[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 6 (Monday, January 11, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Page S12]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK

  Mr. HOEVEN. Madam President, western North Dakota is getting a lot of 
attention these days because of its vibrant energy economy. But people 
also need to know about the spectacular landscape and natural beauty 
that thrives side by side with energy development in my home State. So 
I want to speak today for a few minutes about a remarkable asset in my 
home State of North Dakota that was highlighted this past weekend in 
the New York Times.
  The Times ranked Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North 
Dakota as fifth on its list of 52 worldwide destinations to visit in 
2016. Only Mexico City, Bordeaux in France, the Mediterranean island of 
Malta, and the Caribbean city of Coral Bay St. John in the U.S. Virgin 
Islands ranked ahead of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
  Tim Neville for the New York Times wrote of the park:

       Few presidents have done as much for conservation as Teddy 
     Roosevelt. Fly into Dickinson in western North Dakota to 
     visit the park named after him, where rolling grasslands 
     dotted with bison collapse into the spectacular red, white 
     and gold badlands of tumbling mud coulees.

  The more than 70,000-square-acre park consists of three parts: The 
south unit, which is the largest of the two units, the north unit, and 
the site of Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch, which lies between the north and 
south units. The Little Missouri River meanders through all three 
sections of the park.
  Roosevelt captured a colorful picture of life on the Elkhorn Ranch in 
his 1885 book called ``Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.''

       My home ranch-house stands on the river brink. From the 
     low, longer veranda, shaded by leafy cotton-woods, one looks 
     across sand bars and shallows to a strip of meadowland, 
     behind which rises a line of sheer cliffs and grassy 
     plateaus. This veranda is a pleasant place in the summer 
     evenings when a cool breeze stirs along the river and blows 
     in the faces of the tired men, who loll back in their 
     rocking-chairs (what true American does not enjoy a rocking-
     chair?), book in hand--though they do not often read the 
     books, but rock gently to and fro, gazing sleepily out at the 
     weird-looking buttes opposite, until their sharp outlines 
     grow indistinct and purple in the after-glow of the sunset.

  Theodore Roosevelt National Park has preserved what Roosevelt saw 
more than a century ago. For that reason, it gets half a million 
visitors a year, but more should come to see it, and I believe more 
will as a result of the New York Times list. Speaking of New York, the 
Times was the right venue to highlight Teddy Roosevelt's National Park 
because Teddy Roosevelt was a native son of New York, born in the heart 
of Manhattan at the dawn of the age of concrete canyons and bustling 
growth.
  More than 135 years ago, he fled the hectic pace of New York for the 
solitude of North Dakota's western Badlands on a hunting trip. During 
that trip--his first to what was then called the Dakota Territory--he 
was so taken with the land that he bought a ranch before he left for 
home.
  Within a year, back at home in New York, however, tragedy struck in a 
cruel way. Both Roosevelt's wife and his mother died in the same House 
on the same day. He was crushed, but being a man of action, he sought 
to redirect his grief by throwing himself into a new adventure--cattle 
ranching in North Dakota. He went west and built the Elkhorn Ranch on a 
plot of land that is now part of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
  Roosevelt long acknowledged his debt to North Dakota. He said: ``I 
have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my 
experience in North Dakota. . . . It was here that the romance of my 
life began.''
  That romance is still alive and well in western North Dakota. I 
invite travelers from around the world to visit us and see what the New 
York Times described as a ``century of protecting America's 
magnificence.''

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