We made it to the Black Hills at about the same time everyone started arriving at the K-Bar-S Lodge for Linda's 50-year Nursing Class Reunion. Everyone had a great time during the reunion visiting with old classmates and Gary entertained us every night with his guitar while we sat around the fireplace. We had a profile view of Mount Rushmore from our room and the deer and turkey that roamed the property were almost tame!
We did not realize it while were staying at the lodge, but as we were leaving we discovered that Linda's cousin is a part-owner in the property.
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| Profile View of Washington |
Since the nurses had worked at the Ellsworth Air Force Base hospital as part of their nurse's training, we arranged for a tour of the Base and their museum. Unfortunately, the tour did not include the Base Hospital, but the driver came close enough to the hospital so that I could take a picture of the building.
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| Base Hospital |
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| Photographer Unknown |
We also had dinner aboard the 1880 Train while it traveled from Hill City to Keystone. There were a lot of deer feeding close to the railroad track and also some wild turkeys crossed the road just in front of the train.
Oglala Lakota County (previously known as Shannan County) is entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and is the Poorest County in South Dakota. It is also the only "dry" county in South Dakota.
On December 28, 1890, Chief Big Foot and over 350 Indians were encamped along Deep Creek near the south fork of the Cheyenne River when Big Foot surrendered to the U.S. 7th Cavalry. The band of Indians were then moved about five miles south to the Wounded Knee Creek Valley, where they were surrounded by about 470 soldiers. For extra protection, the Cavalry brought in a battery of four Hotchkiss guns.
The soldiers were worried that some of the warriors who had been "Ghost Dancing" might cause trouble because the warriors had been told by Yellow Bird, a medicine-man, that if they wore "Ghost Shirts" when they did the "Ghost Dance" they would become immune to the whiteman's bullets and could openly defy the soldiers.
On December 29, about 9:00 AM, the soldiers started searching the Indian tepees for hidden weapons and about the same time Yellow Bird "walked among the braves, blowing on an eagle-bone whistle, inciting the warriors to action, declaring that the 'Ghost Shirts' would protect them."
Someone fired the first shot, then mass confusion erupted. The soldiers surrounding the Indians started firing into the crowd using rifles and their Hotchkiss guns, killing warriors, women, children, and their own troops that were searching the tepees for weapons.
After about one hour of fighting, 146 Indian men, women, and children were killed. An Army detail buried all of the Indians in a mass grave on top of a nearby hill and marked the spot with a monument. The site is now known as the "Wounded Knee Massacre" Site. A church was later built near the mass grave.
The Wounded Knee battlefield is the site of the last armed conflict between the Sioux Indians and the United States Army.
Chief Crazy Horse was also from this area and after he was killed at Fort Robinson it is unclear where he was buried. There is no specific spot at the Fort Robinson cemetery that is marked as his grave site but historians believe that he is buried "somewhere in the vicinity of Camp Robinson." However, the Sioux Indians believe that he was buried along Wounded Knee Creek by his family members. There are no grave markers along Wounded Knee Creek to support this claim, so his final resting place remains unknown.
Porcupine, located a short distance up the road, is the unofficial capital of the Republic of Lakotah and alleged birth place of Russell Means.
When I was in the Air Force, part of the area between Porcupine and Scenic was closed to the public because it was located in a designated military bomb range.
During WW II, the area was used for aerial target practice and flight crews were sent out to practice shooting targets on the ground. However, I was told that the flight crews did not like shooting the aircraft guns because the guns were noisy and caused a lot of vibration; so the flight crews just opened the plane's bomb doors and dumped all of the live ammunition out of the plane. The crew then flew around for awhile and after a sufficient time they flew back to the base.
After laying out in the Bad Lands for a number of years, the military realized that all of the live ammunition poised a potential problem for future land uses, so it was decided to gather up all of the live ammunition and properly dispose of it.
Since the Air Force couldn't find a lot of people that wanted to go camp out in the Bad Lands and pick up live ammunition, I broke one of the military's cardinal rules - "don't ever volunteer for anything." They could not believe that someone actually volunteered for the assignment. (When I think back about it, I probably did it for the money because we were able to draw TDY pay in addition to our salary.)
As it turned out, we actually had a good time! To break the boredom, once or twice a week in the evening we could go to the Longhorn Saloon in Scenic and get something to eat. The Longhorn also had a pool table that we could use for free. Of course, the table top was warped and all of the balls would roll to the center of the table, so it made the game more interesting.
Scenic is now considered to be a ghost town and was purchased in 2011 by a church in the Philippines for about $800,000. A number of the buildings are still standing and the old church building is now used as a trading post.
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| Longhorn Saloon |
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| Outdoor Jail |
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| Old Church Building - now a trading post |
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| Town Sculpture |
As we drove down the road on this trip, I distinctly remember pounding stakes around several of the compound curves because we had to redo them multiple times! (Back in that day all of the survey equipment was manually controlled and subject to human error, which we had a lot of!) Anyway, a trip through Badlands National Park is always a great experience!
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