Airing on March 6, 2024 - Larry and Kurt talk with Valerie Naylor, Past Superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Of all the tributes bestowed upon Theodore Roosevelt during and after his life, perhaps he would be most pleased that a national park is named in his honor, centered on the site of his Elkhorn Ranch, in the Badlands of North Dakota.
Roosevelt’s biographer Edmund Morris observed that “As one of many guardians of Theodore Roosevelt's memory, the North Dakota Badlands are the very sanctuary where his environmental conscience matured. It is true that he was a nature lover long before he built the Elkhorn Ranch here, but it was not until he settled in the Badlands and discovered the vulnerability of this fragile ecology to profit-seekers from outside, that he began to ponder the policies that culminated in his unsurpassed achievements as our first conservation President.”
“To my mind,” said Morris, “there is no memorial of marble or bronze anywhere in the country that evokes the conscience of Theodore Roosevelt as powerfully as the Elkhorn bottom and its surrounding hills. It is a crucible of calm, a refuge from the roar of worldly getting and spending. The very disappearance of the ranch TR built here - except for a few foundation stones - emphasizes the transitoriness of human achievement, and the eternal recuperative powers of nature.”
Read the early history of Theodore Roosevelt National Park on line: Harmon, David. At The Open Margin: The NPS's Administration of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.Medora, ND: TRNHA, 1986.
