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road trips, South Dakota, travel inspiration

A Literary Road Trip Across South Dakota

July 25, 2020 Terri Peterson Smith Leave a comment

Visiting South Dakota State and National Parks on a Road Trip from Minnesota to Wyoming

Geese float peacefully among the cliffs of Palisades State Park.

South Dakota seems synonymous with family road trips, summer vacations and heading “out west.” Every time we drive that direction from Minneapolis, there’s a feeling of anticipation as the landscape gradually changes from hills, to flat prairie, to a more rugged and rocky type of Great Plains geology.

Recently, my husband and I set out like Lewis and Clark to explore South Dakota—only with much more pleasant accommodations in our little Winnebago Rialta RV. Our itinerary ran from east to west along I-90 where we hoped to see stunning rock formations, historic locales, uncrowded spaces and the wildlife for which this region is known. Our journey included stops at three parks: Palisades State Park, Badlands National Park and Custer State Park.

Hitting the plains fires up my imagination with images of rugged pioneers, native Americans and western life–images that came from books I’ve been reading since childhood, starting with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series. In fact, De Smet, where Laura lived as an adult is about an hour and a half north of our first stop in Palisades Park. So if you’re a fan you might want to veer north for a visit. Be sure to read the less happy but more accurate story of Laura’ real life, Prairie Fires (a great for book groups).

Palisades State Park

Split Rock Creek, the centerpiece of Palisades State Park in eastern South Dakota, isn’t a huge body of water but it’s had an outsized impact on this rocky gem of a spot about 20 miles from Sioux Falls.

Here, the creek cut deep gorges through the billion-year-old Sioux quartzite rock that lines its banks. That resulted in 50-foot vertical cliffs and intricate rock formations that are popular with kayakers, rock climbers and photographers.

Back in the mid-1800s, the rushing creek also powered a flour mill on the bluff that overlooks the park. Starting in 1862, the tiny town of Palisades grew up around the the mill. However, with the promise of free lots, the railroad soon lured businesses away to the nearby town of Garretson where its rail yard was located and the town of Palisades faded away.

Palisades State Park opened in 1972 and has remained one of the South Dakota’s smallest parks—until now. For comparison, at 71,000 acres, Custer State Park at the opposite end of I-90, dwarfs its little cousin, Palisades. But in spring of 2020, about 270 acres were added to the park for a total of nearly 435 acres. Park officials expect to add 75 new camp sites for a total of 109 sites along with more cabins, hiking trails, day use areas, improved habitat for wildlife viewing, and park programs.

Badlands National Park

Midway across South Dakota, the Badlands gouge through the flat plains with eons-old rock formations that resemble a moonscape. On previous trips to points further west we simply drove through the park for a quick look. We thought it didn’t offer much more than barren (though pretty impressive) rock. This time we stayed for two days. Our hikes and scenic drives revealed not only fascinating geological formations but also plenty of life including wildflowers, agitated prairie dogs and mountain goats galore.

But it surely doesn’t seem like great farmland. That didn’t stop the hopeful homesteaders who arrived in this area after the Homestead Act of 1862 provided the opportunity for folks to head west to acquire land. It was theirs for, say $18 for 160 acres if they lived on it for five years. You can view the some of the land they settled at the Badlands National Park’s Homestead Overlook. Most of the land claims turned into “Starvation Claims” and were abandoned or sold.

Here’s a story I’ll bet you haven’t heard about: African Americans were prominent among the region’s homesteaders. Many were introduced to the area when they were Buffalo Soldiers. You can read about these pioneers in a gripping novel, The Personal History of Rachel Dupree by Ann Weisgarber. The book starts out with a family lowering their little girl down a well to scoop out the last of the water on their drought-stricken farm. It grabbed me from the very start. Also, The Conquest by Oscar Micheaux is a semi-autobiographical novel of a black homesteader in Gregory County during the early 1900’s

The faces at Mount Rushmore don’t wear masks. Neither do the tourists who visit.

Crazy Horse Memorial offers a nice little museum and Native American cultural programming.

We visited on the way to Custer State park we visited South Dakota’s trademark, Mount Rushmore. The four faces appear on promotional material, license plates and have been featured during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Cool if you’ve never seen it before, but crowded. We headed to a similarly giant sculpture nearby, the Crazy Horse Memorial, which I liked better because it has a nice little museum and Native American programming.

Custer State Park

At the opposite end of I-90, we explored Custer State Park, South Dakota’s largest state park. At 71,000 acres the huge park seems more like a national park. It offers hiking, boating, fishing and plenty of wildlife including bison traffic jams.

