Crazy Horse's flowing hair, bare chest, and trusty steed remain unrealized.

The legacy of the late Polish sculptor Korczak Ziólkowski, who was invited by Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear to create a likeness of the 19th-century hero of the Battle of Little Big Horn, the memorial is a bigger-than-Rushmore-size work in progress. Our next stop was Crazy Horse Memorial, 20 minutes southwest. Jefferson has a weird nose, Washington a crepe neck. The quartet of stony visages seemed not quite to match the way we think these presidents should look. Along a wooded byway, Mount Rushmore announced itself with an airport-size parking garage. If you want to examine the human need to make a mark on nature, the Black Hills, southwest of Rapid City, is your place. So much for the romance of the lone prairie. Prairie dogs compete for grass with cattle, which break ankles in prairie-dog holes. They've been wiped off 95 percent of their habitat, they've suffered from disease, and ranchers have called for their eradication. Sprawling as this town was, prairie dogs aren't faring well. It was mating season, and sentries at Roberts Prairie Dog Town squeaked out warnings as Jeanne photographed a nursing mama, whose tiny pups mobbed her. We went to see those marvelous critters at the center of it all. In that sense, the ranger added, unable to resist another simile, “Prairie dogs are like gardeners.” Their burrowing keeps the soil healthy, allowing diverse plants to grow those in turn provide food for local herbivores and a habitat for the insects that the owls eat. Others, like burrowing owls, cohabitate in prairie-dog tunnels, the digging of which aerates the earth. Some species, including the endangered black-footed ferret, feed on prairie dogs. What he meant was that prairie dogs provide both protein and produce to other animals in this ecosystem. “Prairie-dog towns are the burrito joint and the salad bar of the Badlands,” a ranger told me. Today, the baseline species is the prairie dog, a sociable rodent who lives underground. Next came tropical forests, then grasslands that supported modern horses' three-toed ancestors. Later, at the visitor center, we learned that 70 million years ago the Badlands stretched beneath the sea, before tectonics put the kibosh on the era of cephalopods here. We scrambled up the Notch Trail's log-and-rope ladder for an eagle's-eye view of the multihued pinnacles.

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