present course until it reached the great river near where Aberdeen now is. The Cheyenne ran down to Redfield, the Teton or Bad River to Huron, and the White to Mitchell. The great animals, the titanotheres, mastodons, and eleotheres, were destroyed by the ice, and when it had melted away, it left new conditions in climate, soil, and river courses, not greatly different from what exist to-day.
Of the Bad Lands from which much of this story is learned Professor Charles E. Holmes, a poet whom all South Dakotans delight to honor, has written the following verses:—
The Bad Lands
A stillness sleeps on the broken plain,
And the sun beats down, with a fiery rain,
On the crust that covers the sand that is rife
With the bleaching bones of the old world life.
'Tis a sea of sand, and over the waves
Are the wind-blown tops of the Cyclops' caves;
And the mountain-sheep and the antelopes
Graze cautiously over the sun-burnt slopes.
And here in the sport of the wild wind's play
A thousand years are as yesterday,
And a million more in these barren lands
Have run themselves in the shifting sands.
Oh, the struggle and strife and the passion and pain
Since the bones lay bleached on the sandy plain,
And a stillness fell on the shifting sea,
And a silence that tells of eternity!
