Billings County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Billings County

Nine hundred and forty-five residents across 1,149 square miles of Badlands and prairie — Billings County is the second-least populous county in North Dakota per US Census 2020 Decennial (after Slope County's 706 residents), and the population density of 0.82 persons per sq mi puts it in the bottom 15 contiguous-US counties by density. The 945 residents are concentrated in Medora (population 121, the county seat) and a handful of working cattle ranches across the Little Missouri River drainage. The Theodore Roosevelt experience here is direct: in 1883 a young Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the Medora railhead to hunt bison, fell in love with the rough-rider lifestyle and the Badlands landscape, bought a partnership in the Maltese Cross Ranch and later founded his own Elkhorn Ranch 35 miles north, and credited his Dakota years (1883-1887) with the personal transformation from sickly East Coast politician to Rough Rider. The Maltese Cross Cabin sits today on the South Unit Visitor Center lawn in Medora as a moved-and-reassembled artifact.

Billings County wraps the entire South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (the largest of the park's three units, 46,000 acres, with the 36-mile South Unit Scenic Loop Drive paved and rig-friendly to 40 ft accommodating bison, feral horses, and prairie dogs that routinely cross the road) and the entire western half of the Little Missouri National Grassland — the largest US Forest Service-managed grassland in the country at 1.03 million acres, jointly administered with adjacent Slope County. Medora (population 121) is the only town in the county and the operational base for the Medora Musical, an outdoor amphitheater performance running nightly June through September at the Burning Hills Amphitheatre with a chuckwagon dinner pre-show — one of the largest organized outdoor theatrical productions in the Northern Plains per the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation visitor statistics. Cottonwood Campground inside TR South Unit accepts rigs to 40 ft on 76 first-come no-hookup sites. Juniper Campground inside the smaller and more remote North Unit (50 miles north, accessed via US-85) accepts rigs to 35 ft on 49 sites. The Little Missouri National Grassland permits 14-day dispersed camping on most forest roads with rigs to 30 ft.