EARLY INDIANS AND EXPLORERS
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Figure 1. LES MAUVAISES TERRES,
NEBRASKA. This is the earliest published view of the White River
Badlands. The sketch was made in 1849 by Dr. John Evans when he was in
the field with the Owen Geological Survey. The region at that time was a
part of Nebraska Territory.
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Little is known of the prehistory of the region which
comprises Badlands National Monument. The time of man's entry into the
Badlands-Black Hills region is unknown. The oldest Indian site found in
western South Dakota is in the Angostura Basin south of Hot Springs.
Studies indicate it to be a little more than 7,000 years old. Evidence
shows that these early people were big-game hunters who preyed upon
mammoth, large bison, and other animals that lived in the lush
post-glacial grass lands. [1]
Firepits containing Indian artifacts have been found
in the Pinnacles area of the national monument. Radiocarbon studies
leave little doubt that hunters were already using this site by 900 A.D.
[2 More archeological research will probably
show that man hunted and made his home in the Badlands long before that
date. [3
Since about 1000 A.D. the Black Hills area has been
occupied by a number of nomadic Indian tribes. Some of these subsisted
primarily by hunting, while others lived on local food plants. These
tribes probably belonged to the Caddoan, Athabascan, Kiowa, and
Shoshonean linguistic groups.
During the 18th century, parties of Arikara from the
Missouri River went on buffalo hunts as far west as the Black Hills.
There they met with the Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Cheyenne at
trading fairs where they acquired horses. The Arikara, in turn, traded
horses with the Teton Sioux who had been slowly migrating south and
westward since about 1670 from the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
Around 1775 the Oglala and Brule, tribes of the Teton Sioux, moved west
of the Missouri River to occupy respectively the Bad River country
(around the present town of Philip, S.D.) and the region along the White
River south of the Badlands. Because of their move from a timbered area
to a plains region, the Sioux underwent great adjustment. As the result
of acquiring guns from the whites and horses from other tribes, the
Sioux became primarily a nomadic people, dependent on buffalo for
sustenance. [5]
For more than a century prior to 1763, the upper
Missouri Valley, including what is today Badlands National Monument, was
under French control. Under terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 French
possessions west of the Mississippi River were ceded to Spain. Spain
returned the area, known as Louisiana, to France in 1800 in the secret
Treaty of San Ildefonso. [6] In 1803 the
entire region, which included all of the present states of Arkansas,
Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota, plus parts of eight other
states, was purchased by the United States from France for
$15,000,000.
The early French-Canadian trappers called the region,
which includes the present day national monument, Le Mauvaises terres
a traverser, which translated means "bad lands to travel across."
Other traders applied the term "bad lands" to this locality as well as
to any section of the prairie country "where roads are difficult...."
The Dakota Indians called the region Mako Sica (mako, land; sica,
bad). [7]
Father Pierre-Jean de Smet called the White River
Mankizita-Watpa. This Indian word commonly means "white earth
river," or more literally, "smoking land river." The priest attributed
the name to the river water which he wrote was "impregnated with a
whitish slime." [8]
Early American trappers and traders called the
attention of the world to the unusual geological features and extensive
fossil deposits of the Badlands along the White River. The earliest
known description of the region, believed to be the White River
Badlands, is that of James Clyman, a member of Jedediah Smith's 11-man
party, who passed through the area in 1823. Clyman described it as
. . . a tract of county whare no vegetation of any
kind existed beeing worn into knobs and gullies and extremely uneven a
loose grayish coloured soil verry soluble in water running thick as it
could move of a pale whitish coular and remarkably adhesive there [came]
on a misty rain while we were in this pile of ashes [bad-lands west of
the South Fork of the Cheyenne River] and it loded down our horses feet
(feet) in great lumps it looked a little remarkable that not a foot of
level land could be found the narrow revines going in all manner of
directions and the cobble mound[s] of a regular taper from top to bottom
all of them of the percise same angle and the tops sharp the whole of
this region is moveing to the Misourie River as fast as rain and thawing
of Snow can carry it . . . [9].
