Theodore Roosevelt’s preeminent biographer, Edmund Morris, observed that Roosevelt was “almost infallibly truthful…He was of course, capable of humorous exaggeration and poetic license, but so is every good story-teller.” But, because TR was at times a “creative storyteller” as regards his experiences in the Badlands, his later biographers have had some difficulty in corroborating some of the dates and places for many of the experiences he writes about in the decades following his time in the West. Roosevelt’s version of many of these episodes seems to evolve over time. From the 1880s letters he writes to friends and family while in the Badlands, to his later recollections in books and articles, letters and speeches, the names and places and dates seem to blur, with TR at times seemingly even remembering himself as a character in experiences in which he was perhaps not present.
Author Doug Ellison, has spent a lot of time looking at the known historical record of TR’s experiences in the Badlands and documented some of those findings in his 2017 book Theodore Roosevelt and Tales Told as Truth of his Time in the West.
