Mount Rushmore was apparently next on our itinerary, because it's the second and third photos, almost out of the bottom of the third. I certainly cannot recapture any impression because sister Sue worked up there for a summer, not very happily, and because I keep seeing Cary Grant fleeing the villains across the giant mockup of the Shrine of Democracy in Hitchcock's North by Northwest. I do know that I liked the corkscrew/pigtail bridge in the Wind Cave section, and we were disappointed by Sylvan Lake, pretty but smaller than we'd expected after all the picture postcards of it, the first time, I suppose, I collided with inflated advertising claims and the shrunken reality. The same deflation occurred with the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, really a very small area. but I had a Viewmaster reel of its sights and thought it would be grander.
We did like the narrow Needles highway (one photo), Mom's first mountain driving, the most scenic section besides the later Spearfish Canyon. I assume the waterfall picture, next, was taken there because of the surrounding rock formations.
The only other waterfall we visited was Bridal Veil in Spearfish Canyon, a beautiful forested area, not rocky spires. (I have ever since made a special point of seeking out every waterfall I could find on my trips.)
Then comes a photo of a huge sawdust pile, and I know we were fascinated with the various sawmills because we got Black Hills-stamped lumber back home. Somewhere in here we went to Lead and Deadwood, the former with its Homestake Gold Mine, "the oldest, largest and deepest in the Western Hemisphere," which the adults refused to take the time to tour; Deadwood with its Mount Moriah Cemetery with the graves of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock, the latter killed with his Dead Man's Hand we saw in the local museum. He actually started his gun-slinging career and killed his first man at Rock Creek Station near Fairbury, Nebraska. (I have been to the re-created Rock Creek Station, a state park site with Oregon Trail ruts, a small museum, and yoked oxen pulling Conestoga wagons in summers.) I don't know who was more freaked out by the steep street up to the cemetery when it seemed the car would go over backwards, Mom driving or we passengers.
We loved the winding Spearfish Canyon, the kind I found all over Montana, Idaho, elsewhere, winding, steep, forested ravines along a noisily rushing mountain stream of cold, clear water over boulder beds. Scenes from Dances with Wolves were filmed there decades later.
I'm sure next we went on to Belle Fourche, where Aunt Ella ran a motel with her second husband, Jack. Aunt Ella was five years younger than Grampa and definitely looked like him. Her first marriage left her the name Adel, that of her three children, Raymond and the twins Lorraine and Lloyd. Her two sons were there with Aunt Ella, so I'm guessing Lorraine was already married. The last I knew, the boys were in the Twin Cities, and Harold and Lorraine Meyer had a ranch near Isabel, South Dakota. Mom and Lorraine corresponded, especially at Christmas. We did not have an auspicious meeting with Ella's second husband, Jack, whose last name I have apparently forgotten on Freudian principle. She wasn't at the motel when we arrived, and he greeted us naked, all of him, hugely obese, with a brash voice to go with the behavior. I think Gram had a sharply witty comment, but mainly I remember our shock. Aunt Ella was humiliated. The photo is of her and her two sons, whom we obviously liked, because we took more photos of them, which I can't find at present.
One of them worked in Spearfish (at a bank?) and was a bare-legged Roman soldier-spear carrier in the Passion Play, which outdoor amphitheater facing Lookout Mountain is the only other photo from the Black Hills, taken in daylight. He got us tickets, and we duly went to this famous American successor of the Oberammergau Passion Play, the Jesus acted by the then well-known Josef Meier, a seventh-generation Passion Player, whose daughter Johanna became an equally well-known Wagnerian opera singer. It was definitely a trip highlight with the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, the dramatic tomb appearance and Ascension. Many years later, when I was going to Norfolk Junior College (now Northeastern, with a different campus) and working at Tom's Music Store, that Passion Play came to the Norfolk Auditorium, and I got to see it for free by ushering, so I was there all three performances to full houses. (In those years Norfolk got outstanding performers through its Community Concerts series, such as Basil Rathbone with Helen Gahagan Douglas and the duo pianists, Ferrante and Teicher, though I don't know whether the Passion Play was part of that or not, probably not.) The tradition was so pure that it was a deja vu experience, the same as I had remembered it from childhood--except for the necessary cramped-stage changes, of course. Not quite the same grand effects as in an outdoor amphitheater for 7,000.
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