Item From the Past: Across the Wide Missouri

On July 31, 2005, we drove from near Alberta Lea, Minn., to Pierre, SD, by way of Mitchell, SD, home of the Corn Palace, which we saw. We also met Zach. He was sitting outside one of the tourist shops in Mitchell. More information about him I do not have.

Our campsite that evening was near the banks of the Missouri River not far from Pierre. Lewis & Clark and their party came this way 201 years earlier, on their way to winter in the future North Dakota. Probably they saw something a little different than we did, especially since we were not too many miles downriver from the Oahe Dam, a 20th-century creation. Still, this spot along the Missouri looks pretty empty, and you can imagine the Corps of Discovery going by, if you have that kind of imagination.

On the morning of August 1, we lingered long enough in Pierre to see the capitol building, which was completed in 1910. The South Dakota state capitol has a white sandstone and limestone exterior, with a copper dome that looked more black than the green you might expect, but then again the elements are harsh in the Dakotas. For some reason, I didn't take a picture of the exterior, but plenty of those are available on line. I did take an upward-looking shot of the rotunda, however.

The state capitol web site has more detail about the building, but my favorite one is that "according to legend [meaning a newspaperman might have made it up in the 1920s], 66 Italian artists were involved with the laying of the Terrazzo flooring throughout the Capitol," the web site says. "... each artist was given a special blue stone that would be called [his] signature stone. Only 55 of the 66 blue stones have been found. Perhaps some were laid where walls, doors, or carpeting cover them."

Item From the Past: Boot Hill

Back in the summer of 2005, I wrote about Mt. Moriah (Boot Hill), in Deadwood, SD: "[It's] a lovely wooded hill, covered in pine, dotted with stones of all sorts, from nearly worn-away to large, handsome, newish monuments. A light mist was falling, and it was fairly cold for the third of August, about 55° F. I think.

"Wild Bill Hickok came to Deadwood in the summer of ’76, died famously, and now reposes at Mt. Moriah. In recent decades, admirers erected a bronze bust to mark his grave, which is surrounded by an iron fence. Calamity Jane rests behind the fence as well, reportedly by her own request nearly 30 years after Wild Bill was stashed away."

As I've said before, acknowledge the famous, but don't ignore the obscure. Not far from Wild Bill is a stone for Grace Lela Trebilcock, born December 10, 1902, died April 27, 1909.

According to the on-line records of Mt. Moriah at least, she's the only Trebilcock in the cemetery. Maybe her parents were passing through Deadwood, or resident for only a few years. A sad story lost to time.

Trebilcock's an interesting name, though. The Internet Surname Database offers this information about the name: "Recorded as Trebilcock and Trebilcocke, this is a Cornish and English surname. It is, like the vast majority of Cornish surnames, locational, and in this case from a place called Trebiloc near the village of Roche. It is first recorded in the annals of the county in the year 1302. The place name and hence the later surname, is believed to mean 'The home on the cookoo's hill' from the Cornish medieval phrase 'tre-pyl-cok', although other explanations are possible."

Item from the Past: September 9, 2004

South Dakota became my 45th state [on September 9, 2004]. I took a childish pleasure in crossing the border, there on I-29. A silly thing, considering the arbitrariness of it, but then again, human beings delight in arbitrary things every day and all night. I just choose eccentrically. Anyway, I’d inspected the area maps beforehand, to see if there was a more civilized way to cross from Iowa to SD than on a four-lane freeway. The Big Sioux River forms the border at that juncture, and I saw a park on the Iowa side of the river with what could have been a pedestrian bridge across to a golf course on the Dakotan side.

Arriving in the park, I got a good look at the river, and the Dakotan banks on the opposite side. The golf course must have been obscured by the trees lining the river, or perhaps it was a mapmaker’s fiction. The item on the map that looked like a bridge turned out to be a large pipe, supported by a truss of some kind. If I had been 19 and brainless, I might have tried a crossing. I got back in the rental truck and drove across the border.

I had only a short time in that large state, and on the map I'd come across a red point-of-interest dot called Spirit Mound, without further information. It was well placed for my purposes, only about 10 miles north of Vermillion, which itself is a short drive across the border. Without further ado, I decided to go.

