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 7th 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.
