Printer Friendly Version

DAY 24 – Tuesday, April 6
START: Spearfish, SD
END: Blue Earth, MN
MILEAGE: 608 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Deadwood, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Wall Drug

On every single night of this trip, at every single motel we stopped at, I asked for a room in exactly the same way.  “A room with one bed, please.”  The disinterested desk clerk would ask the scripted question, “How many people?” to which, unblinking, I would answer, “Just me.”  I’d done it so many times by now that I hardly thought about it anymore.  So I’m not sure why I told the desk clerk at the All Star Travelers Inn, “A room for two people, please.”  Maybe after three weeks I was finally starting to get too road weary to keep lying.  Maybe I had one of those rare flashes of E.S.P. you read so much about; you know, the kind of feeling that makes people decide not to board a plane that ends up crashing into the ocean.  I’m not sure what it was, but come eight o’clock this morning, I was very glad to have told the truth the night before.   

After going through our morning routine of showering, dressing and repacking the car, Lauren and I headed over to the motel office where they were serving their free continental breakfast – our bodies were physically rejecting oatmeal by this point.  We walked in and saw a man and woman already sitting there, mid-conversation, eating toast and drinking coffee.  Not ten seconds through the door the woman spoke up and said to us, “So you guys are from Philadelphia, eh?”  Assuming this chick to be just another patron of the motel, we were initially leery.  Even if our license plate didn’t indicate that we in fact hailed from New Jersey, not Pennsylvania, just who was this woman and just how did she know who we were or where we were from?  She quickly clarified her question by informing us that she was the owner of the motel and had merely gleaned the information from our check-in form.  As soon as we were confident this wasn’t the beginning of some freak highway stalker incident that almost always ends with the hapless travelers getting their throats slashed on the side of the road, I took a moment to realize just how glad I was to have kept the ninth commandment last night.  That could have been rather awkward, sitting down for a free breakfast with a lady whom we’d just gypped out of several dollars and trying to come up with a plausible excuse when she cornered us with, “I thought there was only one of you in that room.”

But without that uncomfortable elephant between us, we had a lovely conversation with her and the other man, who was passing through on business from Rapid City.  We told them all about our trip.  The owner told us all about her kids.  The man, for some reason, told us all about his dogs – filling us in on far more details than you’d expect the average stranger to reveal about his pets on a first meeting.  I even found myself confessing to the motel owner how I had nearly lied to her desk clerk the night before, to which she responded, “Oh I charge by the bed anyway.  I’ve always thought it was kind of ridiculous to charge people by the number of guests.”

“It is kind of ridiculous to charge people by the number of guests!” Lauren and I agreed, even more thankful to have let the truth set us free for once on this trip. 

After breakfast we gassed up and headed just a few miles down the road to the awesomely named town of Deadwood.  If you ever wanted to read a history on the quintessential Old West town, Deadwood would be name you’d look up.  There’s a reason why, just a few months after we returned from our trip, HBO chose this place as the titular setting for its hugely popular old west TV series.  Deadwood, like Sacramento before it, got its start because of a gold rush in the nearby Black Hills (You know the phrase, “Thar’s gold in them thar hills”?  That was the Black Hills.), and just like in Sacramento, when the rush failed to deliver on its promises of quick and easy fortune, the destitute and disenfranchised quickly descended into every kind of lawless behavior; gambling, prostitution, and all kinds of senseless violence.  This was truly the kind of place where you made sure not to cross the wrong person lest you find yourself getting shot in the back in broad daylight.  Because of its dangerous reputation, Deadwood became a legend even in its own time, and several of its local personalities were the modern equivalent of movie stars in contemporary newspaper articles and Dime Novels – the pulp fiction of their time.  Most notable among the residents were the infamous Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.  It was this latter gentleman that drew me, and by default my agreeable wife, to Deadwood.

I’ve never been particularly fascinated, or even remotely interested really, in Old West history and legend.  I don’t read about it.  I haven’t seen more than a handful of westerns, and generally find the classics that defined the genre to be fairly boring.  I didn’t know the story behind Deadwood before we came here.  If the town hadn’t been along our route anyway, we probably would have bypassed it.  I didn’t even know much about Wild Bill Hickok beyond his name and the fact that he was shot dead while playing poker and holding a pair of “aces and eights”, a hand that has since become known as “The Deadman’s Hand.”  It was really only this rather morbidly romantic turn of phrase that piqued my interest.  But that was all it took for me to circle the heading in ECCENTRIC AMERICA for the Old Style Saloon #10, the bar where Wild Bill Hickok died holding that famous hand.

