On a Saturday morning in mid-October, the Days of '76 Museum in Deadwood will throw a birthday party for a president who has been dead for more than a century — and, in this corner of the Black Hills, still feels like a neighbor.
The free program, set for 10 to 11:30 a.m. on October 17, 2026, is aimed at students in grades K through 6. Kids will learn about Theodore Roosevelt's ties to Deadwood and the Dakotas, make a take-home craft, and earn a Junior Ranger badge. Space is limited and reservations are required; families are asked to call 605-578-1657 to hold a spot.
The date lands ten days shy of Roosevelt's actual birthday — he was born in New York City on October 27, 1858 — but the timing is less important than the setting. Few American towns have as personal a claim on the 26th president as Deadwood does, and the reason runs through one of the town's most famous names.
That name is Seth Bullock. The legendary Deadwood sheriff and businessman met Roosevelt during Roosevelt's years on a North Dakota ranch. Roosevelt had come west in September 1883 to hunt buffalo; by the end of his hunting trip he had entered the cattle business with the purchase of the Chimney Butte Ranch, also known as the Maltese Cross. The Badlands remade him. He later credited the region with giving him the grit and physical stamina that carried him through the rest of his life, and he returned to it again and again, eventually establishing the Elkhorn Ranch.
Bullock and Roosevelt became fast friends, a bond that outlasted the frontier. When Roosevelt organized the Rough Riders for the Spanish-American War in 1898, Bullock served as a captain in the volunteer cavalry. As president, Roosevelt appointed Bullock U.S. marshal for South Dakota in 1905, and the relationship continued after Roosevelt left office. Roosevelt called Bullock, in the words often quoted around Deadwood, "a true Westerner, the finest type of frontiersman."
When Roosevelt died on January 6, 1919, Bullock grieved like a man who had lost a brother. With the Society of Black Hills Pioneers, he pushed to rename a nearby peak — Sheep Mountain — as Mount Theodore Roosevelt, and to crown it with a memorial. Construction on the Mount Roosevelt Friendship Tower began in March 1919. The 31-foot tower of native Black Hills stone, designed with a spiral staircase leading to a viewing platform, was dedicated that July, just a few miles from downtown Deadwood. Bullock, then 70 years old, died only a few months after the dedication. At his request he was buried high in Mount Moriah Cemetery, on a plot positioned so that he faces Mount Roosevelt across the gulch — the two old friends, in the phrasing that lingers in the West, still able to "go into their towers and talk to each other."
That history is the backdrop for October's program, and it is exactly the kind of story the Days of '76 Museum was built to tell. The museum grew out of the Days of '76 celebration, which began in 1924 as a way to honor Deadwood's first pioneers — the prospectors, miners, muleskinners, and madams who poured into the Black Hills in 1876 to settle the gold-filled gulches of Dakota Territory. What started as a repository for the horse-drawn wagons, stagecoaches, carriages, clothing, and memorabilia generated by that annual celebration has become a modern museum. Its centerpiece exhibit, "Deadwood: A Story of Movement and Change," fills 7,000 square feet with more than 50 historic wagons, carriages, and buggies, arranged in front of recreated storefronts, a livery stable, a fire station, and the porch of a Victorian home. A separate firearms exhibit displays nearly 100 long arms and 20 handguns. The galleries are deliberately hands-on — which makes the museum a natural host for a kids' history program.
For families, the appeal is straightforward: a free, short, indoor Saturday-morning activity in a town that leans heavily on its past, with a craft to carry home and a Junior Ranger badge at the end. For the museum, it is a chance to introduce a new generation to a president whose legend was forged, in part, a short drive from where they are sitting.
Roosevelt's Dakota years are often reduced to a single image — the bespectacled Easterner turned rancher, grinning on horseback. But the Deadwood connection adds something warmer: a friendship between a president and a frontier lawman that ended only with death, and a stone tower on a hill that has stood over the town for more than a century as proof of it.
The birthday program runs 10 to 11:30 a.m. on October 17 at the Days of '76 Museum, 18 Seventy Six Drive in Deadwood. It is free for students in grades K through 6, but reservations are required and space is limited. Call 605-578-1657 to reserve a spot.