‘50,000 Came’ – Teddy Roosevelt Remembered in Missoula
A Day of Roosevelt
Yesterday Missoula welcomed Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, ex-president of the United States, and through him about fifty thousand citizens of western Montana. Colonel Roosevelt attracted to Missoula the largest crowd that the Garden city’s life has known and was himself chief entertainer to his friends of the west. He delivered three of the four addresses promised for him. The fourth he could not give on account of physical exhaustion. In the morning Mr. Roosevelt spoke twice, to the school children of the city and to the students and friends of the University of Montana. His address to the little people was given on the university campus; Mr. Roosevelt talked a little later in University hall. He advised the children to play hard when they played, and not to play at all when they worked. To their elders he taught the value of vocational education and cultural education, discussing this general subject with expert thoroughness. In the afternoon, at 2:30 o’clock, Mr. Roosevelt made his principal address. He spoke to the largest audience that ever heard anyone in this city. He took “Good Citizenship” as his theme. In all of his addresses Mr. Roosevelt was cheered heartily and frequently. After his talk of the afternoon, Missoula’s guest attended a reception at the Missoula club. At 9 o’clock last evening he retired to his car in the Northern Pacific yards, utterly worn out. He took dinner with Senator Dixon, who introduced him in the afternoon. Missoula was gay in patriotic colors yesterday and the streets were picturesque with Indians and cowboys. Band concerts helped to enliven the day for the crowds, which were so large that it seemed as if all western Montana were poured into Missoula. The arrangements for the day’s program were perfect; there was not a hitch anywhere. Mr. Roosevelt stepped from his car into a breeze that held rigid the flags that were flung from the city’s buildings, and rode and talked all day long under the fickle conditions of an April day. The weather was not what Missoula has been experiencing, but it was not as unpleasant as it might have been. By and large, there was nothing wrong with Roosevelt Day.
The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on April 12, 1911.
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A Missoula man knew Teddy Roosevelt long before he became president. He wrote about him in an article that appeared in The Daily Missoulian on January 8, 1919:
Welliver Writes Of Young ‘Teddy’
Missoula Pioneer Tells Story of Meeting With Roosevelt in 1885.
This is another of those interesting stories of the west by R. F. Welliver, Montana pioneer, now living in Missoula. This story is of special interest now because it deals with the life in the northwest of the great American whose death was recorded with sorrow throughout the world yesterday.
By R. F. Welliver.
In the summers of 1885 and 1886 I met Theodore Roosevelt on an average of three times a week. I was a passenger conductor running between Mandan and Glendive. Roosevelt had a little ranch about two miles from the Little Missouri station. This station was afterwards called Medora – named for the Marquis Demores’ wife.[1]
The Northern Pacific, in those days, ran only one passenger train each way daily, No. 1 and No. 2. On the third of July, 1885, Mr. Roosevelt was a passenger going to the Little Missouri. He wore his Broadway togs, and occupied the stateroom in the sleeper.
A delegation of prominent citizens of Dickinson, N. D., waited on him, asking that he deliver a Fourth of July oration the following day. Roosevelt consented, and to do so was compelled to return on No. 2. The same evening No. 1 and No. 2 met at Sentinel Butte, 20 miles west of the Little Missouri.
The superintendent arranged for me to return on No. 2 so that I could spend the Fourth at my home in Mandan. When I reached the Little Missouri on No. 2, I found Roosevelt on the platform dressed in a complete cowboy outfit, including two huge guns hanging from his hips, and 35 of the liveliest and loudest cowpunchers in the bad lands with him, all his guests.
He furnished tickets for the whole outfit to Dickinson. They took possession of the dining car and champagne flowed like a stream. Teddy was the noisiest of the outfit, and filled his glass twenty times with the boys in the dining car. But the conductor told me after they got off at Dickinson that Roosevelt had not taken half a glass of the sparkling beverage.
They were the noisiest crowd that Dickinson had ever entertained. Roosevelt made himself one of them and no man ever was more loved or will be more greatly missed than he among the boisterous, kind, big-hearted men of the plains, many of whom were college graduates.