Badlands National Park
Badlands National Park, situated in southwestern South Dakota, was established as a national monument in 1939 and designated a national park in 1978. The park spans 244,000 acres and features striking landforms shaped by wind and water erosion, including ravines, buttes, and spires. Despite its seemingly inhospitable environment, the park is rich in biodiversity and history, supporting a variety of wildlife and the world’s richest Oligocene fossil beds, which are crucial for studying mammalian evolution. The park is also notable for its cultural significance, having been a hunting ground for Native Americans for over 11,000 years and the site of historical events such as the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.
Visitors to Badlands National Park typically explore its scenic vistas, either by driving through or hiking the numerous trails available. The park plays a vital role in South Dakota's tourism industry, attracting over a million visitors annually and providing significant economic benefits to the region. Important conservation efforts in the park include the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret and bison, both of which contribute to the health of the local ecosystem. The area is characterized by a semi-arid climate, experiencing hot summers and cold winters, which contribute to its unique landscape and biodiversity.
Badlands National Park
Badlands National Park, located in southwestern South Dakota, was established as a national monument in 1939, and was designated as a national park in 1978. The area's climate and topography appear inhospitable, and may have contributed to the name "bad lands" given to the area by both early French trappers and the Lakota Indians in their native languages.
Visitors are drawn to the park's unique landforms, the result of wind and water erosion, and typically drive through the park. Most of the park is undeveloped, and a number of scenic trails can be explored on foot with a topographic map and a compass. According to the National Park Service (NPS), in 2017 Badlands National Park had 1,054,325 recreational visitors and provided over 950 jobs. It serves as an important part of South Dakota's tourist industry, with visitors bringing significant revenues to the local and state economies.
Ancient History
While perhaps not as obviously majestic as other national parks of the American West, the Badlands National Park protects and preserves an incredible richness of wildlife, as well as history encompassing 11,000 years of human habitation by Native Americans, pioneers, and homesteaders. The park's 244,000 acres include topographic features ranging from ravines, buttes, pinnacles, and spires to the protected mixed grass prairie in the United States.
The park protects paleontological features and geological formations of the Eocene and Oligocene epochs, known as the age of mammals. The world's richest Oligocene fossil beds, some as old as 35 million years, allow scientists to study the evolution of mammal species such as the horse, sheep, rhinoceros, cat, and pig along with early birds, reptiles, and invertebrates. So rich are the Badlands' fossil beds that the area protected within the park is considered to be the birthplace of the science of vertebrate paleontology.
Ecosystem
The park is also home to a living mammal of great scientific importance: the black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes). One of the most endangered land mammals in North America, the ferret can be found in the 64,000-acre Badlands Wilderness Area along with their prairie dog prey. Thought to be extinct since the 1970s, a small ferret colony was discovered in Wyoming, and eighteen specimens were captured for captive-breeding in American and Canadian zoos. Badlands National Park is one of the areas where captive-bred ferrets were reintroduced beginning in the mid-1990s, and although the numbers are still small, the ferrets appear to be reproducing in the wild.
A much larger mammal presence in the Badlands are bison. Reintroduced to the area in 1963 after a nearly 100-year absence, the roaming bison play an important role in the grassland ecosystem, helping to define the type and distribution of plant communities.
An important tool in maintaining the prairie ecosystem is prescribed fire, which keeps plant communities in healthy balance and releases nutrients back into the soil. Visitors may see active fires or patchworks of burned prairie, but new, green growth starts as quickly as three to four weeks after a controlled burn.
The climate of the Badlands is semi-arid with year-round winds. Summers are hot and dry with occasional violent thunderstorms; winters are very cold with 12 to 24 inches of total snowfall.
Native Americans in the Badlands
The human presence in the Badlands dates back to the area's use as a Native American hunting ground more than 11,000 years ago. By the end of the nineteenth century, homesteaders had moved into South Dakota, and the US government stripped the Indians of much of their territory, forcing them to relocate to reservations. One of the resultant confrontations between the US military and Native Americans unfolded near the site of the present-day park.
In December 1890, a confrontation between a band of Minneconjou Sioux Indians, led by Chief Big Foot, and the US Army, which was seeking to disarm them, erupted into gunfire. At Wounded Knee Creek in the Pine Ridge Reservation, nearly two hundred Indians and thirty soldiers were killed. The massacre at Wounded Knee was the last major clash between American Indians and the US military until the American Indian Freedom actions of the 1970s. Wounded Knee, South Dakota, is located approximately 45 miles south of the park on Pine Ridge Reservation. Today, the Stronghold Unit in the south of the park is co-managed with the Oglala Sioux Tribe.