American Sabbatical 018: 9/21/96

9/21...Badlands.

The sun shone on our backs as we spun rubber onto I-90 at Murdo on Saturday morning. We had sworn NO SUPER HIGHWAYS, at the start of this thing, but east-west on the high plains is all 75mph whichever route, and we’d set a goal to be in the Black Hills for the equinox. So we joined the transAmerican stream. Lots of Luminas and Saturns from Minnesota, and the big rigs rolling. And billboards. Had you forgotten about billboards? SEE THE 50 FOOT TALL T-REX AT WALL DRUG. But out here in the vast center billboards can’t begin to block the view , and they provide some comic relief to the limitless astonishment. It’s not that this Great American Desert is so empty. It’s simply too much. And too subtle. An infinite variety of beige. ALLIGATORS AT WALL DRUG. Time gets twisted out here. Billboards, 75mph, and half the cars are Fifties vintage. Motels have old Chevy motifs. 5 CENT COFFEE AT WALL DRUG. Maybe Eisenhower is still President. But bigger anachronisms were just over the horizon.

Then we were in the badlands, and completely out of time. Naked geology can do that to you. The bones of a million years thrust up in our faces to silence us. There is a solemn ritual pace to a stream of American Pilgrims seeing our National Sights. We rush to get there, then we entrain at 25mph, nod and smile at each other. Check out the license plates. This is one of our rituals of identification. We live in such a place. The badlands have resisted our urge to modify the landscape by their sheer alien-ness, so now we worship them by caravanning through with Kodaks. The intensity of windcarved sedimentary rock rising like a nightmare out of the pure horizontal disrupts your vision. So opened by the wideangle plains our eyes are dazzled by the orange and yellow intensities. We go around hushed like in a cathedral. Pilgrims in Winnebagos.

But the great equinocial equalizer, the big chief Hush Yo Mouth, was just ahead. We turned off Winnebago Way onto a dirt road south, back into rolling prairie, and lost our bearings completely. Tiptoeing over the washboard ruts we came up alongside four bull buffalo striding their majestic way across the seamless grassland. We rolled alongside them, creatures out of different times, until our trails diverged. You go looking for history and you might fall through the gap.

Open-mouthed we made more dust down the road, the beyond-old badlands now appearing on our left and the immensity on our right. Below us in Sage Creek valley we saw a campground hard-by the deepcut creek with its line of cottonwoods. Descending we were in a rolling sienna grassland dotted with dark clumps of cedar (or juniper). Round the bend the road was framed with two more bull bison, like the family estate gates of the west. Any road that leads between two buffalo, we decided had to be all right.

But the campground proved to be dry and dusty and full of flies under a hot sun. It was a horse campground, too, and they were fragrantly in residence. While we were debating staying in a magic, timeless place that promised an olfactory adventure with bugs, we grabbed our drawing materials and wandered down to the creek. Topping the bank we spooked a coyote, who stopped, looked, sped a few yards, stopped, looked, loped up the far bank, and, looking over his shoulder occasionally, made a serpent-trail across the far grassland. Right through a prairie-dog village, which set them to scattering and chattering. Here we were caught between the seasons and not sure which end is up.

We are seeing a great many museums in our travels. They are large and small, open and indoors, walk through and behind glass, with many different types of exhibits. The aim of each is to convey the facts about ways of life and people that no longer exist - Seneca Falls commemorates a convention, Cahokia tries to recreate a vast pre-Columbian city, the Prairie Homestead Museum tries to put us alone in a sod house on a claim in the early 1900s. And it succeeds.

The Prairie Homestead Museum is located near the Badlands National Park
(an incredible place on its own) in central southern South Dakota. The original sod house was built into a grassy slope leading down to a small creek valley. Huge cottonwood trees and smaller shrubs grow near the creek. The modern road winds down the shallow valley and a dirt lane leads off it across a small bridge to the entrance building which houses a gift shop and historical display .

There are signs in front of each structure that seem informal, just a few facts on each, and they are unobtrusive. At the well, the sign says it’s sixty feet deep and in dry years only gave a few buckets of water a day. The sign by the root cellar noted that this structure was the only one that really had to be reconstructed since it had fallen in. The rest was as it was when it was last occupied (in the 1940’s !!). The original family had been followed by a bachelor who lived there until he died.

The Homestead Act of 1862 was an incentive for farmers to settle on the Plains. If you were over 21, as a family or individual you could put down $18 for 160 acres. You needed to start making improvements immediately and to live there for five years. Then it was yours. (I still don’t know if women could or did stake claims on their own???). Later the rules were changed a little and you could plunk down only $14 at filing, have proof of six months’ residence and have 10 acres under plow to get your claim. Homesteaders said the government laid a bet, 160 acres for $18 that you would starve to death within 5 years!

This homestead house is three rooms. The original sod house cut into the bank on the north side of the draw is two rooms, a front kitchen (about 15 feet square and six feet high) with two small windows cut above ground level, and a small back bedroom, just bigger than the double bed. There were roof beams covered by branches and sod. The walls clearly show the block of grassy sod cut and stacked and then daubed on the inside (with whitewash?). I imagined the labor of cutting the sod blocks and stacking up the walls. The floors are dirt and somewhat uneven. A small wood cook stove stands in the corner. The rooms are plainly furnished but have all the necessities, table and shelves and cupboards, bed and washbasin, wood bucket too. It looks as though the owner has just stepped out for a moment.

Outside things seemed barer. I went up the path by the house and stood next to the roof (the only small cactuses I saw in the whole state grew on the roof of the sod house). Again the sense of endless grassy distances. The barn and outbuildings are small rude buildings. A small area for a horse or cow is fenced in. The sod cellar has a few empty shelves. A very old car is stashed in one of the sheds (the sign said the claimstakers had not owned it). The farm machinery, the horse drawn plows and the cultivators and hay rakes, are probably better than the original owner used.The area is dotted with prairie dog holes which can easily sprain an ankle. My Antonia also mentions huge snakes, but I haven’t seen any.