It’s a lone hill, standing in the farmland of that part of SD, which looks precisely like the neighboring parts of Nebraska and Iowa. The state of South Dakota is restoring the 300 or so acres around the hill to tallgrass prairie, which was rustling briskly in the wind that day. Armies of crickets and grasshoppers added their buzz to the whip of the grass in the wind. It was late afternoon, but still very warm. I was completely alone. A path led from the small roadside parking lot into the prairie, and, barely visible as a line across the hill, it promised a walk to the top. I didn’t need any more invitation than that.

According to the vague state-erected signage near the parking lot, “Native Americans revered the site,” though it didn’t say who or why or whether any Indians still did so. Perhaps the history of incursions into the Black Hills has made the state hypersensitive in these matters. But it is certain that Lewis & Clark climbed this hill, this very spot, on August 25, 1804, or 200 years and small change before I did.

It took me about 20 minutes to reach the top. The path curved around the hill like a question mark, and was only moderately steep even at the very end, when it ran up to the top of the hill. Lewis & Clark, by their own account, saw herds of buffalo from this vantage. I saw farmland, farmhouses, a radio antenna or two, and the road I’d come on. Still, it was a swell 360° panorama, and I felt a distinct — though fleeting — sense of place.

Wapiti &c.

“You are now in a bear habitat,” a number of signs posted at Wapiti campground, a couple of miles from Jasper Townsite, said in English and below that in French. Also included were stern bilingual warnings about staying clear of bears, not feeding bears, etc., with the unwritten message being, don’t be a moron who mistakes real bears for Yogi and Boo-Boo.

We didn’t see any bears at Wapiti, though there were plenty of elk, which could also clean your clock if you acted threatening or weird in their vicinity. Elk or no elk, Wapiti quickly became my favorite campsite anywhere, edging out other favorites such as the walk-in site at Pete’s Lake in Michigan with its view of starlight on the lake or Bastrop State Park, which evokes a little high school nostalgia for me.

Wapiti’s an enormous wooded campground, 366 sites spread on a large piece of real estate between the road to Jasper Townsite and the Athabasca River. It’s also bounded on one side by a creek, which I later found out was called Whister’s Creek, and we got a site next to the creek that included plenty of tall trees and a flat spot among them just big enough for the tent.

We parked some folding chairs creekside, which made a fine place to read. It was rapid and rocky, meaning great sport for Lilly and Ann in stone tossing. Even better than any of that was the constant low rush of the water, recorded versions of which people pay money for. By itself it was soothing to fall asleep to, but it also had the bonus of drowning out noise from our neighbors on either side, who weren’t that near anyway. No distant caterwauling or radio noise from people who just have to have their Retro-80s! Superstation! Flashback! Weekend! playing in the middle of a national park.

The campsite at the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt NP was shady and quiet, too, because there weren’t many people there. People go to South Dakota. People go to Yellowstone, Glacier and the Grand Tetons. North Dakota? I asked a park ranger about the low number of visitors, and she said yep, TR NP’s an unknown jewel of the park system. I agree.

A thunderstorm greeted us on our arrival in that part of North Dakota. We’d started the day, July 12, in a motel in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and didn’t particularly make haste on the drive that took us back across part of Saskatchewan and into North Dakota. By the time we stopped for gas in Williston, ND, it was almost dark and we could see an angry-looking storm off to the east. Just the thing you want to see when you’re planning to pitch a tent not far away, to the southeast.

But we pressed on, and the darker it got, the more terrific the lightning became. The country around there isn’t completely flat, but it’s flat enough to let you see for miles—boiling dark clouds lit up by bolts. Best lightning show I’d seen in years. The girls were so scared they covered themselves up with a blanket. So scared they actually shared the blanket without argument.

Sleeping in the car wasn’t something I really wanted to do, since I have long legs, and as soon as we got to the campsite, I put up the tent as fast as I could. It rained a little but mostly I had lightning and thunder to content with. There were trees around, and the time between the flash and the rumble was fairly long, so I figured I was fairly safe. We piled into the tent and listened to more thunder and watched everything light up with spooky blue lightning light for a while. When we woke up the next morning, the sky was clear and the ground wasn’t wet.

After our very first day of driving, the long Schaumburg to Fargo run on July 1, we arrived at Lindenwood Park, which is along the west bank of the Red River of the North just across from Moorhead, Minn. It’s a Fargo municipal park, and yet has campsites, a couple of rows for RVs near the river, and space for tents right on the river. I’d called ahead a couple of weeks before but was told that the tent sites had flooded. “It’s been raining a lot here,” the attendant said.

