The Badlands: Mako Sica and the Sea Beneath the Prairie
Near Wall, South Dakota
The Oglala Lakota called this landscape mako sica, bad lands, and when eighteenth-century French fur traders arrived, they translated it faithfully as les mauvaises terres a traverser, the bad lands to travel across. The name has stuck for three centuries, and for good reason. The Badlands are a landscape that refuses to be crossed easily, a jagged wilderness of spires, buttes, gullies, and canyons rising abruptly from the surrounding prairie.
The geological story here reaches back seventy-five million years to a shallow inland sea that covered the central portion of North America. As that sea receded and rivers and winds deposited new material, layers of sediment accumulated for tens of millions of years. Beginning about five hundred thousand years ago, erosion began cutting through those layers at the rate of about an inch per year, carving the formations visible today. The result is a cross-section of roughly thirty million years of Earth history, with the oldest layers at the base and the youngest at the top, containing fossils of rhinoceros-like creatures, saber-toothed cats, and early horses that lived here long before humans arrived.
Humans have been present for at least twelve thousand years. The park contains more than three hundred ancient cultural sites. The Badlands served as seasonal hunting ground for multiple nations, including the Oglala Lakota, who hunted bison along the adjacent prairie. The South Unit of Badlands National Park is co-managed with the Oglala Lakota tribe, recognizing the continuing Indigenous relationship with this landscape.
The park was established as a national monument in nineteen thirty-nine and redesignated a national park in nineteen seventy-eight. The Interior section, formerly used as a military bombing range and transferred to the National Park Service in nineteen sixty-eight, still contains unexploded ordnance and is largely inaccessible, a reminder of a different kind of damage. The park today protects the largest expanse of mixed-grass prairie in the National Park System, and the bison herd, once eliminated entirely from the region, has been restored.
