Destination: Billings Montana, via Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Monument, and Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument

Destination: Billings Montana, via Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Monument, and Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument

Travel Day: September 27, 2012

I’m up early, well before 6. By 630 I’m outside a place that serves breakfast, but it’s closed. The sign say it opens at 7, but it’s still not open even then, so I stand around and feel the morning. It’s a bit chilly, but not even close to being cold. A true mountain morning in the early fall. It’s quiet, but no real sound other than a blanketed, muted softness to everything.

Eventually someone comes along and opens up. I order a quick breakfast of eggs and sausage. My server is from the northern Midwest, but he knows of my hometown. He was in town the night of the big hockey riot the year before, but he said that didn’t color his appreciation of how pretty the place is. And he said we have good beer!

I leave Keystone at 8 to head for Mt Rushmore. Keystone is not a place I’ll miss very much.

Mt. Rushmore is an iconic American wonder. The visual presentation of four of the country’s most legendary leaders and thinkers, is respectful and honorable. Though I can’t help but think of the many times I have seen it mocked on TV and in movies, and humorous as it may have seemed at the time I’m not sure I would find it so now. One of the things I had heard most often about the sculpture from people who had seen it was how small it really was. 

After seeing it for myself I thought the same thing until I took a moment. Such inflated expectations really come from within ourselves because we expect something so big in our minds to be just that much bigger. 

In my day to day work I hear that about some of the people I deal with from both politics and show business. When I took another look at the mountain, I found the proportion to be just right in relation to the size of the cliffside palette the artist worked with.

As I sat there for a few minutes I also realized how America’s Natioanl Parks and Monuments are great social equalizers. Everyone has pretty much the same experience, they come to have a similar understanding of the history, and it didn’t matter how if they came in a bus or a Cadillac or a beat up Honda. They all came to see the same thing, and in that they share a common experience.

I leave Mt. Rushmore around 9, and I’m a bit subdued by the experience. I stop on my way out to stare out at the Black Hills in the gathering morning light, and find I'm becoming aware of the land itself. I make a quick stop just around the corner and take a picture of George Washington’s profile at a roadside pullout.

I become more and more aware of something within myself that is being, well talked to is the wrong word for it, but I am aware of a “something”. Whatever music I try to put on is just “wrong” for the nature of what I’m seeing and feeling. So I make do with XMSirius’ Spa Channel, but it’s still not right.

At 0925 I make the turn off the Highway to the Crazy Horse Monument. Crazy Horse Monument is an attempt, on a very large scale, to depict First Nation leader Crazy Horse on his horse, out of the side of a mountain. Where I had expected the sculpture at Mt. Rushmore to be bigger, I wasn’t prepared for just how big Crazy Horse is going to be when it’s finished. Much larger than Mt. Rushmore, by a factor of about ten!

There is a very informative First Nations Museum attached to the Crazy Horse viewing platform, though I wish it had a more tribal context in it’s information cards. In the gift shop I hear some quiet flute music playing, and I buy a CD called “Song Of The Aspen” by Bryan Akipa. I play it over and over throughout the day. I have finally found the music that fits my “mind mood”. There is something profoundly spiritual about this place. These Black Hills are truly a gift, but there is also something magical here, as if this is a place where all hearts and spirits once lived. 

At 1015 I’m back on Hwy 16 heading south to Custer where I’ll turn west and follow Hwy 16 northwest until I intersect with I-90. From there it’s again west to stop at Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument, and then into Billings, Montana for the day.

The two lane road curves and winds its way through quiet and lightly forested mountain valleys, and except for a few other vehicles I have the road to myself. I make a couple of stops to take pictures, and one to read about a major forest fire that swept through a few years back.

I make a stop to take a picture of a sign about a Civilian Conservation Corps camp that was in the area during the Great Depression. I’m impressed, but the cows that are watching me seem entirely bored.

For the third time this trip I leave a place saddened. Not because of the place itself, the sadness is in the leaving. In this case not because of not having seen enough, but because I haven’t “felt enough” of the Black Hills.