So I wasn’t sure we’d be able to camp there, but the river was down by the time we got there, so we got a site for a reasonable $12.50 a night next to the river. It didn’t have a picnic table, so we took (and cooked) our meals on the ground. Not many rocks were at hand to throw in the river, so the kids pried loose pieces of earth from a nearby spot that had been flooded, then dried and cracked, and used those. We had some mosquitoes, but not as many as I would have thought.

Our neighbor was a minor pest, though. A wiry, grizzled fellow in his 50s who was bicycling long distance, he was eager to make conversation, beginning while I was putting up the tent, including almost immediately oblique comments on my skills at it. “So this is the first time you’ve put up the tent, huh?” I might have answered him as a younger man, but I didn’t bother, especially since I was busy actually putting up the tent at the time. (The answer: I’d put it up in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana, all successfully enough to shield my family from rain and wind and bugs.)

Later conversations with the man, which luckily weren’t that extensive, made me think he was just one of those people who had a knack for saying mildly irritating things, probably without realizing it, so I won’t be too hard on him. Still, like the Red River mosquitoes, I wasn’t sad to leave him behind.

No More About the Trip After This, I Promise

This will be an unusual entry, about places we did not see. Considering the blog’s title, I usually write about things I’ve actually seen. But you can’t see everything, no matter how much time you spend at it. Such is the inexhaustible nature of the world, or maybe the exhaustible nature of any small group of people.

• La Crosse, Wis. By all reports, it has a pretty downtown. Didn’t find out. We drove through it without stopping on our first day out, when we wanted to get as far as possible, to make the second and third days of driving easier.

• Minnesota 16. For the same reason, we skipped this road through the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest in southeastern Minnesota. It parallels I-90, mostly, but such roads are always slower.

• Sioux Falls, SD. Among other things, there’s a park in that town with the outline of the USS South Dakota in concrete. The Interstate takes you north of town, without much indication that it’s there, aside from the signs.

• Stratosphere Balloon Landing Site (1935). What’s the story here? I’d rather not look it up. Let it stay a mysterious point of interest on my maps (both Rand McNally and Michelin) a few miles south of I-90 in Aurora County, SD.

• The historic forts along the Missouri in South Dakota: Kiowa, Hale and Defiance, not to mention Pierre Choteau, and a place called the Triple U Buffalo Ranch. We also bypassed the Akta Lakota Museum.

• Wall Drug and the Badlands NP had their charms, but what about Minuteman Missile National Historic Site nearby? Cool, ICBMs. But I understand that you have to make reservations to get in the silos a long time in advance, which I only found out about just before we left.

• Rapid City & Sites, including Dinosaur Park. Something my brothers (then eight and five years old) remember from a family vacation to South Dakota in 1960, a year before my birth. Too bad, we deprived Lilly of that opportunity for recollection in 2050.

• Took a look around Deadwood, SD, but not Sturgis—which was already beginning to choke with bikers coming to the Sturgis Rally, which was to begin the week after we passed through. Also buzzed by Lead and Spearfish, SD, two towns with fine names.

• Bought supplies in Belle Fourche, SD, just before entering Wyoming and Montana. Up the road on US 85 is “the Geographic Center of the US.” My, oh my. Couldn’t justify the extra miles to see some kind of obscure marker. This time.

• Saw the very spot where fate caught up with George Armstrong Custer and his men, but not the Custer and Reno Museums. Poor Reno, he got the blame, though not officially.

• Plenty of Yellowstone, but really only a fraction. Too tired to consider the Grand Tetons after Yellowstone.

• Driving home, the goal was to get home. So we stopped for very little. A whole other trip could have been stitched together from such bypassed places as; Cody, Wyo.; the hot springs of Themopolis, Wyo.; Hell’s Half Acre, Natrona County, Wyo.; Casper; Fort Laramie NHS, Goshen County, Wyo.; Scotts Bluff National Monument, Scottsbluff, Neb.; Chimney Rock NHS, Morrill County, Neb.; various sites and towns along the Platte; the SAC Museum between Lincoln and Omaha; and even places in Iowa, especially Winterset, the birthplace of Marion Morrison, better known as John Wayne.

Mt. Moriah

It isn’t a complete trip if I don’t visit at least one cemetery. That’s what was missing during our stay in central Florida earlier this year, so I decided I wanted to see a really famous one on this trip—none other than Boot Hill in Deadwood, SD, more formally known as Mt. Moriah, a municipal cemetery.

