M.L. Berg

Minot

In January, 2022, a statue of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback flanked by a Native American man standing on his right side and an African American man standing on his left, was removed from in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This statue might now be moved into a storage facility by Medora awaiting completion of the Theodore Roosevelt Library there.

There have been many complaints made, in recent years, about the ease with which this statue lent itself to racist symbolisms/interpretations: a white rider towering over an indigenous man on one side and a man of color on the other.

Its sculptor was James Earle Fraser (1876 – 1953), born in Winona, Minnesota. He completed this work in 1939; it was put on display at the museum in 1940. Fraser had also designed the Buffalo Head nickel, as well as creating the famous statue “The End of the Trail”, showing a tired Native American man bending over in sorrow while sitting astride his equally downcast mount.

Fraser seems to have been sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans, so that this Roosevelt statue was not intentionally meant to demean any one of its three figures. Since then, perceptions of the statue have gone in another, perhaps totally unforeseen, direction, focusing on the past mistreatment of minorities.

As it happens, Roosevelt himself has a checkered past, involving racist views. When he was hunting and ranching in Dakota Territory, in the 1880s and 1890s, he perhaps readily the views of the cattle barons who had brought their stock to graze in the Badlands. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps because of his own character, there are several passages in his writings that have racist overtones.

These are writings describing his views and experiences in Dakota Territory. One of them is his book ‘Hunting Trips of a Ranchman’. Another such passage taken from his writings was quoted by the late Edmund Morris in the first volume of his Roosevelt biography entitled ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt’ (on page 306).

Given Roosevelt’s own expressions of racism, it would be a mistake to display the statue that has just been removed from in front of the American Museum of National History anywhere around Medora or within Billings County.

That statue has become – quite improbably! — a symbol of racist features in our collective past.

We should all take into consideration that the land where the Roosevelt Library will stand had been part of the Fort Berthold Reservation from the time of the first Laramie Treaty in 1851 until the summer of 1880, when a presidential executive order removed it from the tribes, so that the Northern Pacific Railroad could build its rail line through there at that time. Previous to that, this whole area had been used for centuries, or perhaps millennia, by Native American tribes crossing back and forth to visit each other and to exchange goods. In particular, the Crows, living southwest of this area, crossed through it to barter their horses for garden crops and a variety of other goods provided by the Hidatsa, the Nueta/Mandan, and the Arikara/Sahnish. Of course, these three tribes, as well as host of other tribes, had also hunted in the Badlands time out of mind.

And once Northern Pacific Railroad trains began running along their rail line, the Crows rode the train to visit the Hidatsa, who were their distant relatives.

The ‘Bad Lands Cow Boy’ newspaper reported in its issue for Thurs., Oct. 2, 1884, that three carloads of Crows had arrived in Medora going from Fort Berthold, where they had been visiting, via Dickinson to Fort Custer: “They were gorgeously attired in various costumes and decorated with ornaments” (page 4).

Such a lengthy, and rich, indigenous history throughout the Badlands deserves to be respected and appreciated, not tarnished, by art work that has become associated (rightly or wrongly) with our common racist heritage, the effects of which have been felt in every state of the union, in every community within North Dakota.