The Big, Dumb, Gluttonous Fun of America’s Semiquincentennial

Free stuff wasn’t sufficient to keep an ambient sense of dread at bay, however. “It is beautiful,” a dimpled young man at the Utah booth said when I complimented his state. “Unfortunately, it’s on fire right now.” At least ten states did not send official delegations, citing the cost of participation, scheduling issues, or the partisan tenor of the event. At the North Carolina booth, whose display was sponsored in part by a Nascar team, a visitor, his shoulders hunched in anger, asked why the video monitors in the booth originally included images of the Confederate flag. (They had since been removed.) “We were invited to be here to showcase the resiliency of North Carolina,” a staffer repeated stiffly. In the Faith & Family pavilion, the Museum of the Bible gave away fans, a Pentecostal preacher promoted anti-vax literature, and a cozy reading nook featured material such as “My First Board Book: The Second Amendment.” By the time I reached Iowa’s booth—whose list of items you can get on a stick at the Iowa State Fair (pork chop, smoothie, pecan pie) made me long for Des Moines—I was heat-struck and weary, and I wondered whether the fair was actually a brilliant ploy to spur domestic tourism, by making everywhere else in the U.S. seem better than here.

In the evening, after the heat broke, I made my way to the American Heartland Arena, at the eastern end of the Mall, where a small rodeo was under way. The bleachers were packed, and for the first time all day the air hummed with genuine enthusiasm. The announcer gave an abbreviated and pointedly inclusive history of rodeo—vaqueros and Native riders, cowboys and cowgirls—and then a woman with a pageant smile and a spangled outfit entered the narrow, dirt-floored corral. She stood astride two horses, one foot on each of their backs. The horses circled the ring at a swift trot, passing close enough that I could see the rider’s thigh muscles tremble with effort. “If we had more space, she’d go at full speed,” the announcer said. Instead, she left the arena, smiling and waving. The announcer directed our attention to a large screen playing a video about the history of the lasso. People began thumbing at their phones again. The free pen I’d been given at the Moms for America exhibit, hours earlier, had somehow already run out of ink. Like many Americans before me, I looked at the world around me and realized that it was played out. It was time for me to head west.

Medora, North Dakota, has been called “the best little town in the West” and “North Dakota’s most historic town.” Throughout the eighteen-eighties, when the area was still known as the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt spent extended spells there, cowboying and investing in ranchland. “In this country of hills and plateaus, the romance of my life began,” he later said. Medora—which has a hundred and twenty-one full-time residents, according to the latest census—comes alive in the summer. On a typical day this July, around four Roosevelt impersonators were roaming the streets, identifiable by their mustaches, stout bellies, and dispensing of homespun wisdom. Many of the town’s bars, restaurants, and hotels have names referencing “T.R.,” as the twenty-sixth President is known, with proprietary familiarity, in Medora.

The town gives the impression of being draped in a kind of perma-bunting, and it goes all out for the Fourth of July: a Teddy Roosevelt brunch is followed by a sparkler-filled parade down Main Street to the town square. This year, the town expected huge crowds to come celebrate America’s two hundred and fiftieth, which coincided with the opening of the town’s Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. The library, a four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar rammed-earth building, was envisioned as an architectural embodiment of Roosevelt’s conservation legacy, and people had arranged their trips to see it years in advance. What better place to indulge in some old-fashioned patriotic razzmatazz?

After I booked my flight to North Dakota, I learned that Trump had the same idea. The library’s grand opening was now a Freedom 250 event, and Trump planned to make a speech after the ribbon-cutting, on July 1st. When I arrived in Medora, rental cars were sold out and broad-shouldered MAGA boys in too-tight pants were swaggering down the sidewalk, three abreast. The high point of my visit, I had imagined, would be the “Medora Musical,” a patriotic song-and-dance revue, dating from the nineteen-sixties, filled with men in cowboy hats and women in ruffled skirts making corny jokes, then bursting into soaring, irony-free harmonies. Performances take place at the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, a nearly three-thousand-person outdoor arena with dramatic views of the Badlands; at a pivotal moment, the stage set slides open and horses gallop onstage. I am a soft touch, particularly for a small-town show, and was looking forward to crying. But the performance was cancelled—word around town was that crews had to reinforce the amphitheatre’s stage to bear the weight of a bulletproof barrier for the President to speak behind.