When Maximilian, Prince of Wied, returned to Fort
Pierre in 1834 after making his historic journey up the Missouri with
Charles Bodmer, William Laidlaw, the trader of the fort, gave him a
description of the Badlands. The German prince wrote:
. . . I much regretted that I could not remain long
enough to visit the interesting tract of the Mauvaises Terres, which is
some days' journey from hence. Mr. Laidlow [sic], who had been there in
the winter, gave me a description of it. It is two days' journey, he
said, south-west of Fort Pierre, and forms, in the level prairie, an
accumulation of hills of most remarkable forms, looking like fortresses,
churches, villages and ruins, and doubtless consisting of the same
sand-stone as the conformations near the Stone Walls. He further stated
that the bighorn abounds in that tract. [10]
Father de Smet visited the Badlands region in 1848.
He described it as
. . . the most extraordinary of any I have met in my
journeys through the wilderness . . . . Viewed at a distance, these
lands exhibit the appearance of extensive villages and ancient castles,
but under forms so extraordinary, and so capricious a style of
architecture, that we might consider them as appertaining to some new
world, or ages far remote. [11]
The Jesuit noted further, "The industry of the
settler will never succeed in cultivating and planting this fluctuating
and sterile soil ... " However, he believed that the fossil deposits in
the region would be of interest to the geologist and the naturalist. [12]
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Figure 2. OREODONT SKELETON. Oreodonts
are the most common fossil mammals found in the Badlands. Several
species of these now-extinct animals have been scientifically described.
[13]
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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 forgot
ten 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]
Dr. Evans drew a map (See Figure 3) of Mauvaises
Terres (Bad Lands) and Dr. Joseph Leidy prepared a catalog as well
as sketches of the most significant fossils the Owen Geological Survey
Party found on its journey to the region. [25]
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Figure 3. AN EARLY MAP OF THE WHITE
RIVER BAD LANDS.
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In 1850 Spencer F. Baird of the Smithsonian
Institution arranged for Thaddeus Culbertson, a younger brother of
Alexander Culbertson, to visit the Badlands under the auspices of the
Institution. Born in 1823 at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, young
Culbertson, a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, set out with
his brother, Alexander, from Chambersburg in mid-February. The brothers
left St. Louis by steamboat on March 19 and arrived at Fort Pierre May
4. With his brother supplying the equipment, Thaddeus and two others set
out from the fur-trading establishment three days later. On May 11 they
encamped at Sage Creek in the White River Badlands. [26]
Culbertson, too, was very much impressed by the
Badlands as he approached them:
The road now lay over hills which became more steep
and frequent as we approached the Bad Lands. These occasionally appeared
in the distance and never before did I see anything that so resembled a
large city; so complete was this deception that I could point out the
public buildings; one appeared to have a large dome which might be the
town Hall; another would have a large angular, cone shape top, which
would suggest the court house or some magnificent buildings for public
purposes: then would appear a long row of palaces, great in number and
superb in all their arrangements. Indeed the thought frequently occurred
as we rode along that at a distance this portion of the grounds looked
like a city of palaceseverything arranged upon the grandest scale
and adapted for the habitation, not of pigmies such as now inhabit the
earth, but of giants such as would be fit to rule over the immense
animals whose remains are still found there. [27]
Culbertson was also moved by the complete desolation
of the Badlands:
Fancy yourself on the hottest day in summer in the
hottest spot of such a place without waterwithout an animal and
scarce an insect astirwithout a single flower to speak pleasant
things to you and you will have some idea of the utter loneliness of the
Bad Lands. [28]
The young scientist was disappointed, however, with
the fossils. Instead of finding well-preserved skeletons of different
animals, he located only the imperfect remains of several turtles, a
number of excellent teeth and jawbones, and several good skulls of
animals. [29]>
After rejoining his brother at Fort Pierre, young
Culbertson proceeded up the river to Fort Union. On his trip he
collected not only fossils but skulls, skins, and skeletons of buffalo,
grizzly bear, white wolf, prairie wolf, and other animals. He also
collected plants along the Missouri. Surprisingly, the fossil remains
Culbertson collected were declared by Baird as "an exceedingly
interesting series of Mammalian and Reptilian species including many
that had never been described." [30]
In poor health, young Culbertson died in late August
1850, soon after his return to Chambersburg. [31]
In 1853 two geologists, Dr. F.V. Hayden and F.B.
