Day Six

South Dakota Air Force Musem/Mammoth Site/Wounded Knee/Badlands, Day Two --

I'll fast forward to visits of Wounded Knee and the Badlands.

I had set my GPS to Wounded Knee and it had pinged to the area without giving a specific site. But I had noticed a cemetery at the top of a hill and went to investigate, and it seemed ordinary. Driving toward the bottom of the road several persons waved at me to go their way, which I complied since I hadn't an idea of my surroundings.

I asked a gentleman named Richard where the battle of Wounded Knee took place, and he said "You're standing on it, man. It happened right here.'' He pointed to the cemetery yonder, which was the site of the mass graves. He said that the massacre of his people shall never be forgotten.

I politely asked him how I could get to the Badlands from here, and he pointed the road north -- remarking that the whole land is full of tragedy, of the conflict between the Native Americans and the settlers who tried to make their homesteads.

Indeed the grasslands and the Badlands seem like a less than ideal place to live. The eastern drive along Route 44 put me on the edge of the Badlands, and at 6:30 p.m., it was 93 degrees Fahrenheit. Traveling as the sole vehicle for miles in this place can be daunting. There's no cell phone coverage and an emergency pick-up would probably take hours.

Still, that drive for about 30 minutes was pretty amazing -- all I could think about was the extraordinary landscape. The jagged formations and the different colors of the the stratified rock will stay in my mind long after this trip is over.