CHAPTER THREE

The Hills Today

It is this writer’s personal opinion that no other resort area in the United States possesses such a wealth of tourist attractions as the Black Hills. This profusion of happy endowments can be separated into three categories, each of which deserves individual study and enjoyment. Two of these, the region’s folklore and its memories of the gold rush, belong to the amazing history of the Hills. But of course the visible landscape and the natural wonders of the area are the primary objects of the tourist’s visits, and it is proper that they be considered immediately and in detail.

_Wind Cave_

The Wind Cave lies ten miles north of Hot Springs on U.S. 85A. The cavern is the focal point of interest in its own National Park, which takes in forty square miles. Nearly half of this park is enclosed with a high fence, behind which one of the last great bison herds roams contentedly. Protected antelope, elk, and deer also enjoy this game preserve.

The cavern was discovered, according to legend, by a cowboy who heard a continued low whistling noise in the weeds and, investigating, found air rushing from a ten-inch hole near the present entrance to the cave. And indeed it is this very phenomenon that makes Wind Cave different from other notable caverns, such as the one at Carlsbad. Even on the stillest of days a steady current of air can be felt rushing in or out of the cave’s opening—into the earth if the barometer is rising, and out of the ground if the pressure is falling.

The National Park Service conducts tours of the cave, the complete excursion lasting some two hours. Fortunately, although the visitor descends to a great depth as he searches out the various chambers on the route, the tour ends at an elevator which whisks him swiftly to the surface near the starting point.

The entire cavern is a little more than ten miles long, although there are portions of it which have not even yet been explored so that their size may be known with accuracy. It is not graced with the growths of stalactites and stalagmites normally to be found in limestone formations, but nature has compensated for that lack by fashioning a peculiar box-work which looks for all the world as if the cavern had been subjected to an interminable frosting process. These beautiful fretwork deposits, which are not to be found in any other cave, are the result of a strange chemical process that took place in the limestone stratum where Wind Cave is located. Surface water seeping into the stone became charged with carbon dioxide gas from the decaying organic matter through which it passed. This gentle acid then dissolved the limestone only to redeposit it in cracks and crevices around other limestone fragments. The precipitated limestone was of a different chemical composition and resisted later onslaughts by the eroding acids—which, however, did eat away the fragments around which the precipitate had formed, leaving the maze of hollow crystalline formations that can be seen in the various chambers of the cavern.

The National Park, being relatively small, is not equipped with overnight facilities; but this does not matter, for the town of Hot Springs is but twenty minutes’ drive from the park, and the town of Custer is only twenty miles away. There are, however, camping grounds in the park, and the Park Service operates a lunchroom at the entrance to the cave.

_Custer State Park_

Custer State Park is located almost in the center of the Black Hills. Containing nearly one hundred and fifty thousand acres, it is one of the largest state parks in America. It was originally set aside as a state game refuge, and it was not until the advent of summer touring as a national pastime that the state of South Dakota purchased additional private lands which contained scenic wonders, incorporating all of them into the one large area.

Today the park is the center of all tourist activity in the region. A number of excellent lodges, camp grounds, and tourist courts along every road make it particularly easy for the tourist to stop at will for a day or more to enjoy the various recreational facilities as his fancy dictates. In every respect the park is effectively administered: food and lodging prices are held to a reasonable figure, the cleanliness of the buildings and grounds is regularly inspected, and the landscape is protected from commercial exploitation.

The center of the park’s activities is the Game Lodge, a monstrous Victorian hotel built in 1919 and operated under a private lease. Close by the Game Lodge are cabins, stores, eating establishments, the park zoo, a museum, and the offices of the state park officials. The Lodge, those with a flair for nostalgia will recall, achieved international renown in 1927 when President Coolidge made it the summer White House. It lies on US. 16, thirty-two miles from Rapid City and seventeen miles from the town of Custer.

It behooves the writer to mention at this point that the museum connected with the Game Lodge is by no means the drab and dusty sort of collection of impedimenta associated with the vicinity that is so often found in museums at scenic sites. Indeed, this fine attraction is an assemblage of geological, paleontological, and historical items which trace with rare discernment the whole history of the Hills through the ages, and up to our own day. The visitor who fails to pass an hour in this exciting spot will have missed the heart of the Hills entirely.

_Harney Peak_

Harney Peak stands like a sentinel in Custer Park. The highest point in the Black Hills, it rises to an altitude of 7,242 feet, 4,000 feet above the prairie floor outside the Hills. Higher by 900 feet than Mount Washington in New Hampshire, it is the highest mountain east of the Rockies.

