Tickets on sale for grand opening of Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library; KFGO, April 1, 2026

Gretchen Hjelmstad, KFGO; Tickets on sale for grand opening of Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

"You could be among the first to visit the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Tickets are now available for the library’s grand opening on July 4, which is also America’s 250th birthday.

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is located in Medora in the Badlands of western North Dakota, where the 26th president hunted and ranched as a young man in the 1880s.

Capacity is limited. You can reserve tickets here."

Teddy Roosevelt’s Family Urges G.O.P. to Protect Public Lands; The New York Times, February 16, 2026

Maxine Joselow, The New York Times; Teddy Roosevelt’s Family Urges G.O.P. to Protect Public Lands

In a rare letter to Republican senators, four descendants of the former president oppose mining near a wilderness area in Minnesota. 

"Off the top of his head, Mr. Roosevelt rattled off several conservation efforts by Republican presidents: Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the first national park. Abraham Lincoln protected Yosemite Valley by giving it to California as the first state park. And most recently, George W. Bush created a marine national monument in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii.

“I don’t see any Republican leadership on that scale today,” Mr. Roosevelt said.

President Trump, who has indicated that he will sign the measure to allow mining near the Boundary Waters, has sought to increase oil and gas drilling, mining and other industrial activities on public lands and waters across the country. His administration plans to permit new oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters.

“There’s never been a president with zero interest in protecting the natural world until Donald Trump,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University and the author of the book “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.”...

Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, frequently invokes Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation legacy in speeches, social media posts and emails to Interior Department employees.

While serving as the governor of North Dakota, Mr. Burgum also championed the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D. The library is set to open on July 4 to mark America’s 250th birthday, an occasion that the four Roosevelts highlighted in their letter.

“On Independence Day, three pillars of T.R.’s life will take central stage: leadership, conservation and citizenship,” they wrote. “It’s one thing for politicians to say they believe in these three pillars, and it’s quite another thing to act that way.”"

What Is a Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library Doing in North Dakota?; The New York Times, October 27, 2023

 Jennifer Schuessler,  The New York Times, October 27, 2023; What Is a Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library Doing in North Dakota?

"The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, set to open on July 4, 2026, will pay tribute to the 26th president’s “relentless, resilient spirit” and environmental vision. Perched dramatically on a butte, it aims to be “a people’s presidential library,” rooted not in books and archives — there are none — but immersive exhibits that challenge visitors to get, as Roosevelt famously put it, “in the arena.”...

More than a century after his death, Roosevelt remains one of the most popular presidents, celebrated as a man of action, a muscular nationalist, an environmental visionary, a trustbuster or all of the above. He’s a favorite of Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, Tom Brady and LeBron James. Historians consistently rank him among the top five.

But Roosevelt also saw life as a struggle between the weak and the strong, with whites at the top of the evolutionary heap. Which raises another, thornier question: How do you build an honest 21st-century museum about a figure whose 19th-century attitudes about race, empire and, especially, Native Americans still trail him like a cloud of dust?...

Scott Davis, a former executive director of the North Dakota Indian Affairs Commission, said he immediately texted Governor Burgum when he saw the news. “I was really upset,” he recalled in an interview last month in Medora. After a long conversation, Davis said, the governor raised the possibility of adding a “platform” for Native voices at the library...

A two-page spread in the library’s “Story Guide” lists “sensitive issues,” including Roosevelt’s support for eugenics, his militarism and his often “coarse and fearful” views of Native Americans.

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he said in 1886, “but I believe nine out of every 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”"...

Roosevelt’s conservation policies, the guide acknowledges, “came at a great cost to Native Americans,” who lost access to homes, hunting grounds and spiritual sites.

Still, the historian Douglas Brinkley, a board member and the author of “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America,” called Roosevelt “a sustainable hero” — imperfect, but possessing virtues and accomplishments that can be built on.

“We’d be a much lesser nation without the efforts of his presidency,” Brinkley said.

Kermit Roosevelt, a great-great-grandson of the president and a board member who teaches constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was important to address his ancestor’s ugly attitudes toward Native Americans, as well his broader “atmospheric Social Darwinism.”"