It was, as a matter of fact, the existence of this area that helped keep the Black Hills nothing more than an empty question mark on maps until the rumors of gold began to circulate. The first American explorers, who might have discovered the natural wonders of the Hills in the 1820’s, found their paths diverted to the north and the south by this impassable valley, and consequently missed the Hills. The first reliable record of the wonders of this lost world was dated 1847. That year, it will be remembered, was one of great moment in the history of the western movement—the year that Brigham Young braved the high prairies and pathless mountains with his great exodus, settling an empire on the shores of Great Salt Lake. Although the Pacific trails were fairly well established by then, his was the first of the true migrations, and the gold rush to California, the Oregon excursions, and the Pikes Peak mosaid were yet to come. In this fateful year of 1847 a certain Professor Hiram A. Prout of St. Louis came somehow into contact with a representative of the American Fur Company, which ran substantial trapping operations all up the wide Missouri and its tributaries. How this meeting came about is lost to record, but we do know that the fur trader gave Professor Prout a souvenir of his recent travels through the Badlands of Dakota—a fragment of the lower jaw of a Titanothere, the first fossil ever to be quarried out of the region and used for scientific purposes. In that same year a second Badlands fossil turned up, this one a well-preserved head of an ancestral camel, given to or purchased by the great scholar, Dr. Joseph Leidy. With true academic ardor both of these gentlemen, Leidy and Prout, rushed their discoveries into scholarly print, describing in learned journals the nature of their trophies. Enjoying the slender circulation of academic publication, the essays which described these fossil wonders eventually found their way into the offices of the government’s geological survey, which acted quickly to dispatch an expedition to the overlooked region of their origin. That first exploring party, the David Owen Survey, went into the field in 1849. A prominent scientist-artist, Dr. John Evans, was attached to the group, and from his pen we have several sketches of this pioneer adventure into the empty wastelands. If these drawings look more like studies of Dante’s Inferno than like the breath-taking Badlands as they really are, it must be remembered that such geological formations had never before been visited by the members of that party, and, being completely alien to the America of their knowledge, impressed them every bit as a visit to the moon might have done.