On Our Way Into the Black Hills For Some Caching 7/15/2010

This morning we headed out to do some caching and sightseeing in the Black Hills and into Custer State Park. Our first cache was one at the pizza restaurant just down the road from the campgrounds. Then it was on into Custer State Park as we paid our $12.00 for our 7 day pass. After we got about 2 1/2 miles into the park we rounded a curve and there were hundreds and hundreds of buffalo grazing on the lawns of the visitor's center and the lawn at the Custer Lodge. There were many many calves and all of them were wandering all over the road as we drove through.


Custer State Park is a state park and wildlife reserve in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota, USA. The park is South Dakota's largest and first state park, named after Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer. The area originally started out as sixteen sections, but was later changed into one block of land because of the challenges of the terrain. The park began to grow rapidly in the 1920s and gained new land. During the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built miles of roads, laid out parks and campgrounds, and build three dams that set up a future of water recreation at the park. In 1964 an additional 22,900 acres were added to the park. The park covers an area of over 71,000 acres of hilly terrain and is home to many wild animals.
The park is home to a famous herd of 1500 free roaming bison. Elk, mule deer, white tailed deer, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, and feral burros also inhabit the park. The park is famous for its scenery, its scenic drives (Needles Highway and the wildlife loop), with views of the bison herd and prairie dog towns. This park is easily accessible by road from Rapid City. Other nearby attractions are Wind Cave National Park, Mount Rushmore, Jewel Cave National Monument, Crazy Horse Memorial, and Badlands National Park.
The popularity of the park grew in 1927, when U.S. President Calvin Coolidge made it his "summer White House" and announced from the Black Hills that he would not seek a second full term in office in the election of 1928.
The Peter Norbeck Center is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is located on U.S. Route 16A in Custer. Exhibits focus on the park's natural history and cultural heritage, and include wildlife dioramas, a CCC bunkhouse and a gold prospecting display. The center is named for South Dakota Governor and Senator Peter Norbeck. Many of the park's naturalist programs begin at the center.
Badger Hole, also known as Badger Clark Historical Site, was the home of Charles Badger Clark (1883-1957), who was named South Dakota's first Poet Laureate in 1937[3] and was noted for his cowboy poetry. The house is maintained as it was when Clark lived there. Visitors can tour the home and hike the adjacent Badger Clark Historic Trail.
Begging Burros is a name used to refer to the donkeys in Custer State Park. For many years, these donkeys have earned this nickname as they approach various passing cars through the park begging for food. After earning this reputation, the burros have become famous now garnering the attention of most travelers through the park inside and outside of cars. Many people bring food to the park specifically for the purpose of feeding these animals. The Begging Burros inhabit one area of the park upon a hill where approximately 50 of them try to obtain any food they can. Custer State Park's roadway is blocked off by these animals to the point where a driver needs to beep his or her horn to pass and continue through the park.


We continued our drive through the park to the first cache there as we passed many campgrounds and picnic areas. We stopped several times at the scenic overlooks as we climbed into the mountains. Our first cache was on Mount Coolidge one of the highest points in the park at 6023'. It was kind of a scary drive up there as it was a narrow road with no guardrails. We got there and climbed the fire tower and took pictures of the lovely scenery of the Black Hills and read the history of the Galena Fire in the park. The 80's had been very dry and in July 1988 a flash of lightening with no rain in the storm hit a single tree and started a fire that consumed 17,000 acres of Ponderosa pine. We found our cache and were on our way back down.

Next was a cache at the Blue Bell Picnic Area which we found quickly in the woods. Then we drove to the monument of Annie Tallent. Annie Donna Tallent is recognized as the first white woman to enter the Black Hills region, arriving with the Gordon-Russell expedition in 1874. The Gordon-Russell party entered the Hills looking for gold, in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that recognized the Black Hills as a part of the Great Sioux Reservation. Tallent accompanied her husband David and son Robert on the illegal and dangerous journey overland from Sioux City, Iowa. The group of prospectors stayed at Fort Defiance/Gordon Stockade east of the current-day city of Custer during the winter, and were detained and escorted back to Sioux City by troopers from the U.S. Cavalry the following spring.
In spite of the great hardships, she fell in love with the Black Hills, describing them as "one continuous poem, replete with all that is grand, sublime, and beautiful."
The U.S. Government began to allow white settlement in the Black Hills in 1876. Tallent and her family then returned to the Hills, and settled in Deadwood for four years, after which she moved to Rapid City where she remained for fourteen years – while there she served 4 years as superintendent of public instruction in Pennington County, and three as a member of the board of education (two years as its president).
Upon her retirement in 1897 she wrote “The Black Hills: or The Last Hunting Ground of the Dakotahs,” in which she defended the white incursion into the Black Hills that violated existing treaties with the Indians. Tallent maintained that "such treaties as tend to arrest the advance of civilization, and retard the development of the rich resources of our country," should not have been entered into.
Her life, her experiences, and her observations upon the Black Hills of her day have been long interpreted by historians and others as a valid record of that particular era of history, though her writings have been labeled as racist when viewed in a more contemporary context.
Tallent lived in the Black Hills from 1876 until her death in 1901. Despite the recent furor over her period racism, she is recognized as an interesting figure among the pioneers of the Black Hills, and especially in the annals of early educational history in the region. After finding the cache we headed into Custer, SD.

