SD Day 4- Brunch, Buddies, and Black Hills History
Today was my mom’s last day staying with me in South Dakota, so we decided to start things off in style by getting a big fancy brunch at a place called Tally’s Silver Spoon (which you might remember from that most hallowed of days, Pork and Pinot Tuesday). Brunch was always my go to birthday or Mother’s Day present for my mom so it felt nice getting to share in that again. We went all in and no breakfast staple was left out. I got pancakes, bacon, and eggs, and my mom got a fat slab of ham and toast. It was a big hearty meal, and everything was delicious. Throw in some coffee and good company, and it was really the perfect way to start the day.
I did have to tell my mom that perhaps her massive sun hat wasn’t quite so necessary while we were inside:
After our hefty meal, we decided to hit up another excellent museum in the area to cram in as much South Dakota as we could before my mom took to the skies. Our destination was the Journey Museum and Learning Center dedicated to the history of the Black Hills from prehistory to today. The campus itself captures a lot of that varied history with lush gardens, historic cabins, and a sleek modern building that features beautiful glass windows framed to evoke a tipi (preferred Sioux spelling) as a tribute to the land’s indigenous peoples. It’s quite a first impression.
Things began quite loftily as visitors enter the museum’s exhibits through the Star Room, a shimmering imagining of the Black Hills when all the dust and particles that would eventually form our planet were just drifting through the vastness of space. I’ll give ‘em credit, it’s probably the furthest back I’ve seen a regional history museum go, but it makes for a fun, psychedelic start to the journey.
Once all that stardust started to coalesce into the world we know today, what would eventually become the Black Hills began to take shape in the form of growing mineral deposits. This was reflected in the first major exhibit dedicated to the varied geology of the region. The collection was really impressive featuring cross sections of gold ores, mineral deposits dating back nearly 500 million years (!), and some vibrant polished agates.
Transitioning to (slightly) more lively inhabitants, the exhibits transitioned to fossils of early plant life and aquatic invertebrates that would lead to the inevitable explosion of life on the planet:
Evolution did its things and eventually those small organisms became the monstrous dinosaurs that would be the dominant life forms until they were cancelled via mass-extinction. This exhibit featured some incredible fully assembled skeletons as well as a cool replica paleontologist tent which showcased the process that went into finding, assembling, and preserving fossils.
The museum then pivoted to focusing on the dominant life in the Black Hills post-mass extinction: humans. The museum collected pictographs and early art from predecessors of current Native American tribes marking some of the earliest documents of human life in the region.
Jumping forward a millennia or so, the next few displays collected items related to more recent Native history in the region. These items included various homemade tools, instruments, jewelry, and articles of clothing, which taken together painted a portrait of the various facets and responsibilities of daily life.
The trumpet above belonged to Dewey Beard, a Lakota man whose life happened to intersect with a number of major (and tragic) moments in US-Native relations. He survived fighting in the Battle of Little Big Horn. The next year, the US ordered every Indian to settle on a reservation, but Dewey instead fled to Canada to join Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull was killed, he and his family eventually fled back to the states with the intent to comply and live on a reservation. He went with a group to attend a Ghost Dance, and had the misfortune of making camp at Wounded Knee on what just happened to be the night of one of the most brutal massacres ever perpetrated by the US army against Native Americans. Dewey was shot three times but survived, but he lost his mother, father, wife, and a child which must have been unimaginable. After recovering, he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and performed with them for 15 years. Traveling got to be hard, so he bought some land on the Pine Ridge Reservation and settled down. He started a family again and worked the land for 30 years, but then WWII happened and the government annexed 300,000 acres of the Reservation displacing Dewey and 125 other families. Unsurprisingly, the families were never fully compensated. When Dewey died in 1955 at the age of 96, he was the last known survivor of either Little Bighorn or Wounded Knee let along both. I don’t know if he was the luckiest man alive for surviving everything he went through, or the unluckiest for having to go through it at all but either way his many trials and near misses illustrate quite powerfully the sheer extent of the many broken promises and brutal killings our government committed against our indigenous peoples in such relatively recent history.
On a much lighter note, my favorite items were all impressive displays of various crafts including: a quilted buffalo horn; carved wooden staffs; a painted and decorated animal skin drum; and colorful beaded stuffed animals.
On the more contemporary side of things, there was a collection of works from young local artists featuring dynamic collages, pop art drawings, and beautifully dreamy watercolors:
Rounding out the collection, the museum had some life sized dioramas of spooky faceless mannequins in beautifully made outfits and a fully furnished tent:
After the Native people’s collections, the next few exhibits were about the history of European-American settlement of the region. This started with some great historic photos capturing everything from pioneering cowboys to 1940s beauty pageants.
Some of my favorite findings amongst the photos were: a vintage magic lantern, one of the earliest forms of a photographic projector; and a simply astoundingly silly photograph of a retro daredevil riding a bicycle around a big wooden circle in front a small of weirdly well dressed crowd of onlookers.
