ONWARD TO MONTANA!
On Thursday, October 18, 2018, my brother and I began a new journey. This was not a trip taken lightly; it was one that had been progressing for many years, decades in fact. It was the journey to start a new life, one that we had always wanted to partake in, but due to our mother’s illness with Alzheimer’s disease had to be put on hold for over a decade. We couldn’t take our mom across six states and 2,000 plus miles from everything she had known, and there was no way we were going to leave her in a nursing home, so we stayed with her for over ten years until she passed from this earth in 2016. Two years later, with nothing holding us back, the decision was made to sell our house and take the great plunge.
Our trek of 2,128 miles, began as we left the streets of Nashville, Tennessee behind at approximately 6 pm on that historic date. After one last visit to our mom’s final resting place, our new life began in earnest on that fall evening and we have not looked back. Oh, we miss our family and friends, but we have always loved these wonderful creations that the Almighty Lord shaped with his own hands, and we do not ever expect to look back.
Plans were made for a leisurely four-day journey to reach our new destination, since we did not have to sign the lease for our apartment until the following Monday, October 22. Our first leg took us to Little Rock, Arkansas, and a stopover at the local Motel 6. Friday’s journey was destined for a stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the University of Nebraska. The Cornhuskers’ football team was slated to play a home game the next day, but we exited the city well before the traffic posed a problem. That Saturday night found us stopping at the Motel 6 in Rapid City, South Dakota, gateway to the Black Hills and the famed Mount Rushmore National Monument. Our last day on the road, took us through the northeastern portion of Wyoming before turning north at the small city of Buffalo (not to be confused with the city in New York where Niagara Falls is located) and finishing our journey in Billings, Montana. Although not the capital of the state, Billings does have the largest population, and at a little over 100,000 citizens, it is the largest such metropolitan in the four-state region of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota (although Sioux Falls with close to 190,000 people, is technically the largest city in South Dakota; it is on the other side of the state on the extreme eastern border with Iowa and Minnesota. In fact, it is over 400 miles from the Wyoming border).
I did not take many photographs along this trail to the “Big Sky Country,” but the one place I did want to stop at, was Mount Rushmore. The last time I had visited this iconic landmark was on a research trip I took during the summer of 2007. I knew it might be a while before I got back that way, so we made plans to stop and I was able to take many fine snapshots. I have a magnificent 20” x 30” blowup of this long-lasting symbol of America greatness hanging on the wall of my apartment. I took it with my old Minolta single-lens reflex, or SLR, camera during a perfect summer day in 2004 while traveling across country with Doug and my good friend Gerald and his two teenage sons. The pictures I got this time were just about as good as there was not a single cloud in that magnificently clear blue sky.
Pahá Sápa the Sioux name, for the Black Hills of western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming is a very lovely place to visit and is spiritually important to the native Americans, especially the Lakota, or Sioux tribe. Viewing the mountains from a distance they appear black, because of the large amounts of trees covering them. Although I have visited Mount Rushmore four times, I never get tired of seeing this magnificent work by Gutzon Borglum. The sculptor, with help from his son Lincoln Borglum oversaw the excavation of the monument from 1927 to 1941. Final construction ended on October 31, 1941. Thirty-six days later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor thus forcing the United States into the second war to end all wars.
Doane Robinson, a South Dakota historian, is credited with the idea of carving likenesses of noted figures into the mountains of the Black Hills. However, he wanted the mountain to feature “American West heroes, such as Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, famous Oglala (Sioux) chiefs Crazy Horse and Red Cloud and the master showman, Buffalo Bill Cody. Robinson also wanted the sculpture to be in “the Needles” another great place to visit while in the Black Hills.
Borglum, however, rejected that spot due to opposition from Native Americans as well as the poor quality of the local granite. He, along with tribal representatives, settled on Mount Rushmore, known as “Six Grandfathers,” by the Sioux, and construction began on October 4, 1927. It was Borglum who recommended the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln be used for the sculptures on the famous mountain. They were chosen to represent the nation’s birth, growth, development, and preservation.
The Chief Carver was an Italian emigrant named Luigi del Bianco. Using dynamite and a process called “honeycombing” over 400,000 tons of rock was blasted off the mountain. Peter Norbeck, a United States Senator from South Dakota, secured the funding needed for this massive project. Each of the heads is 60 feet tall. Compare that to the CenturyLink Tower in Sioux Falls, the tallest building in the entire state, which is 174 feet tall.
There are actually a lot of other great sites to visit in the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore is just one of many such eye-catching, jaw-dropping view to behold while traveling through these iconic hills, actually small mountains. If the tallest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains is Clingman’s Dome at 6,644 feet, then what can you call a group of mountains that has the tallest such eminence topping out at 7,242 feet. This peak, Black Elk Peak, formerly known as Harney Peak, which stands almost 600 feet taller than the highest peak in the eastern United States, must be called a mountain. This peak is the highest point, east of the Rockies, in the United States.
In addition to Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills, also, boast Wind River National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, the Crazy Horse Memorial and Custer State Park. In the northern section of the Black Hills lie the cities of Sturgis and Deadwood. In 2015, over one million motorcyclists visited the 75th Rally in Sturgis, while Deadwood is best known for the place where Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back while he was playing cards. The infamous “dead man’s hand” of a pair of Aces and a pair of 8’s has lived long in legend from this 1876 murder. And lest we forget, Devils Tower lies just across the border in the Wyoming section of the Black Hills. The Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was filmed there in 1977. Do you remember the scene where the alien spacecraft rises from behind Devils Tower?
