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Black Hills Invasion details an impromptu trip to the Sturgis Rally with my good friend Jeff 'Clarence' Linssen. In addition to my observations at the rally, I made sure to delve into the colorful history that took place in and around the Black Hills region.

146 pages/Published in 2011

Rail-Time Tracking

 Feeling only the slightest bit cleaner after my frustrating experience with the one-armed shower, I decided it was high time for a walk down the railroad tracks into Sturgis to see what was abuzz. My Boxcar Willy tribute of walking the tracks evolved after driving into town from the campground and noticing just how few pedestrian-friendly routes there were in which to follow. The campground was located four miles from Main Street Sturgis and the only options available to a transportationally-challenged individual such as me was walking on the shoulder of I-90 or walking down the railroad tracks. In the end, I decided it was safer to dodge locomotives than semis. Besides, how many trains could there possibly be right?

  On that initial venture, I really had no idea what to expect. Was there a train barreling down the rails every hour? Every two? Never at all? By employing an impressive array of low-tech investigative skills, I was able to conclude with utter uncertainty that the tracks had been used fairly recently, as evidenced by the absence of rust on the rails. Unfortunately, the dull sheen on the rails offered little perspective on daily schedules or frequency. In other words, I was walking the rails quite blind.

   I thought it might prove wise to ask a few locals about the matter in a manner I considered as low-key and casual as possible so that they wouldn’t become alarmed by my actions (walking on the tracks) and take it upon themselves to call the police if such a thing was actually prohibited. I understand train hopping is illegal, but track walking doesn’t seem outlandishly criminal to me. I can see that the tracks are owned by the railroad and therefore private property, but on the other hand, nobody would probably give a shit if I walked on the tracks. Aside from characters in books, the only people I generally see walking along train tracks are Navajos in Gallup, New Mexico…Although not very steadily. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve walked plenty of tracks in my time, but usually as a pleasant diversion, not as a principal means of thoroughfare.

  I must have asked a half-dozen or so people about the matter. Answers varied from “very busy, better watch yourself” to “nah, used to be busy, but these days the train only goes up and back to a mine”. Others claimed the tracks were wholly unused and had been for years. Always pays to have local information right?

  As I wended my way down the tracks, I did my best to avoid stepping on deer carcasses and funky bits of flotsam debris. The carcasses meant there was definitely some recent train activity. That or the deer had simply dropped dead from natural causes. This however, seemed highly unlikely.

The laborious tie to tie trek, gave me ample time to ponder my beautiful new surroundings. Between not so furtive glances up and down the tracks in order to avoid an utterly untimely demise by locomotive, I took in the scenic Pahá Sápa scenery around me. Pahá Sápa is the Lakota translation for “Black Hills” which supposedly refers to the “darkness of the area when viewed from afar”. Hmm, I guess that makes sense but then many things look different from afar don’t they. The little mountain range is certainly a geographic anomaly…A forest sanctuary set amongst a sea of windswept weeds located smack dab between the towering peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the flat prairies of the Midwest. Harney Peak, named for General William S. Harney, who commanded troops in the area during the 1870s, is the highest point in the Black Hills and for that matter east of the Rocky Mountains at 7,244 feet. It was on Harney Peak that Sioux medicine man, Black Elk, received his “Great Vision” at the age of nine. As an old man, he accompanied writer John Neihardt and reflected back to his earlier childhood experience on the high peak in the Black Hills:

“I was standing on the highest peak of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I can I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together as one being.”

 Now that’s deep. It wasn’t mentioned whether hallucinogenic drugs were involved or not, but I do believe Yogi Berra would have naturally bonded with Black Elk. Artifacts reveal that human habitation has taken place in the Black Hills for at least the past 9000 years. The Arikara tribe arrived more recently (500 years ago) followed by the Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, Pawnee, and the Lakota (Teton Sioux). The Sioux and Cheyenne both consider the Black Hills axis mundi, or their sacred center of the world.

The Black Hills were largely overlooked by the Lewis and Clark expedition in the early 1800s and weren’t properly explored in any great detail by non-native factions until the 1874 Black Hills Expedition, led by then Lieutenant Colonel, George Armstrong Custer. This however, does not mean that there weren’t plenty of adventurous souls poking around much earlier.

According to journal entries, the French exploring brothers Francois and Joseph Verendrye seemed to have dropped into the northern reaches of the Black Hills on January 1st, 1743. Interestingly, the Verendryes noted that they hadn’t run across anyone else, Indian or other, during their entire time spent in the region.

Legendary mountain man, Jedediah Smith, visited the southern Black Hills in 1823 while convalescing from his famous grizzly attack. Jeremiah Proteau, a fur trader with the American Fur Company, entered the northern Black Hills with a party of trappers in 1854. It stands to reason that any, and perhaps all, of these parties could have done a little panning. It certainly makes even more sense that the native tribes in the region extracted ore at one time or another. While questions will continue to remain unanswered surrounding the first non-native gold extractions in the Black Hills, there is a slab of stone resting inside the Adams Memorial Museum in Deadwood, South Dakota that remains even more controversial...(Read more, buy the book)