There really isn’t much to the town of Deadwood; one main drag with a couple parallel streets is all, and at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning the place pretty much lived up to its name.  But when you looked at the old brick buildings lining the empty street, with their awnings, wood carved signs, palladium windows and generally brown and sand-blown exterior, all against the surprisingly close undeveloped backdrop of tree-covered hills, it was not hard to picture what this place looked like circa 1876, when the street was made of dirt, the law was nothing but a joke, and hookers, horses and desperados walked the streets, just trying to get wherever they were going alive.  This place wasn’t some Hollywood-created heightened reality trying to perpetuate the illusion of an old west town.  Deadwood is the old west town it used to be – at least as far as the layout and architecture goes.  Nothing we saw on that main drag gave us the impression that it had been artificially manufactured just to add to the atmosphere.  It was like the whole town knew it didn’t need to pretend.  It just had to be what it had always been.

That palpable sense of old menace followed us as we walked up to the Old Style Saloon #10.  Even before we entered the place, hanging on the doorway outside were two signs that stated, without any apparent sense of irony that I could detect: “No Motorcycle Colors” and “Wearing apparel which is likely to provoke a disturbance or embroil other groups of the general public in open conflict will not be allowed at any time.”  Now, I’m not sure what exactly “motorcycle colors” consist of, or how certain clothing would be apt to incite a riot, but it was obvious from that very first moment that this place wasn’t, and never has been, your typical tavern. 

There were slot machines in the back (where Lauren promptly lost the four quarters I had in my pocket), a wooden bar at the front, whiskey barrel chairs at heavy stained oak tables, old lantern chandeliers on the ceiling and sawdust on the floor.  There were several poker tables where they hosted Texas Hold’em tournaments every weekend and a stage where live bands performed at night.  Among the bar’s special events are the annual Pimp and Ho party, the Legs and Kegs Charity Fashion Show and the Saint Panties Day party, where patrons are apparently encouraged to arrive in the skimpiest underwear they feel comfortable wearing out in public.  Every day at 3pm the saloon reenacts the fatal shooting that made it famous – on their website, they encourage you to “Bring the kids!” 

This place doesn’t pretend to be sinister.  It doesn’t need to.  It couldn’t help being that way if it tried.  On the way out, I bought the coolest shotglass I’d found all trip.  Made of tin, it had a picture of a gun and, of course, the Dead Man’s Hand that originally drew me here.  

I really wish we’d had more time to spend in Deadwood.  A long weekend at least.  If the Old Style Saloon #10 was anything to go by, this place makes Vegas seem like the family friendly, Disney World striving destination it simultaneously embraces and tries to distance itself from.  Deadwood seemed like it would be a gritty, dirty, throw down drunken good time if we’d come under other life circumstances such as a college Spring Break or something.  I initially got worried when we returned home and saw that HBO would be airing a series about the notorious town that once was.  I thought for sure the popularity of this place would soar to something higher than the town anticipated and the local administration would respond by trying to “clean the place up.”  Fortunately I don’t think anybody who watches the show – which is as well known for its graphic use of F-words and other such profanity as any of its storylines – sees the town and thinks this might be a nice place to take the family for a wholesome vacation.  As far as I know, Deadwood still has yet to sell out to such silly things as “family values” and “kid-friendly amusements.”

Before leaving town, Lauren and I headed into Woody’s Wild West to get an “old time photo” of the two of us.  We wanted to do some kind of shot that would draw notice to Lauren’s pregnant form that didn’t involve a boring neutral background or a belly-concealing blouse, as seemed to be the pattern for all the other pregnancy pictures on display.  After nearly an hour of browsing and consideration, we opted for the very popular “man-in-metal-washtub-with-woman-standing-over-him” theme.  Lauren, ever the proponent of the idea that birth is beautiful and the pregnant form is something worth honoring, didn’t bother with the aforementioned frilly blouse, opting instead for a flowy washer-woman skirt and dainty cloth bikini top – which allowed her immensely pregnant belly to stick way, way, way out.  Most of the men in the pregnancy samples had one of two expressions on their face: overzealous shock or oversappy love and adoration.  (yawn)  When the flashbulb popped I tried to convey sheer boredom sitting in that tub with my old west hat, a book and a jug of moonshine, while Lauren held a water pail in one hand and her huge belly in the other, fixing the camera with a glare that said, “I married this prick?”  I know I’m biased, but I think ours was one of the best, most original tongue-in-cheek photos in the entire place, and I still can’t help but wonder if the owners ever put it on display in the shop.  Today our old time photo hangs prominently on our wall in a faux-antique oval frame with bubble glass, and remains one of my absolute favorite pictures of the two of us. 

