It is said that every square yard of the Black Hills has seen a human footprint. Perhaps so...but the case could be different for the nearby Badlands. In the Badlands are flat-topped tablelands that are all but inaccessible from the surrounding land.
South of Scenic stands eerie Coffin Butte. Its crumbling 90-degree walls have been climbed only a couple times. In 1936 a troop of Scenic Boy Scouts climbed the precipitous walls of Coffin Butte in an effort to prove or disprove an old legend. According to the old tale, 10 Indian boys ran away from the reservation. In efforts to elude a pursuing military detachment the boys supposedly formed a human bridge to the butte's summit. Soldiers surrounded the tabletop, but the boys starved rather than surrender...or so the story goes.
The Boy Scouts reached the top of Coffin Butte with the aid of telescoping ladders. There they discovered stark proof that they were not the first to scale the steep walls. They found a human skeleton. No one knows if this discovery ties in with the legend or perhaps solves one of South Dakota's "lost prospector" riddles.
The Virgin Grasses of most Badlands tables waved undisturbed for centuries. Neither the buffalo nor the cow can reach these grasses. But in 1911 a severe drought caused on settler to cast a covetous eye up to the thick forage on Hay Butte. The problem was how to harvest this untapped hay crop. The answer was to pack the mower and other equipment up in pieces and then to spill the hay stacks down the side.
Belvidere area rancher Skee Rasmussen, who describes how one homesteader farmed the top of a high Badlands table, tells a similar story. This old timer planted 40 acres of corn on the butte's flat top, but to do so he had to take his tractor up there piece by piece.
Inventive ranchers could also get firewood and fence posts off the mesa tops. A long wire was stretched from the top to a post on the basin. When cut, the wood was stapled to this wire and sent scooting to the bottom. The impact of hitting the ground would knock off the staple, and the wood was ready to use!
10/01/03