The Southeastern Badlands
Lakota and Northern Cheyenne country: the Powder River attack that opened the Great Sioux War, the Hell Creek beds that gave up T. rex, and Evelyn Cameron's plains.
The Powder River country was Lakota and Northern Cheyenne hunting ground, and the Great Sioux War opened here. At dawn on March 17, 1876, Colonel Joseph Reynolds's cavalry rode into a winter camp of Cheyenne and some Oglala Lakota under Old Bear, on the Powder River southwest of present-day Broadus, and in bitter cold burned the lodges and the food stores and drove off the horses. The Cheyenne took most of the horses back, and the families who had lost their homes went to Crazy Horse's camp. Two Moons and the young Wooden Leg were in that village, and three months later both fought at the Little Bighorn.
Under the grass lie the badlands of the Hell Creek Formation, laid down at the end of the age of dinosaurs. In 1902 Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History dug bones out of the breaks near Jordan that became the type specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex, and the general store in Jordan ran out of lumber and plaster before he had them crated.
Evelyn Cameron came out from England in 1889 to ranch near Terry on the Yellowstone. Raising polo ponies failed, so she turned to a glass-plate camera, the first bought in 1894, and for more than thirty years photographed the buttes, the roundups, the sheepherders and the homesteaders, selling prints to keep the ranch going. She died in 1928. Some eighteen hundred of her negatives sat in a friend's basement for half a century, until Donna Lucey learned of them in 1978.
What to See in The Southeastern Badlands
6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Architecture
Stories from The Southeastern Badlands
The Southeastern Badlands rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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