July 2005

Day 3 - A cave, a mine, and a train

Yesterday we spent the day at Keystone, a mining town that now serves as the home base for tourists visiting Mount Rushmore. I've rarely visited tourist traps, so it was a fun adventure.

The first half of the day we spent underground. After a delicious breakfast of pumpkin-pecan pancakes at Whitetail Ridge B&B,

we headed out to Beautiful Rushmore Cave. The facilities were pretty dumpy, and the gift shop looked like it was stuck in the 1950s. The shelves, flooring, even the gifts looked like they hadn't changed in all those years. The cave was beautiful, however, and the tour was interesting.

The cave was first discovered when gold miners accidentally came across the entrance in 1876. When the miners abandoned the cave, after realizing it contained no gold, it was left open and teenagers from the area adopted it as a hangout. Over time, they explored more and more of the cave, crawling through narrow tunnels clogged with dirt and clay to discover several new rooms. In one room, they carved their names into the rock walls. After years of visits from local teens, the walls became so cluttered with names that it seemed as if the whole town roster was carved into the walls. Today this room is known as the Post Office. The next room they discovered became a favorite haunt, and the kids, who had nothing to do after they crawled deep into the cave, spent their time finding animals in the rock formations. Our tour guide showed us rock formations that looked like a horse and a rabbit, and one that looked like the alien Alf from a 1980s sitcom.

Today the cave is fully excavated and the tour required only occassional ducking as we walked up and down the 440 stair steps that have been built to make it easier to climb up and down between the maze of rooms. I'm always amazed at how people will crawl around through dark, damp holes in the earth and explore with no lights and no idea what they will find. I'm barely able to go through a tour in a well explored, well lit cave.

After we finished the cave tour, we drove into Keystone and stopped at the Big Thunder Gold Mine and spent more time underground. This mine was started by 2 German men in their thirties. With only one pick, one sledge hammer, and gun powder, these two men spent over half of their lives excavating the mine by the light of a single candle. After 35 years, they had stumbled across the tail ends of 2 different veins of gold, both belonging to other nearby claims and containing very little gold in the area where the 2 men were digging. In the end, they made only about $60 each, for a lifetime of work.

After spending the entire morning inside the earth, we decided to spend the rest of the day outside. We took the 1880s train from Keystone to Hill City. It was a 10 mile one-way trip, and took from 2:30 until 5:00, with a 20 minutes stop over in Hill City. The train has been featured in several TV shows and films, including Gunsmoke and the current Into The West mini series. It was a beautiful ride, through the Black Hills National Forest and past several old mining sites.

By the time the train came back, it was time for dinner and then we went back to the B&B to watch an episode of Into The West, but I fell asleep halfway through the episode.

Day 2 - Custer and Crazy Horse

Today we went to Custer State Park and Crazy Horse Mountain, two sides of the same story.

Custer State Park is beautiful. We drove through on the scenic Needles Highway, stopped at a couple of lodges and gift shops, had dinner at the State Game Lodge. Dom had buffalo filet mignon and I had pheasant stuffed with lobster and spinach, smothered in a delicious coconut sauce

After dinner, went to see Guys and Dolls at the Black Hills Playhouse inside the park. The play was outstanding, with a castof actors from around the United States and Canada. Although they didn't quite live up to their claim to be "Broadway Quality at Blackhill Prices," that was mostly because the theater was not air conditioned and the music was pre-recorded as a digital soundtrack, as there is no room in the small theater for an orchestra.

In the afternoon we took a break and drove out of the park to visit Crazy Horse Mountain.

After Mount Rushmore was built, Lokota Chiefs, including Henry Standing Bear, asked Boston-born Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to create a sculpture of Crazy Horse to show that "the red man has heros, too."

The project was begun in 1947, when Korczak moved to the Black Hills and began working on his own, with no help whatsoever, to work on the sculpture. Over time, he was able to get help from his family and others, but it took until 1998 to finish carving the head of Crazy Horse. Korczak died in 1982, but his family is carrying on the project, funded completely by donations and entrance fees to the park and museum that has been created at the site. When it is finished, the statue will be the largest sculpture in the world. The four presidents of Mount Rushmore will fit inside the head of Crazy Horse.

