Travelers cruise into Badlands National Park hungry for something new, shaking off miles of corn, wheat, soybean and ennui. For too long, the undistinguished Midwestern landscape had murmured to the overheated cars and their exquisitely bored passengers, “You aren’t there yet.”
Kids in the back seat had endured hours of tedious license-plate games: Enough, already. At least two states ago, they understood that the westbound lanes teem with cars and sport-utility vehicles and camper vans from Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, Pennsylvania and New York-a convoy of strangers sharing a common desire for scenery and good times.
They hunger for the West, the Wild West, the mountains and boundless grassy plains where buffalo roam and summer vacations officially begin.
The only other diversion–besides counting license plates–came from those celebrated billboards advertising Wall Drug. At frequent intervals, the signs promised free ice water and 5(cents) coffee, buffalo burgers, souvenirs, a cowboy orchestra, doughnuts, a 6-foot rabbit and an 80-foot dinosaur. The Wall Drug signs build anticipation, stimulate the lust for new experiences and tend to lower one’s standards of taste as the highway slowly unravels.
When I told an acquaintance who lives in this state that I would be passing through, she said, “You’ll be coming in on Interstate 90?”
A fair assumption, because almost everyone arrives in western South Dakota that way, but I chose to fly into Rapid City (via Denver), rent a car and drive to a point where I could watch families, honeymooners and retirees arrive Somewhere Else after days spent escaping their easterly, apple-pie homes.
In the Badlands, the prairie suddenly caves in, revealing an ancient sea bed that wind and water have eroded over a period of 64 million years. Volcanoes powdered the rock formations with white ash, floods gouged the walls, and we are left with an amazing landscape of twisted spires, stark canyons, grotesque dry valleys and rugged buttes.
We are told that the area looked very much like this when, beginning about 12,000 years ago, Native American hunters drifted in from the north and east, looking for mammoth at first and, much later, harvesting herds of shaggy bison, running the animals over the edges of buttes to their doom.
White explorers and settlers eventually began pushing the natives out of their home. Among the first invaders were French trappers, who characterized the terrain as “les mauvaises terres a traverser,”meaning bad lands to travel across. To them it was not a scenic wonder, but a vast pothole obstructing their commerce in pelts. Soldiers established forts, prospectors searched for gold, cattle grazed in competition with the dwindling bison population and homesteaders attempted to eke out a living on the hostile ground.
Now the vacationers come to Cedar Pass. They pay a $5 entrance fee per car and stop at the Lakota-run gift shop and restaurant here. At last they unstrap themselves from the fast lane and take a scenic route: State Highway 240, the Badlands Loop, runs a wrinkled, 19-mile, northwesterly course through a tiny fraction of the park’s 243,500 acres.
Perhaps without realizing it, visitors encounter a spectacle crafted by time and social interaction: a cross section of America (as well as most other parts of the world) peers into and climbs upon a cross section of western geography and natural selection. Layers of hard black shale and compliant sediment have been formed by the elements into a wonderland of rock and soil where the prairie abruptly ends. Fossils dating as far back as the Eocene epoch, 58 million years ago, serve as a memorial to the mammals that swarmed through the territory.
Some of the travelers stay for a few days, camping in the tree-less wilderness, hiking on trails where serenity awaits them. A very few even make the 134-mile roundtrip south to Wounded Knee, through the Pine Ridge Reservation, where a simple monument marks the site of America’s last massacre of Native Americans, only 105 years ago.
For most, the Badlands simply represent the first major roadside attraction–rugged beauty at last! And then after a few hours of looking at the wonders along Highway 240, they drive into the town of Wall and the overgrown drugstore that has elbowed its way into the pantheon of Western legend.
By putting up signs and offering free ice water to thirsty sojourners, Dorothy and Ted Hustead turned their strugging Depression-era pharmacy into a gold mine. Now under the direction of son Bill, Wall Drug provides its 20,000 daily summer visitors with a preview of all the kitsch and culture that the road West will likely offer.
