The Devil and South Dakota

The big destination today was Devil's Tower. Remember it from Close Encounters of the Third Kind? It was the rock formation that everyone sculpted in their mashed potatoes in subconscious preparation for the alien landing. It turns out that the tower is actually the inside of an ancient volcano – the outside has been eroded by water and wind over the millennia. We took a short walk around the base of the tower and learned about how it is a Native American sacred site that people insist on climbing anyway. We saw several rock climbers scaling it as we explored. Apparently, in the ‘90s there was an impotent attempt by the Park Service to have a voluntary closure of the tower to climbers during the month of June because this is when major Native American religious ceremonies occur. Then there was a failed lawsuit to keep the voluntary closure from happening. Overall, this pseudo-ban has resulted in about three quarters of climbers heeding the closure during June, according to a park ranger. So this means that about a quarter of climbers still insist on climbing the holy site during the holiest month of the year. The climbing also requires that metal fixtures be drilled into the side of the tower and left there, in order to hold the climbers’ ropes (although, fortunately, no new drilling is allowed). This seems to me to be equivalent to defacing a church or temple, about which people rightly get into a twist. So why should this be any different? There are other rocks to climb that are not sacred sites. The park ranger joked that because it is a voluntary ban on climbing, they don’t “shoot people down or anything.” Hmm. Picking them off doesn’t seem like such a bad idea to me.

This reminded me of our previous day’s visit to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. There was a vast graveyard for all the white soldiers who had died, but where were the Native Americans? The information provided at the monument was a whitewashed history that painted the racist land-grabbing and genocide by white settlers and Custer, etc., as a simple little conflict between Custer and the tribes. As though the battle was simply about a difference of opinion about who should live where and not about white people deciding that natives were inferior and had no rights. I had high hopes for this monument. I had thought that it might provide something rich and educational about Native American life and the struggles they endured as their land and rights were forcibly taken from them. But no. It provided a timeline of names and dates and battles, ripped from the pages of the crappiest high school history textbooks. Which further reminded me of an excellent book I just read, Lies my Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James Loewen. I recommend it.

Speaking of history, we also saw Mount Rushmore today. Which was okay, but not spectacular. We don’t have any great digital pictures of it because we didn’t try all that hard to photograph it. Once you’ve seen Yellowstone, faces carved into the side of a mountain just aren’t very magical. And the whole point behind the carving was to draw tourists to South Dakota. That’s all. Apparently, it was clear that in order to draw anyone to South Dakota, drastic measures, such as defacing a perfectly lovely mountain, would have to be taken.

I am not personally drawn to South Dakota, although we are in Rapid City, SD now. Tomorrow we head for Sioux Falls, which is on the other side of the state. This means a long day of driving. But we will stop at the Badlands and Wall Drug. And then we’ll be almost out of the state.

By the way, Todd posted a some of our Yellowstone pictures on his blog. Take a look.