After spending much longer in Deadwood than we’d originally anticipated, we finally loaded into the car and headed back to the interstate, passing through the town of Sturgis on the way.  Sturgis is a name that has pretty much become synonymous with the words “Bike Week.”  Every August, the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is hosted here and over five hundred thousand bikers roll into the area.  The scope of such an event is not lost on you as you drive through town, which is tiny by any standard.  How five hundred thousand people could fit into this place period is a feat, but to have them all rattling down those streets on motorcycles…  it must be an absolutely deafening experience.  I’ll probably never know as Lauren refuses to ever let me get a motorcycle… which I realize is probably for the best considering just how lame and phony I would look up on one of those things.

From Sturgis we headed south to see Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial.  In my experience, visitors to the two monuments, located about seventeen miles apart from one another, tend to say the same thing, respectively: “It wasn’t as big as I expected,” and “It’s huge compared to Mount Rushmore.”  I don’t know if was because of these two contrasting appraisals and buildups, but when Lauren and I arrived at each place, we had the exact opposite impressions of everyone else. 

After making our way through Rapid City, the congested and commercial precursor to Mount Rushmore, we drove through empty rural roads until we reached the turnoff for the national memorial.  Up a curving mountain, we came around a bend and there they were; Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln etched in stone and looking back at us.  And I’ve got to say, taking in the scope of the mountain and gauging our distance from it, they looked plenty big and impressive to us.  Of course, not impressive enough to actually pay the entrance fee to the park itself.  We were able to get our pictures just fine from a turnout on the road.  Now we could say we’d been here – another critical landmark checked off the list – without dawdling needlessly and reading information we could have gleaned from any book or website about how the thing was commissioned, carved and dedicated. 

We continued on up the road, nearly running over a mountain goat in the process, on our way now to see Crazy Horse.  Initiated in 1948 as a counterpoint to the Mount Rushmore memorial intended to showcase a Native American hero, the Crazy Horse Memorial still has a long way to go before completion.  When the project is finally finished, it will be the single largest sculpture in the world, turning an entire mountainside into an imposing image of the legendary Lakota chief – who made General George Custer shit his pants one final time at Little Big Horn – riding on horseback.  But it’s going to be a while if the current progress is anything to go by.  In just under sixty years, the sculptors have finally almost finished Crazy Horse’s head.  But to hear former visitors talk about the size of that head, I was expecting something that could have eaten the Rushmore boys for breakfast.   

After seventeen miles of twisting, turning, slow-going roads (through the most sparsely populated or developed land you’ll ever find between two such popular tourist attractions) I’ve got to say, I was disappointed.  Part of the problem, ours not theirs, was that unlike Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse is a good mile or more from the main road.  From that distance, the part of the face that is actually completed looks no bigger than the faces on that other mountain.  According to official stats, the Rushmore heads are sixty feet tall while Crazy Horse’s head is eighty-seven feet tall… or at least it will be, again, when it is finished.  Lauren and I turned down the side road toward the memorial, where we could vaguely see the emerging face that had taken nearly sixty years to complete.  We quickly made up an admittedly lame, and probably overused, excuse when we saw a sign asking a whopping nineteen dollars per carload to enter the memorial: “Uh, sorry, we were just, you know, um, coming down here to uh… turn around?”

I really did feel bad about cheaping out at the last minute – especially when you considered how far off our course we’d driven just to get here.  The Crazy Horse project is funded entirely by private funds (they actually turned down a ten million dollar donation from the United States government) of which these entrance fees make up a large portion.  But I took comfort several months later when I learned that not only doesn’t the entrance fee give you access to a view any more dramatic than what we saw from the main road, but also as much as this appears to be an endeavor intended to benefit the Lakota and other tribes, the sculpture in the mountain is actually considered something of an abomination by the very people it’s meant to commemorate.  The project was initiated, not by the Lakota, but by a man with the last name, Ziolkowski.  And for a people who have always honored and worshiped the ground and landscape they rose from, carving something into that landscape in the name of vanity is the utmost sacrilege.  The memorial remains an ongoing controversy within the Native American community. 

