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 grasslands.[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 AD. 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.[4]
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, Les 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]