Many Badlands towns are depopulated and unpicturesque, worn down by drought and the boom-and-bust cycle of oil-and-gas extraction. But Medora is more prosperous; in lieu of dollar stores, there is relentless outlaw kitsch. In 1986, Harold Schafer, the North Dakota entrepreneur behind Mr. Bubble, established the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, which now functions as a kind of nonprofit hospitality conglomerate, operating four hotels, a campground, the Bully Pulpit Golf Course, TR’s Tavern, a pizza place, an ice-cream parlor, a family resort, a horse stable, and a half-dozen other businesses. You could spend a long weekend in Medora and, without realizing it, patronize only foundation entities. The workforce is largely international and seasonal; employees live in dorms and eat at a workers’ cafeteria, as if Medora were a company town whose primary product is the Medora experience. (Not everyone is on board. In a cluttered store not owned by the foundation, I saw a guestbook with a message in shaky handwriting: “thank you to all our patrons since 2007 for helping small business owners succeed when they are trying so hard to push us out and take complete control.”) Medora sometimes feels like a strange, cheerful dream about America. Twice in two days, I found myself stranded without a ride on a butte above town, once in pouring rain; on both occasions, the friendly stranger who offered me a lift turned out to be a Roosevelt.

The story you most often hear around town is that a twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt travelled west after his mother and his wife died on the same day, of different causes. (The new library displays his journal, in which that day is marked with a large black “X” and the sentence “The light has gone out of my life.”) Here, the wealthy and asthmatic young politician, bolstered by time spent outside among manly men, grew strong enough to meet his destiny. But Roosevelt’s first visit to the Dakota Territory actually took place a year earlier, in 1883, when he embarked on a hunting trip, dressed like “a regular cowboy dandy,” as he wrote to his sister, in a buckskin suit, a silk neckerchief, and alligator-hide boots. The expedition did not go as planned. The Wild West was even then a myth receding into a hazy, heroic past. In place of herds of bison thundering across the prairie, there were piles of bones a story high and as much as a hundred feet long. It took Roosevelt nine days to kill a bison; within a year, there would be only around three hundred and twenty-five left south of Canada. The Northern Pacific Railway had recently been completed, and the violent displacement of the region’s Native populations had cleared the path for large-scale cattle operations and wheat farms controlled by absentee landowners—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and a smattering of British dukes and earls. A few decades later, after Roosevelt, as President, opened the nation’s first game preserve, in Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains, he had to stock it with bison imported from the Bronx Zoo.

On a bright morning in Medora, I met Dan Bram, a policy analyst and a T.R. enthusiast from D.C. In 2022, Bram created a profile on the dating app Hinge that said he was looking for “a +1 to the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library opening in the North Dakota Badlands.” He matched with Rachel Coleman, whose profile noted that one of the few states she had yet to visit was North Dakota. They began dating, and she was startled to discover that he had a picture of Roosevelt hanging above his bed; when they eventually moved in together, she asked him to consolidate his collection of paraphernalia into the bathroom, which is now T.R.-themed. They married in 2025. “Everybody assumed I was going to talk about him in my vows,” Bram said. He refrained, but his friends worked a few mentions into their toasts. In Medora, he and Coleman wore custom T-shirts featuring a drawing of Mt. Rushmore with the non-Roosevelt faces replaced by those of their dog and their friends’ dogs.

Bram had worked for Elizabeth Warren, and he told me that his stint with her deepened his appreciation of Roosevelt’s role as an anti-monopolist. More recently, a different politician—another wealthy New Yorker with a populist touch and imperial ambitions—has been trying to identify himself with Roosevelt. The assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, emphasized the parallels. Here was a candidate who got shot—as Roosevelt was, in 1912, by a man who’d been instructed to do so in a dream by the vengeful ghost of William McKinley—and kept on campaigning. Last summer, a pair of three-story banners reading “American Workers FIRST” appeared on the Department of Labor building, in D.C. One featured the face of T.R., the other that of D.J.T.

In 2024, Trump won the highest vote share of any Presidential candidate in North Dakota since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and, despite his abysmal approval ratings nationwide, he still has plenty of fans in the state. On the day of his appearance in Medora, the crowds awaiting him were magnanimous and forbearing, as they have been at every MAGA event I’ve attended. (One of the pleasures of tribalism is how nicely you get to treat others inside the tribe.) We rode buses up to the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, where the air was hazy with heat. Nearby, in front of a private audience at the library, Trump praised Roosevelt as a man who led “a freaking wild life,” who “didn’t want to listen to his doctor,” who “didn’t want to be quiet—he wanted to be great.”