One of my favorite hikes was the one up Black Elk Peak, a 7,242-foot granite mountain with an historic stone firetower at the top. It’s considered the highest peak east of the rockies, depending on if you think the 8,749-foot Guadaloupe Peak in Texas is east of the Rockies or part of them . The beginning of the 7.6-mile loop trail is bedazzled with shiny mica rock which makes it look like it’s paved with rhinestones, quite magical.

The porch at State Game Lodge in Custer State Park. The lodge was the summer white house for presidents Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower.

For non-campers, Custer offers historic lodges and cabins, including State Game Lodge built of native stone and wood in 1920 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It served as the “Summer White House” for President Calvin Coolidge in 1927 and was visited by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. Book ahead and stay in their historic rooms. Even if you’re not staying there, the Lodge welcomes diners in the restaurant and you can carry out food to eat outdoors. We enjoyed cocktails on the Lodge’s front porch before returning to our camp site.

Read Up

Anyone interested in enriching their South Dakota travel experience will find an abundance of great books about both the state’s history and modern life, too. Here’s my list:

Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Life of Two American Warriors–Stephen Ambrose

Dakota : A Spiritual Geography–Kathleen Norris

The Last Stand–Nathaniel Philbrook

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee–Dee Brown

The Golden Bowl –Frederick Feikema Manfred

Buffalo for the Broken Heart–Dan O’Brien

Ideas for Book Clubs, Uncategorized

Move over, Jack Kerouac. Five Books by Women to Inspire Your Next Trip

April 9, 2014 Terri Peterson Smith Leave a comment

The most famous travel books have been written by men: Travels with Charley, On the Road, and Blue Highways, to name a few. But women have been “on the road,” too, and not just Route 66.

I love reading books about women’s adventures. I especially like funny stories, with plenty of travel mistakes, misadventures, mix-ups. And, I appreciate most the stories that weren’t inspired by trauma, bad boyfriends, dead or abusive husbands, or the authors’ search for new love. Eat…pray…you know what I’m talking about. Instead, I go for the stories that were simply rooted in a woman’s daring and love of adventure. Here are a few favorites.

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, Isabella Bird
The amazing Isabella Bird was an Englishwoman who lived a life of continual travel and was, as a result, the first woman to be elected the the Royal Geographic Society. She came to Colorado in 1873, three years before it became a state. She traveled solo through the wilderness and covered more than eight hundred miles during her journey around Colorado, which she described in letters that she wrote to her younger sister in Scotland. The letters were published in 1879 as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, part travelogue, part memoir, part character study of the people who settled on the frontier, especially “Mountain Jim,” a handsome trapper and desperado with whom she was fascinated. Bird was also one of the first of a genre that we now call “environmental writers.”

By Motor to the Golden Gate, Emily Post
Emily Post was a travel writer. Who knew? This book is a reprint of articles originally published on Colliers Magazine seven years before she became famous for her book on etiquette. In 1915, Post documented her New York-to-San Francisco road trip investigating whether it was possible to drive comfortably across the country an automobile. That was a valid question since few women of her Gilded Age background did such daring things and because she was driving on the Lincoln Highway, this country’s first transcontinental highway.

The Wilder Life, Wendy McClure
Do you travel to visit places where you can pursue hobbies or a particular interest? Wendy McClure sets the bar high for anyone who travels in pursuit of a particular passion. In her case it’s Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books and her effort to re-create “Laura World” for herself. She investigates the settings and activities that have made several generations of young readers flock to the Little House books and to the sites across the Midwest where they took place. See my article my previous post on this book and my article, Novel Destinations, for my own encounter with Laura World.

The Good Girls Guide to Getting Lost, Rachel Freidman
We’ve read plenty about bad boys on the road; Jack Kerouac is the most famous. That’s why it’s nice to learn that good girls like Rachel Friedman can take risks and open themselves to great new experiences. She goes to Ireland on a whim where she forms a friendship with a free-spirited Australian girl, a born adventurer, who spurs her on to a yearlong odyssey that takes her to Australia and South America, too, and learns to cultivate her love for adventure.

No Touch Monkey, Ayun Halliday
If you’ve ever made grievous errors in judgement while traveling, you’ll relate to Halliday’s experiences, which she doesn’t hesitate to share— from hygiene to intestinal problems to a collagen implant demonstration during Paris fashion week with her mother.I enjoyed her sarcastic writing style, her impressive globe-trotting, and her openness to adventures that wouldn’t even occur to me. She’s a witty observer of the details that most travelers see but forget about. For example, the title comes from a sign she saw in Bali with rules to assure “your enjoymen and safety” including: “Never grab a monkey. If a monkey gets on you, drop all your food and walk a way until it jumps off.”

