Mount Rushmore, Custer, Crazy Horse and Wall Drugstore

We didn’t get to see the best of the Quality Inn, to enjoy the swimming pool or the bars because there simply wasn’t enough time and in the morning after our first generous American breakfast in the dining room we met our tour guide and were pretty quickly loaded back on to the bus and sped away from the city on Interstate 90 and then Highway 16 towards the famous Black Hills of Dakota.

The Black Hills is an area that is famous for gold, Indian wars and Custer’s last stand.  After the discovery of the precious metal in the 1870s, the conflict over control of the region sparked the last major Indian War on the Great Plains of America known as the Black Hills War.  Previously the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had confirmed Sioux ownership of the mountain range but this was conveniently overlooked by the authorities when gold was discovered and the native Americans were assigned alternative land ownership on less valuable bits of real estate in order to make way for the prospectors.

This led to real trouble and culminated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the neighbouring Montana territory, where the 7^th cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer took on a coalition of Native American tribes comprised of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors and led by the Sioux chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall and by the Hunkpapa seer and medicine man, Sitting Bull.  The one thousand, eight hundred Indian warriors outnumbered the army troops by four to one and with superior tactics and a rightful cause as motivation won an emphatic victory and killed all of the four hundred and fifty or so US cavalry troopers and Custer himself who despite his heroic image probably committed suicide in preference to ritual mutilation.  Good choice!

Our first destination was to see the U.S. National Monument Mount Rushmore with its famous granite sculptures of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  The sculptured faces are sixty feet high and are as grand and enduring as the contributions of the men they represent.  Between 1927 and 31st October 1941 the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and four hundred workers created the colossal carvings to represent the first one hundred and fifty years of American history and symbolised these particular presidents who were selected for mountain side posterity because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory.  Originally the sculptures were to be carved from head to waist but this all proved to be a bit too ambitious so what we have are just the heads.

Next stop was the Crazy Horse Memorial about thirteen kilometres away and a sort of alternative ethnic memorial to the great native American warrior chief.  The monument has been in progress since 1948 and is still far from completion.  The sculptor died in 1982 and if and when it is ever finished, it will be the world’s largest sculpture because the head of Crazy Horse will be a massive eighty seven feet high.

The Memorial is on the road to a place of notoriety called Wounded Knee where on December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This cowardly action is commonly cited as the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Sioux Nation and the massacre resulted in the deaths of an estimated three hundred Sioux, many of them women and children and just twenty five U.S. soldiers.  Attacking in the early morning while the Sioux were still in bed proved to be an overwhelming advantage to the U.S. troops.

Later that day in the afternoon we drove along Highway 44 close to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and through the Badlands National Park, which is a strange and beautiful landscape of deep gorges, saw-edged spires and grassy-topped buttes, an eerie world carved out of the prairies by thirty five million years of wind and water erosion and with wonderful names like ‘Buffalo Gap National Grassland’ and the ‘Sage Creek Wilderness Area’ to inspire the imagination.

The term badlands represents a historical consensus in North America, the Indians called the place ‘mako sika’ and Spanish colonists called it ‘malpaís’, both meaning literally bad land, while French trappers called it ‘les mauvaises terres à traverser’ which translates as ‘the bad lands to cross’.  The term is also topographically apt because these badlands contain steep slopes, loose dry soil, slick clay, and deep sand, all of which seriously impede travel.  Luckily we were on an interstate highway in an air conditioned coach and we found the journey rather more straight forward than the early pioneers.  After visiting the Ben Reifel Visitor Centre in the Cedar Pass we rejoined the Interstate at Cactus Flat and turned west back towards the city.

All along Interstate 90 there were hundreds of billboards advertising the Wall Drugstore and I was beginning to wonder what this was all about when we reached the town of Wall and all was revealed.  ‘The Wall’ is actually a rugged topographical strip a half mile to three miles wide and nine miles long with a succession of tinted spires, ridges and twisted gullies which separates the lower prairie from the upper and from which the name of the town of Wall, South Dakota is derived.

This is a small settlement just off the highway that is unremarkable except for the Wall Drugstore.  This small town store made its first step towards international fame when it was purchased by a man called Ted Hustead in 1931 during the great depression.  Hustead was a deeply religious man and a pharmacist who was looking for a small town with a thriving Catholic community in which to establish a business and he discovered and purchased Wall Drug.