Meek, visited the Badlands region. Both were to receive national
recognition later as distinguished scientists. They spent several days
at Sage Creek, noted by travellers for the purgative qualities of its
water. Both men and their horses experienced a weakening effect after
drinking from the stream. [32]
Brevet Brigadier-General William S. Harney's
expedition, in its punitive campaign against the Brule Sioux in 1855,
crossed overland through a portion of the Badlands en route from Fort
Laramie (old Ft. William) to Fort Pierre (old Fort Tecumseh) on the
Missouri. Accompanying the expedition were Lt. G.K. Warren, U.S.
topographical engineer, and Dr. Hayden who had visited the Badlands
region two years earlier. [33]
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Figure 4. REMAINS OF THE FORT
LARAMIE-FORT PIERRE TRAIL. Here, just outside the most northern boundary
of the present national monument, it is believed E. de Girardin made his
poetic observations of the Badlands on the horizon, as recorded on page
14. Wagon-wheel ruts along the old trail in the foreground
can still be traced for miles in unplowed terrain.
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Warren was authorized to map the trail over which the
expedition passed. This route, which crosses the western edge of
Badlands National Monument, had been used since at least the early
1830's primarily by trappers and traders to transport furs and supplies
between the two forts. Fort Pierre was abandoned as a military post in
early 1857 soon after the route was mapped, and the trail fell into
disuse as a major overland thoroughfare. [34]
Remains of this historic route can still be seen.
Dr. Hayden and his party camped on Bear Creek, west
of the present national monument, where Alexander Culbertson, Dr. Evans,
and others had obtained their valuable collections in the 1840's. Dr.
Hayden wrote, "We spent five days at this locality, and with the
mammalian remains already collected in other places, our carts were
loaded to their utmost." [35] Unlike his
predecessors who had visited the region, Hayden was favorably impressed
by the White River region. "Contrasted with most of the country on the
upper Missouri, The White river valley is a paradise, and the Indians
consider it one of the choice spots of earth." [36]
Hayden revisited the White River Badlands in 1857 and
in the 1860's. His records may be found in government reports and in
several scientific publications. [37]
Captain John B.S. Todd, a cousin of the wife of
Abraham Lincoln and later governor of Dakota Territory, also accompanied
the Harney Expedition of 1855 and was impressed by the scenic grandeur
of the Badlands. [38] On October 12, the day
the expedition broke camp at Ash Grove Spring (now known as Harney
Spring) southeast of Sheep Mountain Table, he recorded in his
journal:
After leaving camp, we continued to ascend the gentle
slope upon which it had been pitched, for nearly a mile, and on reaching
the crest, the most superbly grand and beautiful sight burst upon our
view, that my eye ever rested upon. Down for a thousand feet and more,
the road abruptly wound into the valley below; while far away, on all
sides, spread this magnificent panorama of mountain precipice and vale
solitary, grand, chaotic, as it came from the hands of Him "who
doeth all things well." What a scene for the painter, what a wonderous
field for the Naturalist! [39]
Todd also described "the remains of turtle,
petrified, of all sizes, shattered and perfect, some not larger than the
crown of a hat, others of huge proportions . . . " [40]
Beginning in 1870 other organizations began making
important collections. Among these were the United States Geological
Survey, Yale University, Princeton University, American Museum of
Natural History, University of Nebraska, Carnegie Museum, University of
South Dakota, and the South Dakota State School of Mines and Technology.
[41]
In 1874 the Badlands were visited by the
distinguished paleontologist Dr. O.C. Marsh of Yale University and his
party. At that time the Indians in the region were in a very ugly temper
as a result of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills by the Custer
Expedition. Guaranteed much of present northwestern Nebraska and all of
South Dakota west of the Missouri by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868,
they regarded white visitors to the western Dakota region as intruders.
Accompanied by an army escort, Dr. Marsh and his party slipped into the
reservation through the Red Cloud Agency (located along the banks of the
White River near the present town of Crawford, Nebraska) at night
without arousing the Indian sentinels and reached the fossil region.
Hurriedly gathering and packing its specimens, the party returned to the
agency less than 24 hours before a war party scoured the region for "the
Big Bone Chief." At the agency, Chief Red Cloud informed Dr. Marsh of
the manner in which the Indian Bureau was fleecing the Indians in their
rations. Dr. Marsh carried this information to Washington, which
resulted in a Congressional investigation of the agency. [42]
Mr. John Bell Hatcher did much of the collecting for
Dr. Marsh, under the auspices of the United States Geological Survey,
and is considered to be one of the most successful and original of all
collectors who have worked in the Badlands. [43] He is responsible for beginning the practice
of collecting and preserving complete skeletons of fossilized animals.
