CHAPTER SIX
The White River Badlands
Any visit to the Black Hills must also be the occasion of a tour, at least for a few hours, of the famous South Dakota Badlands. This fantastic National Monument is not a part of the Hills, either geographically or historically, but because the two regions lie so close together—a scant fifty miles apart—they are expediently linked as two great natural wonders in the same region.
The term “badlands” has a loose scientific acceptance, meaning any region where a specific type of heavy erosion has taken place. Such regions usually have subnormal rainfall and sparse vegetation. Those rains that do occur, then, find little on the earth’s surface to prevent almost complete runoff, which is so vigorous as to act as a powerful cutting agent. The final ingredients of a badlands are rock formations known as unconsolidated—lacking any general unity of structure which might tend to withstand erosion. When all these conditions exist, the devastation of the rushing flood waters is without pattern, a great gash being carved in one spot while no damage is visible on a near-by outcropping. The end result is an almost frightening collection of gruesome stone monuments rising to the sky and marking the heights once reached by a general plateau.
Actually, much of the high western plain abutting on the Rocky Mountains is basic badland formation, and small pockets of distinct erosion can be seen all through eastern Colorado, western Nebraska, and eastern Wyoming, in addition to the vast depression in the valleys of the White and Cheyenne rivers in South Dakota. This one region, though, sixty-five miles long and five to fifteen miles wide, is the largest and from the geologist’s point of view the most important of all such regions in the world. Desolate, empty, seared by ages of sun and wind, it is now a great gash in the earth’s flesh which exposes to view rock and soil strata that measure a great span of earth’s history.
In addition to the splendid opportunity to see and study the various layers of the earth’s surface going back as far as sixty million years, the very composition of badlands formations makes any such region a veritable museum of fossils and petrified animal relics. The South Dakota Badlands have turned up absolute treasures of such paleontological finds, enabling scientists to trace the evolution of mammalian life all the way back to the appearance on earth of the first carnivorous animals—the vastly distant ancestors of the dog. And the Badlands are noted not only for the great span in geologic time of their fossil beds, but also for the number of different types which have been found in their ancient soil, more than 250 different prehistoric animals having been discovered in various stages of fossilized preservation in this general region.
The tourist, though, need not be even an amateur student of geology or paleontology to be thrilled and awed by a visit to this grotesque but beautiful area. The mere colors of the various rock strata, ever changing under the light patterns of sun and cloud, provide a never-to-be-forgotten experience. One of the most articulate tributes to the grandeur of the Badlands is that of Frank Lloyd Wright:
Speaking of our trip to the South Dakota Badlands, I’ve been about the world a lot and pretty much over our own country but I was totally unprepared for the revelation called the Badlands. What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of the mysterious otherwhere—a distant architecture, ethereal, touched, only touched, with a sense of Egyptian-Mayan drift and silhouette. As we came closer, a templed realm definitely stood ambient in the air before my astonished “scene”-loving but “scene”-jaded gaze.
Yes, I say the aspects of the South Dakota Badlands have more spiritual quality to impart to the mind of America than anything else in it made by Man’s God.
The word “badlands,” which now has a genuine scientific meaning, was taken into our vocabulary from the folk name for this very region. In the earliest days of North American exploration, far back before the Revolution, French trappers had braved this empty wasteland on their endless quest for new fur grounds, and had brought back tales of this lost world of silence and strange shapes. They were the ones who gave it the name Badlands, but they were only translating directly the Sioux name, Mako Sika, which meant, precisely, lands bad for traveling.
To the early explorers the badlands meant only that—high escarpments to be overcome; twisting, winding, endless canyons from which there were no outlets; crumbling rock underfoot on the three-hundred-foot crawls from the canyon bottoms to the table-tops; and the hot, shimmering distances of this forbidding terrain as far as the eye could see.
It was, as a matter of fact, the existence of this area that helped keep the Black Hills nothing more than an empty question mark on maps until the rumors of gold began to circulate. The first American explorers, who might have discovered the natural wonders of the Hills in the 1820’s, found their paths diverted to the north and the south by this impassable valley, and consequently missed the Hills.