RonnieAdventure #0229 - South Dakota, 2016 Part III

We made it to the Black Hills at about the same time everyone started arriving at the K-Bar-S Lodge for Linda's 50-year Nursing Class Reunion. Everyone had a great time during the reunion visiting with old classmates and Gary entertained us every night with his guitar while we sat around the fireplace. We had a profile view of Mount Rushmore from our room and the deer and turkey that roamed the property were almost tame!

We did not realize it while were staying at the lodge, but as we were leaving we discovered that Linda's cousin is a part-owner in the property. 

Profile View of Washington

Since the nurses had worked at the Ellsworth Air Force Base hospital as part of their nurse's training, we arranged for a tour of the Base and their museum. Unfortunately, the tour did not include the Base Hospital, but the driver came close enough to the hospital so that I could take a picture of the building.

Base Hospital

The Base tour also included a stop at a Minuteman Missile silo, and we did not have to climb down the hatch! (No elevator, but they did have stairs to safely move visitors in-and-out of the silo.)

Photographer Unknown

We also had dinner aboard the 1880 Train while it traveled from Hill City to Keystone. There were a lot of deer feeding close to the railroad track and also some wild turkeys crossed the road just in front of the train.

Oglala Lakota County (previously known as Shannan County) is entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and is the Poorest County in South Dakota. It is also the only "dry" county in South Dakota.

On December 28, 1890, Chief Big Foot and over 350 Indians were encamped along Deep Creek near the south fork of the Cheyenne River when Big Foot surrendered to the U.S. 7th Cavalry. The band of Indians were then moved about five miles south to the Wounded Knee Creek Valley, where they were surrounded by about 470 soldiers. For extra protection, the Cavalry brought in a battery of four Hotchkiss guns.

The soldiers were worried that some of the warriors who had been "Ghost Dancing" might cause trouble because the warriors had been told by Yellow Bird, a medicine-man, that if they wore "Ghost Shirts" when they did the "Ghost Dance" they would become immune to the whiteman's bullets and could openly defy the soldiers.

On December 29, about 9:00 AM, the soldiers started searching the Indian tepees for hidden weapons and about the same time Yellow Bird "walked among the braves, blowing on an eagle-bone whistle, inciting the warriors to action, declaring that the 'Ghost Shirts' would protect them."

Someone fired the first shot, then mass confusion erupted. The soldiers surrounding the Indians started firing into the crowd using rifles and their Hotchkiss guns, killing warriors, women, children, and their own troops that were searching the tepees for weapons.

After about one hour of fighting, 146 Indian men, women, and children were killed. An Army detail buried all of the Indians in a mass grave on top of a nearby hill and marked the spot with a monument. The site is now known as the "Wounded Knee Massacre" Site. A church was later built near the mass grave. 

The Wounded Knee battlefield is the site of the last armed conflict between the Sioux Indians and the United States Army.

Chief Crazy Horse was also from this area and after he was killed at Fort Robinson it is unclear where he was buried. There is no specific spot at the Fort Robinson cemetery that is marked as his grave site but historians believe that he is buried "somewhere in the vicinity of Camp Robinson."  However, the Sioux Indians believe that he was buried along Wounded Knee Creek by his family members. There are no grave markers along Wounded Knee Creek to support this claim, so his final resting place remains unknown.  

Porcupine, located a short distance up the road, is the unofficial capital of the Republic of Lakotah and alleged birth place of Russell Means. 

When I was in the Air Force, part of the area between Porcupine and Scenic was closed to the public because it was located in a designated military bomb range.

During WW II, the area was used for aerial target practice and flight crews were sent out to practice shooting targets on the ground. However, I was told that the flight crews did not like shooting the aircraft guns because the guns were noisy and caused a lot of vibration; so the flight crews just opened the plane's bomb doors and dumped all of the live ammunition out of the plane. The crew then flew around for awhile and after a sufficient time they flew back to the base.

After laying out in the Bad Lands for a number of years, the military realized that all of the live ammunition poised a potential problem for future land uses, so it was decided to gather up all of the live ammunition and properly dispose of it.

Since the Air Force couldn't find a lot of people that wanted to go camp out in the Bad Lands and pick up live ammunition, I broke one of the military's cardinal rules - "don't ever volunteer for anything." They could not believe that someone actually volunteered for the assignment. (When I think back about it, I probably did it for the money because we were able to draw TDY pay in addition to our salary.)

As it turned out, we actually had a good time! To break the boredom, once or twice a week in the evening we could go to the Longhorn Saloon in Scenic and get something to eat. The Longhorn also had a pool table that we could use for free. Of course, the table top was warped and all of the balls would roll to the center of the table, so it made the game more interesting.

Scenic is now considered to be a ghost town and was purchased in 2011 by a church in the Philippines for about $800,000. A number of the buildings are still standing and the old church building is now used as a trading post.

Longhorn Saloon

Outdoor Jail

Old Church Building - now a trading post

Town Sculpture

State Route 44 from Scenic to Rapid City is now a nice paved highway, but up until the 1960s it was an uneven, washboard gravel road that was treacherous to travel. So, while I was a college student, I worked for the South Dakota Highway Department on a survey crew to "blue top" the road in preparation for paving. 

As we drove down the road on this trip, I distinctly remember pounding stakes around several of the compound curves because we had to redo them multiple times! (Back in that day all of the survey equipment was manually controlled and subject to human error, which we had a lot of!) Anyway, a trip through Badlands National Park is always a great experience!

RonnieAdventure #0228 - South Dakota, 2016 Part II

The World's Largest Petrified Wood Park was constructed in the 1930s by Ole Quammen and the town's people of Lemmon, South Dakota. A sign at the site states that "Thirty to forty otherwise unemployed men received sustenance during this period"

Constructed on the site is a castle, wishing well, waterfall, hundreds of petrified wood sculptures, and a museum building. We were not able to tour the museum building because it is only open during the summer months.