Dazed customers wander through a jumble of rooms, some beautifully adorned with fine western art, others bursting with corny gimcracks. Children pump quarters into a video game that lets them shoot it out with gunslingers, while parents browse through stacks of cowboy boots, jewelry, clothing, postcards and pottery. A drug counter still can be found in there, too, somewhere between the camera department and the ice-water stand.
One afternoon, a tightly coiffed woman tugged at her husband’s arm as he admired a case of bowie knives. “I know you,” she hissed. “You could be here the rest of your life.”
Whimsical stuffed animals and that promised a 6-foot rabbit clutter up the courtyard out back, and the 80-foot, bright-green concrete dinosaur stands guard over Wall Auto Livery two blocks away. It peers across I-90 at the cars leaving the Badlands for more adventure.
Some 50 miles farther on, the vehicles reach Rapid City, a municipality of about 50,000 that barely clings to vestiges of its Old West atmosphere. It’s a good place to bunk down, study the maps, refill the coolers and wander around.
Rapid City also helps visitors regain perspective. I spent part of one morning at the Museum of Geology on the campus of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. A parking lot devoid of recreational vehicles hinted that most tourists had skirted it, but about two dozen visitors obviously found the museum fascinating. Enormous skeletons filled the main room, the remains of creatures who stalked the Badlands and swam the inland sea as long as 365 million years ago, their bones undiscovered until nicked by the plows of modern farmers.
Near downtown, the Sioux Indian Museum, housed in a log building, reminds us of the people who were here first. Handsome full-scale dioramas depict costumes and lifestyles. Collections of tools, utensils, artwork and photographs bring an often-painful history to life.
Again, I found myself nearly alone. Serious museums obviously are well off the Tourist Trail. To get back on it, I followed the Route of the Winnebago and the traffic on southbound U.S. 16–Mt. Rushmore Road.
The beautiful, pine-covered Black Hills quickly become evident in the Rapid City outskirts, but initially they serve only as a muted backdrop to the lures of roadside zoos, private caves, dolphin shows, snake farms and shops selling trinkets made from Black Hills gold.
After 25 miles of all that, the highway blunders into Keystone, where the commercialism intensifies to a point bordering on the ludicrous. Images of Mt. Rushmore cover every conceivable product, from key chains to Christmas tree ornaments.
I never had actually seen Mt. Rushmore, and I was eager to get that accomplished. But I put it off for awhile and followed the crowds into a museum called the Rushmore Borglum Story.
Gutzon Borglum, of course, was the sculptor who carved the Mt. Rushmore Memorial, starting at the age of 60 in 1927 and continuing until his death in March 1941. His son Lincoln finished the task in October of that year. Both Borglums used crews of unemployed miners to chisel and jackhammer the presidential features on the granite of a mountain named for an obscure real estate developer.
The Rushmore Borglum Story ushers visitors through a series of rooms, with artworks, photographs and family possessions illustrating the sculptor’s life story. The tour ends at a full-size reproduction of one of President Lincoln’s Mt. Rushmore eyes, fully six feet across. That boggles the mind, and so does a huge wall poster depicting a Mt. Rushmore constructed entirely from Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln postage stamps.
At last, I had to see the stone faces themselves, and so did hundreds of others, judging by the thick traffic on Highway 16 A. We could glimpse the presidents now and then through the trees, and we had seen photos of the memorial thousands of times, but no one can resist the urge to climb the steps, file through the construction site and finally stand near the base.
“Is this the closest you can get to it?” one little boy whined repeatedly as his mother led him to the retaining wall next to the Mt. Rushmore restaurant/gift shop.
It was close enough for most people. The faces are 60 feet tall, so no one has to squint in order to make out this unique feat of artistry and engineering. There is not much else to do but stare–and question whether we really need to adorn nature this way.
In the gift shop, a Lincoln impersonator roamed among the teddy bears and coffee mugs, stopping to pose for snapshots and to tell the kids, over and over again, “I came down off the mountain just to see you!”
