When Tom’s alarm went off at 5:30am on Monday September 11, 2023, the two of us took a moment to reflect on that horrific day in 2001. Even though I hadn’t yet been created in a Chinese factory when the 9/11 attacks were carried out, I had visited all three sites in the past and stood near the very spots where thousands of innocent Americans died that day from the cowardly acts of terrorists. Patriot Day is not only a day of remembrance and reflection, but it’s also a day where our nation needs to make sure all of our defenses are in place to ensure such a tragedy never occurs on our soil again. If we don’t stay vigilant, complacency and overconfidence will lead to another 9/11-type disaster.
With Vicki once again behind the wheel of our Family Truckster at 7:50am, the three of us began the laborious ride across North Dakota. For one hundred miles, all I saw out of the passenger-side window was grassland. There were very few trees and houses, and the terrain was as flat as a road-kill coon along the highway.
Then finally, about 90 minutes into the trip, we saw the signs of civilization – we had arrived at Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota. Once Vic had taken the exit off I-94, she began the two-mile drive from the interstate to the State Capitol Building, which we saw in the distance as it towered above the other buildings in town. While the structure looked extremely tall, its height at 242 feet made it only the 20th tallest State Capitol Building in the country.
After my photographer’s wife found a parking space on the north side of the capitol, the three of us walked to the south side of the building where Tom had me pose for pictures at two Presidential sites. At the first site, my photographer set me down in the middle of a narrow roadway where President Dwight Eisenhower had travelled in his limousine in June 1953. As I stood alone in the road while Tom found the perfect angle for his camera, I was worried I might be hit by a car. But thankfully the road was a small access drive that circled around the Capitol Mall. and we didn’t have to move for one vehicle during the entire time.
The second Presidential site was located on the steps of the Capitol where President George H.W. Bush stood and delivered a speech on April 24, 1989. During that speech, Bush dedicated an American Elm tree that was planted near the Capitol steps to commemorate the state’s centennial. It turned out the tree came from the White House lawn and was transplanted at the North Dakota State Capitol. Unfortunately, the elm tree was removed the following year when it did not survive the harsh winter.
Following our walking tour of the grounds on the south side of the Capitol, the three of us went inside the building. Tom was pleasantly surprised when we entered the building and discovered there was no security system in place – which was likely due to its Republican-based demographics. Once inside, my companions and I explored for roughly 25 minutes, but sadly, the interior seemed as lackluster as the exterior. The highlight of our visit came when we took the elevator up to the 18th floor observation deck, which afforded us a spectacular look at the city of Bismarck, as well as the Capitol grounds directly below us.
Our visit to the North Dakota State Capitol Building lasted about an hour. Even though I was very happy to have been carried around the grounds and to have seen the building, I was underwhelmed by the experience. While I don’t have an official ranking of State Capitol Buildings (at least for now), I know the one in Bismarck ranked near the bottom – just ahead of the Capitol in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s saving grace in my book was the two Presidential sites, along with the observation deck on the 18th floor.
Westward bound again on I-94, Vicki and Tom did their best to find a suitable station on the radio. I laughed when I heard them say how much they missed their Jeep’s Sirius XM Radio – especially Tom’s ’50s station where he waits to hear songs by Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Just when my photographer was Crying, Waiting, Hoping to hear a good Buddy Holly song, he saw an amazingly cool sculpture on the north side of the expressway. I saw it too – it looked like a flock of black geese flying over a mountain. Luckily, Tom had his camera at the ready and was able to snap a photo of the sculpture as we flew past the geese at 80mph.
‘Geese in Flight’ was created in 2001 by sculptor Gary Greff, who fashioned the entire piece out of scrap metal. Even though it was located along a north-south road known as the ‘Enchanted Highway’ near the town of Gladstone, North Dakota, the elaborate piece of artwork was enormous – standing at 110-feet tall and 150-feet wide. It was so large, in fact, the artwork was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2002 as the world’s largest scrap metal sculpture.
I once heard my photographer say, “Minnesota is where fun goes to die”, but I think he was wrong. North Dakota, with its never-ending landscape of flat grasslands, made Minnesota seem like Disney World on a ‘Sugar High’. But that all changed when we got close to Medora, North Dakota as the grasslands transformed into the Badlands. We were in Teddy Roosevelt country, and I was extremely happy to be there.
