Mount Rushmore and Custer State Park

The next day we visited Rushmore. The sight brings patriotic emotions to all American visitors. It's difficult to prepare for what you will experience. This video shows how the artist, Gutzon Borglum, intended the finished sculpture to appear compared to the finished sculpture on the mountain. I shot this video from the studio building near the base of the mountain.

 In 1927, Borglum started a fund raising campaign and when President Coolidge visited that same year, federal funding began adding to the fund. Borglum had stocked a local creek with trout and placed hidden nets under the surface to entrap the fish. Coolidge caught lots of fish and was honored that night at a beef and buffalo barbecue with lots of music and dancing. Borglum toiled on through the depression and into WWII but in 1941 money for the war trumped Borglum's project and he quit after 14 years of work. He died soon after.

After Rushmore, we moved on to the Crazy Horse Monument which is being built nearby. The fee is $10 per person so we got this photo and moved on.

Our next stop was Custer State Park where we saw more lazy buffalo, begging mules, and pronghorn than we had ever hoped. Here are some photos.

The buffalo were grazing near the road and frequently wandered out into the roadway, blocking traffic for several minutes. At about two tons and able to run at 30 miles per hour, no motorists were eager to try to encourage them to move.
 The mules come up to your window to beg for food. They will eat anything including a cigarette that one fellow fed one of them.
 The pronghorn are said to be the fastest land animal in the western hemisphere, having been clocked at over 70 miles per hour. They have horns instead of antlers and shed and regrow them every year unlike most other horned animals.

We drove into the town of Custer, Wyoming and found a clean, inexpensive motel. A local restaurant prepared a tasty buffalo burger for us. Not wild tasting as expected. We wandered into the Gold Pan Saloon across the street where we watched some hombres shoot pool as we talked to the bar manager. The floor of the bar was covered with a sawdust-like material (fire retardant he said) as it had been since the bar opened almost a hundred years ago. The original owners dumped the sawdust to hide any gold dust that drunken prospectors might have spilled as they paid for their whiskey. Every few months the owner would sweep up the sawdust and burn it to render the spilled gold. Touristy looking isn't it?

On Monday, September 13, we drove into Wyoming and stopped for the night at the town of Buffalo where we discovered the Occidental Hotel. The hotel was booked full but the proprietors allowed us to explore. Moose heads, elk heads, two pronghorn heads, as well as many others hung over us in the bar. I took the photo below so that the heads are visible in the mirror over the bar. A young man sitting next to us asked us to report back to our Eastern friends that Wyoming is boring, and not worth visiting and certainly not worthy of moving there. Indeed, we saw many stickers proclaiming that "Wyoming has an EAST infection.

The hotel has rooms decorated as they might have been 100 years ago and many artifacts such as women's dresses, quilts, and photos from those bygone years line the hallways. They even have created their own radio station that plays music from the 1930s and 1940s continuously 24 hours per day and can be tuned in within any of the rooms on vintage tube-type radio sets.

We settled on this cozy little cabin instead and saved about $150 in doing so.