It was located in a small town that was recently by-passed by a new main road in what he himself referred to as ‘the middle of nowhere’ and he thereafter struggled to make a living and business was very slow indeed until his wife hit upon a brilliant idea to advertise free ice water to thirsty travellers passing by on the nearby highway.  This was an immediate success and began to divert motorists off the main road to take advantage of the offer, to the extent that Wall Drug grew into an enormous cowboy themed shopping mall and even today free ice water is always available for travellers who stop by for a rest.  It’s a nice story and the place was busy but full of arcade shops with merchandise that I had no desire to purchase and it wasn’t a place that I would rush back to and I was happy to move on.

This was day 1 of my visit to some of the National Parks of the USA, the rest of the journey can be found here:

National Parks of the United States

Wild Bill Hickok, Deadwood and the Wild West

After a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast we packed our bags and loaded them onto the coach because it was time to move on from Rapid City and start going west.  Today we were going to travel through some of the old wild-west towns that previously I had only seen in movies or on the TV, towns with famous names like Mule Creek, Buffalo, Custer and Sundance.  Also along the route was the unfortunately named town of Gayville but I don’t remember that featuring prominently in any John Wayne films.

As there was a fair way to travel today, the coach left early and we rejoined Interstate 90 and this time travelled northwest towards mountains and snow.  Soon we were back in the Black Hills and after a short time the coach left the Interstate and turned onto a road that ran down the side of a dry creek bed full of fallen trees washed here by flash floods towards the appropriately named town of Deadwood who amongst its famous previous citizens were Annie Oakley (I couldn’t help humming the tune to ‘The Deadwood Stage is coming on into town’) and Wild Bill Hickok.

It was the gold rush of 1874 which gave rise to the notoriously anarchic town of Deadwood, which quickly reached a population of around five thousand citizens.  With so many people needing entertainment two enterprising brothers brought a wagon train to the town in 1876 containing what were deemed to be commodities essential to the community to supply the saloons that were frequented by gamblers and whores and which proved to be a very profitable venture.  Demand was high, and the business of prostitution proved to be an especially good investment.  The hotel Madams became the richest people in town and an abundance of boisterous saloons were soon established.  The town attained famous and lasting notoriety for the murder of Wild Bill Hickok, and it became known for its wild and almost lawless reputation, during which time murder was common, and punishment for homicide not always fair or impartial.

A fire on September 26 1879 completely devastated the town, destroying over three hundred buildings and consuming everything belonging to its many inhabitants and without the opportunities of rich untapped veins of ore that had characterised the town’s early days, many of the newly impoverished left town to try their luck elsewhere and the place never quite recovered.

In the centre of the town today there is a conservation area with both original and reconstructed old west buildings including the Nuttal & Mann’s saloon where old Wild Bill was shot whilst enjoying a glass of whiskey and a game of poker on August 2^nd 1876.  Legend has it that Hickok could not find his favourite empty seat in the corner, where he always sat in order to protect himself against sneak attacks from behind, and instead sat with his back to one door and facing another.  This was unlucky for him because this night  he was shot in the back of the head by a man called Jack McCall.  When he was shot he was holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights and ‘aces and eights’ has been known ever since as a dead mans hand!

Gambling lives on in Deadwood and in the middle of the town we visited the Midnight Star Casino which was a upmarket sort of place that is owned by Kevin Costner who bought it while he was making the film ‘Dances with Wolves’ which was filmed in the Badlands National Park.

After we were through in Deadwood we continued our drive west and soon passed the state line into Wyoming and after about fifty kilometres we passed the town of Sundance which is famous for the fact that in 1887 a man called Harry Longabaugh was convicted of horse theft in the town and was sentenced to eighteen months in the Sundance prison.  Because of this time in jail Harry became known thereafter as the Sundance Kid and later Robert Redford.

There was a lot of snow now and after another two hundred kilometres we passed the town of Buffalo where close by is the famous Hole-in-the-Wall which is a remote hideout located in the Big Horn Mountains.  The site was used in the late 1800s by the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang, a group of cattle rustlers and other outlaws which included among its members Kid Curry, Black Jack Ketchum and Butch Cassidy.  The area was ideal for outlaws as it was remote and secluded, easily defended because of its narrow passes and impossible for lawmen to approach without the outlaws being alerted.  From the late 1860s and for about fifty years the pass was used frequently by numerous outlaw gangs and at its height it featured several cabins that gangs used to lay up during the harsh Wyoming winters, and it had a livery stable, a corral, livestock and ample supplies to see them through until Spring.

We passed teasingly close to the site of the battle of the Little Big Horn but like Sundance and Hole-in-the Wall we didn’t stop off and the coach kept relentlessly going west and it was about now that I thought it would be nice to be driving myself so I could stop off now and again whenever I choose to and not only when the schedule said so.

