Rough rider

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https://www.deseret.com/magazine/2025/03/05/who-owns-public-land/
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/11/15/interior-utah-oil-gas/
https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/07/09/doug-burgum-donald-trump-vice-president-mitt-romney/
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2025/04/08/trump-signs-executive-order-to-unleash-the-coal-industry/
In the heart of the Badlands, a shrine to the American West rises from the earth. A mile west of Medora, North Dakota, what is now a heap of dirt, concrete and scaffolding will be, by July 4, 2026 — the country's semiquincentennial — the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a monument to America's 'conservationist president.'
Roosevelt lived in North Dakota twice — first in 1883 during a prolonged bison hunt, and again in 1884, to heal after his wife and mother died on the same day. 'I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,' Roosevelt later wrote; it was in the rugged Badlands 'that the romance of my life began.'
The library, its designers say, will offer visitors that same experience. The sprawling, 90-acre plot, filled with walking trails and recreation opportunities, will be the only presidential library accessible by mountain bike or horseback. A mile-long, circular boardwalk will offer panoramic views of the surrounding Badlands, as visitors gaze upon miles and miles of untamed wilderness.
Perhaps no individual has championed the project as stoutly as Doug Burgum. A history buff who relishes tales of the Rough Riders, the horse-mounted regiment Roosevelt commanded during the Spanish-American War, Burgum often recites the 26th president's 1910 'Man in the Arena' speech from memory. While governor of North Dakota, Burgum signed into law a $50 million endowment for the library, coming from the state's oil and gas revenue. To secure the deal, he invited conservation and business luminaries such as Roosevelt's great-great-grandson and a former Walmart CEO to North Dakota to lobby legislators. Now, as bulldozers and cranes crisscross the land outside Medora, Burgum has turned his attention to the invitation list for the 2026 grand opening, including all living U.S. presidents.
Burgum, for a fleeting moment, aimed to be among the presidents. His short-lived 2024 presidential campaign changed the trajectory of his own career — after becoming the first Republican candidate to drop out and endorse President Donald Trump, he became a top proxy for the eventual winner. In a surrogate pool filled with career politicians and celebrities, Burgum was a unique breed: A former tech entrepreneur, he was far less eager to discuss 'culture war' issues than he was to hypothesize on the future of artificial intelligence or to pontificate on energy policy.
But he was never destined to be president — not this cycle, at least, and not with this electorate. Instead, Trump placed him in a much more natural role: overseeing the 500 million square acres of federal lands; the oil and gas leases that rack up billion-dollar bids; the national parks that Americans are loving to death; the prospect of a massive energy shortage that could kneecap our ability to compete with China or leave us defenseless against it.
As the newly sworn-in Interior secretary, Burgum ascends to the Cabinet at a time when America, and the West, seem poised for massive transformation. Those who know him best — colleagues, friends, fellow officeholders — told me that Burgum is particularly poised for the challenge. As international dynamics shift, the U.S. lurches toward increasing isolation, including with our longtime trade allies. The American energy sector, already producing record amounts of gas, oil and renewables, is drooling for a green light as artificial intelligence will demand more and more. As the West's population booms, haggling over natural resources — including public lands — will only increase.
It's a job suited for a Westerner: Since 1949, few Interior secretaries have hailed from east of the Mississippi. But it's also a job suited for a Rooseveltian heir. Over a third of the United States' public lands were designated under Roosevelt; today, a battle is underway between the federal government and Western states over how those lands should be managed and conserved.
Roosevelt enabled the 1906 American Antiquities Act; today, a game of political pingpong is heating up over how lands should be protected under that measure, including the Bears Ears and Escalante national monuments in Utah. Roosevelt set the standard for water reclamation efforts in Arizona and the arid West; today, climate change threatens prolonged drought in the region, even as massive population growth increases demand.
Burgum — the 68-year-old aw-shucks, small-town businessman — finds himself at the center of it all.
The rags-to-riches trope finds its perfect vessel in Burgum — a farm boy and literal chimney sweep turned billionaire. He was raised in Arthur, North Dakota, a town so small that Burgum says it had no paved roads. Three hundred and fifty people called it home when Burgum was growing up; in the five decades since, its population has remained stagnant. His family had spent three generations running a grain elevator. Burgum's father died when he was a freshman in high school; his mother commuted 30 miles for work in Fargo to keep the family afloat.
