The Close Encounter

Formed in the time after the extinction of the dinosaur and before the last ice age, the Black Hills are among the oldest mountains in the United States. Native Americans have been living in this area since 7000 B.C. In the 1500’s the Native Americans known as the Arikara came to call this land their’s. They were joined by the Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa and Pawnee and became known as the plains Indians. This was a great hunting land as there were a great amount of buffalo that congregated there.

French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle first claimed the Louisiana Territory, which he named for King Louis XV, during a 1682 canoe expedition down the Mississippi River. Eighty years later France ceded the land to Spain, and went on to lose most of it’s holding in the New World to England during the French and Indian War.

France regained the land in 1800 with making a secret treaty with Spain which made the United States a little nervous when they found out. President Thomas Jefferson claimed that it would become, “a point of eternal friction with us.” He was concerned that in order to defend the United States we would have to, “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” So he sent representatives to Napoleon Bonaparte pressing him to sell the land to the United States. In 1803, for the sum of $15 million dollars, President Jefferson brokered the deal known as the Louisiana Purchase in which 287,000 square miles of land became the United State’s. This purchase more than doubled the size of the United States and included the land known as South Dakota. President Jefferson immediately assigned the task of exploring this new territory to his personal secretary Merriwhether Lewis and Lewis’s friend William Clark.

It was in the 1800’s that the Lakota Sioux moved into the Black Hills and drove all the other tribes out. They named the mountains Paha Sapa “hills that are black” and this became a very sacred land believed to be the “center of the world” to the Sioux. The U.S. military understood the sacred nature of this land to the Native Americans and struggled to keep the settlers from encroaching on their territory. As more and more settlers came onto the Lakota land the relationship between the Sioux and the “white man” deteriorated. It was then that the Sioux began to raid the settlements. In 1868 the United States entered into a series of treaties with the Lakota Sioux to stop the raids against the settlers and against those building the railroad these treaties became known as the Fort Laramie Treaty. But in 1874 Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Calvary discovered gold in the French River while exploring for land to build a fort on. This gold discovery was reported on by the newspaper men that were traveling with the cavalry, and the gold rush was on. Against their will, the Lakota Sioux were packed up and moved onto a reservation, away from their sacred Paha Sapa and to this day are fighting to regain their territory. The United States Supreme Court ruled on July 23rd 1980 that removing the Sioux from their sacred lands was illegal and the Sioux were award $106 million dollars remuneration. The Sioux are not interested in money, they want their land back and refuse to accept even the smallest amount for fear it would appear as if they agreed to their removal from their “center of the world.” Today the interest bearing account is up over $800 million dollars.

This land is truly beautiful, and the National Park Service has done a wonderful job in preserving the land and making it accessible to the public. There is now a herd of buffalo that populates the area, and the Needles Highway became a reality in 1922.

It is at this juncture that I will tell you a little story of my encounter of a close kind on the Needles Highway. My husband, daughter and I were camping in the Black Hills and decided to take a day trip to Mt. Rushmore and travel the Needles Highway. It had been years since I had first been there and I was excited to share this trip with my family. It is a harrowing drive, no matter how safe it really is and the beauty of the granite spires are breath taking. As we came along a bend in the road I saw an amazing sight, there at the end of what appeared to be a driveway was a full sized buffalo. It seemed to me a rich person must live there as the taxidermy of an animal that big must cost a fortune. (Yes, I was still a city girl at heart). I wanted to see if this buffalo was a mail box, I didn’t see one there so it must be, I rolled down my window and had my husband pull up close so I could reach up and pull on the chin hairs of this huge beast. We pulled up close and I was beginning to reach up and grab those chin hairs when suddenly out pops a tongue. He was alive! He seemed nice enough, but I thought better of pulling those hairs, quickly rolled up the window and we sped off down the road. I was in shock, for about 2 minutes, and as the buffalo was not chasing us I had to laugh at my foolishness.

https://youtu.be/l8xpVSJXEY4