| The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair soared with the largest birdcage ever built; a Ferris Wheel that hosted weddings and dinner parties; a 56-foot iron statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire — and President Theodore Roosevelt’s cabin. Part of North Dakota’s exhibit, the two-room cabin competed with the cabins of Lincoln and Grant to recapture the quickly fading “authenticity” of frontier life. A relic of Roosevelt’s days on a Badlands cattle ranch in the 1880s, the exhibit drew thousands of attendees who hankered to connect with real history, and to see the President’s quarters — including stuffed examples of the game he hunted and two pairs of the Rough Rider’s pants. |
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