I had enjoyed my brief time thoroughly in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and in the spirit of seeking out winding roads I had not yet driven, I took a different way out of Deadwood then I came in. Driving west out of the Black Hills into Wyoming was a delight, with few other vehicles present, sweeping corners galore, and oh the lush scenery! It was wonderful to see these sacred lands, and I took pleasure in thinking that it is only about a five hours drive north of my hometown of Fort Collins. One day I’ll be back, maybe for the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Check out more photos of Highway 85 here.
“The thing I don’t like about this town,” stated the lovely 40-something blonde hosting the campground in Deadwood I stayed at, “are all of the casinos.”
Deadwood, in fact, was the third place in the nation to legalize gambling (after Atlantic City and the state of Nevada). The sheer number of casinos is rather alarming. Go into a grocery store and there is bound to be a few slot machines there. Go down Main Street and in every other window you will see slot machines. There were virtually no restaurants on Main Street where when you first enter the door, you see dining tables instead of slot machines crowding the front.
That said, this historic town has a lot of charm. Continue reading »
Despite its grandeur there is first something cynical about the presidential carvings overlooking the Lakota’s sacred Black Hills. After all, imagine that your ancestors had lived in one of the nation’s most beautiful areas, covered with lush grasses and ponderosa pine, and then, say, Mexico invaded the territory and quickly took it over. Then, just a few decades later, sculptors carved giant renderings of Vicente Fox and Ignacio Zaragoza into the mountains above your former house, as if to constantly remind you, “this land is OURS.”
And there you have it: Mt. Rushmore. Only that Mt. Rushmore features our former U.S. presidents, not Mexico’s, and the land taken away was not yours, but the Native Americans’.
Controversy aside, the sculptures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt is remarkable. Continue reading »
“My lands are where my dead lie buried,” proclaimed Crazy Horse sometime during his short 35 years of life.
No wonder, though, the U.S. kept antagonizing the Native Americans here in the late 19th Century. The Black Hills of South Dakota — accurately described as “an island of trees in a sea of grass” — feature the tallest peaks between the Rockies and the European Alps. The Lakotas and other tribes considered them sacred, and after seeing them myself, so do I. Continue reading »
