What Was Here Before the Badlands?
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In the 1930s you could buy a postcard of this formation. The caption printed on it read: The Altar, in the Castles of the Ancients. That name is gone.
So is the Castle of a Thousand Rooms. So is the whole district once marketed as the Wonderlands of America. The formations are still standing in South Dakota. The names came off.
This episode walks backwards through the record — 1864, 1848, 1834, 1823 — through four travelers from four countries who crossed this landscape before the tourist trade arrived, and who all reached for the same vocabulary. A French expedition artist who climbed a hill and described an immense city ringed by walls, crowned with domes, with a hundred-meter pillar standing at its center like a lighthouse. A Jesuit missionary who called it extensive villages and ancient castles, from another world or ages far remote. A fur trader talking shop about fortresses, churches, villages and ruins. And the earliest written account we have, from 1823, which calls the place a pile of ashes.
Older than all of them is the Lakota account of Mako Sica: a rich plain of grass and streams, a storm that assembled in answer to human arrogance, lightning, fire erupting from the depths of the earth, and a chasm that swallowed the country whole.
We also follow the reading one researcher has built on top of all this — that the Badlands are damage rather than erosion — with their published Google Earth coordinates so you can look for yourself. Their argument is presented as theirs. The ordinary explanations are stated too. You decide what fits.
And then the part almost nobody tells: in 1942, this ground really was bombed.
SOURCES & METHOD
Built from published traveler accounts (1823-1864), period photography and postcard captions, historical maps, Lakota tradition relayed as tradition, and public record on the Badlands gunnery range. Speculative readings are attributed on screen to the researchers who make them. Where a mundane explanation is likely, we say so.
DISCLOSURE
Some historical scenes are AI-assisted reconstructions, clearly created for illustration. No reconstruction is presented as an authentic photograph or artifact.
The old photographs and the traveler accounts are archived and public — go look at them yourself. And if you can reach the original French of that 1864 magazine, the comment section on this channel works as a research desk. It has redirected episodes before.
Related — the map thread this connects to: https://youtu.be/sC0RtWAm-Wg https://youtu.be/FJwLZEJkcpg https://youtu.be/EjzcltNIiHk
#Badlands #ForgottenHistory #AncientMysteries
So is the Castle of a Thousand Rooms. So is the whole district once marketed as the Wonderlands of America. The formations are still standing in South Dakota. The names came off.
This episode walks backwards through the record — 1864, 1848, 1834, 1823 — through four travelers from four countries who crossed this landscape before the tourist trade arrived, and who all reached for the same vocabulary. A French expedition artist who climbed a hill and described an immense city ringed by walls, crowned with domes, with a hundred-meter pillar standing at its center like a lighthouse. A Jesuit missionary who called it extensive villages and ancient castles, from another world or ages far remote. A fur trader talking shop about fortresses, churches, villages and ruins. And the earliest written account we have, from 1823, which calls the place a pile of ashes.
Older than all of them is the Lakota account of Mako Sica: a rich plain of grass and streams, a storm that assembled in answer to human arrogance, lightning, fire erupting from the depths of the earth, and a chasm that swallowed the country whole.
We also follow the reading one researcher has built on top of all this — that the Badlands are damage rather than erosion — with their published Google Earth coordinates so you can look for yourself. Their argument is presented as theirs. The ordinary explanations are stated too. You decide what fits.
And then the part almost nobody tells: in 1942, this ground really was bombed.
SOURCES & METHOD
Built from published traveler accounts (1823-1864), period photography and postcard captions, historical maps, Lakota tradition relayed as tradition, and public record on the Badlands gunnery range. Speculative readings are attributed on screen to the researchers who make them. Where a mundane explanation is likely, we say so.
DISCLOSURE
Some historical scenes are AI-assisted reconstructions, clearly created for illustration. No reconstruction is presented as an authentic photograph or artifact.
The old photographs and the traveler accounts are archived and public — go look at them yourself. And if you can reach the original French of that 1864 magazine, the comment section on this channel works as a research desk. It has redirected episodes before.
Related — the map thread this connects to: https://youtu.be/sC0RtWAm-Wg https://youtu.be/FJwLZEJkcpg https://youtu.be/EjzcltNIiHk
#Badlands #ForgottenHistory #AncientMysteries