... the most extraordinary of any I have met in my journeys through the wilderness.... Viewed at a distance, these lands exhibit the appearance of extensive villages and ancient castles, but under forms so extraordinary, and so capricious a style of architecture, that we might consider them as appertaining to some new world, or ages far remote.[11] The Jesuit noted further, “The industry of the settler will never succeed in cultivating and planting this fluctuating and sterile soil....” However, he believed that the fossil deposits in the region would be of interest to the geologist and the naturalist.[12] [Illustration: Figure 2 OREODONT SKELETON Oreodonts are the most common fossil mammals found in the Badlands. Several species of these now-extinct animals have been scientifically described.[13]] In the 1840’s the reports of fossil remains in the White River Badlands aroused the curiosity of scientific circles in the East. In the fall of 1843(?) Alexander Culbertson, well-known fur trader of the American Fur Company, made a trip from Fort Pierre to Fort Laramie. Either on this particular trip or succeeding ones, he made a collection of fossils and bones in the Badlands.[14] This collection provided the basis for the first scientific description of a Badlands fossil. The description was written by Dr. Hiram A. Prout of St. Louis, published in 1846, and printed again in 1847 with greater detail. The paper described a lower-jaw fragment of a large rhinoceros-like animal which later was given the common name titanothere by Dr. Joseph Leidy in 1852. Another fossil from this same collection, a fragment of an ancestral camel, was also described in 1847 by Dr. Leidy, who in a few years became the authority on Badlands fossils and an outstanding paleontologist.[15] In the fall of 1847 the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia became the first known institution to receive a collection of fossils from this region.[16] In 1848 another deposit to this institution, made by Culbertson’s father, Joseph, included “a new fossil genus of Mammalia, found near the ‘Black Hills’....”[17] These deposits aroused such interest that in 1849 United States Geologist David Dale Owen sent his assistant, Dr. John Evans, to the Badlands.[18] Dr. Evans, accompanied by a fellow geologist, “five Canadian travelers who were to be our muleteers and cooks, and finally an Indian guide and an interpreter,”[19] set out westward from Fort Pierre after traveling by steamboat from St. Louis. Following five days of overland travel they reached the Badlands. One of the party was a Frenchman, E. de Girardin, a soldier of fortune employed as an artist on the expedition. His story of the trip was published in 1864 in a French travel magazine, Le Tour du Monde. After climbing a hill about a hundred meters (about 330 feet) high, he beheld “the strangest and most incomprehensible view.”[20] (See Figure 4.)