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We Always Knew It: Nellie Oleson is a Prairie B****

July 21, 2011 Terri Peterson Smith Leave a comment

Laura Ingalls Wilder would be astounded at the interest people still have in her

alison-book — Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved stories live on through pageants, tours, biographies and through her arch enemy, Nellie Oleson.

books and her life and the many forms that interest has taken. Eighty years after the publication of the first book in her Little House on the Prairie series, The Little House in the Big Woods, Laura is big business in the towns where she lived. Wendy McClure describes these places in her great book The Wilder Life, My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie.

It’s good the Ingalls family kept moving, because it has given each tiny town where they lived, no matter how briefly they lit there, a chance to lure visitors to the family’s various homes, cabins and indentations in the sod. For example, tiny Pepin, Wisconsin, generally the site of the Little House in the Big Woods, holds Laura Ingalls Wilder Days annually in September. In De Smet, South Dakota (By the Shores of Silver Lake), they have a Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, all sorts of Laura-themed shops and restaurants and a pageant that is celebrating its the 40^th anniversary this summer. Walnut Grove, Minnesota, (On the Banks of Plum Creek) also has a pageant and a Laura Ingalls Wilder museum. Four authors appeared at the museum last weekend to promote their books about Laura.

Of course the Little House TV series made hay from the novels and it still lives on in Hallmark Channel reruns decades after it was in production. The show was super-popular in France. I once met a woman from France…. who said all that she knew about Minnesota she learned from the Little House on the Prairie TV series. Now, so far from the prairie, Carnival Cruise lines is getting in on the Laura action, with “THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE REUNION CRUISE, a 7 Day Fan-Filled Cruise to the Mexican Riviera Mexican Riviera with the ORIGINAL Cast Aboard the Carnival Splendor, November 13 – 20 2011.”

But back on the prairie….this Saturday and Sunday, Allison Arngrim, who played Laura’s arch enemy Nellie Oleson on the TV series, will appear at the museum in Walnut Grove. An actress and stand up comedian, Arngrim pokes fun at her days as that ringlet wearing little priss, Nellie, in her book, “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch.” (I love the French title: La Petite Garce Dans La Prairie.) Check out a clip of her comedy show of the same name in which she asks, “Do you know what it means to be Nellie Olesen? It means someone has celled me a bitch every day since I was eleven.”

Seems like it was worth it.

Minnesota

The real Wilder Life versus my imaginary Wilder Life. I’ll take the latter.

June 10, 2011 Terri Peterson Smith Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life in which she recounts her love of Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s Little House on the Prairie books and her effort to re-create “Laura World” for herself. So, it was a fun coincidence to read a post on the Algonquin Books blog about An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. Dillard says of her childhood:

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

That describes the qualities that have sent generations of young readers flocking to the Little Housebooks, and surely what sent McClure on her journey into “Laura World.” What fan of “Half-Pint Ingalls” (who thanks to McClure now has her own Twitter account

200px-Laura_ingalls_wilder_reasonably_small — Laura "Half Pint" Ingalls has her own Twitter account @halfpintingalls.

@halfpintingalls) hasn’t secretly wanted to venture just a little into Laura World? It was a relief to find someone so quirkily devoted to books and McClure’s descriptions of her attempts at some of the Little House activities—churning butter, for example, or making Vanity Cakes—are hilarious. I particularly enjoyed the chapter where she and her ever-patient significant other, Chris, spend a bit of time on a farm learning do-it-yourself skills that might have been of use in Laura World but it turns out they’ve joined a gathering of fundamentalists preparing for “end times.”

I’m a huge advocate of reading books to get a better understanding of places one is traveling. And, a “field trip” to the place where a book took place extends the experience of reading the book. For example, what does fiction such as the Little House books tell us about life in the late 18^th century and how does that experience affect us now? How well would I measure up to the challenges of pioneer life? How does the Long Winter of Wilder’s experience compare to the long winter I just experienced? I can tell you one thing: it makes me happy to have central heat and store-bought sticks of butter in the frig. I’m happy I don’t have to butcher a hog and make head cheese, though I’ve always had a kind of gross fascination with the way the Little House younguns blew up pig bladders and used them as balls.

But McClure also delves into the research about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the dynamics of Laura’s relationship with her daughter, Rose. She discovers just how far the Little House books deviate from the life of the real Wilders and, (Holy Hoedown!) the suspicion that Rose had more of a hand in writing the books than Laura.

It makes me wonder if there’s a danger in learning too much. It just might diminish the magic of reading in the first place. The real Laura World doesn’t hold a hand-dipped tallow candle to the world Laura created in our imaginations. I’m going to meet up later this summer with a group of Wilder fans from the Book Vault (see my previous post) in Oskaloosa, Iowa as they hit the Little House hot spots near Minneapolis where I live. I’ll dip my toes in the water On the Banks of Plum Creek, but my view of Laura World will remain the one in my own imagination.

Off The Beaten Page Travel