We got to our camp at Mt. Rushmore with 1655 total miles driven so far later than we wanted, and thus didn't get to go to the lights at Mt Rushmore. We got our tents set up with a little light left, but the Pezl head lamps worked great as a backup. Mo had never camped before. We practiced setting up the tents back in Blacksburg and that was a good idea. No telling how we will do if this has to be done in the rain. We've got a plan, though. I've always got a plan.
Up at 5:30 this morning. Fixed a hot chocolate on my gas stove and enjoyed readying about coyotes in Mark Twin's Roughing it. This is the third time I've read this book and I enjoy it more each time. I will report back with a story about Mormon women when I get to Utah. Details to follow.
from Roughing It, 1886
Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie dog
villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. If I remember rightly,
this latter was the regular coyote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther
deserts. And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable
either, for I got well acquanited with his race afterward, and can speak
with confidence.
The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a
gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever
sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a
furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip
and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The
coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He
is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures
despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is
so spirtless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are
pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he
is so homely! -so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.
When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out,
and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depressses
his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the
sagebrush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he
is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a
deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again-
another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body
blends with the gray of the sagebrush, and he disappears. All this is
when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a
livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels
and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon that
by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a Minie
rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled
cannon, and by the time you have "drawn a bead" on him you see well
enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning
could reach him where he is now.
But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever
so much- especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself,
and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The
coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and
every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that
will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition,
and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his
neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail
out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder
frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of
desert sand smoking behind him, and marking his long wake across the
level plain!
And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the
coyote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that
he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and
it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the coyote glides along
and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more
and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an
entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm,
soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and
that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from
running away from him- and then that town dog is mad in earnest, and he
begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever,
and reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate energy. This
"spurt" finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from
his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting
up his face, the coyote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and
with a something about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to
tear myself away from you, bub- business is business, and it will not do
for me to be fooling along this way all day"- and forthwith there is a
rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the
atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a
vast solitude!
It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the
nearest sand mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head
reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to
his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and
feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at
half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever
there is a great hue and cry after a coyote, that dog will merely glance
in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself,
"I believe I do not wish any of that pie."
The coyote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding deserts,
along with the lizard, the jackass rabbit, and the raven, and gets an
uncertain and precarious living, and earns it. He seems to subsist
almost wholly on the carcassses of oxen, mules, and horses that have
dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion,
and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have
been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned
Army bacon.... He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a
hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four
days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at
the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of
his parents.
We soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the coyote as
it came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the
mail sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune,
made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and
a limitless larder the morrow.
We started out at Crazy Horse Memorial first thing this morning. Steve Jacobs told me about this and I'm very goad that he did. It really softens how impressive Mt. Rushmore is. Crazy Horse is an amazing project, started in 1948 on a hope, a prayer and an amazing vision by an American Indian chief that wanted to honor American Indian leaders as impressively as Rushmore did American leaders.
http://crazyhorsememorial.org/. You've got to see it to believe it.
The memorial was commissioned by
Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, to be sculpted by
Korczak Ziolkowski. It is operated by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, a private non-profit organization. Mo has been very enthusiastic learning of the history on this trip. You can tell that he has big ideas and wants to make a difference. The persistence of the sculpture and his family over all these years is really amazing. Read the story!
We made a quick stop at Mt Rushmore. Glad I went, but you go Crazy Horse!!!.
We've entered Wyoming now, and are heading to Cody to camp near Yellowstone. On the way we are going to take a slight jog into Montana to Big Horn Battlefield where Crazy Horse defeated George Custer by combining tribes in an organized offensive. This was the first time that native Americans had done this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Bighorn_Battlefield_National_Monument
