Dan Flores

Stepping off the train in North Dakota, he hired a guy named Joe Ferris, who in perfect symmetry for that decade, was from eastern Canada and had himself only been on the scene in the West for a year.

They made the Maltese cross-ranch their headquarters and set out on horseback on what turned into a 15-day quest.

The days of Audubon describing the sound of the vast herds in this same country as resembling continuous rolling thunder were now gone forever.

That year of Roosevelt's hunt, the Fort Benton shipper I.G.

Baker sent a grand total of 5,000 buffalo hides down the Missouri River.

The next year, he shipped none at all.

The bison story was already exemplifying that in the scope of world history, the United States had engaged in a more complete destruction of wild animals and a wider diversity of them than any modern country in existence.

Roosevelt's bison hunt was a revelation to him.

Initially, he wrote his wife, Alice, that buffalo are too rare for me to hope to get one.

Over the course of two weeks of horseback travel that took them into Montana territory, they found a handful.

Roosevelt wounded one bison he never found and missed shots at another pair before finally downing an unsuspecting bull barely 50 yards distant.

A handsome animal whose glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in the rays of the sun, he said.

The celebration became the stuff of Western romance.

Teddy did a freestyle Indian dance and paid Ferris $100 on the spot.

Hooked on the curious, fantastic beauty of the Badlands, before he departed, he bought an interest in his first ranch there, the Maltese Cross.

On a return trip the next year, 1884, he bought a second property he called the Elkhorn along the Little Missouri, the nearest neighbor 12 miles away.

These Western experiences were pivotal in Roosevelt's life.

They gave him a base of operations in the West and put him in contact with individuals whose character stood naked in that setting.

He later commented that he learned how to evaluate people in those years, an affirmation of his evolving belief in strength, directness, and the will to make things happen.

He also learned much more now about the Western animals he had read about.