M.L. Berg, Minot

Teddy Roosevelt is perhaps best known in North Dakota for the time he spent in the Badlands in the 1880s. However, when it comes to Roosevelt’s views of Native Americans and Native American rights during this period, his record is far from unblemished.

This point can be well illustrated by Roosevelt’s behavior when he encountered a small hunting party of Native Americans, probably members of the Hidatsa, or Gros Ventre, tribe, while he was out riding northeast of the Elkhorn Ranch along the Little Missouri River near the Killdeer Mountains.

Traditionally, the Crows and the Hidatsas had used the Little Missouri River as a route to pay visits to each other, with the Crows supplying the Hidatsas with horses and the Hidatsas furnishing garden crops and other materials to the Crows. Of course, the Hidatsa and the Crow, as well as a number of other tribes, had hunted along the Little Missouri River and its tributaries, and within the Badlands, for many centuries by the 1880s, or “for aeons,” as one pioneer has written.

Because of the Hidatsa’s long-time association with the Little Missouri River, the federal government designated the sources of the Little Missouri River in the Black Hills as the southwest corner of the land that was officially ceded to the MHA nation by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851. The 1851 Laramie treaty set the boundaries of MHA territory at the Little Missouri River and the Heart River in the south, at the Missouri River and the Yellowstone River in the east and north, and at the Powder River and the Little Powder River in the west. Their territory embraced almost the entire southwest quarter of what became North Dakota.

This generous allotment of land was basically cut in half in 1870. In that year, President Ulysses Grant signed an executive order on April 12, 1870, that reset the southern boundary line. The southwest corner of the allotted land was moved north from the headwaters of the Little Missouri River to the junction of the Powder River with the Little Powder River, and the southeast corner was moved north from the junction of the Heart River with the Missouri River to a point on the Missouri River near Fort Berthold.

The MHA land allotment was further reduced by another executive order in 1880; it was signed by President Rutherford Hayes on July 13, 1880. The southwest corner was moved north and east from the junction of the Powder River with the Little Powder River to the Fort Buford military reservation. There was only a little land left to the tribes south of the Missouri River and the Yellowstone River.

Billings County and Medora had been tribal lands until July, 1880. One early territorial pioneer remarked on this deprivation of Native American lands, and of their hunting rights, in his book about his life in Dakota Territory. This was Lincoln Lang, the son of Gregor Lang. Gregor Lang and Lincoln Lang had arrived in Dakota Territory in April, 1883, not quite three years after Hayes’s executive order of July, 1880, and just a month after Medora was founded by the Marquis de Mores in March, 1883; Roosevelt himself appeared on the scene five months later, in September, 1883.

The Lang family resided on the Neimmela Ranch about 50 miles south of Medora. Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch lay about 35 miles north of Medora. Both Lincoln Lang and Teddy Roosevelt came across small Native American hunting parties while they were out riding in the countryside. But their responses could not have been more different.

Lincoln Lang wrote about his encounter many years later for his book ‘Ranching with Roosevelt’ on pages 137 and 138. Lang probably met the hunters sometime in November, 1883:

“Rather hesitatingly, it seemed, they rode up, one of them holding aloft what appeared to be a document of some kind. As it turned out, it was a passport of the invading White Man – symbol of Reservation slavery – beneficently entitling them to hunt for a couple of weeks in their own country. In their beloved Bad Lands – their stolen hunting grounds – where for aeons the race had hunted before he came; title to that which they held from God Almighty Himself.

Teddy Roosevelt encountered his band of hunters nearly two years later, in September, 1885, while he was riding towards the Killdeer Mountains. His account is quoted by Edmund Morris on page 306 of the paperback edition of his biography ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt’. Roosevelt dismounted and drew his rifle as the hunting party approached:

“After this, one of them made the peace sign, with his blanket first, and then, as he rode toward me, with his open hand, I halted him at a fair distance and asked him what he wanted. He exclaimed, “How! Me good Injun,” and tried to show me the dirty piece of paper on which his agency pass was written, but that he must not come any closer. He then asked for sugar and tobacco. I told him I had none. Another Indian began slowly drifting toward me in spite of my calling out to keep back, so I once more aimed my rifle, whereupon both Indians slipped to the side of their horses and galloped off.

Roosevelt’s belligerent and dismissive response (with his mention of “the dirty piece of paper”) stands in stark contrast to Lang’s thoughtful and highly sympathetic appreciation of the straightened circumstances in which the tribes of northern Dakota Territory had been forced to live by the late 19th century.