The Black Hills, Mid-Continent ResortWilliams, Albert N. (Albert Nathaniel)
History
The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort
Williams, Albert N. (Albert Nathaniel)
Black Hills (S.D. and Wyo.) -- Description and travel
The Owens party was merely the vanguard of the great army of brave men
and women who have ever since made their dangerous ways into the
remotest distances of the mountain and desert West, seeking neither
riches of gold nor riches of land, but only more minute bits of the
knowledge of the world of our past. Archeologists, geologists, and
paleontologists from universities and learned societies the world over
have spent liberally of their time, energies, and personal safety to
scout out the secrets of mankind’s past in such remote corners of the
earth as the Badlands. Year after year additional expeditions, both
governmental and privately organized, made their way into this
particular area, seeking out the fossil remains which turned up in great
numbers.
V. F. Hayden of the United States Geological Survey was one of the most
diligent of the early explorers. He made trips into the Badlands in
1853, 1855, 1857, and 1866, carrying on detailed and exhaustive studies
and eventually unraveling the story of the region’s major geologic
features.
As Hayden’s reports became more and more widely circulated, various
universities found projects of specific interest in one or another phase
of the work of uncovering fossil beds; and from year to year Yale,
Princeton, Amherst, the universities of South Dakota and Nebraska, and
other institutions sent groups into the Badlands for summer work.
Gradually, as these several groups exchanged information and reports of
progress, it became possible for their scientists to trace back, through
the skeletal remains of prehistoric animals, the very processes of the
evolution of many entire families in the animal kingdom. Not only are
the fossil beds of the Badlands as richly stocked with remains as any
such bed in the world, but in a great many instances entire groups of
three, four, and five whole skeletons have been found, making it
possible for museum workers to re-create almost perfectly the animals as
they existed and to set up models of the terrain at various intervals
throughout its entire sixty-million-year history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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