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Caption: Black Hills Rocks, bones, and ghosts
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Caption: A return It had been decades since I'd set eyes on the Black Hills of South Dakota, host to several of our family vacations, and the most sacred land of the Sioux, who'd been guaranteed ownership by the Treaty of Laramie in 1868.
Then in 1874 General George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Calvary discovered gold, and all bets were off.
Observing through much older eyes recently, I found it every bit as magnificent and kitschy, comforting and haunting, as I remember it.
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Caption: "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too." Chief Standing Bear
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Caption: Seven years after sculptor Gutzon Borglum's Mt. Rushmore was completed, his one-time student began an outsized project of his own, mere miles away.
Korczak Ziolkowski, a Polish-American who'd fled his abusive father in Boston at age 16, had been hired by Borglum to help carve the mountain, on sacred Lakota land. But within days he got in a physical fight with Borglum's son, and packed his bags
Lakota elders pleaded with Korczak to help them build their own monument, and in 1948 work began.
Korczak died in 1982, and his wife, Ruth, died last year. But his 10 children - and some grandchildren - continue to blast and coax out of stone the image of one of the Lakota's greatest leaders.
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Caption: "My lands are where my people lie buried" Chief Crazy Horse
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Caption: The monument is so massive that the heads of all four Mt. Rushmore presidents would fit inside Crazy Horse's.
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Caption: View from the top of Bear Butte, a sacred site to many Great Plains tribes
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Caption: "Wild Bill was a strange character, add to this figure a costume blending the immaculate neatness of the dandy with the extravagant taste and style of a frontiersman, you have Wild Bill, the most famous scout on the Plains."
- General George Custer, writing about Wild Bill Hickok
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Caption: The tiny, historic town of Deadwood from atop Mount Moriarty, where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried next to each other.
That was her idea.
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Caption: When Chief Bald Eagle, 96, was young, his grandfather White Bull would tell him about fighting General George Custer at Little Bighorn.
Years later he'd fight in another war, with the U.S. Army rather than against it.
He was a WWII paratrooper (82nd Airborne) who fought at Anzio, and later was accidentally dropped behind enemy lines at Normandy, where he was shot several times and medics left him for dead. But British commandos found him and detected a pulse.
After the war he married an English woman; they moved back to South Dakota and became ballroom dancing champions. Then she, and their unborn child, was killed in a car accident.
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Caption: Devastated, Bald Eagle threw himself at high-risk pursuits, like race-car driving and skydiving. He played semi-pro baseball. Toured Europe as a bull rider with Casey Tibbs. Made more than 30 movies, including "Dances With Wolves."
He went out dancing with Marilyn Monroe while they filmed "River of No Return."
The chief was wearing his WWII Veterans hat when I first met him. He told me that delivering his buddy's Purple Heart to his parents, who hadn't learned yet that their son had died, was the hardest thing he's ever done.
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Caption: Badlands National Park Fossils and ochre-hued sandstone are all that remain of the Badlands' ancient seabed.
Wind and rains have chiseled this desolate landscape, where outlaws once fled to hide until the heat was off.
Today, the Badlands are eroding an inch per year, which means there's about three feet less of it than last time I saw it.
It's an important habitat for all kinds of Great Plains wildlife.
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Caption: Oh give me a home
Where the buffalo roam
And the deer and the prairie dogs play
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Caption: The town crier
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Caption: After a Soviet hydrogen balloon reached a record altitude of 72,178 feet in 1934, the U.S. Army Air Corps and National Geographic Society partnered to launch its own balloon to study the effects of high altitudes on humans.
They chose a natural depression with steep sides just southwest of Rapid City in the Black Hills National Forest, to keep the balloon from being buffeted by winds as it was being filled.
On July 28, 1934, The Explorer 1 reached a height of about 63,000 feet before suddenly plummeting, as 30,000 people looked on. It exploded 5,000 feet up. But the pilots had bailed, and incredibly, no one was injured.
Undeterred, they launched another balloon a year later, this time filled with helium. At 8 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1935, Explorer II lifted off, reaching a record height of 72,395 feet.
And the Space Race was on.
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Caption: View from the rim of the Stratobowl, where the Space Race was launched.
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Caption: #blackhills
#southdakota
#goexplore
@interior debhopewell.contently.com