Past the photo galleries, the next exhibit was a replica of an Old West town with beautiful frosted glass store fronts:
Inside the mock stores and houses were incredible period furniture and art which showed off both the skills of various different craftsmen as well as the taste of some of the Black Hills’ wealthier residents:
One of the more surprising items was one of the “Three Practical Books” for all turn of the century folks entitled the People’s Home Medical Book which featured wild illustrations of various common ailments.
Next up was a display about various larger than life Western Figures complete with cool albeit slightly creepy backlit photographic prints.
Hanging up in the next exhibit was a massive buffalo hide painting done by a local Lakota artist depicting various events of historical importance via traditionally inspired pictograms.
The next exhibit was another sad one about the unfortunate and complex legacy of the region’s Indian Schools. These boarding schools initially founded by Christian missionaries and later supported by the government and military were supposedly created for the purpose of educating and “civilizing” Native youths. I’m sure some of the educators involved genuinely had good intentions of bringing knowledge to underserved communities, but the reality of the schools was that academic education was far too secondary to forced assimilation to Euro-American values. Children were forced to abandon their clothes and cut their hair, and they were often brutally punished for trying to speak their own tribal languages or talking about their own cultural traditions and religion in any way. Whatever good intentions may have been behind the schools were ultimately corrupted as they became tools of cultural genocide, a shamelessly transparent attempt to wipe out Native culture by cutting it off before the younger generation learned too much of it. It’s a really sad, part of our country’s history, that I really didn’t know anything about until I started passing through so many museums so I think that shows how good we are at ignoring the things we’re not proud of as a nation, but hopefully the more we learn and acknowledge the realities of the past the better we can do at making things right now. There’s so so much more that will need to be done to do something close to right by the families who are still suffering the various cultural, economic, and psychological scars, but at the very least not pretending that it didn’t happen is an important place to start.
Pivoting tonally, the next exhibit was a collection of works, drafts, and tools from Grace French, an excellent painter who is credited as being the first resident landscape painter of South Dakota. She worked continuously in her home studio from 1900 until her death in 1942, and she taught at Black Hills College, so between her own works and her students’ she was pretty instrumental at building the art scene in the region that my mom and I have been enjoying since we got here. Her watercolors in particular were really incredible.
Next up was a fun exhibit about the National Geographic Society’s Explorer balloons. The first Explorer was to be a grand aeronautic laboratory that would reach a record altitude carrying three scientists and their instruments to learn more about our atmosphere than ever before. What actually happened though was that it reached the very respectable altitude of 60,613 ft and then basically imploded. The fabric tore and started a rapid descent that was worsened by the fact that a stray spark ignited the hydrogen in the ballon causing what was left of it to go up in smoke. Fortunately the crew all survived, but the balloon and everything on it was totally destroyed which was a pretty big embarrassment for National Geographic. The chief scientific officer, Albert W. Stevens, campaigned for a second chance and eventually the National Geographic Society gave him the okay to proceed with the bigger, better, and hydrogen-free Explorer II. This balloon succeeded beyond what they could have hoped, and not only did they set the altitude record for a manned flight at 72,395 ft, but they also became the first humans to witness the curvature of the Earth and collected some of the first data on cosmic rays, the ozone distribution and electrical conductivity of the atmosphere at different altitudes, the atmospheric composition of the stratosphere, and the luminosity of the Sun, Moon and Earth. It’s one heck of a comeback story.
The special exhibit closing out the main galleries was all about musical instruments brought over by pioneers over the years. There were some really gorgeously designed pianos, violins, and zithers as well as some handmade Native drums, but this was the second history museum exhibit I’d seen this week to feature a musical instruments section with far more accordions than I ever expected. For me growing up, it was always an instrument associated with polka, Weird Al, and Lady and the Tramp, but it’s oddly enough one of the most culturally versatile instruments popping up in folk musician traditions in all corners of the globe (except maybe Antarctica, though I would pay good money to see a penguin playing an accordion) so it does make sense with immigrants coming to the West from all over that accordions would pop up with a greater regularity than you might expect. Beyond the craftsmanship behind the instruments, there’s a sweetness of music being consistently something that brings people together, reminds them of home, and makes them feel better even in some pretty harsh frontier conditions.
Maybe the craziest instrument on display was this harmonica that was excavated from the Rec Center pool in Deadwood. It certainly looks the worse for wear, but for something that’s spent 1000 years under a community pool it’s pretty impressive that any part of it survived.
The instruments were complimented by hilariously dead-eyed vintage photographs of Black Hills musicians from yester-year. I like these two in particular because you get the vibe on the left that that guy only had kids at all so he could have a family band, and on the right the little girl in the center was clearly not about standing still and waiting for the photo to be taken and the disdain on her blurry face is palpable.