[44]
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Figure 5. MUSEUM OF GEOLOGY, SOUTH
DAKOTA, SCHOOL OF MINES AND TECHNOLOGY. The finest exhibits are on
display in this museum. It is open to the public without charge
throughout the year.
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While considerable collecting of fossils in the
Badlands has been done by various organizations since 1870, it was
conducted in a some what random manner at first. Since 1899 the South
Dakota State School of Mines and Technology has sent students into the
Badlands for brief field studies. [45]
However, it was not until 1924 that a systematic means of collecting
fossils in the Badlands was begun by a Princeton University professor,
Glenn L. Jepsen, who was studying at the South Dakota State School of
Mines and Technology. He organized the first School of Mines Badlands
Expedition, which met with immediate success and laid the foundation for
the present extensive paleontological collections of that school (See
Figure 5). [46]
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Figure 6. Jim Hart of Scenic, South
Dakota, displays a trophy of an Audubon Bighorn Sheep shot on Sheep
Mountain in 1903 by Charley Jones. These animals were last recorded on
Sheep Mountain Table about 1910 and are now extinct. [48]
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For many years large herds of bison roamed the
Badlands during the summer months. About 1861, the year that the Dakota
Territory was established, a drought began and continued for three
years. The buffalo which used the region as their summer range left
during that period. After the passing of the drought years, the herds,
which had been driven far to the west by hunters, returned only in small
bands. For a time great herds of mountain sheep, elk, antelope,
whitetail and mule deer continued to roam the area in large numbers. The
elk wintered in the southern Black Hills and went down into the Badlands
in early spring. In 1877 residents of the Rapid City area and market
hunters from the gold camps in the northern Black Hills killed large
numbers, which ended the elk migration to the Badlands. Antelope as well
as whitetail and mule deer were killed by market hunters and settlers.
The mountain sheep was the last of the big game animals to disappear.
[47]
Predatory animals such as coyotes, wolves, and black
and grizzly bears were likewise common. Bears were exterminated early.
It was during the second decade of this century that coyotes and wolves
disappeared from the Badlands, largely as a result of the work of the
Biological Survey in its predatory-animal extermination program. [49]
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Figure 7. GRAY WOLF. Adult animals weigh
between 70 and 120 pounds and are the largest of the wild dogs. They
were last seen in the present Badlands National Monument around 1913.
[50]
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The region which comprises western Dakota was a part
of the Great Sioux Reservation recognized as such by the Fort Laramie
treaties of 1851 and 1868. In the late nineteenth century the tide of
white settlement had been steadily pushing westward. By an agreement on
September 26, 1876, later formalized by U.S. Statute, the Black Hills
region was opened to white settlement. An Act of Congress approved on
March 2, 1889 (the same year South Dakota became a state), and
proclaimed by President Harrison on February 10, 1890, restored to
public domain the area between the White and Cheyenne Rivers. This
included the present area of Badlands National Monument. [51]
On December 24, 1890, after escaping from military
surveillance at Camp Cheyenne on the Cheyenne River, Chief Big Foot and
his band of Miniconjous Sioux fled through what is now Big Foot Pass in
Badlands National Monument to the White River where they camped. When
the Indians reached Pine Creek on December 28, they were intercepted by
the army. In attempting to disarm them the next day, the military
precipitated the infamous "Wounded Knee Massacre" of December 29, 1890,
when more than 150 Indians and 39 whites were killed. This was the last
major clash between Indians and the United States Army. [52]
The famous western artist Frederic Remington was
attached to a scouting party which went into the Badlands in search of
Big Foot and his band. The first camp Remington made with the soldiers
was on Christ mas night with the thermometer well below zero. In an
article written for Harper's Weekly, January 21, 1891, he
described his trip into the region:
It was twelve miles through the defiles of the Bad
Lands to the blue ridge of the high mesa where the hostiles had lived.
The trail was strewn with dead cattle, some of them having never been
touched with a knife. Here and there a dead pony, ridden to a
stand-still and left nerveless on the trail. No words of mine can
describe these Bad Lands. They are somewhat as Dore pictured hell. One
set of buttes, with cones and minarets, gives place in the next mile to
natural freaks of a different variety, never dreamed of by mortal man.
It is the action of water on clay; there are ashes or what looks like
them. The painter's whole palette is in one bluff. [53]
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