Amphitheatre of the Wilds, Badlands, South Dakota, circa 1940

About this postcard

Eroded badland buttes and castellated rock walls rise above a grassy flat, their fluted spires resembling the tiers and columns of a ruined amphitheatre — the formation the caption calls the "Amphitheatre of the Wilds" in the South Dakota Bad Lands. The Badlands' layered sediments were laid down as river and floodplain deposits and then carved by water and wind into the sharp ridges and pinnacles seen here. Much of the region was set aside as Badlands National Monument in 1939 (redesignated a national park in 1978), and such formations became standard subjects for roadside postcards along the Black Hills tourist routes.