MEDORA — When you come into the Badlands — as opposed to the approach to the Rocky Mountains — the ground dramatically dips. It’s here that you can experience the same views that a 24-year-old Theodore Roosevelt found when he arrived in 1883, determined to kill a buffalo and experience the American West, which he understood was quickly disappearing.

He instead invested in two ranches and fell in love with the badlands of the Little Missouri River Valley.

Within a year, Roosevelt was back, stricken with grief by the deaths of his mother and wife on the same day and determined to find purpose in his life by shedding the frailty of his poor health, the deep depression he had fallen into and the softness of city life which had earned the somewhat snobbish T.R. with the nickname “Dude” among the locals.

Ed O’Keefe, CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which just broke ground here this past summer, explains that because of how much the Dakota Territory shaped the man and the president, it became clear that if ever a Theodore Roosevelt presidential library would be built, it had to be here.

It is in the Badlands that T.R. found solace and lived what he would later call “the strenuous life,” and it would profoundly shape him. He wrote later, “I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota.”

And it was here “that the romance of my life began,” Roosevelt said.

O’Keefe said from the time of T.R.’s death in 1919 and the establishment of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association, there was always intent by Congress to establish a memorial in the east and a memorial in the west.

O’Keefe says people are often stunned to learn that there had never been a presidential library.

“The reason is the presidential library system wasn’t established until Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” O’Keefe said. “However, because Congress established the memorial association act, it served as an official/unofficial way to build a presidential library over a hundred years later to one of the most enduring figures in the American imagination.” Medora, Population 125

Everywhere you look here in the tiny town of Medora, Roosevelt is omnipresent. From the colorful Rough Riders Hotel to the gleaming bronze statue of T.R. standing sentinel outside the Town Hall Theater, people here embrace his presence in their lives, flaws and all.

O’Keefe, a native Dakotan, explains that the library will open in three years, on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “We hope that Medora, North Dakota, and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library will be a star in that nationwide patriotic celebration,” he said.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum explains the move to create a T.R. presidential library got real 10 years ago, as a digital library to be housed at Dickinson State University with scanned copies of Roosevelt items.

“By 2019, I had signed legislation committing $50 million from the state’s oil and gas revenues fund, as long as the library backers could raise $100 million by the end of 2020,” Burgum said in an interview with the Post-Gazette.

The backers met the moment. Two years later, a group of Roosevelt family descendants purchased the land out of their own pocket from the Forest Service for $81,000, and in June ground was already being moved to start the project.

This is not your father’s presidential library. “We have a unique opportunity to embrace technology and do immersive, almost theatrical storytelling. T.R.’s life is an incredible adventure story, and we want people to feel that when they come here,” O’Keefe said.

“People will see artifacts that have been spread out amongst 70 different institutions across the country, many of which have never seen the light of day,” he said of the planned exhibits.

“We want them to be there for people to see and understand and tell the stories of history. But we also have an opportunity to immerse people in the stories of Theodore Roosevelt.

T.R.’s great-great grandson Kermit Roosevelt III, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and one of the family members who sits on the board of the library, said when T.R. came to the Badlands, he just threw himself into the life of a cowboy.

He said the library experiences will reflect T.R.’s belief in the importance of preserving America’s wild spaces.