Wyoming and Montana- Wednesday, July 5, 2017

     I think we were all in agreement that we liked the Mount Rushmore area.  Like Niagara Falls, though, there is a lot to do but to do it is expensive.  There is still more that we would do here if we had the time and money—a museum about Borlgum’s works, a helicopter ride past the faces on Mount Rushmore, a wild animal park, and lots of other sites.  More significantly (and cheaply), we would have liked time for a side trip to the Badlands.  But it’s time to move on.

      On the scale of dookie to lit, however, we have decided that this hotel is more dookie than anything.  It would be an ok hotel, but it’s probably the most expensive than any other we are staying at, solely because of its location.  Anywhere else, and we’d be paying a quarter of what we did here.  The breakfast was limited and crowded, and we decided to go into Keystone for a breakfast buffet at a restaurant.

       We had a slow start, and it was after 10:00 when we were starting to leave Keystone.  When we arrived at nearby Rapid City, Julie decided to get the girls a treat from Starbucks.  We had to turn left over a road that was heavily under construction.  There were two lanes of road that were completely dug out and you had to pick the right side-street in order to turn in to the business that you wanted to.  We had to try more than once in order to find the way in to Starbucks.  The girls went in and got their drinks, and as we were backing out, another driver must have pulled quickly into the drive through lane behind Julie.  Julie back up and ended up hitting her car.  There was a minor bit of fender damage to her car, but none to ours.  While we were exchanging insurance information, an old man that had been parked next to us fell down and was lying flat on his back.  Anna went to help him up.  It felt like it was hard to get out of Rapid City.

      Once we were finally on the road, we passed into Wyoming, and stopped to take our family selfie.  The welcome center coming into Wyoming is extremely nice.  It was like a small museum, with many aspects of Wyoming tourism featured in big displays- dinosaurs, pioneers, cowboys, and so on.  We thought it was interesting that there are cattle grates on the entry ramps to the expressways.

     Our first big stop of the day was Devils Tower.  It is the 867 foot tall out cropping of rock that looks so other-worldly that Steven  Spielberg featured it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The Native Americans considered it to be a sacred place, and some of them said that the unique vertical groves in it were made by a giant bear.   As we were driving into the national park, we found ourselves surrounded by a prairie dog town again.  This one was even bigger than the ones we saw yesterday, and the prairie dogs themselves were just as active.  We spent stopped to watch them on the way in and on the way out again.  The visitor's center is a small cabin with a gift shop.  We took some pictures of the stone tower itself and even more of the prairie dogs.   We didn't stay outside long because it was very hot.  We exited the park, but had a lunch at the KOA campground that is right at the exit by the base of the tower, and of course, went to the gift shop across the street there too.

     Then we started the long driving portion of the day.  We had about 3 hours to go to Little Big Horn, and it was already getting close to 3:00.  We drove out of Wyoming, which we thought was quite pretty, and then into Montana.  When we stopped to take our selfie at the border, we noted that the car temperature was registering 104 degrees, the highest we saw for the day.  There was another family that was stopped to take their own picture, and a few Montana cows that were watching what we were all doing.  Now, we had left the Black Hills, and Montana's land flattened out again, which probably helped make for the "Big Sky" nickname.  Emma didn't think it looked any bigger than the sky at home.     There were lots of cattle on the huge ranches here.  Occasionally, we saw bee hives that were arranged in little circles, making it look like a mini-Stonehenge of white "bee boxes."  About half way through this part of the state, we noted a change in the vegetation as sagebrush started to appear.  We could also see a lot of damage from recent forest fires as we drove through the Custer National Forest and into the Native American lands beyond that.

     We drove through the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and eventually into the Crow Reservation.  They were going to be major players at our next stop- the Little Big Horn Battlefield.  We arrived at the National Park shortly after 6:00, and managed to get into the visitor's center in time to see most of the day's the very last showing of the introductory video.  The video itself was shown in a corner room with shaded glass windows that look out over "Last Stand Hill."  It gave us a lot of important background on the battle-- how the 1868 treaty was supposed to give the Sioux land that is now South Dakota.  Some of the Sioux who had not signed the treaty preferred to live in the "Unceded Territory" that is now southeastern Montana, where the army believed they weren't supposed to be.  When Americans discovered gold in the tribe's sacred Black Hills, the government sent in the cavalry to push them onto their reservation.   It's hard to tour a battlefield when the United States side was so clearly in the wrong.  We can't know for sure, but it seems that in the battle, Custer was trying to swing around to capture non-combatants- women and children- to hold them as hostages to get the Native warriors to stop fighting.  Yet there is so much mythology built up around the scenes that played out here.  The fame and legendary status of "Custer's Last Stand" is comparable to any similar moment on battlefields from the Civil War that we've visited, and may overshadow them all.

     We looked quickly around the exhibits and gift shop, and Scott bought the traditional audio-tour of the battlefield.  We asked and were told that it would take about an hour and twenty minutes.  There were a couple of problems though.  First, even though Scott had been counting on taking this car tour, he knew that the girls were tired of sitting in the backseat for so long already.  Second, not only was it getting late, but we could clearly see rain storms and occasional lightning flashes in the "Big Sky" across the prairie and around the battlefield.   Finally when we started to take the tour, the road that we were supposed to follow seemed to be closed.  At least, it had a large "road closed" arm across it.  Scott was upset to have to say it after traveling so far to see this battlefield, but it looked like the auto tour wasn't going to happen.

     We still got to see the most famous part of the battlefield, though.  We parked at the Visitor's Center and walked to the top of "Last Stand Hill."  On the way there, we could see the many white stones that are supposed to mark the place where a soldier was killed.  We walked up to the large monument to the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry that were killed and buried there.  We had at least scene the dioramas and paintings, so we could picture what it might have looked like as we looked out over the hilly fields dotted now with white stone markers.  We saw the "horse cemetery" marker.  But the best moment may have come when we came to the relatively new monument to the Native Americans that fought there.  It is a circular monument, and when you walk inside of it, large stone tablets tell the Native perspective of the battle.  Several figures, known as "Spirit Warriors" are made of metal outlines.  As we were looking there, a Native person came and started to sing what we assume was a prayer.  It wasn't part of a National Parks presentation, he was just having a moment to himself here, but it sent chills up our spines.

     We had been watching the rainstorms come, and now the drops were starting to fall and some lightning was flashing closer, so we scooted off of the hill, and got into the car.  We went to an Indian gift shop across the street from the battlefield.  Anna has been wanting to buy a "dream catcher" for a while, but wanted one from a shop on a reservation.    We then made our way to Billings, Montana, where we had a hotel room waiting.  We ate a late dinner at Denny's (where Julie re-created the mashed potato model of Devil's Tower that Richard Dreyfus made in Close Encounters).  Then we found our hotel.  There were a lot of older people outside the hotel and in the lobby having a party.  Emma said it looked like a hospital or an old-folks home.