48 Fun Facts About Badlands National Park

Which landmark stands in the Black Hills of South Dakota, west of Badlands National Park?

Mount Rushmore was carved between 1927 and 1941 by Gutzon Borglum and nearly 400 workers; Borglum died months before the end, leaving his son Lincoln to finish the job.

Besides its eroded buttes and pinnacles, Badlands National Park protects the largest undisturbed expanse of what in the US?

Mixed-grass prairie grows here because rainfall sits between that of the wetter tallgrass prairie to the east and the dry shortgrass plains to the west, so its grasses range from ankle- to waist-high.

Which is the nearest major urban centre to Badlands National Park, and the second largest in South Dakota?

Rapid City, west of the park, was founded in 1876 during the Black Hills gold rush and grew as the eastern gateway to the hills.

French-Canadian trappers named the Badlands 'les mauvaises terres' because the land was bad for doing what?

Travelling across: the trappers' phrase meant bad lands to travel through, echoing the Lakota name mako sica, 'land bad', for the rugged terrain and lack of water.

Which president signed the 1929 law authorising Badlands National Monument on his final day in office?

Calvin Coolidge signed the act on 4 March 1929, his last day in office, but its conditions, including land purchases and a new highway through the Badlands, took a decade to meet, so the monument was proclaimed only in 1939.

Which president signed the 1978 law that made Badlands National Monument a national park?

Jimmy Carter signed the National Parks and Recreation Act on 10 November 1978, calling it the most significant conservation legislation of that Congress; one of its provisions renamed the Badlands monument a national park.

Fossils show that ancestors of which animal once roamed the Badlands alongside three-toed horses and early camels?

Rhinoceros relatives such as Subhyracodon lived here about 33 million years ago, when the Badlands were a warm, moist floodplain rather than dry prairie.

Who was Ben Reifel, the namesake of Badlands National Park's main visitor center?

The first Lakota elected to Congress, Ben Reifel was born in a log cabin on the Rosebud Reservation, earned a Harvard doctorate and then served five terms as a South Dakota Republican from 1961.

The Ben Reifel Visitor Center was built in 1957–58 under which federal programme?

Mission 66 was a ten-year programme, launched in 1956, to modernise park facilities by the Service's 50th anniversary in 1966; the Badlands visitor center was one of its early products.

Which Oscar-winning Western was partly filmed in Badlands National Park?

Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner's epic, won seven Oscars; the bison hunt was shot at the Triple U buffalo ranch near Fort Pierre, while the park supplied Badlands scenery.

Where was the 1868 treaty promising the Badlands would forever belong to the Sioux signed?

Fort Laramie, in present-day Wyoming, hosted the 1868 treaty that set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills; Congress carved up that reservation in 1889.

One of the last Ghost Dances of 1890 was held on which flat-topped mesa in the park's South Unit?

Stronghold Table hosted one of the last Ghost Dances late in 1890; as winter closed in, the dancers came down from the mesa and returned to the agency.

The Ghost Dance movement of 1890 followed the vision of which Paiute prophet?

Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, said a vision in 1889 showed him that the dead would return and the whites disappear if his people danced and lived in peace.

Ghost Dance followers wore special shirts believed to have what power?

To stop bullets: the ghost shirts appeared among the Lakota in 1890, in a ceremony whose Paiute founder had preached living in peace with the whites.

Chief Spotted Elk's band crossed the Badlands Wall in December 1890 on the way to which tragedy?

Wounded Knee Massacre: on 29 December 1890 the 7th Cavalry opened fire while disarming Spotted Elk's band, killing more than 250 Lakota, many of them women and children; 25 soldiers also died.

Which people, now part of North Dakota's Three Affiliated Tribes, hunted the Badlands before the Lakota?

The Arikara, a Caddoan-speaking farming people, camped in the Badlands before the Lakota arrived in the 18th century; charcoal from their fires and bison-butchering tools erode out of the stream banks.

The Badlands hold the richest known mammal fossil beds from which geological age, about 33 million years ago?