A graphic from a national Native American newspaper tells at least one part of the story of Custer and Crazy Horse quite clearly.

Native Americans continue to lose their land. When will it stop?

You can learn more about both the United States Army General and the Lakota Sioux Chief from these sources:

• Into the West, a six-part mini-series from Steven Spielberg airing on TNT. This weekend the fifth episode is playing. I hope it repeats, but if not I'm sure it will be available on DVD before too long.

• Exploring with Custer: The 1874 Black Hills Expedition (Dakotas) by Ernest Grafe. I saw this book at a bookshop today. I didn't buy it, but I intend to get it from the library. It includes maps and a detailed reconstruction of Custer's route through the black hills.

• Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz, an excellent book told in the voice of Crazy Horse. Having spent a lot of time with the Lakota when she was a child, Mari Sandoz captures the heart of this people and their great leader beautifully.

Day 2 - Into the West

Here we are in South Dakota, land of the Lakota Sioux. Driving up here, it was easy to see the Lakota people travelling over the land in Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota following herds of buffalo across the prarie. I give partial credit to Steven Spielberg for the excellent depiction of this region's history in his mini-series Into the West for helping me envision what it was like here in the past.

The past is still present here, also. The land hasn't changed much. It is still empty--rolling hills, grass, and blue skies stertching out in every direction as far as the eye can see. Only in the Black Hills themselves is the horizon blocked from view by the terrain. So much land... it makes me wonder why the white felt it was necessary to steal so much from the Lakota people and to kill the "savages" who were standing in the way of " Manifest Destiny" and "progress." In the Black Hills, at least, it was for the gold, which is gone now except for the tourist dollars that flow into this place every summer. I bought a pair of Black Hills Gold earrings. I love them, but at the same time they will always make me a little sad, knowing that the beginning of this industry was so dark.

It makes me sad to think ofhow the people who first lived here were hunted down like animals, starved because the buffalo were wastefully killed off to provide carriage robes to settlers,and how the Native people of this country are still being discriminated againts by our government's policies--and by some individuals.

Discrimination and prejudice bother me more than almost any other injustice. Why? Maybe because I'm 1/2 Jewish and I know my family was just lucky to be in North American and not Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Or perhaps it's because I'm a woman, and even though we have many more rights than our sisters who lived here 100 years ago or than those who live in countries such as Saudi Arabia today, I know there are still those who feel that "wives should submit themselves to their husbands," and would prefer that feminism and "women's lib" never existed.

I never feel things like this in Colorado. I never felt the presence of Native Americans in New York or California, either. Why is that? Their existence is largely ignored, even though the place names are constant reminders of their language and their sense of belonging to the land. Something about South Dakota, like Alaska, makes the presenence of the original Americans more immediate and apparent.

I know it is impossible to restore things, to make things right, to give back all of the land that we (speaking as a white American, even though my relatives were still in Russia and Lithuania at the time this land was taken from the Lakota) stole. But there must be some way to respect the Sovereign Nations and the traditions and ideals of the people who truly first discovered America and make reparations, as inadequate as they would be, and to reverse the trend of disregarding their needs and knowledge.

Day 1 - Mammoth Site in Hot Springs

On the way to the Black Hills, we stopped at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, just a short drive from the Nebraska/South Dakota border. The building has been erected over the the site of an ancient sinkhole that contains the remains of over 50 mammoths and many other large and small animals that died about 26,000 years ago.

Dom standing by a life-size mammoth in the Mammoth Site museum.

Soft Spearfish Shale surrounds the Black Hills of South Dakota with a narrow ring of red dirt. When an underground cave in the soft rock collapsed about 27,000 years ago, a sink hole formed. Because area under the collapse was porous, water from under the ground made its way to the surface, forming a pond. Eventually the pond filled with enough sedement to block the underground spring, and the pond dried up. The new rock inside the sinkhole became harder than the surrounding shale and eventually what was once a hole became a hill.