Vicki pulled the van into the Painted Canyon Visitor Center where the three of us got our first look at the rugged terrain we’d spend the rest of the day exploring. And since we had just crossed into the Mountain Time Zone, we’d have an extra hour to scour Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I was excited because this area of North Dakota was where the frail, snobbish New York socialite had transformed himself into the legendary gunslinging, Rough Riding American hero.
Near the Visitor Center, Tom carried me out to the overlook which gave us a breathtaking view of the Painted Canyon. At one point, I saw wild bison in the distance as they relaxed in the shade of colorful rock formations. But there was only one thing on my mind – and that was Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch site, which was roughly 35 miles to the north.
Theodore Roosevelt is one of my favorite Presidents and I was giddy to visit the area of the country he loved most. In 1883, the sickly 24-year-old New Yorker travelled by train to the high plains of the Dakota Territory where he hoped to rub elbows with the heroes he had dreamt of – hunters, soldiers, explorers, and cowboys. When he arrived at the Badlands, near the Little Missouri River, Roosevelt found paradise, especially when he shot and killed his first American bison. He was hooked – and built his Maltese Cross Cabin shortly after. During the next couple of years, after his mother and wife died in New York in 1884, TR built a larger ranch, known as the Elkhorn Ranch, 40-some miles north of his first cabin. There, Roosevelt and a couple of ranch managers invested heavily in cattle – owning somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 head of cattle by 1886. But when the severe winter of 1886-87 wiped out most of his herd, which cost TR his $80,000 investment, Roosevelt returned to New York – albeit a much stronger and changed man.
From the Painted Canyon Visitor Center, Vicki drove the Pacifica about five miles west into Medora where we found the South Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Tom carried me through the NPS Visitor Center and out the back door where I got my first look at Roosevelt’s home-away-from-home, the historic Maltese Cross Cabin.
Originally known as the Chimney Butte Ranch, which was constructed by Roosevelt’s ranch managers Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield in 1883, the 1 1/2-story Maltese Cross Cabin was originally located about seven miles south of Medora. The cabin served as TR’s temporary home – he spent time in NYC and North Dakota. The following year, Roosevelt had his Elkhorn Ranch constructed along the Little Missouri River where he spent a majority of his time. When TR left the Dakotas in 1887, other people claimed the cabin and used it as their own. By the time Roosevelt became President in 1901, the small cabin was acquired for the World’s Fair in St. Louis, before it was taken to Oregon for another exhibition. Eventually, the Maltese Cross Cabin found a home on the grounds of the North Dakota State Capitol, until the cabin was moved in 1959 to its present location, which was roughly 100 feet behind the NPS Visitor Center at the South Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
To me, it seemed as though I was in a Norman Rockwell painting as I posed near the exterior of Roosevelt’s Maltese Cross Cabin. And even though the original roof had been removed and replaced by 1900, the ponderosa pine logs used for the construction of the cabin’s walls were original – and I thought that was amazingly cool. But when Tom carried me inside the cabin, I was terribly disappointed to see the three interior rooms, which were Roosevelt’s kitchen, living room, and bedroom, were partitioned with Plexiglass to keep people like my photographer from setting bobble heads on some of the period furnishings. To make matters worse, the interior was very dark, and the Plexiglass was extremely dirty – which made it difficult to view the rooms and for me to pose for pictures.
Following our visit in and around Roosevelt’s cabin, Tom carried me into the Visitor Center in search of the whereabouts of TR’s original monogrammed trunk and his writing desk, which in the past, had been on display inside the cabin or in the museum. When my photographer began the discussion with one of the on-duty NPS rangers, that’s when the fun began. After he was told the trunk and desk were not on display at the time, the woman told Tom they did have a display inside their small museum that featured the shirt Roosevelt was wearing when he was shot in Milwaukee. Tom said he saw the shirt TR was wearing when he was shot, and it was in the museum at Roosevelt’s NYC birthplace. That revelation didn’t set very well with the ranger as she sarcastically bellowed, “We have the shirt. Come here, I’ll show you the bullet hole.” The two of us followed the cranky woman into the museum where she pointed out a white short-sleeved shirt – and sure enough, there was a hole on the right side. But the longer I looked at the shirt in front of me, the more I realized it was likely Roosevelt’s undergarment, while the shirt I saw in NYC was his outer dress shirt. Even though Tom was peeved at the woman’s demeanor, I smiled because I knew both of them were right.
