Oreodonts are the most common fossil mammals found in the Badlands. Several species of these now-extinct animals have been scientifically described.[13]
In the 1840’s the reports of fossil remains in the White River Badlands aroused the curiosity of scientific circles in the East. In the fall of 1843(?) Alexander Culbertson, well-known fur trader of the American Fur Company, made a trip from Fort Pierre to Fort Laramie. Either on this particular trip or succeeding ones, he made a collection of fossils and bones in the Badlands.[14] This collection provided the basis for the first scientific description of a Badlands fossil. The description was written by Dr. Hiram A. Prout of St. Louis, published in 1846, and printed again in 1847 with greater detail. The paper described a lower-jaw fragment of a large rhinoceros-like animal which later was given the common name titanothere by Dr. Joseph Leidy in 1852. Another fossil from this same collection, a fragment of an ancestral camel, was also described in 1847 by Dr. Leidy, who in a few years became the authority on Badlands fossils and an outstanding paleontologist.[15] In the fall of 1847 the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia became the first known institution to receive a collection of fossils from this region.[16]
In 1848 another deposit to this institution, made by Culbertson’s father, Joseph, included “a new fossil genus of Mammalia, found near the ‘Black Hills’....”[17] These deposits aroused such interest that in 1849 United States Geologist David Dale Owen sent his assistant, Dr. John Evans, to the Badlands.[18]
Dr. Evans, accompanied by a fellow geologist, “five Canadian travelers who were to be our muleteers and cooks, and finally an Indian guide and an interpreter,”[19] set out westward from Fort Pierre after traveling by steamboat from St. Louis. Following five days of overland travel they reached the Badlands. One of the party was a Frenchman, E. de Girardin, a soldier of fortune employed as an artist on the expedition. His story of the trip was published in 1864 in a French travel magazine, Le Tour du Monde. After climbing a hill about a hundred meters (about 330 feet) high, he beheld “the strangest and most incomprehensible view.”[20] (See [Figure 4].)
At the horizon, at the end of an immense plain and tinted rose by the reflection of the setting sun, a city in ruins appears to us, an immense city surrounded by walls and bulwarks, filled by a palace crowned with gigantic domes and monuments of the most fantastic and bizarre architecture. At intervals on a soil white as snow rise embattled chateaus of brick red, pyramids with their sharp-pointed summits topped with shapeless masses which seem to rock in the wind, a pillar of a hundred meters rises in the midst of this chaos of ruins like a gigantic lighthouse.[21]
De Girardin was also impressed by the large deposits of fossil remains in the area. “The soil is formed here and there of a thick bed of petrified bones,” he wrote, “sometimes in a state perfectly preserved, sometimes broken and reduced to dust.” The party discovered “petrified turtles,” some of which were “admirably preserved and weighing up to 150 pounds....” The expedition also found “a head of a rhinoceros equally petrified, and the jawbone of a dog or wolf of a special kind, furnished with all its teeth.” At places the scientists located “heaps of teeth and scraps of broken jawbones; ... bones and vertebrae of the oreodon, the mastdon [sic] and the elephant.” However, after exploring for three days in the region without having discovered “the elephants, the buffaloes, and the petrified men of which they had spoken to us so much,” the party began its journey back to Fort Pierre.[22]
Dr. Evans himself was not only impressed by the scenic qualities of the Badlands but by the scientific importance of the region as well. He wrote:
After leaving the locality on Sage Creek, affording the above-mentioned fossils, crossing that stream, and proceeding in the direction of White River, about twelve or fifteen miles, the formation of the Mauvaises Terres proper bursts into view, disclosing as here depicted, one of the most extraordinary and picturesque sights that can be found in the whole Missouri country.
From the high prairies, that rise in the background, by a series of terraces or benches, towards the spurs of the Rocky Mountains, the traveller looks down into an extensive valley, that may be said to constitute a world of its own, and which appears to have been formed, partly by an extensive vertical fault, partly by the long-continued influence of the scooping action of denudation.
The width of this valley may be about thirty miles, and its whole length about ninety, as it stretches away westwardly, towards the base of the gloomy and dark range of mountains known as the Black Hills. Its most depressed portion, three hundred feet below the general level of the surrounding country, is clothed with scanty grasses, and covered by a soil similar to that of the higher ground.
To the surrounding country, however, the Mauvaises Terres present the most striking contrast. From the uniform, monotonous, open prairie, the traveller suddenly descends, one or two hundred feet, into a valley that looks as if it had sunk away from the surrounding world; leaving standing, all over it, thousands of abrupt, irregular, prismatic, and columnar masses, frequently capped with irregular pyramids, and stretching up to a height of from one to two hundred feet, or more.
So thickly are these natural towers studded over the surface of this extraordinary region, that the traveller threads his way through deep, confined, labyrinthine passages, not unlike the narrow, irregular streets and lanes of some quaint old town of the European Continent. Viewed in the distance, indeed, these rocky piles, in their endless succession, assume the appearance of massive, artificial structures, decked out with all the accessories of buttress and turret, arched doorway and clustered shaft, pinnacle, and finial, and tapering spire.
One might almost imagine oneself approaching some magnificent city of the dead, where the labour and the genius of forgotten nations had left behind them a multitude of monuments of art and skill.[23]
Dr. Evans was equally awed by the rich paleontological deposits of the Badlands region. After describing the extreme heat of the region, he continued:
At every step, objects of the highest interest present themselves. Embedded in the debris, lie strewn, in the greatest profusion, organic relics of extinct animals. All speak of a vast freshwater deposit of the early Tertiary Period, and disclose the former existence of most remarkable races, that roamed about in bygone ages high up in the Valley of the Missouri, towards the sources of its western tributaries; where now pastures the big-horned Ovis montana, the shaggy buffalo or American bison, and the elegant and slenderly-constructed antelope.
Every specimen as yet brought from the Bad Lands, proves to be of species that became exterminated before the mammoth and mastodon lived, and differ in their specific character, not alone from all living animals, but also from all fossils obtained even from cotemporaneous [sic] geological formations elsewhere.[24]