If you drive north of the Black Hills in northwest South Dakota, you will find the Cave Hills, a portion of the Custer National Forest. It is part of Harding County, which gives meaning to the word broad. It stretches out over 2670.5 square miles, an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. However, the 2010 Census Estimate places only 1,255 people living in Harding County. That is a population density of less than 1 person per every 2 square miles, and it is decreasing. In many places, the Hills might not seem particularly impressive, but they are 85 miles of some of the flattest, plainest, and least inhabited land in the lower 48. That stretch of road and plains is what first seems to make the Cave Hills so impressive and powerful.
The Cave Hills stand as two massive sandstone plateaus rising to 600 feet above the flat prairie in some places. Their tops are covered in the beautifully dark green of ponderosa pine, which contrasts greatly with the golden yellows of the prairie and the Tongue River Sandstone, of which they are composed. When settlers first reached that Cave Hills they found the Hills useful for many of the same reasons that Plains Indians found them to be sacred for millennia. The Hills are sources of scarce, reliable clear water springs, even scarcer timber, and always important game. The tribes in the area include the Lakota, Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, and Crow, and they have been conducting ceremonies in the Cave Hills for generations.
