a wild west boom
Medora began as a military cantonment called Little Missouri. It was officially named Medora in 1883 by the Marquis de Mores, an entrepreneurial French nobleman with a big dream for a meat-packing empire. He named the town after his wife, Medora von Hoffman.
That same year, a young Theodore Roosevelt made his first visit to Medora — where he would later find solace and strength after the death of his wife. Many years after that, he would tell an audience in Fargo: “I never would have been President had it not been for my time in North Dakota.”
In 1888, a brutal blizzard wiped out the majority of Medora’s cattle industry — and the town spent decades approaching “ghost town” status. But the story doesn’t end here…
