Monthly Archives: July 2013

38-Big Sky Country, MT

Little Big Horn – I was surprised to find how ignorant I really was about what happened here!

The battle of the Little Big Horn aka Custer’s Last Stand.  I knew very little about this event, basically that Custer and his soldiers had a battle with some native Americans and lost and every man was massacred.

Well, it’s more complex than that!  Here’s what I know now about this event after spending a day at the Little Big Horn National Park:

The Sioux and Cheyenne tribes of Montana and Wyoming had been rounded up and put onto a very large reservation after some of their leaders signed a treaty.  The bison that they depended on for food, clothing and many other aspects of their lives were decimated and there were NONE on the reservation (the decimation of the bison is another story, but in a nutshell there were an estimated 8MILLION bison in North America in 1840 and only 500 left by 1890.  Native Americans didn’t do that, white man did!).

Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and other native American leaders who had not signed the treaty  left the reservation and many others left with them.  In December of 1875 the government issued orders – they had 30 days to get back to the reservation or be considered hostiles, in which case they would be forced back or killed.  In the middle of the worst winter they had ever seen, there was no way to get the women and children back to the reservation even if they wanted to go (do you think the government did that on purpose?!?) and by June the government sent the cavalry out to get them.

Custer headed one of three commands sent to the area and he had approx. 500 men.  There was a command from the south with a little over 1000 men, and one from the west with under 500 men.  The command from the south engaged the native Americans first, were driven back easily and they decided to go back to Wyoming and go fishing (this is a true fact!)  Custer didn’t know that since there was no way to communicate among the three commands.  The command from the west arrived one day too late and to them fell the task of burying the dead.

So Custer, thinking there were two other commands headed towards the native Americans like he was doing, came to the camp.  They were astonished to find over 8,000 people, over 2,000 of them warriors in the camp.

Custer divided his command into three sections, and one struck first but was easily pushed back.  Custer’s section came from the north, but the native Americans had already routed the first section and rode north to face Custer’s men.  This was over 2,000 warriors vs. 263 men with Custer!   Custer sent runners to the other two sections saying “Come quickly, bring ammo” but they couldn’t get through.  Custer though the other commands would show up, they didn’t.

The battle was very one-sided.  Towards the end Custer ordered his men to dismount and shoot their horses to use them as barricades, but it was too late and this action stunned the native Americans into really thinking the white man was crazy, and they killed all the men in Custer’s section.  The other two sections were later surrounded and held under siege for over 24 hours until they gave up and were allowed to leave.

When the command from the west arrived, they and the survivors buried the dead soldiers where they lay.  Several years later the dead were all dug up and re-buried in one mass grave with a monument on top.  There were headstones placed where each man fell, which shows where the battle was fought.  The native Americans took their dead away, but later (like in the 1990s) some headstones were placed where stories from survivors said that it was likely that native Americans had fallen.

The news of this battle reached Washington DC two weeks later, in the middle of the 4th of July festivities on the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  The news angered the government, who sent a much larger force west to subdue the native Americans.  They were subdued and forced back to the reservation, where almost half died of starvation the next winter while food that was sent to sustain them was withheld from them.

Personally, I’m shocked and saddened at the way the white Europeans treated the native Americans, here and elsewhere during the American history.

Anyway, the national park is fairly small and contains only part of  the site of the battle.  There’s also a Veteran’s Cemetery on the park, not related to this battle.  Veterans from the Spanish-American war, WWI and WWI, Korea and Vietnam are buried here.

The pictures below show the valley as seen from the site of the battlefield – you can imagine what it would have looked like with 8,000 people living in the valley, the grave markers (look closely, you can see several all over the hillside), and the grave marker of Custer (who was disinterred and taken back to Washington at a later date) and one of the Indian chiefs who died in the battle.  Also, there’s a picture of a native American sculpture that was erected along with walls showing some history of the Sioux and Cheyenne people that were engaged in the battle.

37-Mount Rushmore, SD, Places we Visit-Year 1

Black Hills Cavern – a privately owned cavern!

We visited a second cave in the Black Hills area called the Black Hills Cavern, this one a privately owned cavern instead of a National Park.  While it was in many ways very similar to the Wind Cave, we found that there were a lot of differences too.  This cavern had flooded totally in 1972 and it took a couple of years to drain it of all the water and mud.  That changed the way a lot of the formations look.

We also saw that there were a lot more mineral deposits around this cave.  Most likely gemstones as well, but even though privately held, this cavern is under federal protection and no mining can be done here.

Back during prohibition, moonshiners used the cavern to make their liquor and there are a few remnants of it – lots of black on the ceilings in one area where they had fires.

As it’s always been privately owned, the concrete that was poured to make the walkways is not as well maintained as a national park cave is, so it was more treacherous to walk the inclines and the stairways that were narrow and steep and having to duck to one side while going up or down was a bit nerve-racking!  But, they had guard rails and the guide was very good about cautioning us when we got to a place with potholes etc.  All-in-all, a fun and interesting cave to visit!

Here are some pictures:

37-Mount Rushmore, SD, Places we Visit-Year 1

Wind Cave – one of several caves in the Black Hills

We learned that there are several caves and caverns in the Black Hills.  We visited two of them, the first is Wind Cave (look for a post with pictures of the second one shortly).  It’s the first cave that became a National Park, back in 1905 and contains a huge area of land around the cave itself so that the forests and hills are protected.