High as it is, Harney Peak is by no means the typical mountain which tourists come to expect after a trip through Colorado, for example, or western Wyoming. It is older by ages than the precipitous and craggy Rockies, and the winds and waters have worked their slow erosion on it, cutting away what high shelves and escarpments might originally have existed and leaving it, except at the top, a gentle and easy mountain that may be climbed over a trail which will scarcely tax the laziest tourist.

On the top of the peak will be found the core of granite that originally broke through the Archean shales. This granite, subject to the mechanical ravages of wind, rain, and frost, is rugged and coarse, a steep dome covered with a thick lichen. From this eminence the entire Black Hills area can be seen, rolling away in every direction—great waves of pinnacle and mountain, gradually subsiding and disappearing in the haze of distance which covers the prairies. Especially striking from this spot is the view of Cathedral Park, with its hundreds of needle-like spires and organ pipes, and, sheltered in a quiet recess, that amazing phenomenon, Sylvan Lake.

_The Needles_

The Needles Highway, a fourteen-mile stretch of road, branches off U.S. 16 about five miles west of the Game Lodge. At the time of its construction in 1920-21 it was regarded as an engineering marvel, although later exploits of American highway builders, such as the road to the top of fourteen-thousand-foot Mount Evans in Colorado, have since far overshadowed this accomplishment.

The road winds and curves in an interminable pattern, finding its way, by trial and error it seems, among the great granite spires that give the region its name. These “needles,” through the last of which the highway actually plunges in a tunnel, are the remains of a great granite plateau which once covered that entire portion of the Black Hills. Contrary to popular opinion, the rocks are not outthrusts, the result of some ancient upheaval, but the last thin vestiges of this once-solid plateau. The age-old process of erosion has carved them into the shapes they now have; and the inquiring visitor can see the process still at work, for upon close inspection this granite is found to be not the impregnable stone it appears, but rock in a late stage of disintegration. Rot is the word which actually describes this formation, and in many spots whole chunks can be picked from the side of a spire by hand. It was, as a matter of fact, this situation which made the construction of the Needles Highway possible. Had the granite been solid, the task of cutting the Needles and Iron Creek tunnels would have been so expensive as to prohibit the entire undertaking.

_Sylvan Lake_

Not all of the scenery in the Black Hills was created by Nature. Sylvan Lake, in many respects the most beautiful corner of the region, was made entirely by hand.

It was near the turn of the century when two hunters, Dr. Jennings of Hot Springs and Joseph Spencer of Chicago, got the intriguing idea of having an additional tourist attraction in the vicinity of Harney Peak—a lake.

Some lakes are difficult to construct, while some are relatively easy. Sylvan belongs in the latter category. The two imaginative gentlemen merely bought a small tract of land between two great granite shields and built a dam seventy-five feet high between the boulders. The waters of Sunday Creek, which flowed to their dam, together with local springs, at last contrived to fill the area back of the dam. Today this loveliest of lakes basks peacefully high above the world at an elevation of 6,250 feet, actually on top of a ridge, at the north terminal of the Needles Highway.

It is easy for any lover of water scenes to become enthusiastic as he describes the colorations of his favorite lake, so I shall merely state that Sylvan never looks the same in two consecutive moments. Not having the symmetry of natural lakes or the tremendous depths of glacial pools, this body of water plays the role of mirror to the fabulous rock shapes which surround it; and indeed it is a source of never-ending delight to watch the cloud and sun patterns as they wrestle with the shadows of the rocks on its surface.

For many years Sylvan Lake and its environs were operated privately. A hotel catered to the tourists who bounced over the privately built road in buggies and horse-drawn busses. In 1919 the property was purchased by the state of South Dakota, and since that time it has been operated as a public facility. When the original hotel burned, in the thirties, the state built with funds procured from the federal government a comfortable and modern hostelry, the most amazing feature of which is the expansive dining room with picture windows looking out over the lake to Harney Peak.

The hotel is small, as resort hotels go, containing only fifty rooms, and the tourist would do well to arrange for accommodations in advance of his visit. There are, however, a number of cabins operated in conjunction with the main building, and except at the height of the season rooms can probably be found in the annexes. Along the lake shore an excellent restaurant, independent of the hotel, serves the needs of the traveler who has only a few hours to spend at this stop.

_Mount Rushmore_

From Sylvan Lake around back of the north side of Harney Peak it is a drive of but a few miles to the second man-made wonder of the Hills—the Mount Rushmore Memorial.