A Life in a Year – 31st October, Mount Rushmore

We didn’t get to see the best of the Quality Inn, to enjoy the swimming pool or the bars because there simply wasn’t enough time and in the morning after our first generous American breakfast in the dining room we met our tour guide and were pretty quickly loaded back on to the bus and sped away from the city on Interstate 90 and then Highway 16 towards the famous Black Hills of Dakota.

The Black Hills is an area that is famous for gold, Indian wars and Custer’s last stand.  After the discovery of the precious metal in the 1870s, the conflict over control of the region sparked the last major Indian War on the Great Plains of America known as the Black Hills War.  Previously the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had confirmed Sioux ownership of the mountain range but this was conveniently overlooked by the authorities when gold was discovered and the native Americans were assigned alternative land ownership on less valuable bits of real estate in order to make way for the prospectors.

This led to real trouble and culminated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the neighbouring Montana territory, where the 7^th cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer took on a coalition of Native American tribes comprised of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors and led by the Sioux chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall and by the Hunkpapa seer and medicine man, Sitting Bull.  The one thousand, eight hundred Indian warriors outnumbered the army troops by four to one and with superior tactics and a rightful cause as motivation won an emphatic victory and killed all of the four hundred and fifty or so US cavalry troopers and Custer himself who despite his heroic image probably committed suicide in preference to ritual mutilation.  Good choice!

Our first destination was to see the U.S. National Monument Mount Rushmore with its famous granite sculptures of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  The sculptured faces are sixty feet high and are as grand and enduring as the contributions of the men they represent.  Between 1927 and 31st October 1941 the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and four hundred workers created the colossal carvings to represent the first one hundred and fifty years of American history and symbolised these particular presidents who were selected for mountain side posterity because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory.  Originally the sculptures were to be carved from head to waist but this all proved to be a bit too ambitious so what we have are just the heads.

Next stop was the Crazy Horse Memorial about thirteen kilometres away and a sort of alternative ethnic memorial to the great native American warrior chief.  The monument has been in progress since 1948 and is still far from completion.  The sculptor died in 1982 and if and when it is ever finished, it will be the world’s largest sculpture because the head of Crazy Horse will be a massive eighty seven feet high.

The Memorial is on the road to a place of notoriety called Wounded Knee where on December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This cowardly action is commonly cited as the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Sioux Nation and the massacre resulted in the deaths of an estimated three hundred Sioux, many of them women and children and just twenty five U.S. soldiers.  Attacking in the early morning while the Sioux were still in bed proved to be an overwhelming advantage to the U.S. troops.

Later that day in the afternoon we drove along Highway 44 close to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and through the Badlands National Park, which is a strange and beautiful landscape of deep gorges, saw-edged spires and grassy-topped buttes, an eerie world carved out of the prairies by thirty five million years of wind and water erosion and with wonderful names like ‘Buffalo Gap National Grassland’ and the ‘Sage Creek Wilderness Area’ to inspire the imagination.

The term badlands represents a historical consensus in North America, the Indians called the place ‘mako sika’ and Spanish colonists called it ‘malpaís’, both meaning literally bad land, while French trappers called it ‘les mauvaises terres à traverser’ which translates as ‘the bad lands to cross’.  The term is also topographically apt because these badlands contain steep slopes, loose dry soil, slick clay, and deep sand, all of which seriously impede travel.  Luckily we were on an interstate highway in an air conditioned coach and we found the journey rather more straight forward than the early pioneers.  After visiting the Ben Reifel Visitor Centre in the Cedar Pass we rejoined the Interstate at Cactus Flat and turned west back towards the city.

All along Interstate 90 there were hundreds of billboards advertising the Wall Drugstore and I was beginning to wonder what this was all about when we reached the town of Wall and all was revealed.  ‘The Wall’ is actually a rugged topographical strip a half mile to three miles wide and nine miles long with a succession of tinted spires, ridges and twisted gullies which separates the lower prairie from the upper and from which the name of the town of Wall, South Dakota is derived.

This is a small settlement just off the highway that is unremarkable except for the Wall Drugstore.  This small town store made its first step towards international fame when it was purchased by a man called Ted Hustead in 1931 during the great depression.  Hustead was a deeply religious man and a pharmacist who was looking for a small town with a thriving Catholic community in which to establish a business and he discovered and purchased Wall Drug.

