Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Lewis and Clark's travels up the Missouri River led them through the extraordinary heartland of America.
Beginning in St. Louis, the point at which the Missouri joins the Mississippi, they traveled America's
longest river west across what is now the state of Missouri. They rowed upriver north through the Great
Plains of Kansas and Nebraska, on into the Dakotas, finally stopping to winter near the site of North
Dakota's present capital of Bismarck. In the spring, they set out again, the Missouri taking them west to-
ward the majestic Rockies. As they neared the junction of the Missouri and the Yellowstone Rivers near
today's Montana-North Dakota border, they passed through what is today North Dakota's Badlands.
Talk about giving a place a bad name. You've heard of those places that are nice to visit but you
wouldn't want to live there? The Badlands might be what they had in mind when they coined that ex-
pression. The idea of calling this territory “bad lands” dates at least to the Sioux, who called them
mako
sica
, literally “bad land.” But for thousands of years, Native Americans had discovered good uses for the
treacherous, forbidding landscape of the Badlands. Instead of trying to kill bison with crude weapons, they
stampeded great herds of the animals over their stark, steep cliffs. French fur traders, the first Europeans
to penetrate this north-central section of America, agreed with the Sioux assessment and called the region
mauvaises terres à traverser
(“bad lands to travel across”).
Once a flatland beneath an ancient inland sea, the Badlands are stark, arid regions, seamed and lined
with deep gullies that have been cut by occasional heavy rains, often accompanied by violent thunder-
storms. The unequal resistance of rocks—softer rock erodes more readily than harder rock—leaves tall
columns and platforms of stone standing out above the surrounding land. The Badlands don't generally
receive enough regular rain to support a covering of grass or other vegetation. When the sudden rains do
come, they suddenly turn the landscape into a gluelike mud. Although some grasses survive in this in-
hospitable climate—115˚ in summer, 30˚ in winter—the Badlands are almost valueless for agriculture or
pasture land. The farmers who were given some of this land, which had been taken from the Indians in the
late nineteenth century, quickly learned that.
In 1876, after the Indians' victory at the Battle of Little Big Horn, the Sioux were placed on a reserva-
tion near the biggest and baddest part of the region, in western South Dakota. Now the Badlands National
Park, it is 243,302 acres of ravines and sharp ridges of multicolored shale. Frustrated and starving, the
young Sioux began a religious revival called Ghost Dancing around 1889. A reaction against white ways
that called for a return to Indian traditions, the movement turned bellicose and a dangerous element was
added when the Ghost Dancers were told that their magic shirts would protect them from federal bullets.
A U.S. Army crackdown on the Indians began. One band of Sioux, led by a sick and aging Chief Big Foot,
came out of the Badlands and surrendered to the army. But as the Indians were disarmed, a shot was fired
and the result was an outright massacre of the Indians, most of them old, or women and children. The site
of this massacre was Wounded Knee Creek in the Badlands.
The other great stretch of American badlands is that seen by Lewis and Clark in western North Dakota,
now the site of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. As a young man, Roosevelt was among the first east-
erners who set out for the West lured by romantic tales of adventure and great hunting. Although he came
as a hunter, Roosevelt quickly came to appreciate the value of the preservation of land and animals and is
rightly considered one of the founders of the American conservation movement, one reason he is the only
president to be honored with a national park.
Both the Badlands and Roosevelt national parks attract substantial tourism, but in the past they have
held even greater appeal for paleontologists. Fossils have been found in the Badlands from as far back as
80 million years, when the area was an ocean bed, and include a fossil turtle twelve feet long.
Although the two Badlands of the Dakotas are the most famous, the term
badlands
is also applied to
similar regions in Asia, such as in parts of Mongolia's Gobi Desert.
