Listing Through Life

On Friday evening, we headed a short distance outside Medora to the Pitchfork Steak Fondue. As we arrived, we saw the cooks putting the steaks onto the pitchforks.

I didn’t see them cook the steaks because we were on the other side of the dining area looking at the view. The big house in the middle distance on the right is the Chateau de Mores, the home of Antoine-Amedee-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores et de Montemaggiore, commonly called the Marquis de Mores. He was a French adventurer who ranched in the region for a couple years at the same time Roosevelt was here. He opened a meat packing plant, lost a battle with the Chicago meat packers and the railroads, named the town after his wife, Medora, and left. He bounced around the world for a few more years before being killed in North Africa while trying to stir up a revolt against the British. The house can be toured, but this is as close as we got.

The ruins of his meat plant are next to the national park visitor center. You can see the smokestack as a tan stripe below the bluff on the left. Medora is in the middle distance.

We wandered about the area after eating, then filed down into the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, to our seats in the sixth row. The Medora Musical was a mix of comedy and music put on by the Burning Hills Singers and The Coal Diggers band. It was hokey, but amusing and well-done.

After intermission, there was a very weird performance by a group called Cirque Zuma Zuma who performed rhythmic dance and acrobatics to African-style music. One of the performers was a young lady who could contort her body into any position she wished. It was grotesque, and I took no photos. I said to my wife that it wasn’t a talent so much as a deformity. The rest of their show was entertaining, but so out of sync with the rest of the program that I wondered if they’d gotten lost and wandered onto the wrong stage.

The country-western music came back on for another set, and it seemed a lot more fitting with the location.

Theodore Roosevelt visited the North Dakota badlands in 1883 and began a cattle ranch called the Maltese Cross with two other men, about seven miles south of Medora. He soon moved to another site, called the Elkhorn Ranch, about 35 miles north of town. His active ranching career was over by 1887, and he sold all his remaining cattle interests in 1898.

When Roosevelt became president, the cabin was taken apart and shipped to St. Louis for the World’s Fair. It then went to Oregon, and spent 50 years in Fargo before being brought back to the badlands and reconstructed behind the National Park visitor center in Medora.

We toured the tiny three-room cabin with about 30 fellow tourists and the world’s most annoying ranger tour guide. He started every sentence with “Well …,” moved around like a mime and talked to all of us as though we were five.

The desk and rocking chair in the main room are thought to have been Roosevelt’s. It was in this room that he wrote Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.

The trunk in the bedroom also belonged to Teddy.

The Maltese Cross brand can be seen on the end of the one of the outside logs.

I wandered by again the next morning and took a few more photos.

And I took this photo in one of the in-town museums.

The visitor center display had the shirt Roosevelt was wearing when he was shot in Milwaukee.

From the brochure:

The Geese in Flight sculpture was raised in June, 2001 and is in the Guinness World Book of Records as the largest scrap metal sculpture in the world. It was built of used oil well pipe and oil tanks. It weighs over 75 ton. The sun ray is 156 feet long and 110 feet tall. The largest goose has a 30 foot wing span and is 19 feet long.

Here’s what it looks like from near the Deer Family statue, with the town of Gladstone and I-94 in between.

From the brochure:

The Deer Family was completed in 2001 and erected in 2002. It was made from old oil well tanks cut apart and welded to form the shadow design. To fit through the streets of Regent, the buck’s front leg had to be cut off and re-welded onsite. The buck is 75 feet tall and 60 feet long. The doe is 50 feet tall by 50 feet long.

A Horned Lark watched us look at the deer. It stayed on the fence post as we pulled the car within about three feet.

Here’s what the deer look like from a hill north of I-94. The grain elevator in the middle distance is in the town of Gladstone.