Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy looms large in western North Dakota, where the young, future president ranched and hunted in the Medora Badlands in the 1880s. The National Park in his name cements his place in state history. The efforts to establish a Theodore Roosevelt park in North Dakota reaches back to at least 1921, when the state legislature passed a resolution urging Congress to establish the park around the petrified forest in the Badlands north of Medora.