Speaking of revisionism (see yesterday, about Custer), I saw about half an hour of Deadwood in a hotel room last year, a cable series famous for its blistering profanity. Just about every sentence by every character contained some. No doubt there was a good deal of swearing in the real Deadwood of 1876, more than in old Western movies or network TV Westerns, though no aural record exists, and written records are going to be vague on that point. But I suspect there wasn’t as much profanity in real life as on cable TV. The producers of Deadwood make it that way because they can. We want to make a gritty Western! None of this mealy-mouthed oater stuff for us.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Consider the dialogue of the first half of Full Metal Jacket, set on Parris Island. Every foul word of that rang true, though I’ve never actually heard a Marine drill sergeant.

However they talked in life, the residents of Mt. Moriah are quiet now. Yet they attract a steady trickle of visitors. There’s even an admission charge, a rarity for a cemetery. But it was a reasonable $1, so I paid up and headed up the hill, for indeed Boot Hill is a hill. A lovely wooded hill, covered in pine, dotted with stones of all sorts, from nearly worn-away to large, handsome, newish monuments. A light mist was falling, and it was fairly cold for the third of August, about 55° F. I think.

Wild Bill Hickok came to Deadwood in the summer of ’76, died famously, and now reposes at Mt. Moriah. In recent decades, admirers erected a bronze bust to mark his grave, which is surrounded by an iron fence. Calamity Jane rests behind the fence as well, reportedly by her own request nearly 30 years after Wild Bill was stashed away.

I wonder how these two have maintained their fame after all these years. Custer died fighting Indians—formerly considered an admirable pursuit, now an ignominious one. But Wild Bill and Calamity? Memorable nicknames, I guess.

Four Faces

I got a short sideways look at the profile of the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills, as we drove by on US 16/385, and it looked impressive indeed. A fine monumental project. Why didn’t we stop? Price for a carload of visitors: $24. I would have paid half that, I think. Whoever’s in charge of the sculpture needs to raise money, but I refuse to be gouged for the cause.

Besides, we were on the way to Mt. Rushmore that evening, and the sun was going down. We wanted to see the iconic mountainside by day, and then after dark, lit from below. Speaking of gouging—or at least nicking—parking at the Mt. Rushmore National Monument costs $8. Not that bad, but my brand-new national parks pass didn’t cover the cost. Grumble.

The garage looked fairly new, a lot like the parking structure next to a mid-sized regional airport. A couple of stairways out of the garage lead to fairly new-looking tourist infrastructure, starting with a walkway that leads to a building complex—including a gift shop, near a large bronze bust of Gutzon Borglum by his son—that leads to another walkway flanked on both sides by structures (too bulky to be poles) flying the flags of all the states in groups of four. Four doesn’t divide evenly into 50, so perhaps DC and Puerto Rico are included, but I didn’t check.

From there, you reach another building, which also includes a gift shop, past which is an amphitheater. All the way, though, the Mt. Rushmore sculptures are visible. Despite the fact that the Four Faces are seen in countless photos, drawings, cartoons and North by Northwest, the sculptures capture and hold the eye. Yuriko, who didn’t grow up with iconic Mt. Rushmore, was just as impressed, if not more. Later she said she used to wonder why anyone would deface a mountain in such a large way, but after seeing it she called it great art.

I hope Simon B. has had a chance to see Mt. Rushmore in person. He was an erudite young Englishman I knew in Japan in the early ’90s. I forget how it came up, but once he suggested that Mt. Rushmore was a vast act of vandalism. When I heard that—which sounds like a lump from the oatmeal of anti-Western Civilization diatribes, trying to pass as an idea--I decided I needed to shock him a little, so my comment was, “You know what? Even if it is, I don’t care.”

We sat in the outdoor amphitheater facing the Faces, along with hundreds of people, waiting for the lighting ceremony. By this time it was getting dark. An enormous bank of clouds loomed off to one side of the sky, dark and rumbling. Eventually, a park ranger—a woman no older than 30, I think—came out on stage and said the show was going to go on until it started raining. Rumble.

