February 17, 2021
In 1884, the grieving 25‑year‑old New York State Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt—after losing his mother to typhoid fever and his wife to kidney failure on the same day that his first daughter was born—marked an
X in his journal and wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.” He then headed west to North Dakota. A scrawny young man with a high‑pitched, scratchy voice and a nervous disposition, the foppish dude from New York had, the previous year, ridden into Little Missouri the day after the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad corridor, on an expedition to hunt buffalo. By horse, he traveled deep into the Little Missouri Valley, scouring the badlands for bison throughout a weeks‑long torrential downpour.