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The
wide-open spaces of the Great Plains roll
away to infinity to either side of I-90 in
SOUTH DAKOTA. Though the land is
more green and fertile east of the
Missouri River, vast numbers of
high-season visitors speed straight on
through to the spectacular southwest, site
of the Badlands and the adjacent
Black Hills – two of the most
dramatic, mysterious and legend-impacted
tracts of land in the US. For whites, they
encapsulate a wagonload of American
notions about heritage and the taming of
the West. To Native Americans they are
ancient, spiritually resonant places.
The
science-fiction severity of the Badlands
resists conversion into easy tourist
palatability. The bigger, more
user-friendly Black Hills, home of that
most patriotic of icons, Mount Rushmore,
have been subjected to greater
exploitation (dozens of physical,
historical and downright commercial
attractions, and the mining of gold and
other metals), but encourage more active
exploration (via hiking trails, mountain
lakes and streams, and scenic highways).
Time and
Hollywood have mythologized the
larger-than-life personalities for whom
the Dakota Territory served as a stomping
ground: Custer and Crazy Horse
battled here for supremacy over the
plains, while Wild Bill Hickok and
Calamity Jane were denizens of the
once-notorious Gold Rush town of
Deadwood. On a more contemporary note,
Kevin Costner’s award-winning 1990
Dances with Wolves, shot in the state,
continues to boost South Dakota’s tourism
image, though Costner’s own ambitious
development plans for Black Hills mean
that he himself has now fallen foul of the
Sioux.
Sioux
tribes dominated the plains from the
eighteenth century, having gradually been
pushed westwards from the Great Lakes by
the encroaching whites. To these nomadic
hunters, unlike the gun-toting Christian
settlers and federal politicians, the
concept of owning the earth was utterly
alien. They fought hard to stay free: the
Sioux are the only Indian nation to have
defeated the United States in war and
forced it to sign a treaty (in 1868)
favorable to them. Even so, they were
compelled, in the face of a gung-ho gold
rush, to relinquish the sacred Black
Hills, and ultimately the choice lay
between death or confinement on
reservations. For decades their history
and culture were outlawed; until the 1940s
it was illegal to teach or even speak
their language, Lakota. More Sioux live on
South Dakota’s six reservations now than
dwelled in the whole state during pioneer
days, but their prospects are often grim.
Nowhere is the legacy of injustice better
symbolized than at Wounded Knee, on
the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation
– scene of the infamous 1890 massacre by
the US Army, and also of a prolonged
“civil disturbance” by the radical
American Indian Movement in 1973.
Native
American traditions are celebrated by
music, dance and socializing at powwows,
held in summer on the reservations; the
state tourist office can supply dates and
locations. Apart from powwows, South
Dakota summers are taken up with
historical celebrations, volksmarches (a
friendly sort of community walking
exercise), ethnic festivals and rodeos.
The state has 170 parks and recreation
areas for hikers and campers. In winter,
downhill skiing is limited to Terry
Peak and Deer Mountain outside Lead
in the Black Hills; cross-country and
snowmobiling are more prevalent.
Click here to go to South
Dakota State web site. |
