The Territory of Dakota was situated about midway between the two great oceans, and between the parallels of Latitude 42o 30’ and 490 of north latitude. The latter parallel forming the northern boundary of the United States.
According to the estimate of the United States census bureau, it embraced an area of 149,000 square miles. Its longest dimensions were about four hundred and thirty miles from south to north, and approximately three hundred and eighty-five miles east and west.
The Missouri River divided the territory into two great sections. It entered near the northwestern boundaries and left the territory at the southeast corner. Owing to the course of the river, that portion lying east of the river was much larger in area.
The distinctive topographical feature of the territory was a gently undulating vast plain which covered nearly four-fifths of its area. The feature extends west of the Missouri River, though broken to a much greater extent by rivers and creeks and by the “bad lands.” They are marked on most of the older maps as the “mauvaise terres,” a French term meaning “bad lands,” and beyond these are the Black Hills. They cover an area of 3,200 square miles and have an average elevation of 6,000 feet.
Very little is known of the prehistory of the region which comprises the badlands of South Dakota. The time when man first entered the Badlands-Black Hills region is unknown.
The oldest Indian site found in the western part of 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. They preyed upon mammoth, large bison, and other animals that lived in the lush post-glacial grass lands.
Fire pits containing Indian artifacts have been found in the Pinnacles area of the Badlands National Monument. Radiocarbon studies leave little doubt that hunters were already using this site by 900 A.D. It is thought that additional archaeological research will probably show that man hunted and made his home in the Badlands long before that date.
Since about 1,000 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 belong to the Caddoan, Athabascan, Kowa, and Shoshonean linguistic groups.
It was during the 1700s that parties of Arikara from the Missouri River went on Buffalo hunts as far west as the Black Hills. There they met with 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 (near 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.
For more than a century prior to 1763, the upper Missouri Valley, including what is today Badlands National Monument, was under French control. Under the 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 a secret treaty. It was in 1803 that the entire region was purchased by the United States from France for $15,000,000. It included all the present states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota, plus parts of eight other states.
The early American trappers and traders often 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 trace of country where no vegetation of any kind existed being 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 remarkable adhesive there [came] on a mistly 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 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 precise same angle and the tops sharp the whole of this regions is moveing to the Missourie River as fast as rain and thawing of Snow can carry it . . . .”
Alexander Culbertson, well-known fur trader of the American Fur Company, made many trips between Fort Pierre and Fort Laramie. He wrote:
“Fancy yourself on the hottest day in summer in the hottest spot of such a place without water–without an animal and scarce an insect astir–without a single flower to speak pleasant things to you and you will have some idea of the utter loneliness of the Bad Lands.”
Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on September 6, 2023