Some of the Mt. Rushmore visitors absorbed themselves in the construction details, informatively laid out in exhibits at Borglum’s studio on the site and told and retold by National Park Service guides.
One of them, Kevin Poe, drew a crowd outside the studio when he invited some children to heft one of the small jackhammers workers used to carve out the granite. “How did it affect their hearing?” a man asked. “Did they wear earplugs?”
“You know,” Poe said, “there are about a dozen of those guys still around, and they live to hear that question, so they can say, `WHAAAT?”‘
Poe disclosed that some of the crusty old miners wore earplugs and some didn’t. Some wore masks to protect themselves from silica dust. Others refused. “The ones who didn’t wear masks aren’t with us any longer, of course.”
Another employee said that only about 20 percent of the people who visit Mt. Rushmore venture as far as the Borglum studio. The majority of them impatiently check the memorial off their list of sights-seen and move on.
The Latimores of Minneapolis, a large brood stoking up on ice cream cones, told me they thought Mt. Rushmore ranked just below the Badlands as the best attractions so far.
“We’re on our way to California,” mother Lessie Latimore said. “We’re going to be in Yellowstone by this afternoon.”
That meant driving well over 300 miles and missing the other riches of southwestern South Dakota. While the Latimores trekked through Wyoming, a lot of the other tourists would travel south and west for 17 more miles to the Crazy Horse Memorial, a mountain sculpture in progress.
About six years after the completion of Mt. Rushmore, Boston sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski accepted the invitation of Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear to carve another giant monument, this time honoring the martyred Native American leader Crazy Horse.
“My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes too,” Chief Standing Bear wrote. Ziolkowski embarked on a project of heroic proportions. When finished, sometime in the next century, Crazy Horse will be the largest statue in the world, 531 feet high and 641 feet long. Most of the face has been completed, a startling sight rising from the forest and prairie like a noble apparition, a clearly defined aquiline nose 27 feet long, the shape of a 263-foot arm, the painted white outline of Crazy Horse’s steed, its head alone measuring 219 feet from ears to muzzle.
Ziolkowski died 13 years ago. Work continues under the direction of his wife, Ruth, and other members of the family. Without benefit of government funding and lacking swarms of workers, the project has gone slowly. But with the face nearly done (completion projected for 1998) and dynamite blasting out more details, Crazy Horse promises to present an indelible memory for the ages.
Most other Black Hills landscapes remain relatively unembellished but equally startling. On the 19-mile Needles Highway (State Route 87), a portion of sprawling Custer State Park, passengers frequently scramble out of their cars to photograph the improbable granite obelisks that loom at every turn. Off in the distance, Harney Peak rises impressively, the highest point in the Black Hills at 7,242 feet. It may be a midget when compared with the loftier elevations of the great mountain ranges, but South Dakotans are quick to mention that Harney Peak is the highest point between the Rockies and the French Alps.
Farther south, a park wildlife loop breaks off from 87 and describes a wide circle around prairie grass and the gray stumps of trees destroyed by a 1988 forest fire. Wildlife sightings are not guaranteed; sometimes the bison, elk and pronghorn sheep coyly hide in the hills. Almost certainly, though, travelers will encounter Custer Park’s notorious “begging burros,” little donkey street gangs that poke their heads into open car windows looking for handouts and slobber on the glass when the windows are closed. They proceed from cute to tiresome within minutes.
Those who stay on southbound 87 for 17 more miles enter Wind Cave National Park, 28,292 acres of rolling country where the bison do often congregate within sight, prairie dogs carry out their convivial social life in “towns” near the road and visitors get a sense of what a mixed-grass prairie looked like when it stretched beyond sight to every horizon.
Below all that territory, rangers lead expeditions into the caves themselves, and point out the unusual crystal formations where calcium carbonate deposits percolate through cracks in the limestone. The caves wind on for miles, 73 miles charted, some of them well lit and furnished with stairways, 95 percent still awaiting discovery. The caves revealed themselves to white settlers when two brothers stumbled upon a small hole in the ground in 1881. Wind whistled out of it and still does, exhaling or inhaling depending on atmospheric pressure and ventilating the labyrinth of caverns below.