Oligocene beds are some 30 million years too young for dinosaurs: their fossils are mammals such as three-toed horses, which roamed an open savanna where the bare buttes now stand.

The first Badlands fossil known to science, a jaw collected by a fur trader, was described by a physician in which city?

St. Louis physician Hiram Prout took the jaw for a giant Palaeotherium, an extinct European relative of the horse; later study showed it came from a titanothere, one of the 'thunder beasts' of Lakota tradition.

Which Yale fossil hunter won access to the Dakota badlands in 1874 by agreeing to carry Red Cloud's complaints to Washington?

O. C. Marsh kept his word, taking samples of the poor rations issued at Red Cloud's agency back east as proof of fraud; the two became friends, and Red Cloud later visited him at Yale.

The oldest rock in Badlands National Park, the Pierre Shale, was laid down 75 million years ago beneath what?

An inland sea, the shallow Western Interior Seaway, left the Pierre Shale with fossils of ammonites and mosasaurs before draining away as the Rockies rose late in the Cretaceous.

The colourful band in the Badlands called the Yellow Mounds is what, geologically?

An ancient weathered soil: the Yellow Mounds are a paleosol, a fossil soil that formed as the dark shale beneath weathered at the surface before rivers buried it under fresh sediment.

Roughly how much do the bare slopes of the Badlands erode each year?

About an inch a year, a rapid rate for rock: the granite of the nearby Black Hills loses an inch in about 10,000 years, and at this pace the Badlands are expected to erode away within 500,000 years.

Ash in the Badlands' rock layers came from eruptions in which region of the American West?

The Great Basin of Nevada and Utah sent ash that washed onto the floodplains with sediment from the Black Hills; it now shows as the white bands in the Badlands' striped cliffs.

Which endangered mammal, once written off as extinct, has been reintroduced to the Badlands Wilderness?

Black-footed ferret: the species was thought extinct until 1981, when a Wyoming ranch dog named Shep killed one and carried it home; every ferret alive today descends from the colony found there.

Which burrowing animals make up about 90% of the diet of Badlands National Park's most endangered predator?

Prairie dogs are both larder and landlord: the predator hunts them underground and raises its young in their burrows, so an outbreak of plague in a prairie dog town can wipe out both.

The Badlands bison herd began in 1963 with animals shipped from which other national park with badlands of its own?

Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota supplied the founding herd in 1963; it has grown to about 1,200, and each autumn's roundup sends surplus bison to tribal herds.

Which bird, found in the grasslands of Badlands National Park, is South Dakota's official state bird?

Ring-necked pheasant: South Dakota's state bird since 1943 is not a native at all but an Asian game bird introduced for hunters, and it now lives in the park's grasslands.

Which grass, the most common in Badlands National Park, is also South Dakota's official state grass?

Western wheatgrass spreads by creeping underground stems that bind the prairie soil into a tough mat; South Dakota named it state grass in 1970, and North Dakota chose it too.

What rare fossil did a seven-year-old visitor spot near the Badlands visitor center in 2010?

A saber-toothed cat: Kylie Ferguson reported the skull to rangers instead of digging it out, and it proved to be a rare nimravid, a cat-like hunter that walked flat-footed like a bear.

What may visitors do almost anywhere in the Badlands Wilderness?

Camp overnight: backpackers may pitch a tent almost anywhere in the 64,000-acre wilderness, but fires, pets and bicycles are all banned, and every fossil must stay where it lies.

What was the standard size of a homestead when settlers first tried farming the Badlands?

160 acres was the Homestead Act allotment, far too little to feed a family on semi-arid prairie; the 1916 Stock-Raising Homestead Act allowed 640 acres, and the Dust Bowl drove most settlers out anyway.

What did many Badlands homesteaders build their first houses from?

Blocks of sod: settlers cut the prairie turf itself into bricks for their walls, and most of these houses were abandoned when the Dust Bowl of the 1930s drove the homesteaders out.

During World War II, the Army Air Forces turned most of the Badlands' present-day South Unit into what?