We did 2 caches in Custer one under the steps of an old caboose in a small aprk and the other under a bridge in the same park. Then we drove outside of Custer for our final 2 caches both along the road under some rocks. Then we drove back into Custer for a little sightseeing.

Our first stop was at the Custer Mansion B & B. Over 100 years ago, the west edge of the booming town of Custer, became the location for a prestigious Victorian Gothic style house, built and designed by native New Yorker, Newton Seymore Tubbs. Mr. Tubbs found his way to the Dakota Territory in 1877, just two years after the city of Custer had been founded by General George Custer and his Calvary.
He homesteaded 179 acres becoming the area’s first rancher/ farmer, well known as “the big sheep man” with 1,000 sheep scattered across the canyons as far south as Edgemont. The harvest of an excellent potato crop in 1890, enable Tubbs to trade potatoes for lumber from local saw mills. He then began construction of a large two-story home for he and his family, grand in style with seven gables!
For years “the house that potatoes built” was the center of Custer’s social life. Later, it served as the county old people’s home, a preschool, a local church, mini-mall, a tourist attraction know as “Monster Mansion”, a rental home and eventually in 1988, the house was turned into the first bed and breakfast in the southern Black Hills.

We drove through Custer, pop. 1860, looking at all the older buildings, shops and the statue at the Visitor's Center of the towns namesake General George Custer. Custer is generally considered to be the oldest established town and the "mother city" of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. The site of one of the major encampments of the Black Hills Expedition of Brevet Major General (a largely ceremonial title, his official rank was Lt. Colonel) George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry in 1874 and the location of the first public discovery of gold in the Black Hills, it was first established as the town of Stonewall (after Stonewall Jackson) by illegally trespassing gold-boomers in 1875, but the town was renamed quickly. Almost abandoned in 1876 when word of the much larger gold strikes in Deadwood Gulch spread, Custer City later became an established city, if smaller and less wealthy than the Northern Hills cities of Deadwood and Lead. Custer observes a "Gold Discovery Days" celebration and festivities annually in late July to celebrate the discovery of gold by the Custer expedition in nearby French Creek.

Then we stopped outside of Custer at a roadside historical marker regarding General Custer's Campsite. His orders were to go to the Black Hills (a little-known and mysterious range of mountains in present day western South Dakota), explore the territory, locate a potential site for a fort on the western side, find a connection to a previously known route from Ft. Laramie to the southwest, and report back to Ft. Lincoln by Aug. 30. Unofficially, the Expedition was also to confirm or deny the rumored presence of gold in the Black Hills. Until this time, no organized party of whites had traveled into the Black Hills and returned to civilization to tell about it, though several groups had passed around the perimeter of the mountains in earlier years.
After crossing the hot, dry Great Plains, the Black Hills Expedition arrived on the western side of the Black Hills on July 22, 1874. The entire force entered the pine-covered Hills, forging a road, cutting trees, building temporary bridges over gullies and streams - anything necessary to continue on their way with the wagon train. Working their way through the western Black Hills, the Expedition eventually arrived at a beautiful valley south of Harney’s Peak, now the site of the town of Custer, S.D. Here, and at a “permanent camp” 3 miles east, they stayed for 6 days, exploring and mapping the area, and climbing Harney’s Peak, while meanwhile back at camp civilian miners tested French Creek for gold, and found some.


Then we drove back to the Gordon Stockade located on the shore of Stockade Lake. Although the stockade was mostly a recreated fort some of the cabins were the original ones built there. The exodus of miners in August of 1875 was short-lived. Many of them returned to the area before it was officially opened to settlement by the government. They had been lured to the area by reports from the 1874 expedition to the Black Hills and Custer's report of the finding of gold on French Creek. Custer was followed within four months by the Collins-Witcher-Gordon party of pioneers who settled near Custer's former "permanent" camp. The Gordon Stockade was built by that party and it was the magnet that drew the miners to the area in 1875. The Gordon party was evicted from their stockade in April of 1875.