Thirteen miles south, the centuries again peel back at Hot Springs, where 10-ton Columbian mammoths took the soothing waters of what were then jungle pools. A big sinkhole fatally trapped hundreds of them, and their long tusks and massive skulls remain as evidence today. A backhoe operator discovered the bones in 1974, during excavation for a housing development. Now the site of an ambitious paleontological dig, the sinkhole has been covered with a modern building, where visitors can look down at this remarkable collection of prehistoric remains.
A few tourists and a lot more truck drivers paused for lunch at the nearby Dakota Rose Inn, themed for a more recent era. As in most establishments statewide, a sign over the entrance warned, “It is unlawful to enter this establishment with any firearm, knife or other weapon.” Another sign, over a rack of wooden pegs, invited, “Hang your guns here.” But no one did.
A salad bar covered the bed of a chuckwagon, and an obese stuffed bison wearing a western saddle stood in the corner. A radio played Paul Harvey, whose voice seems to take on a commanding trail-boss timbre.
The day’s special, meatloaf, stuck to the ribs; my compliments to the cook. And the cowboy motif reminded me that vacationing kids might be clamoring about now for a look at the West of outlaws and tin-badge sheriffs. Well … maybe not the kids so much, but the European tourists are suckers for that sort of thing.
So I made my way to Deadwood, 89 miles north on U.S. Highway 385, and pulled into Mt. Moriah Cemetery, or “Boot Hill,” just before dark.
The graves hearken back to Deadwood’s gold-mining and card-hustling days, when it served as a wide-open haven for fugitives and fortune seekers. The tombstone for James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok looked appropriately theatrical, its inscription vividly clear, considering Wild Bill was murdered way back in 1876 by that varmint Jack McCall. A few feet away, Martha “Calamity Jane” Cannary Burke rests, her guns and ribald vocabulary silenced forever.
Down below, Deadwood bustled again after decades of stagnation. Not many years ago, the town appeared doomed. Its wild reputation had faded; its fancy storefronts peeled and nearly abandoned. Then, in 1989, the state permitted gambling in Deadwood with few restrictions, letting casinos operate much as they do in Las Vegas, Reno or Atlantic City. Renovators poured $80 million into restoring the old buildings and the town regained its former Wild West look.
Unfortunately, most of the enterprises behind the facades have become casinos–80 in all. The whir of slot machines has replaced the clinking of spurs, and only the blackjack players sit tall in the saddle.
Even so, a Deadwood dominated by gaming probably is better than no Deadwood at all, and for those who can’t stand it, the Interstate 90 entrance ramps can be found just eight miles away.
In one direction, I-90 offers the rest of the West. In the other, a way home. Most of the vacationers pressed westward. I went home, figuring that southwestern South Dakota is destination enough.
DETAILS ON SOUTH DAKOTA ATTRACTIONS
The two most popular attractions in southwest South Dakota, Mt. Rushmore Memorial and Badlands National Park, are operated by the National Park Service. Admission to Mt. Rushmore is free. The daily fee at the Badlands is $5 per car. A $25 Golden Eagle Passport is valid for admission to all National Parks for one year from the date of purchase. Cave tours at Wind Cave National Park range from $3 to $15, depending on the length and complexity of the tour; half price for those 62 years of age or older holding the $10 annual Golden Age Passport.
Custer State Park charges $3 per person or $8 per vehicle for a 7-day temporary entrance license or $15 per vehicle annually.
The nonprofit but privately run Crazy Horse Memorial costs $6 per person or $15 per carload; children age 6 and under free.
———-
For more information on sights, lodging, food and transportation in southwest South Dakota, contact the South Dakota Department of Tourism, 711 E. Wells Ave., Pierre, S.D. 57501-3369. Phone 605-773-3301. Fax 605-773-3256. Most facilities in the Badlands and Black Hills offer at least partial wheelchair accessibility.
