Badlands National Park

The rocks here were laid down as long ago as 75 million years, and they only began eroding 500,000 years back. That gap is the engine of the place. Erosion is still running hard, and as the buttes wear down, fossils buried in the late Eocene Chadron Formation and the Oligocene Brule above it work their way to the surface for park palaeontologists to study. The landscape is actively handing over its contents.

The record was recognised long before any survey reached it. The Lakota found large fossilised bones here, along with fossil seashells and turtle shells, and drew the right conclusions from them: that this country had once been under water, and that the bones belonged to creatures which no longer existed. Western science came later and slower. In 1843 Alexander Culbertson of the American Fur Company picked up a fossilised jaw fragment here and it reached a physician in St Louis; by 1854, when Joseph Leidy published on North American fossils, 84 distinct species had been described. The White River Badlands hold the richest deposits of Oligocene mammals known, a window on life here 33 million years ago.

The park protects 242,756 acres of sharply eroded buttes and pinnacles wrapped around the largest undisturbed mixed grass prairie in the United States. The Badlands Wilderness covers 64,144 acres of the North Unit, and it is one of the places where the black-footed ferret, among the most endangered mammals in the world, was returned to the wild.

The ground has a harder history than the geology. At the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 the United States assured the Sioux that the Badlands would be theirs permanently. In 1889 the treaty was broken and the land confiscated. Stronghold Table and the country around it was Sioux territory revered as a ceremonial site, and it was where the Ghost Dance was held, the last of them in 1890, after which the ritual was banned; it was revived by the Red Power movement from the 1960s. In 1980 the Supreme Court awarded compensation for the treaty's abrogation and the Sioux declined to take the money. The South Unit, the Stronghold District, is co-managed today with the Oglala Lakota.

It was authorised as a national monument in 1929, established in 1939, and redesignated a national park on 10 November 1978.