Here in this broken country, known as the Badlands of the Little Missouri, the Roosevelt Regional State Parks are being developed to preserve parts of the strange area as scenic and recreational centers, and at the same time to establish a memorial to the former President, who as a young man spent part of each year from 1883 to 1886 ranching here. (_See Tours 8 and 10._) To view the freakish, tumbled, unearthly valley is to appreciate and at the same time be amused by Gen. Alfred Sully's oft-quoted characterization of the region as "hell with the fires out." It must be remembered that the general received his impressions as he jolted along in a wagon, sick, while his troops fought Sioux through the confused, uncertain terrain all one hot day in August 1864. Others visiting it under more favorable circumstances, especially during the freshness of spring, concede the unparalleled fantasy of the landscape, and agree on its strange, wild, potent beauty. Twenty years after Sully fought the Sioux here Roosevelt wrote, "I grow very fond of this place ... it ... has a desolate, grim beauty, that has a curious fascination for me." Since then many noted travelers and writers have marveled at its beauties and deplored the fact that its attractions have not been made more widely known. The traveler approaching the Badlands from the rolling prairies on either side suddenly finds himself overlooking a valley cut abruptly into the heart of the plain, a valley filled with a strange welter of bare ridges and hillocks, buttes and domes, pyramids and cones, forming one of the most extraordinary topographies on the surface of the earth. In broad horizontal stripes across the varied shapes of the buttes are the browns, reds, grays, and yellows of the sand and clay laid down centuries ago when during successive ages arms of the sea covered large parts of the North American Continent. Where today the visitor stands and looks out over the naked buttes once lay a mighty sea in which swam monsters whose fossilized skeletons are embedded in the strata laid down by the primordial waters.