I found a seat at the amphitheatre next to a dapper, snowy-haired, retired Houston chiropractor with Presidential-seal cufflinks and a pocket full of George H. W. Bush commemorative coins. He quietly let me know that he had come to Medora to honor Roosevelt, not the current President. “Trump heard about a parade and decided he had to get in front of it,” he grumbled. The midday sun was relentless; a woman collapsed and was carried off by E.M.T.s. After several hours of waiting, two dozen men in suspenders and cowboy hats—Rough Rider reënactors—strode onstage as the sound system blasted “Hot Stuff.” In any other context, I’d have expected them to start disrobing; instead, they stood stoically as the President shuffled out, thumbs-upping the crowd. He told us that the country had been dying, but now it was the hottest it had ever been. He told us that one of his sons had advised him not to say who got more votes, him or T.R. He told us that D.C. was bracing for triple-digit temperatures on the Fourth of July but that he planned to give “a really long speech” just to show that he could. The E.M.T.s scurried to help another wilting audience member. (Forty-five people at the event required medical assistance for heat-related incidents, according to the Billings County Sheriff’s Office.) I thought about how the promise of equality laid out in the Declaration of Independence has always been incompletely fulfilled and how, even so, I missed having a President who paid lip service to it. The chiropractor exited after about twenty minutes; when I left, a half hour later, Trump was still going.

The musical was rescheduled for the following night; I hoped that it would dispel the aftertaste of Trump’s brittle, mean-spirited nationalism, although that seemed like a tall order for a theatrical production. At the performance, I ran into the chiropractor again. He sported a seersucker suit and a fresh sunburn. “I think I’m still a Republican,” he confessed. Dark clouds massed ominously to the south. The cast got through one song—Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America”—before the show was called off, owing to lightning. It was time to drive on.

Trump headed south, to Mt. Rushmore, a monument he’s half joked about wanting to get his face onto; I went another way. As I drove east on Interstate 94, the rumpled topography of the Badlands gave way to farmland, and black cows clustered like scatter plots on the flat graph of the prairie. In Mandan, North Dakota, it was Patriot Night at the Dale Pahlke Arena, where the hundred-and-forty-seventh edition of the annual Mandan Rodeo Days was taking place. By the food stands, a soft-spoken man whom everyone was treating with conspicuous deference turned out to be Dale Pahlke himself, the president and C.E.O. of a local bank and a longtime rodeo supporter. “Energy and agriculture are our two biggest things here,” he said. “Oil can be good, oil can be fickle, but agriculture’s here all the time.”

In its early years, I was told, the rodeo was a casual affair sandwiched between baseball games and community cookouts. Nowadays, it’s a sanctioned event on the circuit of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, the largest organization of its kind in the world. In rodeo circles, the Fourth of July is known as Cowboy Christmas—a reliably lucrative and hectic period during the peak of the competitive season. As with Christmas, the logistical wrangling can outweigh the enjoyment, at least for the cowboys. One competitor spent the weekend driving between Mandan, the Sitting Bull Stampede (in Mobridge, South Dakota), and the Killdeer Mountain Roundup, north of Medora—a circuit of roughly four hundred miles.

The competitors huddled by the bull chutes looked focussed and road-weary, and I didn’t have the heart to pester them with questions about America. I flipped through the program, in which the riders had names with the loping cadence of protagonists in cowboy-romance novels: Canyon Bass, Riggen Hughes, Keaton Street, Lane Leeper. Near me, an elderly couple named Dusty and Sandy—“We’re dirty,” Dusty joked—diligently marked the results of the contests, as if recording a baseball game’s box score. A rider named Koby Jacobson, from Haiku, Hawaii, drew Paper Cut, a jet-black bull. When the chute opened, Paper Cut thrashed across the arena until, at the sound of the buzzer, Jacobson launched himself off the animal and staggered away, his chaps flapping. Dusty squinted appraisingly. “Eighty-five,” he pronounced. A moment later, the announcer gave the official score: eighty-five. Dusty nodded, satisfied, as Sandy squeezed his arm.