There is a herd of bison in the national park, as well as lots of deer, antelope, and long-horn sheep.  We didn’t see many animals while driving to the cave though 🙁

But, the cave itself is interesting.  As with most of the caves in this area, there are very few stalagmites and stalactites due to a low amount of water seeping into the caves.  There are, however, formations called boxworks which were formed when carbolic acid (the mixture of water and CO2) seeped through the ground containing a mixture of fossilized sea creatures and gypsum, dissolving the fossils but was not acidy enough to dissolve the gypsum, so you’re left with lacy, spiderwebby looking formations.  Here is one picture of the boxworks:

And, here are more pictures of the cave:

37-Mount Rushmore, SD, Places we Visit-Year 1

Crazy Horse Memorial – have you ever heard of it?!?

There is a second huge stone monument in the process of being built in the Black Hills not too far from Mr. Rushmore.  It’s a memorial to Crazy Horse, a Lakota Sioux indian chief who refused to sign a treaty and move his people to a reservation and was stabbed in the back by a soldier while under a flag of truce when he was only 35 years old.

When the American Indians in this area learned about Mt. Rushmore they wanted to have a monument as well, to honor one of their heroes.  They asked a sculptor who had won some national awards to come and build it.  He started it in the 1940s and it’s still only partially done because it’s being done with NO federal money – it’s all donations!

The sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, first did a small sculpture, similar to how Mt. Rushmore was done, and then used it as a scale to calculate where each section of the mountain needed to be blasted and shaped.

Here is the Crazy Horse memorial with Mt. Rushmore alongside the head of Crazy Horse.  This is close to actual scale of the two monuments!  This shows how HUGE the Crazy Horse memorial will be when completed.

This next picture shows the small sculpture next to the mountain, to show what it will look like when completed:

And here’s a picture showing the mountain that is being carved:

 

37-Mount Rushmore, SD, Places we Visit-Year 1

Mt. Rushmore

While in South Dakota, we drove to Mt. Rushmore.  I always thought Mt. Rushmore was right next to the town of Sturgis, SD because I’d seen a commercial for the motorcycle rally that showed the main street of Sturgis and Mt. Rushmore was right there big as life.

Well, that was incorrect!  Mt. Rushmore is almost an hour from Sturgis and is way out in the middle of the Black Hills area.  Beautiful country though!  The road we took was very winding and narrow and had several places where the road actually looped around itself to gain height up/down the mountain!  Also, there were some tunnels that were one-lane…you drove to the entrance, stopped and looked and honked, and if nobody was coming you could go through the tunnel.  Interesting!!

Mt. Rushmore itself is very impressive!  It was built during the depression and created jobs for a lot of men.  There were several setbacks during the construction, one of which was a crack in the rock that required the face of Washington be shifted a bit in the middle of making it so the crack wouldn’t cause his nose to fall off (yipes!)

The visitors area is impressive – you park and walk up some stairs and through a sort of gateway and then – there it is!  Several people would just stop in their tracks right there to take a picture, so you have to watch where you’re going to avoid bumping into them LOL

Here are pictures we took of the mountain:

36-Cody, WY, Places we Visit-Year 1

Devils Tower!

We’re in Belle Fourche, SD now to visit the Devils Tower and Mt. Rushmore.  Yesterday we visited the Devils Tower.  It’s very impressive!  Jutting out of what otherwise is a scene of rolling gentle green hills.

It was formed by a volcano pushing molten lava upwards towards the earth surface approx. 50 millions years go – but it didn’t make it all the way to the surface.  Instead it cooled slowly with the top about 1.5 miles underground.  Over time the earth around it was eroded through mostly rivers that run through the area, snow and rainmelt etc. so that the lava flow came to the surface.  As it’s so much harder than the surrounding rock and earth, it is eroding much, much more slowly.

It is eroding, rainfall on the top seeps into cracks, plants start to grow, snow and ice expand down in the cracks etc. so that periodically the vertical columns will give way and crash down.  The last large columnar fall was about 10,000 years ago although small rocks fall periodically.

The native Americans of the area have a story that some children were chased by a huge, supernatural bear and the forest animals told the children to stand on a rock which then started rising into the air.  The bear clawed at the rock to get to the children but couldn’t, and that’s what caused the vertical column effect.

The native Americans also called this tower the Bear’s Lodge.  A group of soldiers who came to the area asked an interpreter what the name was and he mistakenly said it was “Bad Gods Tower”.  The soldiers changed it from Bad Gods to Devils.  Some people use “Devil’s” instead of the plural, the name is controversial for almost everyone it seems.

Even today the native Americans consider this sacred ground.  They often come to the area to pray and tie cloth or bundles in the trees as prayer bundles.  Tourists are asked to not photograph the bundles out of respect, so we have no pictures of these although they were all around.

In addition to hiking trails around the base of the tower, people can climb the tower.  It takes experienced rock climbers to make this climb however since it’s pretty much straight up and then straight down!  We saw some climbers and took a few pictures, in the gallery below you’ll see that I put orange pointers to the rock climbers so you can see where they are.  Brave people!!

Here are pictures we took: