Another Active Day In Custer, South Dakota

We picked yesterday as our Crazy Horse day. On the way to the highway, we stopped at Pat and Mike McFall's place to give them a check for the repeater we bought for the Pressure Pro system. While we were there, we asked for a demonstration of the Dri-Wash n Guard, which is a product to clean and protect the car and rv without water. We'd heard about this product before, and Pat is a distributor. Of course we ended up with a big bottle, so we'll have to schedule some cleaning time now. We'll let you know how we like it! According to Pat, the only reason she became a distributor is because they liked the product so much they wanted to be able to buy it at a discount, and this was the way to do it.

I enjoyed our visit to Crazy Horse. We watched the orientation film that shows the history and story of it. I won't go into a lot of detail about it here, but you can get quite a bit of information from the web site.

This is a good view of the current progress.


The actual mountain shown behind the model:

Indian dancers - I was surprised that people were encouraged to take pictures. When I was a young child, my uncle managed Seven Falls in Colo. Spgs. They had native dancers, but they didn't really like for people to take pictures in those days. (Yes, I know, that was a long time ago!)

My favorite part of the Crazy Horse Memorial is the Indian Museum. There are some beautiful artifacts from many tribes, as well as current craftspeople working on many arts. In about 1930, my dad had a summer job at a camp east of Colo. Spgs., called Ten-Sleep. That summer, the owner of the camp took all the boys, including my dad, to a big celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Oregon Trail. This celebration was held somewhere around Cheyenne, Wyoming. Dad was given a small jar of beads to trade with the Indians at the pow wow there. He used the beads to trade for these beaded moccasins, which we still have:

At the museum, there are many examples of the same type of beaded moccaisns. I thought it would be interesting to show a comparison to the ones my dad passed down to me.

Huge teepee:
This is a display of beads which are examples of the 70 tons of Italian Glass beads obtained by Prairie Edge Gallery and Trading Post in Rapid City. It is reportedly the largest collection of such beads in the world. The "Societa Veneziana Conterie" which is the same Venetian guild that supplied fur traders in the 19th century, closed it's doors in 1992, and the Prairie Edge obtained the collection of over 2,600 different styles and colors of beads.

After our visit with Crazy Horse, we headed back home for a rest period before our evening activity. There is a Paint Horse association camped here at Broken Arrow this weekend. The owners of the campground invited all the folks staying here to join the "horse people" for a real chuckwagon supper, cooked over an open fire.

Here's the cook preparing the fire. You can see the big pot of potatoes hanging on the rack. Behind the cook is another pot, containing beans.

The chuckwagon is in the upper right.

We enjoyed a delicious meal of steak, grilled over the open fire, plus beans and potatoes. Peach cobbler was served for dessert! All that for $12 per person. We also met some really nice folks.

When it started getting dark and cool, we retreated to our rig for an evening of reading and watching tv. Another great day!