We continued by Crazy Horse without even taking a picture, passing through the town of Custer and circling back toward the interstate through the middle of Custer State Park.  The naming of these two places, or rather the proximity of these two places, struck me as rather strange.  General George Custer, for whom they are named, has kind of become the poster boy of Indian hatred.  To name anything after him in this particular part of the world (besides Crazy Horse, there are several Indian reservations in the area as well) seems to me a bit… in bad taste.  Even worse than that, surrounding the Little Bighorn Monument in Montana there is an entire national forest named after the man!  I don’t know, to me this seems the equivalent of naming a town Mengeleville anywhere near the vicinity of Auschwitz. 

Though perhaps that’s too harsh a comparison.  For all the violence and hatred that seem to have surrounded his final days, Custer really and truly was one of this country’s bona fide heroes.  His unorthodox and often reckless strategies as a military leader helped turn several Civil War battles to the Union’s favor and made Custer something of a celebrity.  Had he not come to an untimely demise at Little Bighorn, it’s quite possible he would have been elected President a few years later.  So it’s actually rather strange that his sins against the Indians haven’t been historically “forgiven” or at least conveniently forgotten in the way that history tends to gloss over things like the fact that Washington and Jefferson, for example, owned slaves.  Custer was, after all, just doing the dirty work of the U.S. government, whose obsessive policy at the time had been to get the Indians right the hell out of their way.  It’s almost a shame when you think about it that history has painted Custer as the arch villain in the whole thing. 

But even still, my god people, if you’re going to name a town, park or forest after him, do it in Virginia or Pennsylvania or near any of his other Civil War victories.  Don’t put it right smack in the middle of a place where he played such a large and historic role of slaughtering the indigenous people!    

But I digress.  I suppose I’ve digressed several times over the course of this narrative when it comes to the American Indians and America’s treatment of them.  Believe me, I’m no bleeding heart when it comes to tragic tales of the conquered and dispossessed.  It doesn’t take a lot of reading to realize that every spot on this earth, at one point or another, belonged to somebody else.  There isn’t a single place you can go in the developed world that wasn’t, at least once, conquered by an invading army.  And no downfall is ever pretty.  The conquest of the Americas wasn’t unique or exceptional in its violence and brutality when taken in context of the history of the world.  Hell, if you read even a history of the Native Americans, you’ll find accounts of warring tribes and the horrible things they did to each other before we even arrived.  The United States government actually justified the usurping of the Black Hills (where Mount Rushmore stands in fact) from the Lakota in 1877 by pointing out that the Lakota had taken the area by force from the Cheyenne in 1776. 

The one main difference between past conquests and that of the American Indians, though, is that most of these insults, lies, double-crosses and outright genocides were sold under the new banner of democracy where all men were supposedly created equal.  So while what we did to the Indians might not seem like such an unusual thing through the long lens of history, through the short lens of the ideals of this place called America, there is no excuse, no justification, no conscionable explanation for the injustices that we wrought upon these people.  And whenever you cross this country by car, you are reminded of those injustices at regular intervals by historical markers indicating the massacres of entire Indian families; government-granted reservations that are so desolate they yield no crop; sacred sites that have since been relocated or bulldozed in order to build a mall or public highway, which they name after the supplanted tribe in a frivolous act of tokenism; impoverished families handcrafting jewelry and other artwork indicative of their people on the side of the road getting undercut by corporate gas stations who mass produces the same stuff in Taiwan; and everywhere you go, signs asking, no, begging the state legislature to allow the local tribe to build a casino so they can provide some possible means of survival for their slowly vanishing people – even if that means embracing all the worst behaviors of the greedy, money-grubbing, land-hoarding people who deposed them in the first place. 

I’m no activist, but all it takes is a drive across America to ignite a white-hot anger for all the horrible things we as Americans have done to the Indians in the name of life, liberty and the pursuit of our own happiness.  It doesn’t matter where you go, everywhere you set foot in this country is covered in the blood of generations upon generations of people we bullied out of the way in order to plant our flags, build our condos and erect our theme parks.  It’s too late to change the past.  Too late to offer insincere apologies.  Obviously too late to give everything back.  All we can do is try like hell not to ignore the reminders scattered across the landscape and do what we can to stop making it worse. 

THERE'S MORE
DAY 24 - CONTINUED