Furnishing Plan for a Badlands Ranch House

This discussion of typical furnishings in ranch houses of western Dakota or eastern Montana during the last two decades of the nineteenth century was completed to fulfill the requirements of RSP H-1 from Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park. This unit of the National Park System on the western edge of North Dakota honors the activities of Theodore Roosevelt in that part of the west between 1883 and 1899. Roosevelt's active involvement in Dakota ranching lasted less than five years, but he visited his Elkhorn Ranch nearly every autumn on hunting trips. Roosevelt last saw the land where "the romance of my life began" in 1903. The spell of the North Dakota Badlands along the Little Missouri caught Roosevelt during his first extended stay in the region. The Badlands of the Little Missouri River possessed curious fantastic beauty and savage desolation in Roosevelt's eyes when he saw them in 1884.