9/5/10 – Big Heads

After a tiring ride yesterday and a long night of pounding beers with Richard, Wilma-Mae, Grandpa and Bubba, I slept like a log, thrilled that I wasn’t sleeping in back of toothless-Richard’s truck. I hit the road back towards Rapid City and then on to Mt. Rushmore. Rapid City is mostly a modern town of Olive Garden’s, Marriott’s and Red Lobster’s, but there a few blocks downtown that are real old school early 20th Century western architecture; brick buildings, with western apparel stores, gun shops and bronze statues of Wild West figures on every corner. As I rode south out of town, the Black Hills sprung-up from the grasslands and they are gorgeous. The twisty mountain highway was a great ride.

Mt. Rushmore is just 30 miles from Rapid City, but it’s a world away. I had lunch at the new lodge and then went on a guided tour around the park. The Ranger leading the tour was an elderly Chippewa Indian and she was clearly bitter about how the U.S government [her employer] treated Native Americans. I don’t blame her, but it was odd how freely she spoke about how Indians are now just a bunch of drunks due to the White Man’s persecution. If Dr. Laura said what the Ranger said, she’d be off the radio airwaves.

Now some useless trivia about Mt. Rushmore:
• Rushmore is the name of a NY lawyer that came to SD to settle gold mine disputes;
• The Monument was commissioned as a way to get more tourists to visit SD;
• It took 600,000 sticks of dynamite to make the Monument;
•The selection of Presidents was based on the Presidents that most affected the first 150 years of U.S. independence and expansion; and
• The artist appeased a women’s group by promising to add the head of Susan B. Anthony, but he never did it.

After Rushmore, I went to the Crazy Horse Monument, which is another Rock sculpture that’s dedicated to all Native American tribes. The sculptor of Crazy Horse started blasting the mountain by himself back in the 1950’s and his 10 children are carrying-on his legacy. This Monument is way bigger than Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse’s head is bigger than all four presidents’ at Mt. Rushmore. I watched a movie about the sculpting of Crazy Horse and the history behind it and it was more moving than all the Rushmore history. It’s clear that the Native American’s were screwed big-time.

I left Crazy Horse at 5:30 and wanted to go west to see the motorcyclists Meca of Sturgis, but I decided to head east instead. Richard had told me to see the Wall Drugstore in Wall, SD and that’s where I went. I got there around 7:30 and got one of the last available rooms in town. 6 miles from Wall are the SD Badlands that I will ride though tomorrow. There are at least 100 signs and billboards advertising Wall Drugstore between Rapid City and Wall. The Wall Drugstore is like a Wild West mall with many rooms that each have unique items; In the Wall Drugstore there’s a soda fountain, a western apparel store, a candy store, a restaurant, numerous curio shops and a drugstore. It’s definitely worth seeing.

Tomorrow the weather forecast here calls for thunderstorms and I plan to bug-out of Dodge before the storm arrives.