In southeastern Montana, Medicine Rocks is a fantastically beautiful landscape of perforated sandstone monuments formed over millions of years and long used by people as well as shaped by nature. Indigenous people harvested medicinal plants there and performed ceremonies and religious rituals, leaving petroglyphs of warriors and animals that mark hundreds of years of use. The Lakota called it Inyan oka-lo-ka, meaning "Rock with a Hole in it." European explorers, then trappers and traders, passed through in the early 1800s and left their marks, followed after 1862 by gold seekers and then by cowboys, ranchers, homesteaders, laborers, and tourists whose carved initials, names, dates, images, and other inscriptions created a rich record tied to state, national, and world events. Traveling there in 1883, Theodore Roosevelt called it the Medicine Buttes and wrote that it was among the most fantastically beautiful places he had ever seen. County officials maintained Medicine Rocks as a park beginning in the 1930s, and it became a Montana state park in 1957.