The sink hole containing the mammoth remains was discovered in 1974 when a construction worker uncovered a tusk on the hill with his bulldozer. The 14-acre area was scheduled to become a housing subdivision, but after Dr. Larry Agenbroad, a professor from Chadron State College in Nebraska, exained the site and found bones from at least four to six mammoths, the construction was put on hold. After a year of excavation, a full mammoth skull was found and local citizens along with the Hot Springs Gem and Mineral Society formed a non-profit corporation to buy the land.

The current building was erected to protect the dig site from the elements with a controlled climate. The basement also houses a lab where bones that are removed from the site can be studied and replicas can be made for display in the museum that was built adjacent to the site and book/gift shop in 2001.

Here are a few highlights from the dig site and museum:

The most complete skeleton in the dig was found near the mouth of the sink hole. Because water was coming into the sink hole at this piont, the bones moved around a lot before they were buried in sedement. Because the bones are in such a disarray, this mammoth has been dubbed "Napoleon Bone-Apart" by the staff.

Napoleon Bone-Apart, the most complete skeleton at the site.

Near Nepoleon, is the complete skull of another mammoth, that clearly shows the shape of the head, including the tusks and eye sockets. A mammoth tusk contained thousands of muscles, but not one single bone, so the tusk is not visible. This mammoth is endearingly called "Beauty".

Beauty, a complete mammoth skull.

Another almost-full skeleton is found at the far end of the sink hole. The animal was near the edge (which can be seen because the dirt inside the sink hole is a hard yellowish tan sedimentary rock, while the surrounding area is soft, red Spearfish Shale. Before realizing that all of the mammoths in the sink hole are males, this one was dubbed "Marie Antoinette" because it's skull is missing. Today he's known simply as "Murray".

Murray was called "Marie Antoinette" before his pelvis bones
were uncovered and it was apparent that he was a male.

Mammoth society is thought to have been similar to the matriarchal society of modern elephants. When males became sexually active and rambunctious, they were kicked out of the herd and wandered alone until they found a new herd. While these males were wandering, they may have found the sink hole an appetizing sight. Because of the warm temperature of the hot springs in the area, fresh grass would have grown around the edges of the sink hole year-round. But the slippery shale at the edges did not provide a good foothold, and any large animal that fell in would have been unable to scale the walls and escape. They would eventually have died of exhaustion or starvation.

It was amazing to see the bones of these huge animals partly exposed in the excavation. I can't comprehend how people like my in-laws and my friend Kris's sister-in-law can deny the reality of geologic time and the existence of these magnificent creatures (and the dinosaurs) in the face of so much evidence. Kris told me that her sister-in-law recently said, "It's against my religion to believe in dinosaurs." Kris didn't know what she meant, but I did because I remembered my in-laws scoffing at a display about the big bang when we visited the Kennedy Space Center together several years ago. According to them, God literally made the universe in six days, only about six-thouhsand years ago. I guess he must have put fossils in the ground and background microwave radiation in the sky as a cruel joke or to test our faith. How can people deny evidence that they can see with their own eyes, yet at the same time believe that an invisible man who lives somewhere in the sky wrote a book that contains all the knowledge we will ever need?

Day 1 - Uh oh, what's that in my mirror?

We started off our vacation by gettng pulled over in the middle of nowhere by a cop. State Highway Patrol in Nebraska. I took this picture while he was sitting in his car writing the ticket. My first ticket in 6 years. Oh well, he said he I was going 76 in a 65. Straight road in the middle of Nebraska with nothing around.

I failed to mention, we were driving our RED V8 Mustang. <grin>

Dom got snagged speeding in the middle of nowhere.

We are Leaving

We will be on our way to South Dakota tomorrow morning. We are leaving around 6am and we should get there about 1pm. We are driving the Mustang convertible. The first long road trip that we are taking it on. We've had it for over 5 years (the Mustang).

On the way up there we will be stopping at the Mammoth fossil dig that they have in Hot springs, South Dakota.

We have a full schedule. Stay tuned.