Mary: Are you gonna show me? You showing me around?
Everybody's just standing around looking at the sky because
there's supposed to be this big storm coming. And what better
place to watch a storm than in the Badlands? I'm gonna drive up
the road a little. I'm not patient enough to just like sit
here and wait. Though it doesn't really seem like I'm gonna have
to wait too long. Whoo there's a flash.
I've been here to the Badlands before. My ex and I came here on
our honeymoon a million years ago but our rental car broke
down before we even got to the scenic loop. Everything I saw I
saw from a tow truck. We certainly are not doing the
Scenic Loop right now. The Scenic Loop is 40 miles long and
we're on it but we just barely got on it when this insanity
began. Wow. According to Dark Skies, this rain is going to
continue for 15 minutes and then stop so... Quick storms like
this happen a lot here. They come down fierce ,wash away a
bunch of sediment, and then they stop and that uncovers all these
fossils. This is one of the richest spots in the world for
prehistoric fossils. The bus is really really moving. Really
rocking. It's getting pummeled. Do you hear this?
It feels like hail. They didn't say what's going to be hail but
it feels kinda hail-y.
OK, it must be ending up the road a little because I'm seeing
more and more people driving who seem to maybe think it's over. I
can't see, there's no way I could see at all even with
windshield wipers to get out of this and you know how my little
man dude feels about windshield wipers.
Still raining, not like it was though. You can actually see the
sun. See, I can see blue sky over here. Can you see that blue
sky?
What do you think? What do you think about that?
Mako Sica is the Lakota name for this place. It translates to
"land bad" - Badlands, named for the rough terrain. The
history of the Lakota people is written all over this place.
There are other associated tribes too. I'll put a list in
the description. Oh, there's a bison. I wasn't going to stop. I
was gonna go straight to the campground but... He's right
here. Oh my god. He's like a cat. He's scratching himself on
that post. This is a little awkward. I feel like I'm
watching something that's supposed to be private. Wow,
look at that tongue. Back in the day, those tongues were cut out
and sold as delicacies. There was a bounty on the hides too.
Oh, I probably shouldn't say that in front of him
Tomorrow I'm gonna go buffalo hunting. You know, not
literally, of course. I mean, for one thing, they're bison.
They're not even buffalo. The Buffalo is a completely
different animal that lives in Africa. "Tatanka"- that's the
Lakota word. Now I'm headed to the only campground that's
inside of Badlands National Park. It's a free first come
first serve campground and I want to nab a spot before it
fills up. Hope they're gonna let me into the campground because
there's supposed to be an 18 foot length limit to stay there.
Max is 20 feet. Hopefully nobody's gonna be standing there
with a measuring tape Well, I'm glad I didn't stress out too
much about the length requirement because there's some
big vehicles here. There's actually a fifth wheel that
looks like it's about 35 feet long. Plus it has a truck
pulling it. There's one guy who's in a little self built
trailer that's really cute. When you add a car to it, it's
definitely longer than 20 feet. Yeah, Max is one of the smaller
vehicles so I'm not going to worry about it. The camping here
is a little closer together than I usually like. But it's you
know, it's a nice communal feel. I found a spot on the other side
of the loop that's pretty good. I have a tent neighbor behind
me, but nobody in front of me until you get to the other side
of the restrooms. Those tents are a group, they're all
together. They're doing some kind of science projects or
something. I don't know something to do with the prairie
dogs. Maybe tagging them or something, catching them and
tagging them. These guys have a lot to say. I don't think
they're really happy about the science project. Tomorrow is
tatanka day.
So I mentioned before that the US government had a bounty on
the hides. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were 30
million bison here. They went from Canada down to Mexico, New
York to Oregon. They had roamed this country for 10,000 years,
and they didn't disappear by accident. In the 1800s the US
government embarked on a plan to eradicate the bison. They call
them Buffalo and all the official paperwork. Oh there's
So the herd is hanging out pretty far from the main road.
one.
Keep your eyes open, they might be hard to spot Oh, wow. Not so
hard to spot. So why would the US government want the bison
gone? Well, a little thing called Manifest Destiny.
European settlers believed it was their birthright to expand
control throughout the entire continent, and the native
population who had been on this land almost as long as the
bison. They stood in the way. Politicians at the time saw the
eradication of the buffalo as the solution to what they called
"The Indian Problem." The goal was to disrupt tribal life and
control the population. See, the Lakota and other nomadic tribes
followed the bison. They got food, blankets, clothing, fuel,
all from the bison. The herd was an important part of spiritual
life too. A quote from Army Colonel Richard Dodge sums up
the perspective at the time. "Kill every buffalo you can.
Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone." But the bison were so
resilient, the government was barely making a dent in the
population. Until the railroads were built. On those trains came
1000s of sport hunters from the east, often shooting right off
the platforms and out the windows, littering the plains
with 1000s of buffalo carcasses. In less than 100 years, there
were only about 300 Bison left out of 30 million. And that was
a devastating blow to the means of self preservation. It allowed
the Native Americans to be pushed onto the reservations.
Life on this continent was forever reshaped by that.
A big chunk of this park is tribal trust land, meaning it's
held in trust for the Oglala Sioux people, the Lakota, by the
US government. And that's seems a little ironic, you know, that
the same government that set out to destroy an entire culture
would be the ones entrusted with their land. I wish I had time to
spend here and really dig into all this. There's just so much
history here. But I have to move on Traveling on a deadline is
better than not traveling but it's only a little bit better.
I'll see you next time.