There are reported to be over 100 conical sculptures in the park, several reaching as high as 20 feet. Some of the cones were made using petrified wood and others were made using spherical "cannonballs"  from the Cannonball River in North Dakota. The Castle was constructed using a combination of petrified wood, dinosaur and mammoth bones.

After Ole died, his heirs donated the property to the City of Lemmon in 1954. Over the years the property fell into disrepair, so in 2002 the City completed extensive repairs and renovations to the Park to restore it to its original condition.

Lemmon not only has the World's Largest Petrified Wood Park, but they also have an artist that makes scrap-iron sculptures!

About 12 miles south of Lemmon (on State Route 73) is another "real airplane on a stick" that is being used as a wind vane. As I watched the plane move with the wind direction, I also noted that the airplane's propellers actually turn with the wind speed.

Just south of Shadehill is a gravel road turnoff to the west that goes about three miles to the Hugh Glass Monument that is located on top of a hill overlooking the confluence of  Grand and South Grand Rivers.

Although The Revenant (2015 movie staring Leonardo DiCaprio) was based on an actual incident that happened to Hugh Glass, the movie was so Hollywoodized that it is almost unrecognizable as the same story.

According to a plaque at the monument, in August 1823 Hugh Glass was horribly mauled by a grizzly bear near the confluence of Grand Forks rivers while traveling with the Ashley Fur Party. The Fur Party assumed that Glass had a very short time to live, so they paid John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger to stay behind and bury him after he died. Believing that Glass was dead, Fitzgerald and Bridger took Glass's gun and accoutrements and left him for dead. However, Glass "was not dead and...sustained himself on seasonal fruit and meat obtained when he drove off some gorged wolves from a buffalo calf they had downed." He then dragged himself about 190 miles (as the crow flies) from the fork of the Grand Rivers to Fort Kiowa.  About 10 years later Glass was killed by Aricara Indians "on the ice of the Yellowstone River near the mouth of the Big Horn."

The Hugh Glass bear attack and grave site that was prepared, but not used, is now under water from the Shadehill Reservoir; so the monument is located on top of a nearby hill.

It is easy to know when you are in Bison because there is an iron buffalo silhouette mounted on a pedestal in front of the grain elevator. Bison also contains a Hugh Glass monument in front of the High School parking lot, Earl's Bison Museum (closed when we were there), a nice veteran's memorial park, and large fields of sunflowers located just outside of town.

After Custer's defeat at the battle of Little Big Horn in June of 1876, General Crook led one of the most grueling military expeditions in U.S. History to track down the Indian tribes that had scattered across the plains and into Canada. On September 7, an Indian village was discovered on the east slope of Slim Buttes, so at dawn on September 8 General Crook led a cavalry charge against the village. It was raining, so most of the Indians were in their tepees that were tightly fastened up to keep the rain out. During the six-hour battle Chief American Horse was fatally wounded, so the Indians surrendered. A monument now marks the battle site.

Centennial Park in Buffalo contains a number of beautiful sculptures and many interesting historical markers about Harding County.

Of particular interest are the "two most famous characters" of Harding County - a horse named Tipperary that could not be ridden and a killer wolf named Old Three Toes that played havoc with the ranchers.

Tipperary is one of the greatest bucking horses of all times. The horse has been inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame and memorialized at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

Three Toes was a large gray wolf that received his name because one of his toes was cut off in a trap when he was young. Three Toes then went on to kill over $50,000 (1925 prices) worth of livestock between 1909 and 1925. He was eventually captured alive and while being transported back to Buffalo the wolf laid his head on the lap of a passenger in the car and "died of a broken heart."

Crow Buttes is the location of an 1822 battle between the Crow and Sioux Indian Tribes.

According to a site marker, the Sioux Warriors raided a Crow Village and chased the Crow Warriors to the top of the buttes. The Crow Warriors had no food or water, so the Sioux surrounded the buttes and waited until the Crow Warriors died from thirst. After several days the Sioux Warriors then went up to look for Crow survivors and contacted "a fever" from the dead bodies. Then, almost all of the Sioux Warriors died in a nearby canyon, so there were no winners in this battle.

At the base of the buttes there is a small store and lots of antelope on the nearby grassland plains.

The Full Throttle Saloon (located on 30 acres of land outside of Sturgis) was the World's Largest Biker Bar and would average 20,000 patrons each night during the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. In addition to the large indoor/outdoor bar, there were "several large stages, a burn-out pit, a tattoo parlor, zip lines, a wrestling ring, restaurants, dozens of stores, hundreds of cabins for rent, and parking for thousands of motorcycles." Unfortunately, on September 8, 2015, a massive fire destroyed the Full Throttle Saloon.

The owners are rebuilding the facilities and hope to be open for the 2017 Sturgis Rally.

The Full Throttle Saloon site is located along the historic Bismarck-Deadwood Trail, and just down the road from the Saloon there is a State Historic Marker. The marker indicates that on this site the Wagnus family was ambushed and killed by Indians July 17, 1877, while waiting to catch the next outgoing wagon train. The family was homesick and disappointed in the "land of Gold" and were on their way back East.

Bear Butte is a 4,422 foot high "volcanic bubble" that rises about 1,200 feet above the surrounding plains and was used as a landmark guide by the Plains Indians and early explorers. The mountain was considered to be sacred to the Indians and this is the place where Sweet Medicine, the Cheyenne spiritual leader, received the Four Sacred Cheyenne Arrows and the Cheyenne Code of Ethics (religious, political, social, and economic customs).

Bear Butte is now a South Dakota State Park.