bumping nway into the bottomlands, often to be sunk in silts 

 and deltas and fossilized like the extinct creatures of long ago 



The Pronj;horn "Antelope" is a mysterious left-over from a 

 bygone age. It stands today all by itself among the other ungu- 

 lates or hoofed animals. It has rather gawky-looking upright 

 horns that are hollow, grow on a bony core, and are shed but 

 have a fork. This presents the question of how a horn that 

 divides like a Y is shed. The process is most unusual. Each year 

 a fully furred skin starts to grow up from the base of the bony 

 core of the horn but insiJr the old horny covering. This finally 

 reaches the tip of both the main and the branch tine, and as it 

 grows, it bursts the old horn so that it splits and drops off. 

 Another odd feature of the Pronghorn is the hair of its rump. 

 This is long, stiff, and glistening white at all times, and can be 

 raised or fluffed out by the animal at will by means of muscles 

 under the skin. Pronghorns went into a serious decline along 

 with the Bison, but today they have made a magnificent come- 

 back and may be seen grazing placidly along the verges of main 

 roads all over the prairielands. 



The great Prairie Belt of this continent was a land of unique 

 beauty before it was blanketed by the works of man. There are 

 still pockets where, if one orientates oneself carefully, one may 

 look out upon a vista of softly undulating hummocks and hill- 

 ocks, all sere brown and featureless but laid out almost geo- 

 metrically in perfect herringbone pattern. At first there appears 

 to be nothing but dead grass on this land, but if you sit and wait 

 you will note many small birds of exactly the same color as the 

 drab landscape. Next a slight discoloration may suddenly move, 

 and you find that a pronghorn was standing there all the time. 

 And you get greater surprises. Of all things unimaginable in 

 such a stark land, an enormous porcupine may come trundling 

 along looking like a vast hairy mop and with no place to go. 



But above all it is to the sky that one looks when out on the 

 true prairie. Weather is perhaps the single most important factor 

 in the life of man. Everybody, even the most troglodytic city 

 dweller, looks at the sky the first thing every morning. And 

 although the "sky" is similar everywhere around this planet, it 

 looks completely different in different places. On the prairies 

 it is forever a glowering and powerful presence, stretched taut 

 above one like a great tent, in front of which sail majestically 

 the clouds — all kinds of clouds: in serried ranks: in puffy for- 

 mations; alone in tragic isolation; or in great, awe-inspiring 

 masses. Over prairies there may be a great dark blanket, black 

 as rolled steel to one side, brilliant sunshine to another, and a 

 vast latticework of white rectangles covering the firmament in 

 another, with vivid shafts of hard yellow sun rays descending 

 to earth between them. You may drive along in half-darkness 

 at midday watching a thin blue line ahead and be inundated 

 with hailstones almost the size of golf balls in a sudden burst 

 for half an hour, and then abruptly come out into soft sunlight 

 under a cloudless sky; or you may be sitting stripped to the 

 waist in blazing heat, see something like the hand of a man on 

 the horizon, and in a few minutes be running for shelter in a 

 downpour of tropical type but of Arctic temperature. The 

 "weather" on the prairies is violent and sudden, and it is always 

 with you. 



BURNED BADLANDS 



The great Prairie Belt is divided by some (including students of 

 biology, of vegetation, and even of land form) into three separate 

 subbelts. These are: first, to the west, on higher elevations near 

 the mountain barrier, what are called "steppes"; second, the 



true grass prairies on the intermediate levels. covcrc<i with loc»s 

 and sandy soils; and third, the alternating upland plateau grass- 

 lands and vegetated bottomlands, The difference between the 

 first two cannot today be seen, even if tt ever existed; thai 

 between the second and third is merely empirical. The point to 

 remember is that this whole vast area consists of that which lies 

 between the parklands and the temperate forests on the one 

 hand and the scrublands, chaparrals, and Hot Deserts on the 

 other. Its parts are all much of a oneness, whatever you choose 

 to call them; their essential feature is grass. 



Vast and monotonous as they are, they are not, however, alto- 

 gether featureless. The most interesting oddity in them is what 

 are called badlands. These are actually the heads of the incised 

 river systems where the "bottoms" are too arid to be fully 

 vegetated, and which thus form dry chasms in the otherwise 

 more or less level plateau. The most interesting and fabulous 

 are those of North Dakota (the Theodore Roosevelt National 

 Memorial Park) and South Dakota (the White River Badlands). 

 It so happens that the strata which make up these lands are. on 

 the surface, composed of clays and other not-as-yet-compacted 

 material which is very soft and easily washed away by water. 

 They also contain, or once contained, interlarded beds of lignite 

 or soft coal. This coal was deposited in inland lakes and swamps 

 about 55 million years ago; and. after being covered up. 

 squeezed, dried out. and partly petrified, in many cases it caught 

 fire due to natural causes. Being highly inflammable and per- 

 meated with combustible gases, it simply smoldered away for 

 centuries or millennia. Some of these coal beds are still burning 

 today. The result is that the strata above collapse as the gases 

 leak away and the layers of clay or other material immediately 

 above are baked to the color of reddish clinkers with the firm- 

 ness and general consistency of pottery. This material (errone- 

 ously called scoria), being harder than the other strata and 

 reddish rather than their soft blues, grays, and greens, stands out 

 most prominently today when the land is guttered by erosion. 

 It very often forms the caps of buttes and the headstones on the 

 fantastic pillars that dot the land. 



The White River Badlands are surely one of the most wonder- 

 ful and mysterious sights on earth. Unlike the Grand Canyon 

 and other overwhelming topographical features, they are rather 

 intimate. What is more, they are one-sided, as it were, in that 

 they are formed all along a line where the land drops suddenly 

 down from one level to another about two hundred feet below 

 Approached from the upper level, the badlands are invisible, 

 seen from the lower level — and it is perfectly level — they stand 

 up like a continuous wall. On a map. the lip of the upper plateau 

 describes a vast fern-leaf pattern as the gullies of erosion divide, 

 subdivide, and sub-subdivide again and again as they eat badt- 

 ward into the tableland. The strata here are horizontal, and as 

 a result the whole place is almost geometrical in design. Yet the 

 resultant formations are beyond the wildest imagining. 



I once reached the lip of this vast, incredible area just at 

 sundown under a clear sky. Looking over the edge. I was nearly 

 blinded by the roiling masses of scintillating colors caused by 

 the orange rays of the setting sun splashed over the many subtle 

 pastel shades of the mud and clay walls. Then came a full moon 

 soaring over one of the most outrageously-shaped buttes. For 

 hours I meandered on. right through the vast one-sided chasm, 

 in and out between isolated peaks and buttes. back and forth 

 among the inky shadows, while the tops of the natural walls 

 changed from yellow to orange to gold to flame to red to pink 

 to amber and ultimately to purple, and on into the colorless 

 spectrum of the light of the moon. This land is not beautiful: it 

 is something that does not seem to belong on this planet. 



