The Big, Dumb, Gluttonous Fun of America’s Semiquincentennial

Medora, North Dakota, has been called “the best little town in the West” and “North Dakota’s most historic town.” Throughout the eighteen-eighties, when the area was still known as the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt spent extended spells there, cowboying and investing in ranchland. “In this country of hills and plateaus, the romance of my life began,” he later said. Medora—which has a hundred and twenty-one full-time residents, according to the latest census—comes alive in the summer. On a typical day this July, around four Roosevelt impersonators were roaming the streets, identifiable by their mustaches, stout bellies, and dispensing of homespun wisdom. Many of the town’s bars, restaurants, and hotels have names referencing “T.R.,” as the twenty-sixth President is known, with proprietary familiarity, in Medora.

The town gives the impression of being draped in a kind of perma-bunting, and it goes all out for the Fourth of July: a Teddy Roosevelt brunch is followed by a sparkler-filled parade down Main Street to the town square. This year, the town expected huge crowds to come celebrate America’s two hundred and fiftieth, which coincided with the opening of the town’s Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. The library, a four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar rammed-earth building, was envisioned as an architectural embodiment of Roosevelt’s conservation legacy, and people had arranged their trips to see it years in advance. What better place to indulge in some old-fashioned patriotic razzmatazz?

After I booked my flight to North Dakota, I learned that Trump had the same idea. The library’s grand opening was now a Freedom 250 event, and Trump planned to make a speech after the ribbon-cutting, on July 1st. When I arrived in Medora, rental cars were sold out and broad-shouldered MAGA boys in too-tight pants were swaggering down the sidewalk, three abreast. The high point of my visit, I had imagined, would be the “Medora Musical,” a patriotic song-and-dance revue, dating from the nineteen-sixties, filled with men in cowboy hats and women in ruffled skirts making corny jokes, then bursting into soaring, irony-free harmonies. Performances take place at the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, a nearly three-thousand-person outdoor arena with dramatic views of the Badlands; at a pivotal moment, the stage set slides open and horses gallop onstage. I am a soft touch, particularly for a small-town show, and was looking forward to crying. But the performance was cancelled—word around town was that crews had to reinforce the amphitheatre’s stage to bear the weight of a bulletproof barrier for the President to speak behind.

Many Badlands towns are depopulated and unpicturesque, worn down by drought and the boom-and-bust cycle of oil-and-gas extraction. But Medora is more prosperous; in lieu of dollar stores, there is relentless outlaw kitsch. In 1986, Harold Schafer, the North Dakota entrepreneur behind Mr. Bubble, established the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, which now functions as a kind of nonprofit hospitality conglomerate, operating four hotels, a campground, the Bully Pulpit Golf Course, TR’s Tavern, a pizza place, an ice-cream parlor, a family resort, a horse stable, and a half-dozen other businesses. You could spend a long weekend in Medora and, without realizing it, patronize only foundation entities. The workforce is largely international and seasonal; employees live in dorms and eat at a workers’ cafeteria, as if Medora were a company town whose primary product is the Medora experience. (Not everyone is on board. In a cluttered store not owned by the foundation, I saw a guestbook with a message in shaky handwriting: “thank you to all our patrons since 2007 for helping small business owners succeed when they are trying so hard to push us out and take complete control.”) Medora sometimes feels like a strange, cheerful dream about America. Twice in two days, I found myself stranded without a ride on a butte above town, once in pouring rain; on both occasions, the friendly stranger who offered me a lift turned out to be a Roosevelt.

The story you most often hear around town is that a twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt travelled west after his mother and his wife died on the same day, of different causes. (The new library displays his journal, in which that day is marked with a large black “X” and the sentence “The light has gone out of my life.”) Here, the wealthy and asthmatic young politician, bolstered by time spent outside among manly men, grew strong enough to meet his destiny. But Roosevelt’s first visit to the Dakota Territory actually took place a year earlier, in 1883, when he embarked on a hunting trip, dressed like “a regular cowboy dandy,” as he wrote to his sister, in a buckskin suit, a silk neckerchief, and alligator-hide boots. The expedition did not go as planned. The Wild West was even then a myth receding into a hazy, heroic past. In place of herds of bison thundering across the prairie, there were piles of bones a story high and as much as a hundred feet long. It took Roosevelt nine days to kill a bison; within a year, there would be only around three hundred and twenty-five left south of Canada. The Northern Pacific Railway had recently been completed, and the violent displacement of the region’s Native populations had cleared the path for large-scale cattle operations and wheat farms controlled by absentee landowners—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and a smattering of British dukes and earls. A few decades later, after Roosevelt, as President, opened the nation’s first game preserve, in Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains, he had to stock it with bison imported from the Bronx Zoo.