Then it was on to the "Badger Hole". Charles Badger Clark, Jr., was the youngest son of a popular Methodist minister of that gold rush era who inherited the rich speaking voice of his father but not the piety. During his lifetime he achieved a degree of recognition as a western poet and earned the title of South Dakota's first poet laureate, but due to his own reluctance to court fame he was largely unknown outside of his home state. The fact that his best-known poem, "A Cowboy's Prayer" was widely reprinted under the sobriquet "Author Unknown" contributed greatly to his anonymity.
Born in Albia, Iowa, on January 1, 1883, Badger moved with his family to Dakota Territory that same year and thereafter followed the good reverend's callings to Huron, Mitchell, Deadwood and Hot Springs. A restless youth, the college classroom couldn't contain Badger, and anyway, his penchant for smoking embarrassed the founding fathers of Dakota Wesleyan University, one of whom was C.B. Clark, the elder.
Next came six adventurous years in Cuba and Arizona, the first an aborted colonizing effort and the second, a popular tuberculosis cure of the time. The dry air worked an immediate improvement on Badger's health, and he proceeded to fall deeply and passionately in love with ranching, cow-punching and what he called "the last of the old, open range". In fact, mere prose failed to adequately express his enthusiasm for the life, so he sent a letter in verse to his stepmother, who submitted it to a magazine and Badger's fate was sealed.
A self-confessed individualist, Badger had heretofore put off the unpleasant task of choosing a career because he refused to become a slave to whistle, clock or bell", craving the freedom of the open skies.
When his father's ill-health drew him back to South Dakota, Badger's ranching days were over forever, but the " flavor of camp smoke and the bawlin' of the cattle" colored his poetry for the rest of his life, and he never did capitulate to the walled-in lifestyle he so feared.
It soon became apparent however, that the slim output of poetry written between frequent hiking trips and horse back riding was not going to support even his modest needs. Necessity forced Badger to accept speaking engagements, which brought to light a natural speaking style and sharp wit. Although dangerously close to a " real job" the speaking tours were extremely popular and Badger found himself enjoying the diversion. He made friends throughout the state and even made a few cross-country tours before the lure of the Black Hills became too strong to resist.
Already a well-known and well-liked character by the mid-thirties, Badger received permission to build a cabin on state-owned land in Custer State Park. The game preserve was a natural for this early conservationist, who despite his cowboy background, never could bring himseIf to hunt or fish. The cabin was five years in the building, and became one of the strangest "hermitages" ever devised by man.
Although a lifelong bachelor, Badger Clark was a very social animal and the four room cabin with a front porch stretching the entire width of the building, was expressly designed for entertaining. And as he had hoped, a steady stream of friends and admirers made the long trek into the wilderness to listen to his adventures in Cuba or tales of his life on the disappearing range. Badger Clark with book
Though the cabin was large for one person, including an entire wall of bookshelves for his insatiable mind, space was its only luxury. The living room was heated by a stone fireplace, the kitchen by a wood cookstove, and the bedrooms, not at all. There was no running water and kerosene lamps lit Badger's typewriter.
"The Badger Hole" became Badger' s first permanent home and remains today, a South Dakota Historic Landmark, just as he left it for his final trip to the hospital in September of 1957.
Badger Clark lived a long and productive life which should not be appraised by literary output alone. The poems are good on the whole; one or two perhaps will be judged by time to be great. As a body, they evoke a time and a way of life in the great West which is lost to us forever and which he had the great good fortune to experience first hand. There are three volumes of poetry (one printed posthumously) , a novel, and numerous articles and pamphlets - not an impressive sum for an entire lifetime. But to condemn Badger Clark for his apparent lack of industry would be a mistake. He was far less interested in writing than in studying, caring for his tame deer, cultivating his many close friendships and, most importantly, enjoying the great out-of-doors.
His lectures kept him alive but were unimportant to him other than the attendant social intercourse. Notwithstanding his own attitude, the influence his speeches, especially commencement addresses, had on the state's young people was inestimable. Among today's middle-aged South Dakotans are lawyers, newspaper editors, teachers, businessmen - people in all walks of life - who recall fondly the campfire talk or junior high commencement address that Badger delivered which had such an impact on their subsequent lives. His message was often serious but tempered with his unflagging good humor, and always couched in common sense terms and logic. The Old West had taught him the values of self-reliance and the virtues of nature, and he passed this experience on to his eager young audiences.

Then we stopped at Stockade Lake and had our picnic lunch and drove back through the park back to the campgrounds. On our way back the buffalo had all almost left the area they were in earlier but there were still a few left and they were galloping across the fields and back and forth across the road making it kind of dangerous for the cars on the road. They were all heading for the high country plains and parts unknown. Well that's about all for today from Custer State Park so until tomorrow we love and miss you all. Mom & Dad Dori & Dick