Burgum excelled at North Dakota State University. Charismatic and quirky, he won the election for student body president as a junior. As a senior, hoping to rake together some extra cash, he took a job as a chimney sweep. All winter long, as part of a sales gimmick, he donned a black tailcoat and a top hat, fielding requests to sing 'Mary Poppins' songs as he scraped soot. On one occasion, his ladder didn't reach the top of a three-story house. He grabbed a rope, lassoed the vent stack and scaled the house's icy wall vertically. 'I like climbing, being outdoors, and the money isn't that bad, either,' Burgum later told a reporter for NDSU's student newspaper.
The Associated Press picked up the story, and it made its way to admissions officers at Stanford Business School, where Burgum had recently applied. Within months, Burgum was a first-year MBA student in Palo Alto.
Burgum cruised through Stanford, keeping a framed picture of his family's grain elevator on his desk as a constant reminder. Upon graduating in 1980, he accepted a consulting job with McKinsey in Chicago. But his career took a sharp turn when he was introduced by a co-worker to an Apple II computer, then the latest and greatest in office tech. He watched, mesmerized, as its spreadsheet program automatically performed a string of calculations. 'I had just spent four hours doing what that thing did in a minute. It was one of those blow-you-away kind of moments,' Burgum told The Forum, a Fargo newspaper.
Back in North Dakota, a pair of businessmen were a step ahead. At Great Plains Computers, the state's first Apple retailer, store owners used those same computers to build an in-house software program to perform digital bookkeeping. Soon, it became clear the accounting platform was their real winner: They stopped selling computers altogether and built out their software offerings. Burgum was so intrigued he mortgaged the 160 acres of farmland he inherited from his father and provided it as seed capital for the burgeoning company. 'I literally bet the farm on that tiny software startup,' he later recalled.
The gamble paid off. When Burgum arrived in 1983, the company had 20 employees. By 1990, it had nearly 300, over one-third dedicated to customer service alone, an emblem of Burgum's customer-first approach. A year after arriving, Burgum convinced his brother, mother, two cousins and an uncle to join in and purchase majority ownership in the company, which they did for $2 million. In 1989, according to Family Business Magazine, Great Plains Software did $22 million in sales.
All along, Burgum kept the organization's North Dakota peculiarity front and center. Even as glossy tech companies sprouted up in Silicon Valley, Burgum opted to keep the company in the Great Plains and to lean into its geographical uniqueness. At trade shows, while other tech companies hawked their products at glitzy, screen-heavy vendor booths, Great Plains Software employees dressed up like cowboys and led roping lessons. 'We basically from the get-go said, 'Hey, we're very proud of our North Dakota roots, and we're going to use that as a differentiator,'' Burgum told The Forum.
The rags-to-riches trope finds its perfect vessel in Burgum — a farm boy and literal chimney sweep turned billionaire.
Even though the company was geographically isolated, Burgum recognized that the most important thing would be recruiting a talented, young and bright workforce. He'd frequently call worried parents and explain that, yes, a solid career in tech could start in North Dakota. At one point, they implemented a college-esque 'parents' day' to more effectively make the pitch. 'When everything that you make and sell comes out of the minds of your team members, the only raw material that you need to be close to is brain power,' Burgum said in 2012.
Eventually, Silicon Valley took notice. Steve Ballmer, one of Burgum's business school classmates, was CEO of Microsoft. He offered to buy Great Plains Software; Burgum said no. He came back a second time, and Burgum rebuffed him again. Finally, on the third try in 2000, the two struck a deal: a $1.1 billion acquisition, folding Great Plains' accounting software into Microsoft's portfolio and rebranding it as Microsoft Business Solutions.
Named senior vice president of the division, Burgum stuck around. Microsoft maintained the Fargo office space, eventually growing it into the largest campus outside of its Redmond, Washington, headquarters. Burgum, now at the upper echelons of the booming U.S. tech scene, never lost his small-town persona. Indeed, one Silicon Valley observer wrote, it may have been his greatest achievement: 'He managed to remain the aw-shucks, upper-Midwestern, history-buff that he was despite (or maybe because of) his exposure to a more raffish Microsoft culture.'
In 2009, then-Gov. John Hoeven awarded Burgum the Rough Rider Award, the highest civilian honor in North Dakota, named after Roosevelt. At the ceremony, Burgum looked at the governor. 'Gee, John, I hope I'm not done accomplishing things,' he said.