Later that night, Mandan hosted the Prairie Pyro-Musical—explosions accompanied by a soundtrack of patriotic and pop music—which was advertised as the biggest fireworks display in North Dakota’s history. Garisson Risner, a co-owner of the pyrotechnics company Pegasus Illuminations and one of the event’s coördinators, gave a more measured assessment. “I think it would be safe to say it was the largest fireworks display in North Dakota that night,” he said. “There are a lot of Karens in the world when it comes to pyrotechnics, so we try to watch what we claim.” Pegasus, which is based in Mott, North Dakota (population six hundred and fifty-three), knows how to put on a show. Last New Year’s Eve, the company lit 2.8 million Roman candles in sixty seconds—a Guinness World Record—with the goal of “bringing awareness to the importance of mental health for veterans.”

I found a spot in a broad, sloping field, where children engaged in furious lightsabre battles as they awaited the show. A man sitting behind me streamed Trump’s Mt. Rushmore speech on his phone, but I could hear only fragments: “Your Second Amendment . . . The menace of Communism in our land . . . Our American ancestors.” It was past the scheduled start time, and nothing had yet exploded. Children rampaged across the grass, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” in increasingly aggressive tones. Two boys wove between the field’s blankets and camp chairs, demanding that people proclaim their love for America.

The pyrotechnics world had big expectations for the U.S.’s two hundred and fiftieth, but more than ninety per cent of fireworks are manufactured in China, and Trump’s tariffs had put a damper on things, Risner told me. “If we had a customer that had a ten-thousand-dollar show and they upped their budget to fifteen thousand because it was the two hundred and fiftieth, and they asked us, ‘So how much bigger of a show can we get?,’ you basically had to tell them, ‘None,’ ” he said. Some municipalities shifted to drone shows—swarms of L.E.D. lights that could be programmed to form a bald eagle, then George Washington, then the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. Compared with fireworks, drone shows are cheaper, less alarming to dogs, and more environmentally friendly, but they are as charmless as a QR code.

The Prairie Pyro-Musical happily kept the emphasis on the “pyro.” There were comets, fountains, strobe pots. There was an exploding wheel a hundred and thirty-five feet in the air. New to me was the dragon’s breath, ground-based mushroom clouds of eyebrow-singeing flame. Sophisticated pyrotechnicians may not find dragon’s breath all that impressive (“You take just shy of four hundred fifty gallons of gasoline, you put it in a bunch of metal pipes, and you literally blow it up,” Risner explained), but they riled up the crowd. The children grew manic with glee, their lightsabres flailing, their patriotism sublimated into something more primal. “Fireball! Fireball! ” a girl shrieked.

On Independence Day, on the ceremonial grounds of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, a tribal nation that spans northeastern South Dakota and a small part of North Dakota, the afternoon heat rose steadily. Darell Decoteau, a voluble man in a Hawaiian shirt, sipped from a large plastic cup of lemonade into which he’d tipped a flavor packet of Sonic Ocean Water, turning the liquid a vibrant blue. It was powwow weekend—wacipi, in the Dakota language—and several thousand people had travelled there from Minneapolis and South Texas and Canada to celebrate. There was face painting, a golf tournament, and light-up novelty cups that flashed red, white, and blue. In a long oval at the center of the grounds, women in jingle dresses moved across the grass with light, quick steps to the sound of a steady, thumping drum. Wacipi means “they are dancing” in Dakota, Decoteau explained. Above the dancers flapped a ring of American flags, each representing a military veteran from the community who had passed away.

The powwow was more ambivalent than most Fourth of July celebrations. The tribe that would become the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate held its first Fourth of July powwow in the nineteenth century, during a period when the Native nations on the Great Plains were forced onto reservations and their cultures and languages were suppressed. Tribes were discouraged, and later prohibited, from engaging in many ceremonial practices, particularly “heathenish dances,” as Henry Teller, the Secretary of the Interior under Chester Arthur, called them. “When we’d sing and dance, everyone would get all worried that it was a war party and all that,” Decoteau told me. The tribe, whose treaty with the U.S. established the Lake Traverse Reservation in 1867, was led by a man named Gabriel Renville, who received permission from federal authorities to celebrate the birth of America. There was feasting, dancing, lacrosse, and a competition in which Renville’s spotted horse outpaced a white man’s racehorse. The ostensibly patriotic event repeated every year, serving as a kind of decoy, an excuse for tribal members to gather and dance. It is by some accounts the second-oldest continually operating powwow in the U.S. The tribe found other outlets for communal gathering, ways of translating its traditions into something palatable to white society. “We became a big rodeo society because we couldn’t powwow,” Decoteau said. “We’re a social people.”

