Wednesday, June 24, 2009

If It's Not One Dakota, It's Another

Monday, 6/22. Headed west from Aberdeen and crossed the Missouri River at Mobridge. Here’s the obligatory bridge picture. Shall we call this trip the bridges and barns tour?



PLAYLIST. Before I go any further, let me say a word about the music that plays when you open this blog. If you're tired of hearing Coal Miner's Daughter, you can either click the double bars below Loretta's picture to stop the music, or you can arrow down to pick another song.
Playlist is a website where you can build your own playlists, all for FREE. Just search the site's archives and add selections to your list(s). Then, whenever you want to hear your favorite music while you're on the computer, just open your list and click it on. I put a shortcut on my desktop to make it handy.
From Mobridge we went north along the west bank of the MO, passing through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation that spreads over both SD and ND. In ND, the beautiful grassy hills you drive through are called the Porcupine Hills. Unfortunately, this total stretch of about 100 miles of two-lane highway, with no shoulders, has no rest areas or scenic overlooks or pull-outs suitable for a car, much less a tuzigoot. Fortunately, though, no traffic, so at a spot where I could see that no one was behind me for a long distance, I stopped in the road and got this quicky picture from the driver's seat. We're not in Montana yet, but this is certainly big sky country.



Just before we got to Bismarck we passed Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. We came back later and got this shot of the hills behind the Fort site - a good representation of the whole trip through the Porcupine Hills.



We found our campground in mid-afternoon then did a little sightseeing, starting with the State Capitol building – not your usual domed and columned structure. We entered a hallway that featured the North Dakota Hall of Fame -- such folks as Lawrence Welk, Roger Maris, Angie Dickinson, Peggy Lee, Warren Christopher, Eric Sevareid, … .


Drove back to Fort Abraham Lincoln to check that out. Custer left here in May, 1876, on his fateful last campaign. We'll visit the Little Big Horn Battlefield in a couple of weeks. Here's a reproduction of General Custer's house at the fort.


On the bridge front, from the web, here's a postcard of the old Memorial Bridge in Bismarck.




That bridge has been replaced. In this video you can see one section being blown up, after which you see the new span, located quite near the demolished bridge. I got this picture of the new bridge.


While driving, I got to thinking: Do we really need two Dakotas? (or two Carolinas or two Virginias; or for that matter, what about Delaware? – could just as well be a county in Maryland. And don't even mention Rhode Island See where an idle mind can lead you!). Thought there might be an interesting story there, but everything I googled up was pretty mundane. A little bit of controversy about where they put the dividing line, but it just seemed to be a given that two states would be created from Dakota Territory (after portions that are now largely Montana and Wyoming were split off). The two states achieved statehood on the same day in a single ceremony; the president (randomly, I'm sure) mixed up the order of the signing documents. For alphabetical reasons ND is the 39th state, SD the 40th. (Any historians out there with illuminating information?)

Thinking about this weighty issue brought to mind Ron Thomason, the lead singer and comedian of the Dry Branch Fire Squad. He says the folks who settled West Virginia were not very creative. When they thought about what they should name their state, they knew Virginia was taken, so they scratched their heads and came up with West Virginia. When they found a river winding through the WV mountains, it was new to them so they named it the New River.

Well, enough history and geography, for today.


Cheers,


Susie and Rob

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