Look to the valley below and the distant horizon, and let your mind travel back two hundred years to a time before Euro-Americans settled the Black Hills. Imagine a rolling, unbroken plain without a single fence, building, or road. This was a time when bison roamed free in herds approaching a million; when prairie dog towns stretched for miles; when the forest was limited by fire; when the process of formation and natural regeneration took place. Those processes are still active today. Wind Cave National Park is one of the few remaining places with examples of those events, a place where the past is preserved.