I wondered what the show would be. A laser show! A laser show to John Philip Sousa! A laser show, John Philip Sousa, and four presidential impersonators down on stage! No. The Park Service isn’t quite so showy. The young ranger talked for about 15 minutes, first about coming to see Mt. Rushmore as a kid, then telling the audience about the four presidents, as if anyone over about 10 didn’t know about them. Then again, maybe people don’t. Rumble. The clouds were a lot closer by now.

After she was done, the stage curtain opened. Rumble. Boom. BOOM. A Discovery Channel video about Mt. Rushmore started rolling on the amphitheater’s big screen. The beginning scenes were of the Dakotas, including a shot of distant lightning on the prairie. Off screen, real lightning flashed, and by this time the amphitheater was losing people, including us. Soon the video stopped, and it was raining. People shouted, “Light it! Light it!” for the Faces were dark by this time, except during lightning flashes.

Before long, the lights were on, and we were treated to a luminous Mt. Rushmore in the rain. Water traced down parts of the Faces, leaving dark streaks. In all the many photos of the monument I’ve seen, I’ve never seen it half-washed like that.

The Wall

I’m skipping tomorrow, for various reasons, but picking up over the weekend, during breaks in other writing duties.

Most of what I could say about Wall Drug has already been said. Though Badlands National Park is near, Wall Drug is a tourist attraction — mecca — in its own right, maybe even outdrawing the Badlands. After all, the Badlands may be beautiful, but it’s an austere beauty, and you can’t shop there (except at the lodge gift shop).

Wall Drug, on the other hand, surely has more gewgaws, gimcracks and knickknacks within its many walls than all the rest of South Dakota, with maybe North Dakota thrown in. I’m not about to mock the place. I stood in awe. By rights, Wall ought to be a dusty, sluggish little town just east of the Black Hills. But no. In August anyway, it has as much retail activity as many regional malls in populous MSAs: swarms of people swarming through each of its many aisles, fingering the floor-to-(nearly)-ceiling items, spurring the constant beep-beep-beep of the registers.

Wall Drug isn’t one store, of course, though it’s — sort of — under one roof. It’s a warren of stores: standard souvenirs, clothes, jewelry, books, even a drug store (go figure). It has photos and painting and signs and oddities all around—read the Roadside America article. Its cashiers have nametags that also tell you the person’s place of origin, and two out of three seemed to be summer workers from the former Soviet bloc. (I encountered this at Yellowstone, too, and I asked a lass from Bulgaria about it, and she said, “Three months work, one month travel.”)

I was able to spend some time in the bookstore, and was pleasantly surprised. It isn’t a large place trying to carry every title the way Borders or B&N would, but a small store with an excellent selection, especially about the West.

We had lunch at Wall Drug, for there is a sizable food service there. High time, I thought, to try the buffalo burger. It was OK. Practically the same as regular beef. The doughnuts are also famed, at least the maple-coated ones. They were OK. Well, food isn’t why people go to Wall Drug. And why do they? I know why we went: because it’s there.

Pierre Detour

I-90 through South Dakota doesn’t pass through the state capital, Pierre. About 30 miles is as close as the state’s only east-west Interstate gets to that city (which seems to be locally pronounced “Peer” instead of like a Frenchman’s name). Strictly a civil engineering decision based on topography, or was the South Dakota Congressional delegation on President Eisenhower’s bad side?

In any case, I wanted to detour to Pierre. Not so much to see Pierre, but to see the state capitol. It’s a travel hobby of mine, perhaps dating from the days in high school when I took a bus from San Antonio to Austin during the summers to visit my friend Kevin M., who had moved to Austin after our freshman year in high school together. I always walked to his house from the bus station, about three miles, a walk that always took me through one of the finest state capitols, that of Texas.

I still think Texas’ is one of the finest, and by the time I reached Pierre, I’d seen 34 capitol buildings—but only 20 inside and out, since I’ve arrived at some when they were closed, or for some reason I couldn’t stop for a good look. (See April 7, 2004, for the Missouri capitol and September 13 and 14, 2004, for Nebraska.) I was determined to make South Dakota the 21st complete visit, so we hit the state roads to Pierre, and I got my wish.

Not bad at all. A handsome black dome atop a massive white base, with plenty of the interior detail an early 20th-century capitol ought to have, such as terrazzo floors, heavy wooden doors with frosted glass, grand staircases, lots of marble and at least one wall devoted to governors’ portraits. Only a state since 1889, South Dakota doesn’t have all that many old govs, but they’re on display, as they should be. Most importantly, there was a rotunda to stand under, look up and gawk at.