Decoteau told me that his parents met on the West Coast, where they had moved in the sixties, the result of a federal program that incentivized Native Americans to leave reservations and settle in urban areas. The program was part of a mid-century campaign that sought assimilation while eroding tribal sovereignty. But Decoteau was brought up by his grandparents, who lived a few miles from the ceremonial grounds; these days, he teaches Dakota culture in local schools and serves on the powwow’s planning committee. He gave me a tour of the grounds, stopping to shake hands every ten feet or so—with a man in a Prince hat and a “Make America Native Again” shirt who was promoting a public-art project in Minneapolis, with a woman selling ribbon skirts and handmade silver jewelry, with venders from Guatemala selling knockoff Labubus in Pendleton prints. A couple of kids sprinted by, brandishing plastic machine guns. Decoteau frowned. “ ‘No guns’ is the rule, but one of our venders must have snuck some in,” he said.

Asking people about the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence felt a little silly, given the context. “Newcomers,” one man said tolerantly. “You’re here to get the Native perspective on two hundred fifty years of America?” John Heminger, a photographer with a long face and restless energy, asked me. “You mean stolen lands, broken treaties, boarding schools, generational trauma?” Then he gave a wide, disarming grin. There were people around who might have some interesting thoughts about patriotism, Heminger suggested—the Kit Fox Society, a veterans’ organization named for a Great Plains warrior group. As Heminger led me over to them, he mentioned that Native Americans serve in the military at a high rate compared with other ethnic groups, and I asked him why he thought that was. “It’s that warrior tradition that we have,” he said, then paused. “And the extreme poverty.”

The Kit Fox members were under a shade structure. Two men who had served in Vietnam sat in mobility devices, dozing; Iraq and Afghanistan veterans chatted as they loaded blanks into magazines in preparation for the Grand Entry that evening. “I was reluctant to join the Army, to be honest. It wasn’t that I was scared—it was just because of the history between our tribe and the U.S. Army,” an Iraq War veteran named Nicodemus Cody Seaboy told me. “But my grandpa told me that, when we won at Little Bighorn, we captured their flags, and now it’s your turn to defend that flag, because that flag belongs to us.” The society also planned to hold a welcome-home ceremony that evening on behalf of Matthew Cordell, a tribal member and a logistics officer in the Army Reserve. Cordell had recently returned from a tour in Kuwait, where an Iranian drone attack had killed six soldiers in his unit and injured more than thirty others. The ceremony was meant “to call home our spirit, to alleviate the death and destruction we had to see, so we can leave all that there and come back and live in peace again,” Seaboy explained. Cordell, a polite man wearing fatigues and a pained expression, sat nearby. “They’re doing something special for me tonight,” he told me. “I wasn’t ready for it, mentally, but it needs to happen to help me heal, because our unit got messed up pretty good.”

I made my way back to the stands to await the ceremony. Decoteau was there, sipping his beautifully unnatural lemonade. The sky darkened suddenly, as if it had been turned down by a dimmer switch, and Decoteau frowned at a weather app on his phone. “Nothing good comes from an east wind out here on the prairie,” he said. A storm arrived with pounding ferocity. Minutes later, it passed, the air washed clean in its wake. The drummers picked up a Grand Entry song, and the Kit Fox members stepped onto the grass. I saw that the Vietnam veterans had exchanged their black baseball caps for war bonnets. Then came the welcome-home ceremony. The group moved to the beat in a slow circle, with Cordell at the center. They were joined by family members and by dancers in their jangling skirts until the ceremonial grounds felt charged with noise and purpose. Someone handed Cordell his toddler daughter. She nestled into his chest as he stepped rhythmically in place, the expression on his face unreadable, his feet never slowing. After the ceremony, the dancing and singing continued. The day felt impossibly wide, broad enough to accommodate all the country’s contradictions, the grief and disappointment and pride and fellow-feeling and everything else I couldn’t name.

The sky was still holding on to a shred of light when I walked to my car, after 10 P.M. I passed a softball field, where a laconic announcer unhurriedly narrated the eleventh and final game of the day. “Peyton here is playing with nine fingernails,” I heard him say. In D.C., the President was talking about Communists again, before so many fireworks were shot off that the Mall was blanketed by thick smoke. I got in my car and lowered the windows so I could keep listening to the drums as I drove away. In the waning light, I passed cornfields—knee-high, as prophesied. “Things get hectic at times but things are smooth now,” Decoteau texted me, a little while later. “Now we will dance late into the night.” ♦