Where this is
A house on the river brink
In February 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost his wife Alice and his mother Mittie on the same day, in the same house. He went back to Dakota Territory looking for solitude. His first ranch, the Maltese Cross, sat near a busy carriage road and the railroad — too close to everything to give him any. That summer he picked a second site thirty-five miles north of Medora, on the banks of the Little Missouri, in a grove of cottonwoods, and named it the Elkhorn.
He hired two Maine woodsmen, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow, to build it and run it. Work started in the winter of 1884–85 and finished that spring: a long, low house of cottonwood logs, thirty feet by sixty, with seven-foot walls, eight rooms, and a piazza along the east wall. Around it stood a barn — two stables joined by a roofed breezeway — plus a cattle shed, a chicken house, and a blacksmith shop.
“My home ranch-house stands on the river brink. From the low, long veranda, shaded by leafy cotton-woods, one looks across sand bars and shallows to a strip of meadowland, behind which rises a line of sheer cliffs and grassy plateaus.”
Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
What the winter took
The Elkhorn became the center of Roosevelt's Badlands life — the ranch he called his home ranch, the porch where he wrote, the landing where a boat was stolen out from under him in the spring of 1886, sending him on a three-day chase down an ice-choked river with a copy of Anna Karenina in his lap.
Then came the winter of 1886–87, remembered on the northern plains as the Winter of the Blue Snow. It killed cattle across the open range by the hundreds of thousands, Roosevelt's herd among them. He closed the Elkhorn and sold off the last of his cattle interests in 1898. He left the Badlands a failed cattleman — and a man who had watched a landscape be used up. As president he would go on to conserve an estimated 230 million acres of American land.
Where it sits today
Nothing of the house is standing. The logs were hauled away and reused long ago. What is left is the outline: foundation stones on the riverbank, and cottonwoods east of them old enough to have shaded the porch.
The ground in these views is the Elkhorn Ranch Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park — the most remote and least developed of the park's three units, about thirty-five miles from Medora by gravel road through the Little Missouri National Grassland. There is no visitor center and no reconstruction. There is a trail, a handful of interpretive panels carrying Roosevelt's own words, the cottonwoods, and the river.
- FoundedSite chosen 1884; buildings finished spring 1885
- Ranch house30 × 60 feet, eight rooms, cottonwood logs
- Built byBill Sewall and Wilmot Dow, of Island Falls, Maine
- ClosedAfter the winter of 1886–87
- TodayElkhorn Ranch Unit, Theodore Roosevelt National Park
- Getting thereGravel road from Medora; impassable when wet — check conditions at a park visitor center first