Heritage Renewal

Check out this link. It's the website of 4-H Youth Favorite Places, a collection of kid-generated pages profiling places they like across the United States. Many of these are heritage sites, which is a hopeful sign. When I first visited the site, the Ray Opera House Museum was featured on the home page. NDSU Extension is promoting participation in this national effort.

On our way out to southwest North Dakota by way of Mobridge, we made a stop at the Sitting Bull memorial alongside the Missouri River. Because I have in hand a good seminar paper by Curtis Johnson that treats the establishment of this memorial, along with the removal of Sitting Bull's bones from their earlier resting place at Fort Yates, the Sitting Bull memorial will soon make an appearance in Remembrance in Stone. The site across the river from Mobridge is a serene place. It doesn't get many visitors, but judging by mementoes left, some of them are reverent.

Continuing up old WPA Tour 9, following old Highway 12 along gravel roads, we arrived at the town of Haynes. The town has seen better days, I suppose. It was a coal mining town, and the mines closed, and farm trade declined. Still, about thirty people live here, and the town still functions with a mayor and council. In the middle, occupying a city block, is the park, and in the middle of the park is this remarkable structure. It bears a date in concrete, 1934, so it's too early to be a WPA project--probably FERA. I'm not sure just what it's supposed to be--maybe a bandstand, maybe a picnic area--but it was piped for gas, and so it once was a lighted facility. And here's the thing: it's constructed of petrified wood. It's a remarkable artifact to happen upon. And there's an even more remarkable artifact in the same park, which I'll show and tell about in the next posting.

A couple of days ago I wrote about a site along WPA Tour 9, Hidden Wood Creek, where Custer camped below the Bushy Bank in 1874. I also mentioned the photographer of the expedition, William H. Illingworth. The most famous image Illingworth took at this site was his view of the expedition encampment below the bank, on what later settlers would call Bushy Flat. He took this photo from the top of the bank. Another striking photo from the same day and site was Illingworth's view of nearby Index Butte. Locating this image posed a mystery, as no nearby formation looked exactly like the one photographed in 1874. Finally, though, I got into a certain position and vantage, and realized that I had been walking around Index Butte all the time. What had happened was, first, that the lower part of the rock formation had dropped away and lay on the slope below. Second, the top of the formation, the "index finger" of sandstone that gave the butte its name, had been quarried off. I determined this by locating drill holes atop the remaining rock and other signs of quarrying nearby atop the butte. Well, that's too bad, but here comes an intriguing extension of the mystery. In the 1910s the citizens of White Butte, South Dakota--located about two miles east of Index Butte--were reported to be quarrying sandstone from nearby buttes to fashion into markers for the Yellowstone Trail, the transcontinental highway that citizens were promoting coast to coast. Some of these sandstone markers are still extant (more on them later). It's just a theory, a speculation, but I wonder whether the historic formation of Index Butte was quarried away to mark the Yellowstone Highway. That bears looking into. In the meantime, given here is my replication of Illingworth's view of Index Butte, what's left of it.

The new Ellendale Arts Council and OPERA (the opera house restoration group) combined to pull of an impressive exhibit opening in conjunction with the 125th anniversary of Ellendale last week. This came as the culmination of a series of individual-artist exhibits that have taken place monthly over the past year, commencing with the beginning of the "Building Community Vitality through Cultural Arts" initiative organized by NDSU Extension. The exhibit opening, with wine and cheese, was a grand success; heck, even the governor showed up. The collection of works by local artists was grand, too, and included works by Ken Schmierer, photographer and digital artist, also one of the organizers of the exhibit and all sorts of other things in Ellendale. I tell you, people in Ellendale are serious about boosting the arts, their heritage, and the quality of community life.

In Travel on the Gravel I made mention of an expedition to southwestern North Dakota to retrace the WPA tours of North Dakota--specifically, Tour 9, which essentially follows Highway 12 across Adams, Bowman, and Slope counties. This is part of the "Highways & Trails of the WPA" project of the CHR, funded by the North Dakota Department of Transportation. The expedition proved productive and amazing. Right away, between White Butte, South Dakota, and Haynes, North Dakota, we located Custer's camp on Hidden Wood Creek on his way to the Black Hills in 1874. In the photo at right, yours truly, director of the center, is standing atop the Bushy Bank, the brush-clad bluff on the south bank of Hidden Wood Creek beneath which the expedition of 1874 made camp. You'll notice my peculiar posture--that's because there's a 40mph wind blowing, and I'm trying not be be blown over the cliff. I'm standing precisely where William H. Illingworth set up his tripod to photograph the camp. I'll be sharing more experiences and images from the WPA fieldwork via this weblog. In time the whole rich collection will become a website recreating, updating, and outlining the 1938 tours for modern heritage tourists.