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Paleontologist Thaddeus Culbertson -
"Fancy yourself on the hottest day in summer, in the hottest spot of
such a place without water, without an animal or scarce an insect astir
- without a single flower to speak pleasant things to you and you will
have some idea of the utter loneliness of the Bad Lands.
Homesteads and Ranches
Homesteaders poured into the Badlands when the Milwaukee Railroad
completed track through the White River Valley in 1907.
"Visualize if you can," one observer wrote, "a tar paper shack, tent, or
dugout on every quarter section of land....and you will have a minds'
eye picture of what the community looked like..." A checker-board
pattern was created, bearing little relationship to the natural lay of
the land.
And bearing little relationship to the productivity of the land. Most of
the homesteads turned out to be "Starvation Claims" and were abandoned
or sold.
Starved out homesteaders moved on to build towns and cities, or to seek
other homesteads in a land less harsh.
Today the ranches of this valley are measured in thousands of acres, and
heavy equipment does most of the work once done by callused hands. Even
so, unpredictable drought and economic crisis test ranchers today as
severely as they tested homesteaders yesterday.
Badlands National Park -
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