Though he lacked military experience prior to 1898, Theodore Roosevelt also encountered Indians as a rancher in the Dakota Territory in the mid-1880s, as an historian of the white settlement of North America, and as a reformist federal official. In the spring of 1885, he published his account of his ranching experiences in the Dakota Badlands to that point, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Here, he displayed little sympathy for indigenous populations dispossessed of their land by Euro-American encroachment