Deadwood turned out in force for her funeral. As she had requested, she was buried near Wild Bill Hickok on Mount Moriah, overlooking the town. That she had never really known Wild Bill was quite beside the point, and anyway, there was none present who knew whether she had or not. The shoddy story of her “love” for Hickok was nothing that interested the old timers, but was saved for historians to untangle. That she was no more than an alcoholic old harlot was of no consequence, either, to the good citizens, for with her passing the last of the great names of the frontier was coming home to rest. That the townspeople were proud of her, and genuinely so, was not to be denied, although there was most certainly nobody present at that melancholy service who could have told why. The truth of the matter was that they were burying not a broken old woman, but the last of the Black Hills legends. CHAPTER SIX The White River Badlands Any visit to the Black Hills must also be the occasion of a tour, at least for a few hours, of the famous South Dakota Badlands. This fantastic National Monument is not a part of the Hills, either geographically or historically, but because the two regions lie so close together—a scant fifty miles apart—they are expediently linked as two great natural wonders in the same region. The term “badlands” has a loose scientific acceptance, meaning any region where a specific type of heavy erosion has taken place. Such regions usually have subnormal rainfall and sparse vegetation. Those rains that do occur, then, find little on the earth’s surface to prevent almost complete runoff, which is so vigorous as to act as a powerful cutting agent. The final ingredients of a badlands are rock formations known as unconsolidated—lacking any general unity of structure which might tend to withstand erosion. When all these conditions exist, the devastation of the rushing flood waters is without pattern, a great gash being carved in one spot while no damage is visible on a near-by outcropping. The end result is an almost frightening collection of gruesome stone monuments rising to the sky and marking the heights once reached by a general plateau. Actually, much of the high western plain abutting on the Rocky Mountains is basic badland formation, and small pockets of distinct erosion can be seen all through eastern Colorado, western Nebraska, and eastern Wyoming, in addition to the vast depression in the valleys of the White and Cheyenne rivers in South Dakota. This one region, though, sixty-five miles long and five to fifteen miles wide, is the largest and from the geologist’s point of view the most important of all such regions in the world. Desolate, empty, seared by ages of sun and wind, it is now a great gash in the earth’s flesh which exposes to view rock and soil strata that measure a great span of earth’s history.