Having come full circle through the main galleries, we checked out the gift shop area which was filled with some pretty impressive local art including some particularly dynamic ceramic buffalo and some facinating potter made from hollowed out gourds, polished, painted, and carved with shocking intricacy.
They also had a small but wonderful showcase of a local quilt artist named Andrea Lekberg, who made huge and captivating tapestries blending abstract imagery, animal and landscape paintings, delicate needlework, and some big bold three dimensional elements:
My favorite was this one, because I thought the little deer-boy was super cute, but naturally my mom was drawn to the ones that were equally impressive but didn’t feature any “disgusting animals” on them.
Last but not least, the gift shop randomly had this collection of incredibly adorable photos of baby bears just being total goobers. Somehow my mom was still immune to this cuteness, but I really loved these little dorks:
After some quality museum-ing, I had to bid my mama farewell. It was bittersweet, because we’d really not had all that much time together (we didn’t even finish our audiobook!) but we were also happy and pretty impressed with all the exploring we’d crammed into not all that much time.
I dropped my mom at the airport, hugged her goodbye, and then started making my a little bit north of Rapid City to the awesomely named town of Spearfish where my friends from high school who just happened to be in the area had gotten a motel for the night. It was a whole lot of reminders of home for one random week in June in the middle of the country, but I was looking forward to seeing Alexis and Sami and catching up.
Along the way, I stopped for a much needed coffee in the town of Sturgis, known for hosting one of the largest annual motorcycle rallies in the world as well as over 50 missile silos. I went to the Sturgis Coffee Company housed in a wood cabin for extra ruggedness, and while I enjoyed the coffee very much I also felt like I wasn’t manly enough for the entire town.
Re-caffeinated, I finished making my way to Spearfish to meet up with my friends, who were getting lunch at Taco Bell. I was still pretty full from my hefty brunch, but I hadn’t indulged in fast food in a while and I couldn’t resist getting a quick taco while I caught up with my friends.
After our highly nutritious lunch, we went out and enjoyed some pretty incredible nature walking around Spearfish Canyon. Alexis, who’s been teaching on one of the reservations in SD, had recently adopted a super cute young Rez dog, and while I think we all really loved the scenery, none of us could match the puppy’s enthusiasm for just being out and about.
After enjoying the vistas, we stopped at a fantastic local ice cream shop called Leone’s Creamery, which had a line out the door that we quickly learned was very well deserved. They make everything from scratch with rich, creative homemade flavors and top notch chocolate dipped waffle cones for extra decadence. I got the insanely delicious double cookie ice cream which was like a cookie dough ice cream but with extra fresh baked chocolate brownie cookies rolled throughout as well. It was amazing.
Even better, their location has a cute little shady are overlooking a stream and some quality public art so we got to chill out and enjoy our ice cream in style.
We kept our streak of just enjoying great local establishments going, by going out for drinks at Crow Peak Brewing Company, an awesome brewery and even better hang out spot with live music and not one but two patios on ground level and on the second story of their impressive two story wood cabin building. For beer, I really enjoyed pints of their Pile O’ Dirt porter and Irish Red and it just felt like a perfect summer evening drinking beers on a porch with old friends and enjoying some solid tunes from local artists. Plus we got to hang out with this big lazy old dog in the right hand picture, so what could be better than that?
After hanging out for a while, we decided to settle in for the night by getting some might fine grilled chicken pizza from local spot Dough Trader’s Pizza Company and picking up some more booze at a convenience store where our baby faces and MA IDs raised quite a bit of bemused skepticism. Back in the motel, we enjoyed our pizza and got nice and tipsy, cracking jokes and sharing stories. It felt so nice and normal just having a good time with Alexis and Sammi, that we almost forgot just how improbable all 3 of us being in South Dakota at the exact same time really was. I was sad to see my mom go earlier in the day, but this was just about the perfect pick me up and a day/night I really remember fondly.
Favorite Random Sightings: A big billboard that said “Catholics believe what?” (I think it was intended to be thought provoking rather than incredulous but it cracked me up either way); an advertisement for Balls of Finance (no clue what that meant); a salon called Hair Panache; a dog groomer called U Dirty Dog; and the False Bottom Bar (kinda an ominous name)
Regional Observations: A lot of people here say “Have a Blessed day” when they say goodbye, and it was strange at first but sort of sweet
Albums Listened To: I just kept chugging along with Lincoln in the Bardo
Joke of the Day:
An elderly couple had dinner at another couple's house, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen.The two gentlemen were talking, and one said, “Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great. I would recommend it very highly.”
The other man said, “What is the name of the restaurant?”
The first man thought and thought and finally said, “What is the name of that flower you give to someone you love?You know... The one that's red and has thorns.”
”Do you mean a rose?”
'Yes, that's the one,' replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, 'Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?
Song of the Day:
I didn’t listen to any music today here are two of my favorite songs about South Dakota by British people who probably had never really been there:
Maybe my favorite Beatles song for reasons I’ll never fully understand rendered in a beautifully unnecessary but fun funk cover