By the time we rolled into Chadron, it was pretty late, so we went straight to our hotel and basically passed out for the night. But the next morning, we went back through town and hit up the Museum of the Fur Trade. To be honest, we almost skipped it because we weren't sure it would be so awesome, but we didn't and boy were we glad! It was a very cool museum, and we learned a lot about the early North American settlements and relations with Native Americans. We ended up spending way more time there than we meant to, and did some shopping in the gift shop as well.
One of the canoes early settlers used to get around the lakes and rivers of N. America:
In addition to the entire inside part of the museum, there's also an outdoor area where they have...
A garden with old timey (heirloom) seeds:
A recreation of an old trading post, with lots and lots of stuff for sale:
A sample tee-pee:
The outside of the trading post/lodging area, built into the side of the earth for protection:
The housing quarters (aka, room), with lots and lots of furs covering the bed.
After we learned a ton about the fur trade, we hit the road toward South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore!
We ended up driving through many a beautiful state parks on our way through S. Dakota, one of which being the Wind Cave National Parks. We actually stopped to try to go down into the cave, but we would have had to wait like an hour and a half and we had too many other things to do that day to hang around. Instead, we settled for checking out the museum and learning about the hundreds of miles of passageways crammed into a square mile of earth, or something crazy like that! Certainly something to go back and check out some day :)
As we were making our way up to Mt. Rushmore, we stopped in Custer at a delightful purple pig ice cream store for some delicious ice cream :)
And then we couldn't resist to take a pic with one of the painted bison around town (there are lots, decorated by different artists). We weren't sure we'd see any live bison, so we had to jump on a photo op with fake ones....
Not too long after passing through Custer, we were driving and my mom says, "look, it's Lincoln" and I looked over and saw a face in the rock, and then said, no, that must be Washington because he's on the left, and then we realized we were both over-excited idiots because it was actually none other than Crazy Horse! The Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1948 when a Lakota elder asked sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to do a large scale rock sculpture depicting a Native American hero (Crazy Horse). He agreed and began and worked on the project mostly independently for the next 34 years, until his death. Work still continues on the project, and the privately funded endeavor is supposed to be done around 2120....The whole thing is going to be like 500 times the size of Mt. Rushmore.
Large plaster of what the final sculpture will look like, with the progress in the background:
Mt. Rushmore
After spending some time with Crazy Horse, we hit the road and continued on our way to Mt. Rushmore. My mom was especially excited to see Mt. Rushmore because she remembered hearing about how amazing it was when she was just a kid and has wanted to see it in person ever since. I was glad I got to be there with her when she saw it for the first time :) Even though we had just come from Crazy Horse, which was bigger, I must say, it didn't diminish seeing Mt. Rushmore at all. It really is very very cool! In fact, it was so cool, we couldn't stop taking photos. Below is just a smattering. We also thoroughly checked out the information center and gift shop, and did the little walk to get right under the presidents' noses. And then we checked out the Artists Studio, where you can see what the finished sculpture was supposed to look like. In case you were wondering, the sculpture never was "finished." At the start of WWII, funds to the project were terminated because money obviously needed to be used for the war effort. Unfortunately, the sculpture was declared "finished" at the same time. When the sculptors tried to pick up the project after the war was over, Congress wouldn't grant funding because it had been declared finished. Sort of a bummer...
In the Artists Studio: what the fully finished sculpture was supposed to look like.
Overall, it was really fascinating to learn more about Mt. Rushmore and to see it in person. Very cool monument!
After checking out everything we could, my mom and I had to figure out where we'd be spending the night. Our original plan got changed because the midwest had a particularly dry summer and there were fires
everywhere. In an attempt to skirt the first, a ranger suggested we head to Buffalo, Wyoming, so that's exactly what we did. It was still 4-5 hours away, so we didn't get there until late.
But speaking of Buffalo....we saw buffalo!!!!!!!!! We almost missed them, but my eagle-eyed mother saw them at the last second so we turned around to stare at them for a bit. It was dusk on this random road and it was perfectly quiet as we watched them graze. So cool!
And then we entered Wyoming!!
-ENCM
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