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Of Time
and the Badlands
For
centuries humans have viewed South Dakota's celebrated Badlands with
a mix of dread and fascination. The Lakota knew the place as make sica.
Early French trappers called the area les mauvailses terres à
traverser. Both mean "bad lands." Conversation writer Freeman
Tilden described the region as "peaks and valleys of delicately
banded colors - colors that shift in the sunshine,...and a thousand
tints that color charts do not show. In the early morning and evenings,
when shadows are cast upon the infinite peaks or on a bright moonlit
night when the whole region seems a part of another world, the Badlands
will be an experience not easily forgotten." Paleontologist Thaddeus
Culbertson had another reaction: "Fancy yourself on the hottest
day in summer in the hottest spot of such a place without water _ without
an animal and scarce on insect astir - without a single flower to speak
pleasant things to you and you will have some idea of the utter loneliness
of the Bad Lands
The peaks,
gullies, guttes, and wide prairie's of the Badlands can be challenging
to cross, yet they have long attracted the interest and praise of travelers.
"I've been about the world a lot, and pretty much over our own
country," wrote architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935, "but
I was totally unprepared for the revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands...What
I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere - a distant
architecture, ethereal..., and endless supernatural world more spiritual
than earth but created out of it." The Badlands are a place of
extremes. Your own travels here may produce conflicting responses. You
may visit in summer and curse the heat and the violent lightning storms,
yet be excited by the wildlife and wildflowers. You may come in winter,
chilled by the cold and the winds that roar unhindered out of the north,
and still marvel at the exquisite beauty of the moonlight glistening
on the snow - dusted buttes. Whatever your feelings about the Badlands,
you will not come away unaffected. Stay awhile if you can, and let the
Badlands reveal themselves to you. The so-called emptiness of the plains
is full of traces of ancient life. You will also see eagles hunt, winds
outstretched over grassland and seems to go on forever. And above all,
you will experience quiet, the near absence of human noise. Keep in
mind this is a national park. All fossils, rocks, plants, and animals
must remain where you find them. The more you observe, the more accustomed
you will become to the Badlands landscape. With this familiarity will
come a greater appreciation of the parks biological diversity. There
is a rich and varied plant community here, including the largest remaining
mixed-grasses prairie in North America. Grassland wildlife abounds.
Coyotes, butterflies, turtles, vultures, snakes, bluebirds, bison, and
prairie dogs are a few of the mobile residents in the Badlands. Approached
with curiosity and care, the Badlands will provide you with endless
pleasure and fascination.
The Shaping
of the Land and Life
In the distant past, approximately 75 million years ago
Earth's climate was warmer than it now is, and a shallow sea covered
much of the region we know as the Great Plains. Stretching from the
Gulf of Mexico to Canada and from western Iowa to western Wyoming, this
sea teemed with life. In today's Badlands the bottom o that sea appears
as a grayish-black sedimentary rock called the Pierre (pronounced "peer")
shale. This layer is an incredibly rich source of fossils, for creatures
sank to the bottom of the sea when they died and over an long course
of time became fossils. Within the park, the fossilized remains of variety
of animals have been found. Baculites, an extinct cephalopod,
had a squid-like body with long cylindrical shell tightly coiled at
one end. Inside the shell were individual chambers containing either
gas or liquid for buoyancy control. Clams, crabs and snails in great
numbers have also been found. Outside the park, the Pierre shale has
yielded abundant remains of ancient fish; mosasaurs, giant marine lizards;
pterosaurs, flying reptiles; Archelon, enormous sea turtles;
and Hesperonis, a diving bird something like a modern loon. Why
have the rocks inside the park, which are so rich in invertebrate fossils,
yielded so few marine creatures with backbones? Questions like these
puzzle paleontologists and earth scientists who continue to search in
hope of answering some of the questions about the park's and the Earth's
rich past.
Badlands Fossils, an array of extinct animals, ranging from very enormous
to very small, once ranged through the area now included in Badlands
National Park. Some lived in the subtropical forest that flourished
after the retreat of the shallow inland seas, while others inhabited
the Savannah's and grasslands that came in the years afterward. Some
of these creatures, whose fossils have been found in the Badlands. Based
on the best scientific knowledge from the geologic epoch known as the
Oligocene, that lasted from 23 to 35 million years ago some of the creatures
that were in existence in the Badlands were the Leptomeryx, small,
fraile, and deer-like, had even-toed hooves and browsed on the stems
and leaves of early Oligocene vegetation. Oreodonts, sheep-like
in appearance, were extremely abundant. Their name means "mountain
tooth." Archaeotherium, a distant relative of modern pigs,
had sharp canines and fed on both plants and carrion. An ancestor of
modern horses, mesohippus, had three toes instead of one hoof.
