Manifest Destiny

Medora and her husband are buried side-by-side in Ca

Arthur T. Packard remained a newspaperman throughout his life. The last issue of his Bad Lands Cow Boy was published on December 23, 1887; the next day, the building where Pack and his new bride lived, and where the Cow Boy was published, burned down. (In 1970 publication of the Cow Boy was resumed by Clayton C. Bartz and David C. Bartz, as a historical journal.) Pack remained in the West and in the newspaper game, carving out a long journalistic career in the region between Chicago and Montana. As late as 1912 he was a prominent supporter of Roosevelt’s independent Progressive Party (“Bull Moose”) attempt to regain the Presidency.

In Chicago in 1931, Arthur T. Packard died; he was seventy.

William Wingate Sewall published a memoir shortly after Roosevelt’s death, and died a decade later at eighty-four, in March 1930. His nephew Wilmot Dow had died earlier of acute Bright’s Disease in Island Falls, Maine, at the age of thirty-six in 1891.

Joe Ferris joined Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign for the Vice Presidency in 1900, and traveled with Roosevelt through North Dakota and Montana. Long before that, Joe had sold his store and moved to Montana. Roosevelt kept in touch with him for many years. In 1912 Joe, like his friend Pack, was a delegate to Roosevelt’s Bull Moose convention.

Howard Eaton, the first dude rancher, ran his tourist outfit at Custer Trail until 1904, when with his brothers he moved to the Big Horn country—Wolf, Wyoming, where the famous Eaton Ranch still operates today. Meanwhile the Eaton brothers’ original Custer Trail Ranch near Medora has become a Bible camp operated by the Lutheran Church.

A.C. Huidekoper was one of the few ranchers to remain in the Bad Lands and keep faith in the region. As the foregoing story shows, he was still living there when Roosevelt visited in 1903. Huidekoper raised horses there, quite successfully, until he retired in 1906, at which time according to memoirist Lincoln Lang, “his herd numbered … approximately five thousand head of equine blue bloods, constituting perhaps the grandest, most distinctive single herd of horses the world ever knew, … ranging from full-blooded Percherons to polo ponies from a cross between thoroughbred racing stock and the best Indian pony mares obtainable. The latter were, in fact, the pick of Sitting Bull’s war ponies.”

Roosevelt wrote dryly in his Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, “One committee of vigilantes in eastern Montana shot or hung nearly sixty—not, however, with the best judgment in all cases.” Ironically the founder of the Montana Stock Growers Association and clandestine leader of the neighboring state’s vigilantes, Granville Stuart, according to Roosevelt’s Autobiography “was afterwards appointed Minister by [President Grover] Cleveland, I think to the Argentine.”

As for Theodore Roosevelt (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard 1880), by 1886 he was revitalized and as mature as he was going to become. He returned east to marry Edith Carow (she later described her husband the President fondly as “a six-year-old boy”) and to plunge back into the political life. He lost his bid for election to the office of Mayor of New York but that failure did not daunt him. Soon after, he was appointed Police Commissioner of New York City; he went on to higher offices.

He recruited many Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War from amongst the Bad Lands cowboys with whom he had worked during his ranching days.

Throughout his adventurous life as New York Police Commissioner, Colonel of Rough Riders, Governor of New York State, Vice President of the United States, two-term (1901-1908) President of the United States (the twenty-sixth, and the youngest ever to be inaugurated), builder of the Panama Canal, first American wi

It was Theodore Roosevelt who—even before he became President—guided, expanded and protected the National Park system in time to preserve the great Yellowstone wilderness. Later, as President and as the leading conservationist of his era, he created the Forest Service and quadrupled the holdings of the National Forests to nearly 200 million acres; and he established numerous wildlife refuges, signed the Act that allowed the President to proclaim National Monuments and National Parks, and created by proclamation 23 such areas.

Today the Marquis De Morès’s weighted bamboo stick is in the collection housed in the splendidly preserved De Morès Chateau on the bluff (“Graveyard Butte”) overlooking the town of Medora, North Dakota. The property was given by Louis Vallombrosa (eldest son of the Marquis) to the State of North Dakota, and is administered by the State Historical Society. Its restoration began in 1936; the work was performed by a WPA crew whose labors were fueled and made happy by thousands of intact bottles of wine they found in the cellar beneath the lady Medora’s kitchen.

Thanks to contributions made by the De Morès heirs and by other benefactors, the chateau contains a fascinating collection of possessions from the 1880s including quite a few of the couple’s hunting trophies, furnishings, decorations, books, clothes, weapons, utensils and art works, the latter including a small watercolor that Madame la Marquise painted of the château—slightly impressionistic, very pleasing; Medora had a good eye for color and design.

In the visitor center near the chateau stands one of the four Concord coaches used by De Morès’s ill-fated Deadwood stage line.

The portrait of Madame la Marquise that is the most popular likeness was painted by the artist Charles Jalabert in New York City when she was still Medora Von Hoffman; reproductions are all over the town that was named after her—even on the place-mats of local cafes. The original painting hangs in Bismarck.

Medora town, now restored and developed as a tourist attraction, is much as it was in the 1880s. Harold Schafer, founder of the Gold Seal Company in Bismarck, and his wife were the architects of the town’s restoration. Among the revived town’s attractions are Joe Ferris’s store—still operating as a general store—the rebuilt Bad Lands Cow Boy shack, the railroad depot, the little brick church that Madame la Marquise caused to be built, and the onetime De Morès Hotel (now, with wonderful irony, called the “Rough Riders”—De Morès would have shrieked).

The great abattoir-slaughterhouse burned down on March 17, 1907, but the foundations and the awesomely tall chimney remain to mark the site.

The railroad is still in use across the unpredictable Little Missouri, and Riley Luffsey’s grave is on the butte; take a walk along the embankments on a certain sort of Bad Lands day and it seems not much of a stretch to imagine the footprints of the Lunatic and those who pursued him.

Among the best preserved and least Disneyfied of the restored “ghost towns” of the Old West, Medora brims over with artifacts and scenery that bring to life the Roosevelt-De Morès era.

The town is gateway to the spectacular Bad Lands of the 70,000-acre Theodore Roosevelt National Park, given federal protection in 1947 and National Park status in 1978. For anyone interested in the real West and its history and its morality fables, a visit is virtually mandatory. (The site of Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch is approximately in the middle of the Park.)