Adams Museum Today was a day for contrasts; different traditions of the American west. I spent the early part in the Wild West, Deadwood. The Adams Museum tells the story of the town. It’s named for a mining executive who founded the museum in the 1930s, W.E. Adams. The museum is filled with items of all sorts, ranging from the deeply profound to the inane. All of it is packed closely together. Fans of western lore could get lost in here. The first part talks about Deadwood as myth and url=http://www.cityofdeadwood.com/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B269A8C80-9F36-4D72-A17D-DF18E23E10FF%7Dreality. The town was founded in 1875 and quickly rose to prominence. During this time, the rest of the country was feeling nostalgia for a vanishing frontier. Deadwood fit perfec... read more

Today was another day in Custer State Park. The park has two distinct halves, one mountains and one prairie. I saw the best of the prairie yesterday, so I headed for the mountains. I wanted to get out of the car and climb, which meant Harney Peak. Harney Peak Trail The peak is the highest mountain in the Black Hills. As the tourist authorities love to point out, it is also the highest mountain between the Rocky Mountains and the French Pyrenees! To the Lakota, the peak is sacred, the Center Of All That Is. The forces that regulate the universe meet on the peak. Honored elders would climb the peak to receive visions of the future. These days, park visitors climb it by the url=http://travel.nytimes.com/2009... read more

To many of the local Native American tribes, the Black Hills are a sacred space, the equivalent of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the hills sat on large quantities of gold, and miners ultimately desecrated them. Soon afterward, the hills became a tourist honey pot, attracting them by the thousands. These days the area is filled with attractions, ranging from the tasteful and informative to the inane. I explore some of them today. Wall Drug To start with, I needed breakfast, so I went to what is probably the biggest tourist trap of them all, Wall Drug. Wall Drug started as an actual drugstore run by Ted Husted in a small town near th... read more

Today begins several days investigating the history of the western plains. The most notable parts of that history, unfortunately, involve greed, betrayal, and warfare. Fort Robinson was a center for much of it. The story of the fort is told in a museum in the original commander’s quarters. Fort Robinson Museum The story starts with a treaty called the Fort Laramie Treaty, signed in 1868. At the time, the Sioux, a group of related tribes, were the most feared Native American group on the plains. They were nomadic hunters and excellent horsemen, who lived hunting buffalo. They agreed to give up the eastern half of what is now North and South Dakota, in return for eternal possession of the url=http://www.ndstud... read more

Nebraska Sandhills Today, I crossed one of the most evocative regions of the entire trip so far, the url=http://www.visitnebraska.gov/things-to-do/road-trips/byways-itineraries/99-sandhills-journey-scenic-bywayNebraska Sandhills. This region is a place for visitors to lose themselves, and possibly find themselves. Here the farms of the Great Plains turn into the wide open spaces of the west. The road starts with a premonition of what is to come. It’s located next to a big rail yard. The rail yard is filled with coal trains. In the relatively flat plains, trains are miles long. The road runs next to a busy rail line, so those trains were passing by on a regular basis. The first part of the road looks like the Nebraska I knew already, flat and covered with farms. Things changed soon enough. The plants disappeared to... read more