw them, they just were like, well, let's go see what they have to tell us. Lincoln Lang in his book says that he was aware of Roosevelt's encounter with the Indians and he thinks Roosevelt misinterpreted the whole situation. He said that their land abutted Indian reservation and they frequently saw Indian people. And he said, whenever we saw them, they were in starving condition. They had old weapons, they couldn't hunt, the game was all gone. And they were just starving people that needed help. And he thought Roosevelt just misinterpreted the whole situation, you know? And Roosevelt, of course, you know, you had the comment yesterday from Elliot West about the nine Indians out of 10 that were probably better off dead and I wouldn't inquire too closely on the 10th. The flip side of this was that Roosevelt, once in the White House, said to a young Indian woman that his one regret was that he himself didn't have any Indian blood, you know? So he was constantly this contradictory person, especially since, on the other hand, he had suggested that it would be useful to interbreed with them, to breed them out of existence. So, you know, I have the impression of Roosevelt as a guy who just said whatever was off the top of his head, you know? That he was just kind of impulsive. Now, we're gonna give you the last word, but let's do one more question. Go ahead. Oh, you mentioned Richard Lange's book a couple of times, and you trust Jack Willis's book one? Yeah, it's a great question. Jack Willis has a reliable source. Yeah, I used Willis's book. I tracked down a copy of it and I used it. And I think he's a little bit risky because, you know, he's the one who described the killing of the mountain goat. And he said it was like, I think it was 400 yards or even more than that, and that, you know, Roosevelt killed it with one shot. Roosevelt says, no, it was 70 yards away and we shot it and we went and got it. And so I thought, well, this Willis doesn't sound too reliable. I also have the sense that Willis is a little self-aggrandizing, you know? He tends to make himself the hero of every story, which also makes him a little risky. I mean, that's just an intuitive sense and I could be wrong. But, and then also, you know, he talks about how when he first met Roosevelt, he looked like a brewer's son, you know? He had these ruby red cheeks and he was wearing a corduroy suit. And Roosevelt had been up there for about a year by then. And he already had his buckskin suit and he was anything but a greenhorn. He'd been hunting all over the place, you know? And I thought, well, that sounds a little fabricated, you know, the whole thing with Willis. So I used Willis very carefully and that's why, you know, I presented his story about the mountain goat and then I said, but there is a whole other version of it, you know? Now, interestingly enough, his grandson contacted me. He'd read my book and he contacted me and he has something like 40 letters that Roosevelt sent to Willis. And he also has some diaries that Willis wrote, which were just invaluable, I would think. And so we were talking about how you get this material published. And when I went through the presidential correspondence with Roosevelt, which I felt was important because he stayed in contact with most of his Madora friends, even when, all through his presidency, there were a lot of letters that he exchanged with Willis. So they were clearly very close friends and Willis oftentimes asked him for financial advice and so on. So they were very close friends but I do think his book has to be handled delicately. I know you're gonna steer those Willis documents to the Theodore Roosevelt Center. Yeah, thank you. Valerie, this is unfair but tomorrow we're gonna be out in your part of the world. The park is part of a much larger 1.1 million acre little Missouri National grasslands. Give us a very, very, very brief administrative history of the park. Well, the park was established in 1947 as Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park. Had a little bit of identity crisis in the early years. People weren't sure whether it was a historic site or a natural park or what. So they made it the only national memorial park in the country and that name was changed in 1978 which is a big deal to some people but to those of us in the National Park Service that didn't make any huge change in our management of the area. It's a beautiful natural area of over 70,000 acres today in three units including the small Elkhorn Ranch unit. As Clay mentioned, it is surrounded by both private land and the little Missouri National grassland. Areas that are being developed for minerals and an alarming rate right now. And so the park becomes sort of islands in the sea of development. So they're beautiful, beautiful park units and I hope you all get a chance to come out and see them if you have not yet. And just quickly, what flora and fauna might we see tomorrow in your park? Well, I would hope, it depends on the time of day and the weather and everything else, of course, because wildlife is wild but I would hope for mule deer, white-tailed deer, of course bison which are now thriving in national parks and refuges throughout the country and thanks in part to Theodore Roosevelt and probably feral horses in the south unit of the park too which Roosevelt did right about wild horses during his day in the Badlands. Prairie dogs and possibly an elk. If you're lucky an elk, a coyote, a badger, we have almost all of the native complement of wildlife except for wolves and grizzly bears and black-footed ferrets. So you don't have to worry about a grizzly bear. So please come out and enjoy the park. I want first of all to thank Valerie Naylor, the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Doug Allison, the author and mayor of Midora, North Dakota and Roger D. Silvestro. Thank you so much. Thank you.