Life on the open road in the Dakotas

Part 2: Rapid City, the Badlands, and all that …

Last time out, I recalled the beginnings of my 2003 trip to the Dakotas, while working as the Special Projects Director for the GED Testing Service. After addressing GED graduates at Sioux Falls. I struck out on a once-in-a-lifetime drive across both Dakotas, culminating in the annual GED conference in Bismarck.

Driving from Sioux Falls west to Rapid City, the second-largest city in South Dakota, is not difficult—it is along Interstate 90 all the way—but it is grueling, a truly long trip, some 400 miles, on a surprisingly lonesome, if well-maintained road. I was traveling alone, out of a long-held desire to see Mount Rushmore, and basically killing time as a tourist before the annual conference in Bismarck put me back to work.

South Dakota roadmap, Sioux Falls west to Rapid City. Public domain

I had no real agenda, but having learned of the remarkable Corn Palace in Mitchell, perhaps 75 miles west of Sioux Falls, suddenly decided I really had to cross that off my bucket list, too. If you’ve never heard of it, well, it is one of those strange-sounding local landmarks that seem sure to be overrrated—but turn out to be well worth the trip.

It may no longer be built completely of corn husks—one wonders how much of it actually was when the first Corn Palace was built, a hundred years and more ago—but the murals on the outside still are, and are torn down each August-September to be reborn for the fall crowds.

The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota—a fascinating gem for tourists! Public domain photo

Mitchell is a small town—less than 16,000 today, 20 years after I was there, and only marginally bigger than the small North Carolina town I grew up in—but by South Dakota standards, it ranks as sixth-largest in the state. There is a wonderfully informative Indian museum nearby—Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village, a 1,000 year-old Native American village and the only archaeological site in South Dakota that is open to the public—and the two sites are enough to warrant spending at least one night in Mitchell, which I did.

As South Dakotans put it, the Corn Palace is simply a-maize-ing. It’s like a county or state agricultural fair from your childhood, if you were lucky enough—like I was—to grow up in a state that still values agriculture, and honors its farmers. The only difference is that it is all indoors, and part of the walls started out, at least, as edibles.

It all started out as just one more gimmick in the early 1890s, when Mitchell town fathers were attempting to diversify the tourist base and provide wholesome family entertainment for a tiny railroad town. The Palace went big-time in the 1920s, graduating to a permanent structure that now covers 39,000 square feet, including a large arena. Designers incorporate 12 different colors or shades of corn to decorate the Corn Palace, including red, brown, black, blue, white, orange, calico, yellow and even green corn!

You can find out more about the World’s Only Corn Palace at its official website—https://www.travelsouthdakota.com/trip-ideas/story/visit-worlds-only-corn-palace-mitchell-south-dakota — but you really have to see it to believe it. Because once you do, it’s ear-esistible … another corny but wholesome, pun-worthy promo term.

Visiting the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village was another worthwhile venture, from inspecting the ongoing archaeological dig in the enclosed Archeodome to walking along the (manmade) Lake Mitchell, imagining what daily Native American life was like 1,000 years ago along the since-dammed Firesteel Creek. Remains of more than three dozen earthen lodges were discovered on this site after its modern discovery in 1922.

Inside the Archeodome at Mitchell’s Prehistoric Indian Village. Public domain photo

Then it was back on the open road toward Rapid City, still 300 miles to go before seeing my childhood fantasy at Mount Rushmore. I mentioned in an earlier post my fascination with the Alfred Hitchcock 1959 spy thriller, North by Northwest, the plot of which revolved heavily around the presidential landmark—I had come under its cinematic spell during long and lonely nights in Paramaribo, Suriname, when it was one of the old movies broadcast on late-night Surinamese television. Although I had seen it several times before, I had never watched it carefully and then rewatched it.

As I later discovered, of course, the climactic chase scene down the faces of Abraham Lincoln and his fellow presidents was a sham, staged elsewhere, and the plot was ridiculously impossible—no one could have done what Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint did and lived to tell about it, but seeing the movie again, and again—I taped it onto a videocassette in 1989, and still have it, still watch it periodically —had sparked a true obsession in my head to see the place.

I have since learned the details of Hitchcock’s own obsession with the use of the landmark as a backdrop—and how he duped the National Park Service into letting him use footage t hey did not expect to see in the movie—those of you who don’t know the intricate backstory can check it out elsewhere (see the wonderful article reprinted at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rushmore-north-northwest/ ).

The Mount Rushmore Monument, from a distance. Public domain photo, courtesy National Park Service website

What I did not know at the time, in 2003, was just how far tourists have to stand from the mountain in order to view it. It was, frankly, more than a little anti-climactic, to have come that far and still have to use binoculars to see Lincoln and his three comrades—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and bespectacled scene-stealer Theodore Roosevelt—clearly. The rest of the trappings are typically touristy.

As usual, I bought a book in the giftshop and took it home to learn more of the actual construction details. [That book, by the way, is quite interesting: Six Wars at a Time: The Life and Times of Gutzon Borglum, Sculptor of Mt. Rushmore, by Howard Shaff and Audrey Karl Shaff, which I recommend highly.]

I would suggest that anyone who goes there take the time to do a little research. Try starting out with the National Park Service website at https://www.nps.gov/moru/index.htm . The trip is still worth the effort, of course, but the more facts you know before you get there, the less likely you are to confuse Hitchcock’s ersatz tale with anything resembling reality. There is also a historically appealing article from National Geographic [see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-strange-and-controversial-history-of-mount-rushmore ] that should answer many deeper historical questions …

I should note here that before getting to Mount Rushmore—which is actually somewhat southwest of Rapid City—I forced myself to take a southerly detour through the Badlands National Park. I wanted to see bison and prairie dogs in real life. The prairie dogs are cute, and you can near them, if you;re lucky, and persistent. [I grew up watching them on Walt Disney as a kid.]

But it is the bison most visitors want to see. They warn you, of course, not to get out of your car and approach those shaggy, wilful creatures—who will charge you, but generally only if you frighten them (or insanely, try to feed them)—and I obeyed the warning. They are herbivores but BIG ones … and do not have cuddly personalities. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior website, “male bison (called bulls) weigh up to 2,000 pounds and stand 6 feet tall, while females (called cows) weigh up to 1,000 pounds and reach a height of 4-5 feet.”

No, I never got close enough to check … I was in a rental car, after all …

Bison grazing near the Pinnacles Entrance Station at South Dakota’s Badlands National Park.

Photo courtesy Bram Reusen, https://www.travel-experience-live.com/

Bison—purists do not call them buffalo, and neither will you, f you want to be known as a user of precise language—are not at all glamorous, but still remarkably majestic, even from a distance. As an animal lover, it was hard for me to reconcile the fact that these magnificent creatures are protected in the parks, mostly, but elsewhere, farmed commercially, and their meat ends up, incredibly, in bison-burgers. Risk-taker that I am, I had one, almost against my will, and it wasn’t too bad, but I wished later I had resisted the temptation. It did not make me ill, but it did make me wish I could become a sort-of vegetarian (if without giving up beef, or my favorite, North Carolina pork barbecue).

A face only a mother could love? Bison up close and personal. Public domain photo

Then it was on to see Crazy Horse …

Next time: Crazy Horse and Pierre, South Dakota’s tiny capital