This Week in the West: Theodore Roosevelt

In the summer of 1884, Theodore Roosevelt left New York and settled into a low-slung, log ranch house near the Little Missouri River, 35 miles north of Medora, North Dakota.

Living on the ranch would transform Roosevelt, who had been known as an elite, Gilded Age intellectual, into a proponent of The Strenuous Life. He would challenge himself physically, embrace nature and do hard things.