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Badlands National Park, South Dakota

Badlands National Park is a place of stark beauty. Grasslands meet eroded canyons at the aptly named wall. Pinnacles, spires and buttes are tinted pink, purple and red by the rising and setting sun. Storms rage on the Badlands many a summer afternoon. It's dry as a bone at all other times. So why take the kids? Beneath the façade lies a whole 'nother world. The badlands boast a human history 11,000 years long. Mammoth hunters, Native Americans, cattle ranchers and homesteaders have all dwelled in this dry, desolate place. Badlands National Park is home to a variety of wildlife. Bighorn sheep, ... Read Moreswift fox, prairie dogs, black-footed ferret and bison inhabit this 244,000-acre (98,743 hectare) expanse. What's more, the geological formations at Badlands National Park harbor life systems millions of years old. The gray-green Chadron Formation, made of siltstone and soft clay, contains fossils of flat, broad-teethed animals. Fossils of early horses, pigs and camels are found in the gravel and sandstone rock that form the Brule Formation. The gray and black shale, known as the Pierre Formation, contains remnants of ancient marine life. A lush forest, savannah and shallow sea once spread out across Badlands National Park.

Badlands National Park

Alfredo de Simone

Old Time Store

Alfredo de Simone

Badlands National Park

Alfredo de Simone

Bison, Badlands National Park

Alfredo de Simone

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Prairie Homesteaders

Homestead Wagon

Alfredo de Simone

Homesteaders, also known as sodbusters, farmed the Great Plains of the United States from the 1860s to 1980s. They moved west under the Homestead Act of 1862 to fulfill their dreams and take up free land. But to receive title to the promised 160 acres (640 in some drought stricken places), homesteaders had to do two things. They had to build a home and farm their claim for five straight years. Neither task proved easy on the plains of South Dakota. There were few trees for building houses. The land was difficult to farm. But that didn't stop these sodbusters from trying. Prairie homesteaders built houses from the materials at hand. - They dug sod homes, called soddies, into the ground. They made sod bricks out of buffalo grass. - And while there was little they could do to combat insects and drought, the homesteaders grazed cattle and plowed as much land as they could.