Dateline July 3, 2018, The Bully Pulpit and Theodore Roosevelt
As we laid out the summer, we went looking for interesting golf courses to break up the long run back east, and Janice turned up a beauty: the Bully Pulpit, ranked among the top hundred public courses in the country, out at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, North Dakota. Onto the list it went. And of course there is a story behind the name.
Theodore Roosevelt. Our twenty-sixth president, who held the office from 1901 to 1909, was famous for what he called the bully pulpit, the use of the presidency itself to press his case at home and abroad. "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was the proverb he liked to quote for his foreign policy. That is where the golf course got its name.
Roosevelt first came out to the Dakota Territory in 1883 to hunt bison. He came back the next year a broken man, having lost his mother and his young wife on the same day, the one to typhoid and the other to kidney failure, and he came to grieve and to lose himself in the bigness of the country. He bought two ranches, the Elkhorn and the Maltese Cross, along the Little Missouri not far from where Medora would rise, and took up the life of a cattleman. He said he found in it "adventure, purpose, and wholeness."
"I have always said I would never have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota." — Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
He credited those Dakota years with the making of his character, and with the conservationist he became. As president he created the Forest Service, signed the Antiquities Act of 1906 and used it to proclaim eighteen national monuments, and worked with Congress to set aside five national parks, a hundred and fifty national forests, and a great many other reserves, better than two hundred and thirty million acres of protected land all told. Much of that is what we now know as the National Park Service, which other presidents have built on since. It is, hands down, our favorite thing the government does; we have spent years happily wandering its parks and forests and monuments.
A book by its cover. We stayed in a good RV park right by the entrance to the National Park. The spot they first gave us sat beside what looked like an RV on its last legs, on a lot too crooked to suit us, so we moved over one. Then we got to talking with the fellow, who was there with his wife and his grandchildren, and learned the truth of it: that sorry-looking rig was also his ice house, towed out onto the lake for winter fishing. You really cannot judge a book by its cover.
The Bully Pulpit. We went over for an early tee time, and the course was everything it was billed to be, the layout and the views just sensational, laid out across a run of hills above the badlands.
A wetter year than usual had left not only the fairways green but the badlands around them green too, instead of their usual brown, which is a rare sight indeed.
We had a wonderful time of it, and if you ever find yourself in North Dakota, the Bully Pulpit is a must. Afterward we ran into town for lunch at a little cafe and a poke through the shops. Like a lot of folks our age, we are trying to shed possessions rather than gather them, so we mostly just laughed about all the things we would have bought thirty years ago.
From there, the town's own story, and the park itself, were waiting for the next day.