The grounds were nice, too, resplendent with flowers and well shaded by large trees on that fine first day of August. Unlike some other capitols, the grounds -- and the inside for that matter -- wasn’t overburdened with memorials. Or maybe I missed them, chasing after Ann, trying to discourage her from picking the flowers.

We’d spent the night before at a state park near Pierre, so we arrived at the capitol fairly early in the morning. Thus we were able to get an early start toward our next destination -- Wall, South Dakota, famed in tourist lore, and subject of billboards all the way back in Minnesota. More on that tomorrow.

King Corn & His Palace

After Spam (see yesterday) comes corn. This seems like a natural progression in the Midwest. South Dakota might be considered part of the West most of the time, but buzzing down the highway in eastern South Dakota, you’re sure that you’re still in the Midwest. Same flatland, same views of corn and soy.

Mitchell, SD, decided years ago to make a virtue of its place at the edge of the corn belt by building the Corn Palace. “Why are we getting off here?” Yuriko asked me at the Mitchell exit.

“The Corn Palace,” I said. “We’re going to see the Corn Palace.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

I’d seen the Corn Palace point-of-interest spot on the map and read my Roadside America, which says: “It’s a combination of minarets, turrets and kiosks that’s been standing in downtown Mitchell since 1892 [sic, today’s structure is the third, built in 1921, but its corn theme is the same.]… It stands five stories high, covers a square block, and is built out of reinforced concrete, not corn. Its exterior, however, is completely [sic, partially] covered with native South Dakota corn, grain and grass murals. Ears of corn are sawed lengthwise and then nailed flat to outside panels, and are changed yearly. Typical recent themes have been South Dakota birds and a Salute to Agriculture.”

In 2005, the theme is “Life on the Farm,” depicted by murals of corn. Now that’s my idea of a stopover along a straight stretch of Interstate. Even better, it’s free to get in.

So in we went, because on the last day of July, it was hot in eastern South Dakota. Easily above 90° F, and while I could have lingered outside just a while longer to admire the murals, other family members wanted to duck inside, into a large foyer displaying items from the history of the Corn Palace and offering short explanations on how all those ears of corn are nailed to the walls (later, I got a closer look at the exterior murals—which I read use 600,000 ears of corn, 3,000 bushels of grain and grass, and a ton of nails).

We were in time for a guided tour. The guide was a young man, a college student summering in Mitchell I think, who had a remarkably stentorian voice, at least when he was announcing the tour. “Ladies and gentlemen, GATHER ROUND for a FREE TOUR of the WORLD’S ONLY CORN PALACE! Starting NOW!”

Gather we did. He wasn’t so loud after that, and clearly enjoyed telling us about the Corn Palace: its history, its unique décor, and its place at the center of municipal life in Mitchell. If the corn were stripped away somehow, you see, all that would be left would be a mid-sized municipal auditorium, because in functional terms, that’s what it is. According to our guide, during the non-summer months, the building—owned by the city—holds basketball games, concerts, graduations, parties and other functions, pretty much like any municipal auditorium. Beyond the foyer, the main hall sports rows of seats looking down on a basketball court.

But in the summer, it’s a tourist attraction. A gift shop covered the entire court. I bought postcards, since free admission always encourages me to do that. I turned down Lilly’s request for a coonskin hat.

The guide said that 11 hues of corn are used to make the outside images, all of which is grown on a nearby farm specially contracted for the purpose. Over the years, the successive Corn Palace artists—an honor in Davison County like being Poet Laureate, I reckon—come up with the drawings and plans for what amounts to a different corn-by-numbers scheme each year, which craftspeople then execute by nailing the ears down. I’ve seen murals and mosaics over the years, but nothing like this.

I also got to look at the interior murals. Roadside America forgot to mention these, but they’re made in the same way as the exterior murals, except the ears are changed only every decade or so, since the corn isn’t exposed to the elements (including birds). Unlike the exterior, the inside designs are held in such great esteem that they never change. They were created in the late ’40s by regional artist Oscar Howe. They’re distinctly WPA realist in style, showing the history of South Dakota, both Indian and white histories, culminating with giant hands of made of corn, one from each ethnic group, clasping each other in friendship.

Later, I looked Oscar Howe (1915-83) up. The guide didn’t mention it, but he was Yanktonai Sioux of considerable talent as an artist and teacher.