USA Guide
The Great Plains
The Black Hills
The timbered, rocky Black Hills rise like an island from a sea of rolling hills and flat, grain-growing plains, stretching for a hundred miles between the Belle Fourche River in the north and the Cheyenne to the south, and varying in width from forty to sixty miles. For many generations of Sioux, their value was and still is immeasurable. The Hills are "the heart of everything that is," a kind of spiritual safe, a place of gods and holy mountains where warriors went to speak with Wakan Tanka (the Great Spirit) and await visions. They were dubbed Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, even though they are actually mountains (the highest, Harney Peak, rises 7242ft), and the blue spruce and Norway pine trees that cover them only appear to be black from a distance.
Assuming the Hills to be worthless, the United States government drew up a treaty in the mid-nineteenth century that gave these mountains and most of the land west of the Missouri River to the Indians. All such treaties were eventually broken once the discovery of gold turned the Indians' Eden into the white explorers' El Dorado, and fortune-hunters came pouring in.
The Hills these days are a major tourist destination, but despite the T-shirt stores, pseudo-historical wax museums, cowboy supper shows, and water slides, the Hills have not been robbed of all their beauty and dignity. Rustic walk-in campgrounds are available throughout the national forest, and you can get away from it all in a mountain-top lodge. No place in the Hills is much farther than ninety minutes from the four presidential heads carved into Mount Rushmore or the remarkable Crazy Horse Memorial, one of the world's most ambitious works-in-progress. In the shade of these great monuments, the less spoiled southern hills are home to the bison of Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park, along with the town of Hot Springs.