After Mt. Rushmore, I decided to go see the Crazy Horse monument. It is a rock sculpture on Crazy Horse and his horse, intended to be larger then Mt. Rushmore. It is a very ambitious project. They have been working on it for over 50 years and, so far, only the face is finished. According to the 'intro' movie, the plan is ultimately to have a cultural center, Native American museum and even a university and medical school. They count on visitor admission fees and donations to pay for of this. It's never going to be finished. The original sculptor died and the project has been continued by his wife and ten children. In the little Native American museum at the Visitor Center, I was surprised to see blue beads that were used by the Dutch to pay the Indians the famous $24 when they bought the island of Manhattan. Right next to the beads is an article quoting the New-York Historical Society saying that there is no way that these are the real beads. Oh well, it was interesting anyway.
Crazy Horse is revered by the Native American's for never having signed a treaty with the government and the statue is poised to express the moment when he answered the sneering white man's question, "Where is your land now?" He replies pointing out into the Black Hills, "My lands are where my dead lie buried." It's quite a guilt trip. When I was browsing through some hand made jewelery, a woman popped her head up and announced that she had made all the pieces and that she was Sioux. I immediately bought a necklace ito make up for my ancestors screwing her ancestors out of their land. I don't think it worked.
Next I headed for the Jewel Cave. This is another Federal park complex. I arrived just in time for and hour and a half tour of the caves. I was strongly warned that this included going a mile and a half into the mountain and over 700 stairs. "I can't just pop my head in for a quick picture?" No. The only access to the cave is the tour. I was actually concerned about the length of the tour. (I didn't think that the park service would try to kill me, the older couple and the young kids with a stress-test like workout.) The tour was interesting and they really oversold the physical demands it required. It wasn't 350 stairs down and then another 350 back up. It was a walk through a loop of the caves and it involved some stairs. It was really no big deal. I took a bunch of pictures, but most of them came out terribly - the flash washed everything out and I couldn't possibly stand still enough for the pictures without the flash. At one point the guide turned out the lights so that we could see what it was like when they first explored the caves. It is really, really dark. I mean, no light at all. "Close your eyes for a minute. Now open them. See, there is no difference." She was right, there was absolutely no difference. Oddly, I felt like I could see my own hands but I knew that it was just the illusion of being able to sense where they were. It was freaky.
The oddest thing about the tour were the people on it. For a small group, there were three other groups driving cross country. There was a couple who had left Texas in September and were in the middle of a loop around the country, a guy who is traveling from Seattle to Michigan and two girls who had just left San Diego and were two days into their journey. They were dressed in their pajamas. (Clearly they did not get the memo about straight hair and makeup.) We all had fun comparing notes and making stop suggestions. What an odd little cross roads we had arrived beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Here's a picture emailed to me from one of my fellow travelers:
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