Much like its rock formations, the history of Badlands National Park of South Dakota is layered. To begin at the beginning and get a clue to the end, all one has to do is look at the park’s steeply eroded buttes, gullies, ridges and mixed-grass prairies. For the land-lover, the view seems almost nonsensical. Steep dips and dives of rock formations and endless seaweed-like grassy fields make the greater Badlands area seem more akin to an ocean floor than dry land. It makes sense, then, that the Badlands we’re familiar with today began underwater. Over 80 million years ago a great sea stretching down from Canada cut through the heart of North America, dividing it into three separate land masses. The main section of the sea, the Labrador Seaway, split in two like a wishbone around an interior landmass in Canada before converging again just above the Dakotas – one can imagine the volatile soil movements the meeting of two giant waterways might evoke. Then, around 35 million years ago, the sea receded. The Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, Beauford Sea and many of the rugged rock formations and flat prairie lands of the interior states are its remnants. Violent storms and volcanic activity were soon to follow, and the Badlands became a depository for mud, sand, and volcanic ash carried by rivers and streams from the surrounding Black Hills. (Home to Mt. Rushmore and a major player in the story to come.) That influx of sediments built up the layered spiral formations seen in Badlands National Park today. Then, beginning roughly half a million years ago, the castles made of sediment began to slip back into the barren sea. Eventually. About one inch of erosion occurs each year – a slow and steady geographical change, to be sure. But roughly 215 years ago the area’s natural resources and wildlife began to deteriorate at an almost unprecedented rate, a change that seemed to coincide perfectly with the westward expansion of the 1800’s and the deterioration of the great warrior tribes of the Mid-West.