It was the bounty of wildlife that drew a 24-year-old New Yorker to the northern plains in 1883. An abundance of wildlife, from small birds such as meadowlarks, pheasants, and mourning doves up to majestic and now rare or extinct animals like the Audubon bighorn sheep, grizzly bear, and bison all roamed free in this Great Plains wilderness. You may know this 24-year-old New Yorker by his name -- Theodore Roosevelt, who would become the 26th president of the United States.

Mr. Roosevelt arrived initially to hunt buffalo, then sank roots as a cattle rancher, where local cowboys gave him the nickname "Ol' Four Eyes" in reference to his eyeglasses. He shot his first bull bison that fall, but scarcely a month later, the last great herd of 10,000 bison had been reduced to 1,200. This loss of the bison had a lifelong effect Roosevelt, who many believe to be the greatest conservationist in our nation's history.

After his first trip to North Dakota, Roosevelt returned to New York for the winter, only to have his first wife and mother die on the same day (Valentine's Day in 1884) of different causes, (his mother from typhoid, his wife from kidney failure) in different rooms of his house. He headed out West again, determined to immerse himself in the cattle business, although drought, severe winters and the end of the open range combined to drive him out of ranching. By then, his political star was rising back East. Republican party bosses wanted to keep his political ambitions in check, so in 1900 they nominated him as William McKinley's vice president -- a position considered to be a career killer. A half-year after the inauguration, McKinley was assassinated. Roosevelt, at 42, became the nation's youngest president.

Unlike some conservationists -- then and now -- Roosevelt never believed that all resources should be locked up. He wanted to ensure that they would be used wisely and passed on to future generations. One day, he asked his staff whether anything prevented him from protecting Wyoming's Devils Tower. When he learned there was no restriction, he created the nation's first national monument. By the end of his seven-and-a-half years in office he had created 51 national wildlife refuges, five national parks, 18 national monuments, and protected 150 million acres in 150 national forests.

After he became president, Roosevelt realized that great flocks of birds were going the way of the buffalo. Plume hunters were slaughtering the East's last colony of brown pelicans to collect feathers, leaving carcasses to rot. To stop the carnage, Roosevelt issued an executive order to protect the birds and create the first national wildlife refuge on Pelican Island in Florida. The centennial of the national refuge system -- which grew to 52 units during his presidency -- is being celebrated this year.

Nowhere is a place more closely associated with Roosevelt as a conservationist than the Badlands he loved as a young man. The sparse grazing land where his cattle ranged was preserved in 1947 as a memorial park, later upgraded by Congress in 1978 to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. A small herd of bison roams freely inside the park's fenced boundary. California bighorn sheep have supplanted the extinct Audubon species. "Prairie dog towns," where hundreds of prairie dogs cavort, endlessly amuse the more than 500,000 visitors a year.

Aside from his work as a conservationist, Roosevelt's complete list of accomplishments is larger than life. He was called the Rough Rider for leading the 1st Volunteer Cavalry up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He was an African big-game hunter, an Amazon explorer, and a prolific chronicler of his adventures who authored 42 books, including his classic "The Wilderness Hunter," which is still in print. He was a founder of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and hunting's Boone and Crockett Club, the governor of New York, father of the Panama Canal and "big stick" diplomacy, and of course, the inspiration for the teddy bear. He was the first president to fly an airplane, to submerge in a submarine, to own a car, to have a telephone, to travel outside the country while in office, and to entertain an African American (Booker T. Washington) in the White House. And he was the winner of the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russian-Japanese War. Roosevelt said his life would not the same but for his ranching days in the Badlands.

"I would not have been president," Roosevelt said in a speech at Fargo in 1910, "if it hadn't been for my experience in North Dakota."

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