4/7/2012:
Throughout history, American cities tend to bustle with special excitement when a president visits. Not only do presidential visits inspire celebration and news, they usually secure a strong place in their own historical record.
That was especially true when selected lucky cities in North Dakota welcomed the man everyone considered a favorite adopted son-Theodore Roosevelt. T.R. would pass through the territory and state before and after his presidency many times between 1883 and 1918. But on this date in 1903, T.R. made his only swing through North Dakota as the sitting chief executive.
Residents worried that the snow storm the day before would hamper the festivities on the day Fargo Mayor W.D. Sweet had declared “Roosevelt Day.” That was not so, and the sun shone as warmly as the crowds when he pulled into the station in his specially designed traveling car. Stepping into the sunlight wearing his winter coat he quipped “My, I forgot I was in the banana belt. I don’t need this overcoat.” He also said, “I do not feel as if I were a stranger, but rather I feel as if this were more or less a homecoming.”
The President breakfasted with locals, toured the city in a carriage and otherwise engaged the gathered press and citizenry with his obvious joy at being in the state. The Fargo stop re-introduced him to old-time friends from territory days, and those nostalgic reunions continued through stops at Tower City, Valley City, Jamestown, Mandan and Medora.
One of his traveling companions was naturalist John Burroughs. Rolling into the badlands, T.R. and Burroughs stood on his car’s platform drinking in the stark beauty of the landscape.
“I know all this country like a book,” the President exclaimed. I have ridden over it, and hunted on it and tramped over it in all seasons and weather and it feels like home to me.”
In Medora the entire population of the Badlands, he later related, “down to the smallest baby” seemed to be in attendance at his arrival.
He wrote: “At every station there was somebody who remembered my riding in there. They all felt I was their man, their old friend; and even if they had been hostile to me in the old days…they now firmly believed they had always been my staunch friends and admirers. I shook hands with them all, and almost everyone had some memory of special association with me he or she wished to discuss.”
Dakota Datebook written by Steve Stark
Sources:
Hagedorn, Herman, 1921, Roosevelt in the Badlands
Vivian, James F., 1989, Prairie House, The Romance of My Life
http:// www.fargo.history.com