North of the Cheyenne River the plains break into drab gray and tan badlands, the exposed edges of rock laid down at the very end of the age of dinosaurs, in the last few million years before an asteroid ended it about 66 million years ago. Rivers and floodplains then covered this country, and the mud buried what died along them: duck-billed dinosaurs, horned Triceratops, turtles, crocodiles, and the animal that hunted them all. These beds have made northwestern South Dakota one of the richest dinosaur grounds in the world, and ranchers here have been finding bones in their pastures for a century.
Three bones in a cliff
In the summer of 1990 a crew from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a commercial fossil company in Hill City, was digging near Faith on the Cheyenne River Reservation. On August 12, while the others drove to town to fix a flat tire, Sue Hendrickson walked out to a bluff on land ranched by Maurice Williams, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and saw large bones weathering out of the rock. The institute's president, Peter Larson, knew at once what they were. The skeleton turned out to be a Tyrannosaurus rex more than ninety percent complete, larger and better preserved than any found before, and the crew named it Sue. Larson wrote Williams a check for $5,000, and the bones went to Hill City to be cleaned.
The raid
In May 1992 FBI agents and the National Guard arrived at the institute and carried the skeleton away to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. The government's claim turned on the land: Williams's ranch was held in trust for him by the federal government, as much Native land is, and trust land cannot be sold, or its contents disposed of, without federal approval. The courts agreed that the $5,000 deal was void and that the fossil belonged to the land, and so to Williams. A long criminal case against the institute followed, and Larson spent time in federal prison.
The auction
In October 1997 Williams put Sue up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, and the Field Museum in Chicago, with money from McDonald's and Disney, bought her for $8.36 million, then the highest price ever paid for a fossil. She has been on display in Chicago since May 2000. The case became a landmark in the long argument over who owns fossils dug from the plains, and it left lasting bitterness in Hill City, where Sue had been the town's dinosaur.
The same rocks still crop out across the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock country. The Lakota Cultural Center at Eagle Butte is the place to start on the reservation, and the School of Mines collection that once held Sue in custody shows Black Hills fossils at the Journey Museum in Rapid City. Fossils on tribal and federal land belong to the land, and collecting them without permission is a crime.