From base camp in Black Hawk, a circle from Rapid City to Keystone to Custer and back to Rapid City (I-90 to Rapid City, Hwy 16 to Keystone, Hwy 244 to Hwy 385, Hwy 385 to Custer, Hwy 16A to Hwy 79, Hwy 79 back to Rapid City, I-90 to Black Hawk)
Rapid City was founded at the northeast base of the Black Hills in 1876 by disappointed miners whose luck did not pan out on the gold fields and served as the major stepping off point for miners heading into the Black Hills. Its’ location as the gateway to the Black Hills continued to be the focus for the town’s development until World War II, when Elmendorf Air Force Base was established nearby. The twin engines of tourism and the military continue to be the foundation of the local economy. Rapid City is a tidy little place, founded along Rapid Creek and essentially split in two parts by a low range of hills. The downtown area is compact and clearly reliant upon tourists. The Hotel Alex Johnson provides an anchor for the downtown area.
The fact that Mt. Rushmore is only 25 miles to the southwest leads to a lot of “presidential” stuff around town. One of the more tasteful manifestations is the presence of statues of every president on street corners in the downtown area around Main Street Square, a plaza that is central to festivals, etc. Here are three of the statues: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and William Jefferson Clinton.
Rapid City is actually an attractive town, but that’s all you get to see because the battery went dead on my camera! Obviously, there’s still room for improvement in my journalism skills!
After charging my camera battery, I head south out of Rapid City and the road climbs quickly into the heart of the Black Hills. This is tourist country with all kinds of tacky opportunities to spend your money on family entertainment!
The highway winds through a forested canyon, which gets narrower and narrower as we head south. Then it drops sharply to Keystone, an old mining town that has pretty much lost all vestige of its’ mining heritage and has been totally taken over by the tourist trade. Even though it is only three miles from Mt. Rushmore, the canyon is so narrow that you still cannot see the monument. In fact, the canyon is so narrow that the buildings on the east side of the highway are actually built over the creek.
An incredible variety of options are beckoning but I hold firm and head out of Keystone on my quest to visit Mt. Rushmore.
Mt. Rushmore
There are rare occasions when I visit something that has an emotional impact, and Mt. Rushmore is one of those sites. The eastern side of the Black Hills is dryer, more sparsely forested and has many granite knobs jutting above the forests. Between 1927and 1941 sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved the faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. I am not going to go into the history of the process, Google it for lots more detail. Instead I want to focus on the majesty of the experience. As you enter the complex there are two multi-level parking garages set relatively unobtrusively into the mountain side below the monument. If you turn away from the monument you can see for miles and miles east out onto the Great Plains.
You climb a series of stairs to approach the entry court, pass through the Avenue of the Flags, and then emerge onto the Grand View Terrace for an unobstructed view of the monument. Walk with me.
After departing the monument grounds, the highway twists around the granite monoliths, allowing for a last glimpse of George Washington’s profile.
The brief journey west to Hwy 385 then turns south, skirting the western edge of the area of the granite “knobs” as we approach the second monument, Crazy Horse.
Crazy Horse
As the creation of Mt. Rushmore was approaching its’ end in the late 1940’s, Lakota Sioux Chief invited sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to come to the Black Hills to carve a mountain in honor of American Indians. Ziolkowski began work in 1948 and devoted the remainder of his life to the project. He died in 1982 but his wife Ruth and many of his 10 children continue the work. The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation was created to collect private donations to support the work towards three goals: creation of the monument, establishment of an Indian Museum of America, and the establishment of the Indian University of America. No federal or state funds have ever supported the work, only donations and admission fees. The monument is a carving of Crazy Horse pointing out onto the Great Plains in remembrance of a legendary exchange he had with a white man. The white man allegedly asked Crazy Horse ‘Where are your lands now?” and Crazy Horse responded by pointing and saying “My lands are where my dead are buried.” When finished, the monument will look like this, just 34 times larger and carved out of a mountain.
The monument, as it looks today, with the face of Crazy Horse completed and nearly half of the mountain carved away.
A closer shot of the work in progress shows the outline of the horse which is currently being carved out of the granite.
A large museum sits a considerable distance from the monument. Only a substantial donation to the foundation gets an individual “up close and personal” with the actual monument.
The Indian University of America opened in 2010 with 130 students from “25 different tribes completing a summer program over the last five years.
I chose “Pride and Prejudice” as the title for this chapter in recognition of the great pride inspired by visiting Mt. Rushmore as well as recognition of the on-going prejudice revolving around the historic treatment of Native Americans. At the very least, the juxtaposition of the two monuments is thought provoking… Leaving Crazy Horse behind, the highway descends to the small town of Custer and the next destination, Custer State Park.
Custer
The infamous George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry first came to the Black Hills in 1874 with the intent of confirming the discovery of gold and exploring the Black Hills. The southern part of the Black Hills did not prove to have the mineral wealth associated with the north. Miners in the area established a small town called Stonewall (after confederate general Stonewall Jackson) in 1875 but after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 the town was re-named Custer. Now a small town primarily dependent on the tourist trade, Custer serves as a stop before either heading north to the monuments and gold towns or east to the wildlife sanctuary that is Custer State Park.
Just east of town is Custer State Park, a large area of over 71,000 acres and home to a lot of wildlife, including a herd of buffalo that numbers around 1,500. Much of the infrastructure of the park (buildings and roads) were constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930’s. There are some spectacular drives, most notably the “Needles Highway”, but the Lunch Box is too large to traverse them, both due to being the road being too narrow and, more significantly, to the small size of some of the tunnels on the highway. So, instead we take the Wildlife Loop around the southern and eastern portions of the park. It was a warm day and the drive took place in the afternoon so I didn’t expect to see many animals (they are most active in the morning and evening). I was right, though there were three very photogenic buffalo out making sure that the tourists got their money’s worth!
Most of the buffalo were in a series of corrals as this was the end of the fall round-up. The size of the herd is managed intensely by the state to avoid problems with over-grazing and disease so each fall most of the herd is rounded up and culled, with the excess numbers either transferred to other buffalo refuges in the United States or sold.
Other than the buffalo I saw only prairie dogs and “wild” horses. I put “wild” in quotation marks because clearly these horses are not very wild. I could not believe it when I had to stop behind a car where people were feeding the horses out of their hands, and then had to sit for 20 minutes because cars in both directions stopped on a very narrow road. People even let their kids out to pet the horses. It was time for me to move on….
Shortly thereafter the road emerged from the hills and turned back north, crossing the grasslands back to Rapid City. You can clearly see where the hills and forests end to the west and the vast Great Plains stretch to the east.
Next up: Crossing the Prairie
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