What Was Here Before the Badlands？

In the 1930s you could buy a postcard of this formation. The caption printed on it read: The Altar, in the Castles of the Ancients. That name is gone.

So is the Castle of a Thousand Rooms. So is the whole district once marketed as the Wonderlands of America. The formations are still standing in South Dakota. The names came off.

This episode walks backwards through the record — 1864, 1848, 1834, 1823 — through four travelers from four countries who crossed this landscape before the tourist trade arrived, and who all reached for the same vocabulary. A French expedition artist who climbed a hill and described an immense city ringed by walls, crowned with domes, with a hundred-meter pillar standing at its center like a lighthouse. A Jesuit missionary who called it extensive villages and ancient castles, from another world or ages far remote. A fur trader talking shop about fortresses, churches, villages and ruins. And the earliest written account we have, from 1823, which calls the place a pile of ashes.
#archaeology #history