Perhaps no one thing has done so much to make the Black Hills known throughout the world as this incredible undertaking—the carving in the natural granite face of a mountain of the faces of our four most revered presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. “Teddy” is included for his lasting service to the people of the United States as the president who saw the Panama Canal project through Congress and into being. The military and economic values of that enterprise so deeply impressed the sculptor of this mammoth frieze that he insisted upon elevating TR into the august company of the other three great statesmen.

The whole story of the memorial would fill several volumes, and indeed has already done so. Briefly, the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, wished to perpetuate a patriotic motif in stone figures so large that they would attract visitors from every corner of the country and impress upon them the glories of the democracy which the four presidents had done so much to build and sustain. The sculptor’s own words were: “I want, somewhere in America, on or near the Rockies, the backbone of the continent, a few feet of stone that carries the likenesses, the dates, and a word or two of the great things we accomplished as a Nation, placed so high that it won’t pay to pull it down for lesser purposes.”

The actual construction work started in 1926, and the formal dedication was made by President Coolidge in the summer of 1927. Between nine hundred thousand and a million dollars went into the gigantic task, including money for supplies, wages, and the sculptor’s own personal needs during the fifteen years he spent on the project. He died in 1941, and the work was completed a few months later by his son.

The immensity of the undertaking can be grasped when the dimensions are noted. The face of each of the figures, for example, measures sixty feet from chin to forehead.

The rough carving was done by dynamite. Borglum, working from a carefully constructed model, would mark on the sheer sides of the great mountain the lines where he wanted the stone peeled away. Then a blast would be set off in the hope that the rock displacement would approximate the lines marked out, and from that point the work had to be done by hand. At first, taking lessons from the miners working for him who had many years of experience in blasting the hard granites of the region, Borglum was able to reach only within a foot of the final figure by dynamiting. As he became more proficient in the use of the explosives he got to the point where his original blasts would shed the stone to a matter of an inch or less from the final cut surface. The head of Washington was finished in 1930, that of Jefferson in 1936, that of Lincoln a year later, and that of Theodore Roosevelt, the final figure, in 1941.

There are no tourist facilities at the site of the Memorial. Like every other place in the Black Hills, however, Rushmore can be reached in a few minutes’ drive from any one of a number of near-by points where a tourist might be stopping. Borglum’s studio, situated on a prominence a few hundred yards from the carvings, gives the best view of the scene and is open to the public.

_Crazy Horse_

It is not entirely accurate to refer to the Mount Rushmore Memorial as _the_ other man-made wonder in the Hills. At the moment it is the only such marvel outside of Sylvan Lake; but in twenty-five or thirty years it will have to share that honor with the Crazy Horse Memorial, a statue carved on top of Thunderhead Mountain, between Harney Peak and the town of Custer. This gigantic carving, which will be an entire figure and not a mere bas-relief, will be an equestrian statue of the great Sioux chief, Crazy Horse, who led his nation during the desperate years between 1866 and 1877. The chief will be mounted on a prancing steed, his hair blowing, as if in the wind, behind him.

The Indians themselves can take the credit for this fabulous idea. Chief Henry Standing Bear, a resident of the Pine Ridge reservation, is said to have had his inspiration after a visit to Mount Rushmore. Why not, he wondered, erect some monument to an outstanding red man, so that when the last of his people have been assimilated into the white man’s society, visitors to what was once the heart of the Indian country can reflect for a moment upon the greatness of that lost race?

Standing Bear wrote his idea to Korczak Ziolkowski, an energetic and imaginative sculptor, and suggested that Chief Crazy Horse would make a fitting symbol of the Indians’ struggle for existence. This was in 1940.

The sculptor took to the idea, but because of the events of World War II he was unable to commence work on the project until 1947. Since then he has been setting off two blasts of dynamite a day, carving away the rock at the top of Thunderhead. But even yet the first faint outlines of the eventual statue are only barely discernible. Ziolkowski estimates that the entire task will consume a quarter of a century, if not more, and will cost not less than five million dollars. If this figure sounds high compared with the less than a million spent on Rushmore, perhaps the measurements will provide an explanation: the horse upon which the chief will be seated will be four hundred feet from nose to tail, and the entire work, from pedestal to top, will be more than five hundred feet in height.

_Mount Coolidge_

In this same general region lies another prominent Black Hills landmark which every tourist should take time to visit—Mount Coolidge. With a height of 6,400 feet, this peak is by no means an outstanding mountain, being ranked by a good half dozen higher within the Hills. But from its summit, which can be reached by an auto road leading off U.S. 85A a few miles to the north of Wind Cave Park, an amazing vista can be seen. To the east, on a clear day, the White River Badlands loom as a great valley sixty miles away. To the south one can see across the high rolling hills all the way into Nebraska, and to the west landmarks in Wyoming are clearly visible. On the summit a stone lookout tower has been built for the convenience of visitors.

