The Badlands and the Edge of the Plains

The Badlands begin south of the interstate and extend for miles, a landscape of eroded buttes and spires in shades of gray and tan and rust that looks like another planet, or like Mars specifically, which is why the Badlands have appeared in science fiction more often than their geographic obscurity might otherwise suggest. The formations are made of volcanic ash and ancient river sediments, laid down between thirty-seven and twenty-three million years ago. The ash came from eruptions to the west, in what is now Idaho and Nevada.

The Badlands are eroding at roughly an inch per year, which is fast by geological standards, meaning the landscape you see is temporary in a way that most landscapes are not. They will look different in five hundred years. The Badlands are also one of the richest fossil beds in North America.

Titanotheres, rhinoceros-like mammals that went extinct thirty million years ago, saber-toothed cats, early horses, all of them have been found in the eroding rock. Paleontologists from institutions across the country have worked these formations for over a century. The Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation lies immediately south of Badlands National Park.

Pine Ridge is among the poorest counties in the United States by income statistics. Wounded Knee, where the Seventh Cavalry killed between two hundred fifty and three hundred Lakota in December of eighteen ninety, an event commonly called a massacre, is on the reservation. The site has a modest marker.

Sioux Falls, many hours east, is the largest city in South Dakota and the banking center for much of the Midwest, due to South Dakota's lack of usury limits.