9/23/2009:
When the train pulled up to Medora hours before dawn in early September of 1890, Theodore Roosevelt's ranch hands were already there; eager to see their longtime friend and meet his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson. Theodore had often bragged about her skill as a mighty horse rider. He had built up her reputation so much, Corinne later wrote, that "the cowboys were quite sure that I would leap from the locomotive to the back of a bucking bronco." They were greatly disappointed when she instead begged to ride out to the Elkhorn Ranch in the wagon. But she would soon be given another chance to prove herself.
Over the next few days, ranch hands Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris instructed Corrine on the fine art of "roping an animal" and "throwing a calf." On their final day at the Elkhorn Ranch, Merrifield and Ferris announced a "surprise" to the Roosevelt family: unbeknownst to Corinne, they expected her to wrestle a calf in front of an audience of family members and ranch hands.
Although stunned at the announcement, she accepted the challenge; later describing the scene in a book about her brother. At three o'clock in the afternoon, everyone gathered around the fence to "witness the struggle between a young woman of the East and a bovine denizen of the Western prairies...I followed a most grueling pantomime, galloping after the calf, knee-deep in mud until I successfully got the rope around its neck. I can feel now the mud in my boots as I floundered with agonized effort after that energetic animal. I finally flung myself across its back, and...for some torturing minutes I lay across the heifer's spine, before, by a final Herculean effort, I caught the left leg with my right arm. The cries of 'Stay with him!' from the fence and the shrieks of laughter of my brother and husband" ringing in my "ears, the deed was finally accomplished, when the calf, with one terrible lurch, actually 'wrastled,' so to speak, fell over on its head in the mud." Exhausted, "I only remember being lifted up, bruised and encased in an armor of oozing mud, and being carried triumphantly on the shoulders of the cowboys into the ranch house, having redeemed, in their opinion, at least, the reputation which my brother had given me before I visited the Badlands."
The next day, the Roosevelt family left North Dakota for Yellowstone, returning to Medora briefly on this day in 1890 on their trip back to Washington DC. But Corinne Roosevelt Robinson never forgot that day in the Dakota Badlands. Although she would go on to travel extensively overseas, even meeting European monarchs, she always described "wrastling the calf" in North Dakota as "one of her most thrilling life victories."
Dakota Datebook written by Christina Sunwall
Sources:
Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Edith Kermit Roosevelt. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt. My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921.