For the second time in the past six years, I posed near a shirt worn by Theodore Roosevelt when he was shot in Milwaukee on October 14, 1912. Unlike the dress shirt in NYC, I saw what appeared to be faint blood stains on the undershirt – which brought the attempted assassination to life for me. And that wasn’t too hard; on February 4, 2022, I stood on the site where Roosevelt was shot outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee where I thought to myself: “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
There were a handful of artifacts associated with Theodore Roosevelt inside the small museum, but the highlights for me were TR’s blood-stained shirt and his hunting rifles. That might not seem like very many authentic Presidential relics, but to me, the museum in Medora was a lot better than the Presidential Libraries of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Had TR’s monogrammed trunk and his writing desk been on display, the Medora NPS Museum might have eclipsed Hoover’s Presidential Library as well.
The three of us had travelled across North Dakota virtually in the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt. He had come from NYC by train and entered the Dakota Territory in Fargo. TR rode the rails from Fargo through Jamestown, where we saw the World’s Largest Buffalo, and into Bismarck where we visited the State Capitol Building. On September 8, 1883, twenty-four-year-old Theodore Roosevelt stepped off his railcar and onto the rugged Badland grounds at Medora – he fell in love with what he saw. After a year of living occasionally at his Maltese Cross Cabin where he hunted and learned how to survive in the Wild West, TR travelled on horseback along the Little Missouri River where he found the perfect spot for his new digs, the Elkhorn Ranch, which was built in 1884 roughly 35 miles north of Medora.
It was 12:15pm and time for my two companions and me to head for the Elkhorn Ranch; and thankfully, we weren’t going via horseback. Instead, Vicki was behind the wheel of our Family Truckster, while Tom barked out verbal directions from a crude map he had brought with him. Weeks before we left home, during the planning phase of the trip, my photographer discovered there were areas within the Theodore Roosevelt National Park where cell phone service was not available. And while the Elkhorn Ranch site was only 35 miles north of Medora, the suggested route he found on-line took us on a 63-mile drive – most of which was along dirt roads through the expansive and desolate Badlands.
The first 15 miles of our journey took us west along I-94 until we reached Exit 10. But once we left the expressway and headed on a zig-zag series of dusty roads to the north and east, Tom quickly realized his map wasn’t overly detailed and the crude roads weren’t very well marked. As I looked at the magnificent scenery through an opening in the camera case, I could tell Vicki was growing more and more concerned about us being lost in the middle of nowhere. While we had no GPS signal and Tom was losing confidence in his map, the three of us continued to press onward – all with the hopes of running into a recognizable road that was shown on my photographer’s map. Then suddenly, over an hour into the drive, Tom was able to get a signal on his phone which gave him GPS directions to the Elkhorn Ranch Unit. It was an unexpected small miracle; and it came in the nick of time. Just fifteen minutes after we were under the verbal directions of Siri, we arrived at the Elkhorn Ranch – or should I say, we thought we were at the site.
It turned out we were only at the parking area of the Elkhorn Ranch Unit. If we wanted to visit the Roosevelt Ranch site, we needed to set out on foot along a narrow dirt pathway; although Tom didn’t know for sure how far the site was from the parking area. Before we left the van, I heard my photographer tell his wife he believed the site was only “a hundred or so yards down the path”, so they decided they wouldn’t need the hiking sticks, nor the water, they had brought on the trip. At the same time, my camera guy also emphasized to Vicki that the Elkhorn Ranch house was no longer standing – stones that outlined the building’s foundation would be the only thing we’d see when we got to the end of the “Yellow Dirt Road”.
Tom slung his camera case, with me in it, over his shoulder as we set out along the path. He had no water, no food, no walking sticks, and no Monkey Butt Powder with him when we left the van. I laughed because this hike had an all-too-familiar feel to it – it reminded me of our ‘Hike from Hell’ when we walked with Bob Moldenhauer to Hoover’s Rapidan Camp along Virginia’s Skyline Drive two years earlier.
Fifteen minutes into the hike, Vicki was nowhere in sight. At first, I thought she might have returned to the van. To be honest, I wouldn’t have blamed her – there were only a handful of puffy clouds in the sun-filled blue sky and the temperature was getting higher by the minute. While we waited for his wife to catch up, Tom and I hoped we would see some wildlife – perhaps an antelope or two, or a wild bison, or maybe even a wayward Sasquatch. But the only critters we saw were millions of yellow-striped grasshoppers – most of which avoided getting squished by my ‘Bigfoot’ photographer, who was wearing hiking boots.
