Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In an adjoining room there was an excellent and more or less continuous movie present-
ation giving the history of Mount Rushmore, with lots of impressive statistics about the
amount of rock that was shifted, and terrific silent film footage showing the work in pro-
gress. Mostly this consisted of smiling workmen packing dynamite into the rock face fol-
lowed by a big explosion; then the dust would clear and what had been rock was now
revealed to be Abraham Lincoln. It was remarkable. The whole thing is an extraordinary
achievement, one of America's glories, and surely one of the great monuments of this cen-
tury.
The project took from 1927 to 1941 to complete. Just before it was finished, Gutzon Bor-
glum, the man behind it all, died. Isn't that tragic? He did all that work for all those years
andthenjustwhentheywereabouttocrackopenthechampagneandputoutthelittlesaus-
ages on toothpicks, he keeled over and expired. On a bad luck scale of 0 to i0, I would call
that an 11.
I drove east across South Dakota, past Rapid City. I had intended to stop off and see Bad-
lands National Park, but the fog and drizzle were so dense that it seemed pointless. More
than that, according to the radio I was half a step ahead of another perilous “frunnal” sys-
tem. Snow was expected on the higher reaches of the Black Hills. Many roads in Color-
ado, Wyoming, and Montana were already shut by fresh snowfalls, including the highway
between Jackson and Yellowstone. If I had gone to Yellowstone a day later, I would now
be stranded, and if I didn't keep moving, I could well be stranded for a couple of days in
South Dakota. On a bad luck scale of 0 to 10, I would call that a 12.
Fifty miles beyond Rapid City is the little town of Wall, home of the most famous drug
store in the West, Wall Drug. You know it's coming because every hundred yards or so
along the whole of that fifty miles you pass a big billboard telling you so: STEAKS
ANDCAKES-WALLDRUG,47MILES,HOTBEEFSANDWICHES-WALLDRUG,36
MILES, FIVE CENT COFFEE-WALL DRUG, 25 MILES, and so on. It is the advertising
equivalent of the Chinese water torture. After a while the endless drip, drip, drip of bill-
boardssocloudsyourjudgmentthatyouhavenochoicebuttoleavetheinterstateandhave
a look at it.
It'sanawfulplace,oneoftheworld'sbiggesttouristtraps,butIloveditandIwon'thavea
word said against it. In 1931, a guy named Ted Hustead bought Wall Drug. Buying a drug-
store in a town in South Dakota with a population of three hundred people at the height
of the Great Depression must be about as stupid a business decision as you can make. But
HusteadrealizedthatpeopledrivingacrossplaceslikeSouthDakotaweresodeliriouswith
boredom that they would stop and look at almost anything. So he put up a lot of gimmicks
