The amount of this alluvial land enclosed by a single bend is called a bottom, which may be either covered with cotton-wood trees or else be simply a great grass meadow. 'The river flows in long sigmoid curves through an alluvial valley of no great width.

'The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.' Rattlesnakes are quite plenty, living in the deserted holes, and the latter are also the homes of the little burrowing owls.' 'Around the prairie-dog towns it is always well to keep a look-out for the smaller carnivora, especially coyotes and badgers.and for the larger kinds of hawks. They are never found singly, but always in towns of several hundred inhabitants and these towns are found in all kinds of places where the country is flat and treeless.' they are in shape like little woodchucks, and are the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable. 'In a great many-indeed, in most-localities there are wild horses to be found, which, although invariably of domestic descent, being either themselves runaways from some ranch or Indian outfit, or else claiming such for their sires and dams, yet are quite as wild as the antelope on whose domain they have intruded.' They were a most welcome little group of guests, and we were sorry when, after loitering around a day or two, they disappeared toward their breeding haunts.' 'One bleak March day.a flock of snow-buntings came.Every few moments one of them would mount into the air, hovering about with quivering wings and warbling a loud, merry song with some very sweet notes. 'Magpies are birds that catch the eye at once from their bold black and white plummage and long tails and they are very saucy and at the same time very cunning and shy.' 'They have a funny habit of gravely bowing or posturing at the passer-by, and stand up very erect on their legs.' - Theodore Roosevelt on burrowing owls

'One of our sweetest, loudest songsters is the meadow-lark.the plains air seems to give it a voice, and it will perch on the top of a bush or tree and sing for hours in rich, bubbling tones.' 'Rattlesnakes are only too plentiful everywhere along the river bottoms, in the broken, hilly ground, and on the prairies and the great desert wastes alike.If it can it will get out of the way, and only coils up in its attitude of defence when it believes that it is actually menaced.' 'The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.' 'I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious fascination for me.'

'It was here that the romance of my life began.' 'I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.' Many of the quotes listed here are from Theodore Roosevelt's popular books Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Wilderness Hunter. This page contains numerous quotes used currently or in past versions of the park website.

Theodore roosevelt quotes about endings