The Black Hills

With Cattle Rancher Ed Rhoades of South Dakota donating for the President's special use two miles of Squaw Creek (which runs through the Rhoades ranch and abounds with Lochlaven trout); with telephone linemen stringing wires from Custer Park to Rapid City; with Washington wondering who will accompany the President on his vacation trip (Mr. & Mrs. Frank Stearns of Boston, being mentioned as possible traveling companions); preparations for the Black Hills journey were well under way.

Meanwhile the Black Hills themselves, suddenly become an extraordinarily famed region, were described in Sunday newspaper "magazine sections," in Washington despatches and in "feature" stories till many a U. S. citizen must have felt that he had almost looked into the blue waters of Sylvan Lake or climbed the high peak of Mount Harney.

Perhaps the most authoritative of Black Hills descriptions came from U. S. Senator Peter Norbeck, writing in The Outlook. Senator Norbeck's visits to the White House, his sales talks on the beauty of the Black Hills region are regarded as having done much to determine the Custer Park selection.

After pointing out that the "Hills" are in reality mountains (Mt. Harney has an altitude of 7,240 feet), Senator Norbeck said that the Sioux Indians considered them sacred land, reserved by the Great Spirit for his own hunting ground and not open to mere mortals. It was on account of this belief that Verandrye, French explorer who in 1743 was the first white man to discover the Black Hills, had to turn back as his Indian guides would not trespass through them. The first thorough exploration was made by General Custer in 1874. Then, with the discovery of gold, came a rush of prospectors. Soon "the tent gave way to the log cabin, the lob cabin to the brick block."

Coming down to the present, Senator Norbeck explained that the State of South Dakota "took time by the forelock" in setting aside 125,000 acres of the Black Hills as a State Park, primarily as a game reserve in which "guns are excluded and only camera shooting permitted." A large herd of buffalo, more than a thousand elk, thousands of deer, a herd of Big Horn sheep and many partridge, quail and grouse thrive unharmed by and unafraid of man.

Not far from the State Game

Lodge, continued the Senator, lies the Gold Region, "famous as 'The Richest Ten Mile Square in the World.' It is the home of the Homestake Mine, owned and developed by Mr. Hearst, father of the journalist. More than two hundred million dollars in gold have been taken from a single hill. . . ."

Nearby, too, is the town of Deadwood, where Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok (whose gun bore more notches than that of any other man), Calamity Jane (who "divided her time between the jail and the street" and "robbed the rich and nursed the sick"), were onetime leading figures. On a mountain-top above the city stands the first monument erected to the memory of Theodore Roosevelt.

Near the boundary of the Park is Mt. Rushmore, where Sculptor Gutzon Borglum has been commissioned to carve figures of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt in heroic size. The scale of the figures will be 460 feet--the face of Washington, for instance, will be 60 feet high. (The face of the Egyptian Sphinx is only 19.)