Burgum's ascent to North Dakota's highest political office came as a surprise even to the most astute followers of the state's politics. Burgum had built up a reputation across the state — his time at Microsoft and his role in bolstering downtown Fargo's real estate helped — but he had no political experience. 'I don't want to be a politician,' he admitted in his speech announcing his run for governor. The event — featuring a darkened stage and an on-screen PowerPoint behind him — was 'more typical for a tech entrepreneur than a candidate for statewide office in North Dakota,' a local newspaper reported.
Burgum was immediately pegged as the underdog, facing a North Dakota attorney general who'd accrued 74 percent of the state's vote in his reelection campaign two years prior. In the gubernatorial primary, though, Burgum romped to a 20-point victory.
Burgum's time in the governor's mansion was highlighted by business expansion and economic growth. When he entered office, North Dakota was among the states with the oldest population; when he left office, it was in the top 10 youngest. But where Burgum made his biggest splash — and won the admiration of many of his fellow governors — was his leadership on energy and conservation. 'He's brilliant,' Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told me. 'I've said it before: Everybody thinks they're the smartest person in the room until they're in a room with Doug Burgum.' A firm believer in an 'all-of-the-above' approach to energy production, Burgum knew his state sat hundreds of feet above massive oil reserves, and he recognized his state's economy relied on its extraction. A self-described conservationist, Burgum didn't see his two stances — pro-fossil fuels and pro-environment — in conflict. Instead, he championed North Dakota's place as the country's third-largest oil producing state, while setting the goal of becoming the first carbon neutral state. By 2030, he vowed, his state would accomplish it.
Burgum figured North Dakota could innovate its way to clean fuel extraction. It'd use carbon-capture technology, which relies on capturing greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere and storing it underground. Some environmental groups were skeptical that the unproven technology was a viable long-term solution. But to Burgum, the possibility of innovating his way out of a jam was invigorating. Meeting his 2030 goal, he said, would come 'without mandates but with innovation.' Within a year of his announcement, North Dakota was hit with a 'cascade of interest' from investors around the world, Burgum said — to the tune of $25 billion in grants.
He arrived in Washington a week before Trump. Burgum's January 2025 confirmation hearing fell on a Thursday, crisp and cold, one of the Senate's final orders of business before its Republican members dove into a weekend of inauguration festivities. Burgum, too, was invited to the black-tie galas. But on the day of his hearing, he wore the Trumpian uniform: blue suit, red satin tie, an American flag pin on his lapel. His gray hair was combed back in a long wave. He certainly looked presidential.
The nominee entered clutching his wife's hand. The room, a wood-paneled conference hall in one of the Senate office buildings, just north of the Capitol, was packed with onlookers and supporters; it was the senators, though, that earned Burgum's immediate attention. He led his wife, Kathryn, to a seat in the front, before circling the room and greeting many of the senators by name. This group, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would determine whether his nomination would move forward to the rest of the upper chamber. It seemed Burgum already knew most of them on a first-name basis.
Does American prosperity have to come at the expense of our environment? Roosevelt didn't think so, nor does Burgum. But Roosevelt lived at a different time.
With Utah's Sen. Mike Lee — chair of the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee — Burgum bantered about the proper spelling of 'bison.' ('It's with a z,' Burgum insisted.) Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine, contributed a dad joke. ('What did the lady buffalo say to her little boy when he was going off to school?' Answer: 'Bye, son.') Hoeven, the senior senator from (and former governor of) North Dakota, held up a thick stack of letters from his state's Indigenous tribes, expressing support for Burgum. Kevin Cramer, the state's other senator, praised Burgum's track record. 'He's not just an oil guy from an oil and gas state. He is a conservationist,' he said. 'That's a remarkable balance he brings to this.'
Burgum made it clear to the committee that, while he's a staunch advocate of renewable energy, like wind and solar, he thinks of them as 'intermittent' sources and questions whether they provide the baseload necessary to support the incoming energy wave that will accompany AI. He acknowledged that climate change is a 'global phenomenon,' and said he advocates an energy policy that provides as much energy as possible, as cheaply as possible, to as many Americans as possible. His views are squarely in line with some of the leading Republican thinkers on climate: Sen. John Curtis of Utah, the founder of the Conservative Climate Caucus in the House, said he feels 'very much aligned' with Burgum. 'He brings a dose of reality to the climate conversation,' Curtis told me. 'He understands the moving parts. He understands why it's important for the United States to lead in energy production.'