It was located in a small town that was recently by-passed by a new main road in what he himself referred to as ‘the middle of nowhere’ and he thereafter struggled to make a living and business was very slow indeed until his wife hit upon a brilliant idea to advertise free ice water to thirsty travellers passing by on the nearby highway.  This was an immediate success and began to divert motorists off the main road to take advantage of the offer, to the extent that Wall Drug grew into an enormous cowboy themed shopping mall and even today free ice water is always available for travellers who stop by for a rest.  It’s a nice story and the place was busy but full of arcade shops with merchandise that I had no desire to purchase and it wasn’t a place that I would rush back to and I was happy to move on.

This was day 1 of my visit to some of the National Parks of the USA, the rest of the journey can be found here:

National Parks of the United States

A Life in a Year – 2nd August, Wild Bill Hickok, Deadwood and the Wild West

 

After a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast we packed our bags and loaded them onto the coach because it was time to move on from Rapid City and start going west.  Today we were going to travel through some of the old wild-west towns that previously I had only seen in movies or on the TV, towns with famous names like Mule Creek, Buffalo, Custer and Sundance.  Also along the route was the unfortunately named town of Gayville but I don’t remember that featuring prominently in any John Wayne films. 

As there was a fair way to travel today, the coach left early and we rejoined Interstate 90 and this time travelled northwest towards mountains and snow.  Soon we were back in the Black Hills and after a short time the coach left the Interstate and turned onto a road that ran down the side of a dry creek bed full of fallen trees washed here by flash floods towards the appropriately named town of Deadwood who amongst its famous previous citizens were Annie Oakley (I couldn’t help humming the tune to ‘The Deadwood Stage is coming on into town’) and Wild Bill Hickok.

It was the gold rush of 1874 which gave rise to the notoriously anarchic town of Deadwood, which quickly reached a population of around five thousand citizens.  With so many people needing entertainment two enterprising brothers brought a wagon train to the town in 1876 containing what were deemed to be commodities essential to the community to supply the saloons that were frequented by gamblers and whores and which proved to be a very profitable venture.  Demand was high, and the business of prostitution proved to be an especially good investment.  The hotel Madams became the richest people in town and an abundance of boisterous saloons were soon established.  The town attained famous and lasting notoriety for the murder of Wild Bill Hickok, and it became known for its wild and almost lawless reputation, during which time murder was common, and punishment for homicide not always fair or impartial.

A fire on September 26 1879 completely devastated the town, destroying over three hundred buildings and consuming everything belonging to its many inhabitants and without the opportunities of rich untapped veins of ore that had characterised the town’s early days, many of the newly impoverished left town to try their luck elsewhere and the place never quite recovered.

In the centre of the town today there is a conservation area with both original and reconstructed old west buildings including the Nuttal & Mann’s saloon where old Wild Bill was shot whilst enjoying a glass of whiskey and a game of poker on August 2^nd 1876.  Legend has it that Hickok could not find his favourite empty seat in the corner, where he always sat in order to protect himself against sneak attacks from behind, and instead sat with his back to one door and facing another.  This was unlucky for him because this night  he was shot in the back of the head by one Jack McCall.  When he was shot he was holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights and ‘aces and eights’ has been known ever since as a dead mans hand!

Gambling lives on in Deadwood and in the middle of the town we visited the Midnight Star Casino which was a upmarket sort of place that is owned by Kevin Costner who bought it while he was making the film ‘Dances with Wolves’ which was filmed in the Badlands National Park.

After we were through in Deadwood we continued our drive west and soon passed the state line into Wyoming and after about fifty kilometres we passed the town of Sundance which is famous for the fact that in 1887 a man called Harry Longabaugh was convicted of horse theft in the town and was sentenced to eighteen months in the Sundance prison.  Because of this time in jail Harry became known thereafter as the Sundance Kid and later Robert Redford.

There was a lot of snow now and after another two hundred kilometres we passed the town of Buffalo where close by is the famous Hole-in-the-Wall which is a remote hideout located in the Big Horn Mountains.  The site was used in the late 1800s by the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang, a group of cattle rustlers and other outlaws which included among its members Kid Curry, Black Jack Ketchum and Butch Cassidy.  The area was ideal for outlaws as it was remote and secluded, easily defended because of its narrow passes and impossible for lawmen to approach without the outlaws being alerted.  From the late 1860s and for about fifty years the pass was used frequently by numerous outlaw gangs and at its height it featured several cabins that gangs used to lay up during the harsh Wyoming winters, and it had a livery stable, a corral, livestock and ample supplies.

We passed teasingly close to the site of the battle of the Little Big Horn but like Sundance and Hole-in-the Wall we didn’t stop off and the coach kept relentlessly going west and it was about now that I thought it would be nice to be driving myself so I could stop off now and again whenever I choose to and not only when the schedule said so.