At 1120 I stop at an information sign at a pullout. It signifies the importance of the Cheyenne to Deadwood stage coach line. There is a restored coach that ran this route at the Crazy Horse Museum. The air smells very much like “country” is supposed to smell, like an outside barn.

I press on, driving along what has to be the loneliest stretch of road I have ever encountered. The scrubgrass prairie just goes on for miles and miles, I rarely encounter another vehicle, see no buildings, other than crumpled line shacks, and I don’t even see a cow. 

I see some small dead animals at the side of the road, but that’s it. And the sky begins to get high cloud, and it becomes a slight dirty green color. As driving experiences go, and I’ve had a few, it’s thoroughly surreal.

I make a quick gas stop at a place called Moorcroft, Wyoming at 1230. It seems the gas station is a popular spot, which in a town of a thousand people says something. I’m kidding, most of the plates were from out of state, and a lot of the people seemed to be as road dazed as I was.

Two hours later it’s a pit stop and a fuel up in Sheridan Wyoming. I used this place on my drive out. There are no attendants, just pull in, swipe your card, and pump away. And so I do. I actually wouldn’t mention it at all except an unattended gas station right next to a motel just seems weird.

Arriving at the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument is a sombre experience. Unlike Mt. Rushmore which is a celebration of intellect, and positive achievement, Little Big Horn is the exact opposite. I am unprepared for what I’m going to find here.

The battle that occurred here is one focal point of history’s fickleness of who “wins”. The real truth of this place is that a lot of people died in a very short period of time and you can feel them here. Just as you can in any place where a large group of human lives violently ended. I have felt the same thing when I have visited European battlefields. I would like to think we make these places in “historic places of interest” so that we can get to feel this way. As if the dead are shaming, and teaching, us not to do it again. But we do, usually at the hands of arrogant and egocentric idiots.

As usual I learned a lot of things I didn’t know. Like the makeup of the 7^th Cavalry, and that the infantry troops were mostly unemployed immigrants to America. Three squares and a cot, in exchange for your services. I learned more about the Sioux Wars, and it gave me more context to the underlying conflicts.

Outside, I quietly wandered through the grave markers, mentally taking notes of names and dates. Not that any of the people buried here have any link to me, but beyond the names and dates are real people, and real people died here. One of those gravestones simply reads, “Chippewa Indian Woman”. I am saddened to read such simple wording, and somehow in a personally bewildering but grateful way, that someone saw fit to at least mark her place.

Custer isn’t buried here, though there is a marker (the one marked with black)for where he fell on the battlefield. After a few years they exhumed his body and re interred it at West Point Military Academy. Not so for the rest of his men, who either lay where they fell, or are in the graveyard a couple of hundred meters away.

There is also a monument to the Cavalry horses that fell.

In the Interpretive Centre I learn that a grass fire a few years back burned away a lot of cover, allowing battlefield archeologists to recover even more artifacts after they thought they had all they were going to find. Using the newly found items as a guide, they managed to build a more comprehensive and effective map of how the battle unfolded.

There are a lot of signs around telling you to watch out for snakes and to stay on the paths. Some people don’t get the message and I watch a young woman in flip flops walk through the grass to get a family picture next to a fence. Me, I’m hyper vigilant!!!

Written on the side of the Interpretive Centre is a pearl of wisdom that speaks volumes of the differences in the philosophies at play here.

I am not entirely unhappy to be leaving. This place is an emotional and intellectual challenge for me. As monotone as the land is around the battlefield, there still grows some color as fall trees blaze in oranges and yellows.

I make the short drive into Billings. I’m staying at the Dude Rancher Lodge in downtown Billings. It’s a true throwback to roadside motels. After checking in I walk a few blocks over to the Montana Brewing Company. It’s a bar, but at least is has some local options. I settle on a MBC Pale Ale. Not at all bad, when paired with the Chicken Alfredo. My server is Kelsey, and she’s bright and cheerful. Just the kind of person I need after today.