A bombing and gunnery range of some 340,000 acres took in most of today's South Unit from 1942; crews fired at old car bodies and yellow-painted oil drums, and unexploded ordnance still litters the ground.

Which 1887 law broke reservations into family allotments and sold the 'surplus' land, including Lakota land near the Badlands, to settlers?

The Dawes Act gave each family a fixed plot and declared the rest of a reservation surplus; by the time allotment ended in 1934, tribes had lost about 90 million acres, some two-thirds of their land.

Dewey Beard, forced off his Badlands land by the military in 1942, was the last Lakota survivor of which battle?

Battle of the Little Bighorn: Dewey Beard, or Iron Hail, fought there in 1876; when the military took his horse ranch in 1942 it paid too little to buy other land, and he died in 1955 aged 96.

Badlands National Park has two campgrounds: Cedar Pass and which other?

Sage Creek is free and first-come, but it has no water, so campers must haul in every drop; Cedar Pass, beside the visitor center, takes bookings.

Wall Drug, the tourist emporium beside Badlands National Park, first drew crowds in the 1930s by advertising what?

Free ice water was Dorothy Hustead's idea in the summer of 1936: signs along the highway pulled in hot motorists, and the store now draws some two million visitors a year.

What towering figure at Wall Drug can be seen from Interstate 90?

An 80-foot brontosaurus, designed by Emmet Sullivan, looms over the store's exit: one more roadside lure from a business whose hand-painted mileage signs GIs planted around the world in World War II.

Which Cold War nuclear missile has a launch control centre and silo preserved at the historic site near Wall, South Dakota?

Minuteman: the site keeps the Delta-01 launch control facility and the Delta-09 silo, the last intact Minuteman II system, saved when South Dakota's 150 missiles were retired after the 1991 START treaty.

In which Frances McDormand film does her character work at Wall Drug and as a campground host in the Badlands?

Nomadland, the 2020 Best Picture winner, follows Fern's van across the West; director Chloé Zhao cast real-life nomads such as Linda May and Swankie as versions of themselves.

Paleontologists say plant-eating oreodonts were once as abundant in the Badlands as which animals on today's Serengeti?

Zebras: sheep-sized oreodonts, nicknamed 'ruminating hogs', grazed the ancient savanna in such herds that their bones are among the most common fossils in the park.

The larger South Unit of Badlands National Park lies inside which Lakota reservation?

Pine Ridge: the Oglala Lakota own the South Unit's land and the Park Service manages it under an agreement with the tribe, which has long hoped to run it as the first tribal national park.

Which thriller about an FBI agent sent to a reservation was partly filmed in Badlands National Park?

Thunderheart stars Val Kilmer as a part-Sioux FBI agent investigating a murder; its story was loosely drawn from the violent unrest on South Dakota reservations in the 1970s.

Which Lakota leader's killing on Standing Rock in December 1890 sent his followers fleeing south?

Sitting Bull was shot by Indian agency police on 15 December 1890 while being arrested on the Standing Rock Reservation; some of his followers fled to join Spotted Elk's band.

The Badlands are eroded from which sequence of sediments, first laid down about 37 million years ago?

The White River Group, named for the river south of the park, records a drying climate: its lower clays formed in hot, wet country like today's Everglades, its upper beds on open savanna.

Which institution has sent researchers to the Badlands almost every year since 1899?

South Dakota School of Mines sits nearby at the edge of the Black Hills, close enough to send crews almost every year since 1899, the longest such link any institution has with the Badlands.

The Badlands' Big Pig Dig yielded over 19,000 fossils of animals that died at what kind of ancient site?

A waterhole: in a drought, thirsty animals crowded in and became mired; two visitors reported the first bones instead of digging, and the excavation that followed ran for 15 field seasons.

Which subspecies of bighorn was reintroduced to Badlands National Park after the native Audubon's bighorn died out?

Rocky Mountain bighorn: the native Audubon's bighorn had vanished by the 1920s, so in 1964 the park brought in 22 sheep from Pikes Peak in Colorado.