Dateline July 4, 2018, Medora and the National Park
The marquis and his town. Medora is a curious piece of history. It was laid out in 1883 along the Northern Pacific Railway by a French nobleman, the Marquis de Mores, who named it for his wife, Medora von Hoffman. The marquis had a grand idea: to slaughter cattle here on the range and ship the refrigerated beef east to Chicago by rail. With his father-in-law's money behind him he put up a meat-packing plant, and around it stores, a hotel, and a big house, the Chateau de Mores, looking down on the town from a bluff. All that capital pulled the settlement over from the old camp on the Little Missouri to the new boom town. But for all the marquis's vision and all his ventures, the whole thing had collapsed financially by the fall of 1886.
The family went home to France, where another son was born. The marquis kept on with his restless, adventuring life until he was killed in the Sahara in the summer of 1896; his widow never remarried, and died in France in 1921. The town they left behind held on as cattle country. When Roosevelt came back through as president in 1903, the local hotel renamed itself the Rough Rider, and the first dude ranch in the country got its start just a few miles out.
Into the park. We had it in mind to see a one-man play in town that evening, but first we set out to drive Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
The badlands are a beautiful, broken country, and that rainy summer had laid grass over everything, green where it is usually bare this time of year. Before long we came on a whole town of prairie dogs, scampering about and popping up out of their burrows to look us over.
Farther along we ran into a herd of buffalo. The park system does a fine job of looking after these animals, and it was a joy to watch them, and all the wildlife, against those vistas.
Then we came around a bend, and there beside the road stood a lone bull buffalo, posed as if he knew it. What a photograph.
That evening, Roosevelt himself was waiting for us in a little theater in town.