_Jewel Cave and Ice Cave_

Since the Black Hills are underbedded so widely by limestone, it is not surprising to find in them not one but several memorable caverns. There are, as a matter of fact, a dozen or more well-known large caves; but outside of Wind Cave, only Jewel Cave has been opened and fully prepared for public visit. The expense of exploring, lighting, and carving trails in the others has kept them off the market, so to speak, for in a region so packed with scenic delights two great caverns are about as much as the traffic will bear.

Jewel Cave lies some fourteen miles west of Custer on U.S. 16, almost at the Wyoming-South Dakota border. It is a small cave, with only two tours marked out in it, one a mile long and the other two miles. It is noted for its wealth of colorful crystalline deposits, totally unlike the delicate filigree work to be found in Wind Cave.

The cave was discovered by two prospectors, who proceeded to develop their property for commercial gain. In 1934 they sold the cave and such of its environs as they owned to the Newcastle, Wyoming, Lions Club and the Custer Chamber of Commerce. These two organizations sought to popularize it further as a lure to tourists who would have to travel through their towns to reach the scene. In 1938 the federal government took it over and made a national monument of it.

Not far from Jewel Cave is the famous Ice Cave. This cavern gets its name from the current of cold air which blows from its mouth, cold and clammy on even the hottest of summer days. The Ice Cave is not officially open to the public, and has not even been totally explored. Forest rangers and Park Service employees have charted some of it and have searched out certain channels in the strange formation, and from their meager reports it would seem that if Ice Cave is ever fully opened it will vie with New Mexico’s Carlsbad in beauty and grandeur.

For the curious tourist the only possibility at the moment is to take the lovely off-route trip to the cave’s entrance, a natural arch twenty feet high and seventy-five feet wide.

In addition to Wind Cave, Jewel Cave, and Ice Cave, there are a number of other caverns of varying interest and underground beauty which have been opened and exploited by private individuals. In many cases these are but indifferently arranged for public inspection, but can be tracked down by the visitor by means of the garish signs which too often manage to clutter the otherwise unblemished scenery.

_Just Scenery_

The foregoing are only a very few of the scenic wonders of the Black Hills. Detailed information on the various other scenic features is easily to be had at any of the hotels and tourist courts in the Hills, and brochures covering practically every landmark are available gratis, thanks to the enthusiasm of the local chambers of commerce, the Black Hills and Badlands Association, and the state of South Dakota. The area is crisscrossed with good roads, and no matter which route one takes to his eventual destination, every mile will be marked by breath-taking views and natural wonders.

The region, except at the summits of the peaks, lies at an average altitude of some five thousand feet. Cool nights are thus guaranteed, regardless of the temperatures by day. The highest mean temperature ranges, during the six months between April and November, from 60 to 85 degrees. Light outing clothes are suggested for day wear, and light wraps are always in order after dark.

The rainfall during this same six-month period, averaged over fifty years, amounts to three inches per month; what small showers do occur take place most usually in an hour or so of the early afternoon, and refresh rather than hinder the tourist.

The hillsides are covered with a mass of shrub and tree growth, and an earnest searcher can find specimens of no less than fifty-two varieties. Yellow pine, spruce, cedar, ash, aspen, alder, dogwood, and cottonwood are most in evidence.

The bird lover will find the Black Hills nothing less than a vast aviary, more than two hundred species having been seen in the region. Animal life is almost as widely represented, although the casual visitor is not likely to come upon a native mountain lion or gray wolf. The assistance of forest rangers and Park Service employees is available in locating the habitats of some of the rarer varieties of wildlife.

As might be expected, the fisherman will find plenty of opportunity to ply his pole in this region. There are nearly 150 miles of stream and lake frontage in the Black Hills, and the waters are liberally stocked by the state hatcheries. In addition to trout, the angler will encounter pike, pickerel, bluegills, black bass, and perch.

Finally, there are the annual celebrations and fairs, which are always of interest to the outsider, for they help dramatize the particular region where they are held and its historical background. July and August are the months for these celebrations, and notices of coming events will be found posted prominently’ along the tourist routes. Four such outstanding occasions are Black Hills Range Days at Rapid City, Gold Discovery Days at Custer, the Belle Fourche Round-Up, and the Days of ’76 at Deadwood. The Deadwood celebration, it might be added, celebrates not the Revolutionary War, but the discovery of gold in Deadwood Gulch in 1876.