Hoplophoneus, one of the earliest of the mammals to be called
a saber-tooth cat, was about the size of a leopard. An agile rhinoceroses,
subhyracodon, was a plant-eater. Ischromys, a small squirrel-like
rodent probably lived in trees and ate a diet of fruits and nuts. Metamynodon,
was a massive rhinoceros that, like a hippopotamus, spend much of its
time in the water. Paleolagus, perhaps an ancestral rabbit, nibbled
on plants.
The Prairie
The Badlands prairie contains about 56 species of grass,
which are the anchor species for a complex community of plants and animals.
The prairie once sprawled across one-third of North America. Today,
the patchwork remnants of native grasslands represent adaptations to
millions of years of changing conditions and sustain a diverse citizenry.
Grasslands, or prairies, occur in areas that are too dry to support
trees, but too wet to be deserts. Badlands national park contains mixed-grass
prairie, meaning that it contains tall-grass, such as big blestern,
and prairie cordgrass, and short-grass species such as blue grama and
buffolograss as well as hundreds of species of wild flowers and forbs.
The landscape, which was once forest, now contains a multitude of plants
and animals uniquely adapted to what appears to be unforgiving and harsh
conditions. Grasses, able to withstand high winds, long spells of dry
weather, and frequent fires, thrived. Grazing animals became abundant
and grasses, better suited to withstand constant trampling and grazing,
spread and overtook the ancient forests. Today, many animals - black
- tailed prairie dogs, muledeer, pronghorn )commonly called antelope),
bison, coyote, and bighorn sheep - adapt to and even thrive under the
conditions in Badlands National park.
Return of a Native
In 1981 the scientific community received astonishing
news. Black-footed ferrets, thought to have become extinct since the
last captive specimen died in 1979, were discovered to be alive and
well in the wilds of Wyoming. The news was encouraging, but the long-term
prognosis for the ferrets were not promising. Dependent on prairies
as their prime habitat and prairie dogs as their food source, these
relatives of the weasel remain the rarest mammals on Earth.
Shrinking prairie habitat, destruction of prairie dog colonies by humans,
and the spread of diseases had left the ferrets one step from the brink
of extinction.
Soon after the Wyoming ferrets were discovered, disease ran through
the colony. By 1985, only 18 ferrets survived. Braving controversy and
accepting the risk accompanying intervention, US Fish and Wildlife Service
biologists and State of Wyoming authorities captured the ferrets and
launched a campaign to save them. A measure of success came quickly.
At seven breeding facilities, the ferrets flourished and multiplied.
With high hopes and little fanfare, 36 black-booted ferrets were released
in the park during the fall of 1994. A search in late summer of 1995
yielded two litters of ferret kits born in the wild, an important milestone
on the road to recovery for this species. Additional captive-raised
black-footed ferrets will be released with the goal of establishing
a self sustaining population. Like the reintroduced bison and bighorn
sheep, the black-footed ferrets may again take their place and add their
influence to the northern prairies.
"Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who
you are." Through seemingly inhospitable in first glance, the Badlands
have supported humans for more than 11,000 years. The earliest people
to come into this area were ancient mammoth hunters. Much later they
were followed by nomadic tribes whose lives centered on bison hunting.
The Arikara were the first tribe known to have inhabited the White River
area. By the mid 18th century, they were replaced by the Sioux, or Lakota
who adopted the use of horses from the Spaniards and came to dominate
the region. Through the bison-hunting Lakota flourished during the next
one hundred years, their dominion on the prairie was short-lived. French
fur trappers were the first of many European arrivals who, in time,
would supplant the Lakota. Trappers were soon followed by soldiers,
miners, cattle farmers, and homesteaders who forever changed the face
of the prairie. After 40 years of struggle culminating in the Wounded
Knee Massacre in 1890, the Lakota were confined to reservations. Cattle
replaced the bison; wheat fields replaced the prairies; and, in time,
gasoline-powered vehicles replaced the horse.
White homesteaders and the Lakota have shaped this land in terms of
the impact that human beings have had here. Late 19th century photographers
have captured on film the images of all these people as they created
new lives for themselves and came into contact with one another, showing,
unwittingly, the poignancy and hard work that typified the process.
The bison that had played such a vital role in the Lakotas' way of life
were eradicated with the arrival of the white hunters, leaving only
the paintings and drawings that they had earlier made to continually
remind them of long-gone patterns of life and of ways that they related
to their environment. Build a long house, cutting sod bricks from the
prairie, and collecting chow chips for fuel were just a few of the backbreaking
tasks that the homesteaders faced as they worked to make the Badlands
their own. By contrast the Lakota touched the land differently, recording
on a bison robe that was itself a product of the prairies, chronicling
the nomadica way of life that the settlement of the land would end forever.
