Back in Roosevelt's day, it was the railroad that brought the first tourists to western North Dakota in the 1880's. A sign on an old train depot on the main street of Medora, the park's gateway town, lists the mileage to the nearest key cities on the line -- 594 miles east to St. Paul, Minn., and 1,457 miles west to Portland. The street is wistfully named Pacific Avenue. More than a century after the arrival of the railroad, it's still a long way to just about anywhere from the Badlands. North Dakota is the nation's least-visited state, but it's also the least expensive for tourists, who often link Theodore Roosevelt National Park with a trip to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, or to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana. Isolation is one of the great attractions of western North Dakota. The Roosevelt Inn & Suites is one of the closest hotels some of these beautiful, serene landscapes.

The Badlands, 300 miles west of Fargo, are a 100-by-20-mile north-south corridor of fantastically eroded prairie near the Little Missouri River. The prairie skies are free of pollution, allowing countless stars to twinkle at night. The quiet is so complete you can almost feel it. Raw, exposed earth changes hues subtly, from red to orange to brown to gray, as the sun crosses the sky. About 10 percent of the Badlands is inside the twin units of the 70,000-acre national park. The South Unit, near Medora and I-94, absorbs about 90 percent of the visitors. The North Unit, 70 miles away near Watford City, offers some of the best national park solitude south of Alaska. Elkhorn Ranch on the Little Missouri, the second of Roosevelt's two North Dakota ranches, is midway between the units.

Although the buildings have blended back into the prairie, the park service is negotiating to purchase the surrounding land to create a 22,000-acre Theodore Roosevelt National Preserve. One of Theodore Roosevelt's cabins, from his Maltese Cross Ranch, is displayed in the park named for him. Roosevelt's first ranch, the Maltese Cross, was eight miles south of Medora. His cabin, displayed in Portland nearly a century ago during the Lewis and Clark Exposition, has been restored and relocated to the park's visitor center at Medora. The rest of the Badlands are part of the Little Missouri National Grassland, or private ranches.

The 36-mile Scenic Loop Drive through the South Unit brings visitors into intimate contact with the park, mostly at scenic overlooks and via short hiking trails. A 14-mile road does the same in the North Unit.

The Badlands have been described as "hell with the fires put out" by soldiers and as "no-good land" by the native Sioux. Roosevelt called them a "land of vast silent spaces, a place of grim beauty."

This grim beauty is also the state's number one tourist attraction, causing Medora, a sleepy little town of 100 residents, to morph into a city capable of entertaining a half-million visitors from June through August. Among the area's first tourists were the Marquis de Mores, a French aristocrat, who arrived to found a cattle empire right about the time Roosevelt was trying to make a go of ranching. De Mores brought his wife, Medora von Hoffman, and named his town for her. The daughter of a New York investment baker, Medora brought a rare bit of refinement to the North Dakota prairie, teaching her two children music and art along with horseback riding. The couple's 26-room Chateau de Mores, maintained by the state as one of North Dakota's main historical landmarks, still crowns a hill overlooking the Little Missouri.

After the cattle industry went bust in the late 1880s and the family's cattle packing plant burned down in 1907, the town of Medora was all but forgotten. Then along came Harold Schafer, born in 1912 on a small farm near Stanton, N.D. Curious and inventive, he created the Gold Seal Co. during World War II. By 1960 the company had expanded to produce Glass Wax, Snowy Bleach and Mr. Bubble, each the No. 1 selling product in the world in its category at one time. Before he died in 2001, Schafer bequeathed part of his fortune to create the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, a nonprofit company that owns and manages half of Medora's businesses and produces its summer shows. The foundation does $6 million in business each summer, much of it from the nightly Medora Musical, a Western variety show that is the top entertainment draw in the state. The success of the 2,500-seat outdoor musical has allowed the foundation to invest in other attractions, among them the 100 mile Maah Dah Hey, a single-track mountain biking trail just 14 miles from Watford City, ND.

Story by Terry Richard. Originally published August 10 2003

Enough history. Show me the rooms!