How the U.S. produces that energy, though, is a chief concern of some environmentalists. Within Burgum's first days leading the Interior Department, he signed an order that directed his deputies to review the possibility of mining in public lands currently closed to such activities. The order was met by swift backlash from many climate advocates, some arguing that it was the first step in opening protected lands — like Utah's Bears Ears and Escalante national monuments — to drilling. 'This isn't technology neutral 'energy abundance,' it's a blatant giveaway to the fossil fuel interests who were generous benefactors to Trump's campaign,' said Alan Zibel, research director at Public Citizen. Indeed, the possibility of extraction at the southeastern Utah monuments was mentioned multiple times during Burgum's confirmation hearings. Eventually, Sen. Lee interjected. 'There is no significant oil in the Bears Ears,' he said. 'I don't know who came up with this idea that someone is getting ready to drill in the Bears Ears National Monument.'
Lee's issue — and a concern Burgum shares — is how the boundaries around Bears Ears, and other national monuments, were drawn. It was Roosevelt who first enabled the cartography; his 1906 American Antiquities Act allows presidents to unilaterally designate plots of federal land as protected national monuments. In Utah, each president since Barack Obama has expanded or shrunk the boundaries. (Trump, in his second term, is expected to continue the tradition by shrinking the protected area.) Burgum seems open to the idea — the key is 'local consultation,' he said in his hearing — but he seems much more interested in utilizing public lands in an innovative way to meet crucial needs: energy and housing. 'Some (lands), like the national parks, absolutely, we need to support and protect every inch of those,' Burgum told the Senate committee. 'But in other cases, we've got a multiple use scenario for our lands.' He has expressed support for public-private 'land swaps' to allow the construction of affordable housing, and now that he holds the keys to the country's oil and gas leases, he will make some federal lands available for energy projects — a paradoxical approach likely to mark his time at the Interior Department.
In February of this year, for one of his first public appearances as Interior secretary, Burgum addressed his former fellow state leaders at the National Governors Association winter meeting. He made an impassioned plea for a clear-eyed look at the biggest threats on the horizon: China and AI. An all-out investment in American energy, he posited, could solve both. He begged governors to begin by enacting permitting reform in their states and cutting through red tape that kneecaps energy and infrastructure projects. 'We're in a competition, and the competition we're in is with other countries that aren't slowing themselves down with the level of bureaucracy we have,' he said. The rise of AI will require more and more energy, and the U.S. should be at the forefront of producing it, he said. 'If our allies have an opportunity to buy energy from us, as opposed to our adversaries, we can stop their ability to wage war for the world,' Burgum said. China is producing coal, nuclear and hydro plants light-years faster than the U.S.; why can't we catch up?
There, of course, lies the tension for Burgum's tenure atop the Interior. Does American prosperity have to come at the expense of our environment, of our West? Roosevelt didn't think so, nor, it seems, does Burgum (a Department of Interior spokesperson declined my request to interview the secretary). But Roosevelt lived at a different time: when the outdoors were only loosely regulated and the West still largely 'untamed'; when climate science was rudimentary; when America's largest threats were almost exclusively abroad. Can a frontiersman's approach to the West, a century and change later, still hold out?
'Everybody thinks they're the smartest person in the room until they're in a room with Doug Burgum.' — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox
Burgum aims to find out. By the time the doors on the new Roosevelt Library swing open in 2026, we should have a decent idea, too. The Colorado River Compact of 1922, which allocates water for the Southwestern states, expires next year; Burgum's Interior Department will be required to renegotiate the terms. The International Energy Agency projects that an AI-fueled electricity demand will be, in 2026, double that of 2022; Burgum will play point on ensuring the U.S. sources that energy, too. The same goes for public lands and housing shortages and pressing climate issues.
Those who know him best suggest that Burgum understands the gravity of the road ahead for the West. 'He's obviously a very smart, driven person,' said Spencer Zwick, who sits on the Roosevelt Library's board of directors. 'But when you're with him, he's not worried about popularity. In a very Teddy Roosevelt-esque way, Doug Burgum is worried about just doing the right thing.'
This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

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