A GMJoe™ Consulting Narrative Essay
By Joe Cozart
I have always thought history becomes most interesting at the moment it ceases behaving like history.
Dates are useful. Battles matter. Names should be remembered. But history becomes something larger when an event from another century suddenly explains the architecture of the place in which we are standing.
That is what happened to me when I read Jack Tribolet’s excellent account of the Spanish-American War.
At first glance, the connection is obvious. Theodore Roosevelt. The Rough Riders. San Juan Hill. A brief war in 1898 that altered the strategic posture of the United States and accelerated Roosevelt’s ascent into national political life. The familiar photographs are all there, including that extraordinary image of Roosevelt standing among the men of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry beneath an American flag, looking less like the beginning of a political career than the accidental creation of an American mythology.
But I live in North Dakota.
And in North Dakota, Theodore Roosevelt is never merely Theodore Roosevelt.
He arrived in the Dakota Badlands as a young man years before Cuba, before the Rough Riders, before the White House, and long before anyone would think to construct a presidential library bearing his name in Medora. Roosevelt later attributed enormous importance to those Dakota years. North Dakota, in turn, never permitted the association to disappear.
That is a remarkable relationship when one considers what came afterward.
Roosevelt went east. He entered government. He became Assistant Secretary of the Navy. When war with Spain came in 1898, he resigned, joined the newly created 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, and went to Cuba. By July, Roosevelt and the Rough Riders were part of the fighting around Santiago. Within months, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York.
Political careers are usually presented afterward as though they had been assembled according to architectural drawings.
They were not.
They are usually accidents that later hire biographers.
Roosevelt is particularly useful because the accidents are so visible.
A young New Yorker goes west after personal catastrophe. He lives among ranchers, hunters, cattlemen, bad weather and enormous distances. He returns east altered by the experience. He enters public life. He leaves a comfortable government office when war arrives because, in the Roosevelt imagination, discussing war while someone else fought it would have been intolerable. He joins a volunteer cavalry regiment. Newspapers discover him. Cuba transforms him from public official into national figure.
And somewhere in that sequence, North Dakota becomes connected to San Juan Hill.
Not geographically.
Architecturally.
The Dakota Badlands did not create the Rough Riders. Cuba did not create Roosevelt. No single episode created anything so simple.
But systems rarely work that way.
One layer enables another.
Landscape becomes temperament.
Temperament becomes decision.
Decision becomes action.
Action becomes reputation.
Reputation becomes political capital.
Political capital becomes presidency.
Presidency becomes legacy.
Legacy returns to landscape.
That last part is what fascinates me.
In 1961, North Dakota established the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award. It remains the state’s highest commendation for citizens whose achievements bring distinction to North Dakota. The name deliberately joins Roosevelt, the Rough Riders and North Dakota into a single civic symbol.
Think about how peculiar and elegant that is.
A cavalry regiment organized for a war in Cuba in 1898 eventually becomes the name of North Dakota’s highest honor.
The men in that photograph could not possibly have known this.
They are standing on a hill after battle, exhausted, dirty, armed, staring toward a nineteenth-century camera.
They have no idea they are standing inside a future state mythology.
Roosevelt himself could not have known it.
He could not have known that the phrase “Rough Rider,” associated with a volunteer cavalry regiment formed for a war that lasted only months, would survive the regiment, survive the war, survive his presidency, survive him, and eventually become embedded in the civic identity of a state more than two thousand miles from Santiago.
History loves this sort of irony because history has the luxury of knowing the ending.
The participants never do.
And now the circle has become even more complete.
In 2026, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened in Medora, North Dakota, in the very landscape that preceded practically everything for which Roosevelt would later become nationally recognizable.
There is almost something literary about that geography.
The presidential library is not in Washington.
It is not in New York.
It is not beside San Juan Hill.
It is in Medora.
The story has returned upstream.
And that is the part of Jack’s essay that stayed with me.
We usually encounter Roosevelt downstream.
President Roosevelt.
Trust buster.
Conservationist.
Commander in chief.
Rough Rider.
Face on Mount Rushmore.
Historical monument.
But the man existed before the monument.
Before the presidency there was Cuba.
Before Cuba there was the Navy Department.
Before Washington there was the Badlands.
And before any of that there was simply a young man who had not yet discovered what his life would become.
This is why I find the image of Roosevelt and the Rough Riders so compelling.
It is not merely a military photograph.
It is a photograph of unfinished consequences.
The Spanish-American War itself lasted only a few months, but its consequences were enormous. The United States emerged from the conflict with an expanded strategic presence in the Caribbean and Pacific. Roosevelt emerged with a national reputation that helped propel him almost immediately into higher office. The Rough Riders emerged as something larger than a regiment.
And North Dakota eventually inherited the symbol.
One can almost draw the entire story as a circle.
North Dakota shapes Roosevelt.
Roosevelt joins the Rough Riders.
The Rough Riders help shape Roosevelt’s national image.
Roosevelt becomes president.
The presidency turns Roosevelt into history.
History turns Roosevelt into a North Dakota symbol.
North Dakota names its highest honor after the Rough Riders.
And North Dakota eventually places Roosevelt’s presidential library back in the Badlands.
The Rough Rider comes home.
Not the man.
The meaning.
There is a larger lesson here that reaches beyond Roosevelt.
Places sometimes contribute to history without receiving immediate credit because their contribution occurs upstream.
The battlefield receives the photograph.
The election receives the headline.
The presidency receives the monument.
But something usually happened before all of them.
An environment formed a disposition.
A relationship altered a decision.
A difficult period produced resilience.
A remote place supplied perspective.
The visible event is rarely the beginning.
That principle is as useful in strategy as it is in history.
By the time everyone recognizes the consequence, the important architecture may already have been built.
Roosevelt understood that in his own fashion.
North Dakota apparently understood it too.
More than a century after San Juan Hill, the state still calls its highest honor the Rough Rider Award.
And now, when I look at that colorized photograph from 1898, the men no longer appear quite as remote.
One of them had already been shaped by Dakota.
The rest of the story simply had not happened yet.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.™
Live Upstream.™
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