After a handful of rest breaks, Vicki caught up and the three of us made it to the site of Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch. It had taken us over thirty minutes to finish the three-quarter mile hike to the place where Theodore Roosevelt lived for several years – from 1884 until sometime in 1887. Tom carried me through an old metal gate and onto the historic ground. After my photographer placed me on the ground in the center of the site, I heard him say to his wife: “Look around you and smell the air. See the river behind us and look at those massive formations in front of us. Theodore Roosevelt breathed the same air and saw the same scenery with his own eyes – and those distant buttes likely haven’t changed much in the past one hundred and forty years. This is Theodore Roosevelt country!”
The fact was – in the mid-1880s, Theodore Roosevelt was a young man who embraced the Badlands life with every fiber of his soul. During his time there, TR stopped stampedes; he participated in month-long roundups; he arrested thieves at gunpoint; he punched out a drunken gunslinger in a bar; and he helped to organize the region’s first stockmen’s association. Later in his life, Roosevelt recalled his time in the Badlands of North Dakota: “I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota. It was here that the romance of my life began.”
Unbelievable as it may sound, we weren’t alone at the Elkhorn Ranch site – and no, Sasquatch didn’t make a surprise appearance. Moments after I had finished posing for a handful of photos, I heard Vicki say out loud: “I don’t believe it; I see a couple of people coming towards us. I figured for sure we’d be the only ones dumb enough to walk a mile out in the middle of nowhere to see nothing.” When the pair walked through the gate and onto the historic site, we discovered the energetic duo was North Carolina wildlife artist Jeanie Edwards and her young son. Edwards told my companions she and her son like to travel around the country to visit sites associated with Theodore Roosevelt, which prompted Tom to mention some of the Roosevelt sites he and I had visited with Bob Moldenhauer in June.
The return trip back to the parking area became eerily familiar to me when I heard my photographer complain about his knees aching and how thirsty he was. Then to top it all off, Tom told his wife he was experiencing some “serious chaffing” in his nether region, which made me roll my painted eyes. I thought to myself: “Doesn’t that guy ever learn? He brought a backpack, bottled water, Monkey Butt powder, and hiking sticks on the trip and he left all of the stuff in the van. He deserves to have a chapped butt!”
While the Elkhorn hike brought back memories of the 2021 Rapidan ‘Hike from Hell’, it actually paled in comparison. Our 2021 adventure to Hoover’s camp featured a four-mile round trip hike on a rugged, slippery trail that was filled with a countless number of jagged rocks, tree roots, and other ankle breakers. To top it off, there was a 1,520-foot elevation change with three bridgeless stream crossings we had to endure as well. The hike to Roosevelt’s cabin site took us along a flat dirt trail that was void of trip hazards – plus it was only a one-and-a-half-mile round trip in 73-degree dry weather. But when we finally made it back to the van, my chunky photographer collapsed in the passenger seat and drank a bottle of water. I laughed to myself when I heard Tom exclaim: “My hiking days are over.”
At about 3:00pm, we left Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch Unit behind as we slowly made our way northwest along a narrow, dusty road. Roughly thirty minutes or so into the trip, the scenic Badlands transformed back into the vast prairie grasslands we saw earlier in the day. In other words, the landscape I saw out of the passenger-side window was once again boring – although the boredom turned to exuberance when we crossed the border from North Dakota into the state of Montana. We were in ‘Big Sky Country’ – and Montana became the 43rd state I had visited in a little over ten years.
We made it to our final destination of the day, which was the Holiday Inn Express in Sidney, Montana. Vicki went to the lobby to register while my hungry photographer unpacked the Truckster and brought their gear to the room. Before my two companions settled down for the evening, the three of us headed to the nearby Taco John’s where they bought a bagful of the tasty tacos for dinner, which they devoured in our hotel room.
Tom placed me alongside the TV set where I spent the rest of the evening watching the New York Jets – Buffalo Bills game on Monday Night Football. With a full stomach, my exhausted photographer showered and powdered his nether region before he extinguished the lights at 8:30pm.
During the night, I not only listened to the tacos as they worked their magic on my slumbering camera guy’s digestive system, but I also stood in the darkness and thought about where we were headed the following day – Glacier National Park. Even though we had a 500-mile drive ahead of us that will take us across the northern part of Montana, I figured the mountainous scenery would be breathtaking. Morning couldn’t get there fast enough.
