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death, and the dead cattle were still piled up along buttes and in bottoms. Day in and day out he tried to inventory his losses. “The land was a mere barren waste,” Roosevelt wrote; “not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.”79 America’s great range had been ravaged. Less than half of Roosevelt’s own herd had survived the series of blizzards. For once he was hard-pressed to find a silver lining. The only optimistic observation he could muster was that at least a thaw was under way. No longer, however, was the spring roundup a glorious, fun event. Instead of branding and roping, dour-faced local ranchers collected rotting carcasses and scattered bones in wooden carts as if bubonic plague had stricken the region. The winter of 1886–1887 had made the Elkhorn and Maltese Cross ranches nearly go bust as a business venture. “I am bluer than indigo about the cattle,” Roosevelt wrote to his sister. “It is even worse than I feared; I wish I was sure I would lose not more than half the money ($80,000) I invested out here. I am planning to get out.” All told, his net loss would be $23,556.68.80

For the first time in his life nature had been cruel to Roosevelt. The magic of the Badlands had turned menacing and gruesome. No longer was he writing prose hymns about the Missouri lark being the “sweetest singer” or snow geese “nibbling and jerking at the grass.”81 The wildlife seemed to have died or disappeared. Within a few years Medora would become nearly a ghost town, and the open-range cattle business would be steadily diminished. Nevertheless, over the coming decades, Roosevelt continued to boost North Dakota, telling people that in the Badlands he found vigor based on self-assuredness.82

Even though Roosevelt would return to Medora in the coming years (his last visit was in October 1918), his days as a serious rancher were over. Although he didn’t abandon the cattle business entirely in 1887—keeping, for example, his ranch brand—after the “Winter of the Blue Snow” he was always downsizing. His years of genuine residency—September 7, 1883, to December 5, 1887—were history. Yet Roosevelt was rich in glorious memories. Even the gray alkali dust, layers of sandstone, and heaps of debris, it seemed, took on a romantic cast in his highly selective mind. Years later, after being president, he told Senator Albert Fall that his days in North Dakota had been far and away the best of his entire life. “Do you know what chapter or experience in all my life I would choose to remember, were the alternative forced upon me to recall one portion of it, and to have erased from my memory all the other experiences?” he asked himself and then answered. “I would take the memory of my life on the ranch with its experiences close to Nature and among the men who lived nearest her.”83

Although North Dakota provided the “romance” of his life, it was also where his worries about the depletion of America’s natural resources took root. Nobody championed the conquering of the West by the U.S. Army, mountaineers, homesteaders, trappers, farmers, and ranchers more than Roosevelt. Already in 1887—as he worked on a biography of Gouverneur Morris, author of much of the Constitution and creator of the U.S. decimal coin system—Roosevelt planned on writing a multiple-volume work he called The Winning of the West, an epic history in the Parkman tradition tracing American continental expansionism from Daniel Boone in 1774 to the death of Davy Crockett in 1836. Roosevelt even considered the genocide of Native Americans—which was indeed explored when the work first came out in 1894—as heroic. “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,” he wrote. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.”84

Because Roosevelt had lived on the Dakota frontier, he felt ideally suited to write a paean to westward expansion. In many ways, he saw The Winning of the West