"The great state of South Dakota was stolen in 1743 by the French in the person of Louis-Joseph Gaultier de La Vérendrye."

"La Vérendrye—who very grandly called himself Le Chevalier—was a fur trapper and explorer acting on behalf of his father, Pierre, commandant of New France. (Nepotism is a South Dakota tradition.) The precise Native American tribe from whom South Dakota was stolen is not certain, but Le Chevalier called them the Gens de la Petite-Cerise or 'People of the Little Cherry,' and probably they were the Arikara, a Plains Indians tribe that had broken off from the Pawnee. This is the rare instance in human history in which the theft of somebody’s little cherry was commemorated on a chiseled plaque. That was a hunk of lead dug up in 1913 and known today as the Verendrye Plate. Bearing the inscription of King Louis XV, the plate had been engraved in Latin by Le Chevalier’s père (who, incidentally, is not the same Pierre after whom South Dakota’s capital city is named). Le Chevalier scattered similar lead plates along his journey, chortling in his journal about one of these that 'the savages … did not know of the tablet of lead that I had placed in the earth.'"

From "South Dakota Is a Moral Sewer and Should Be Abolished/Governor Kristi Noem isn’t the problem. The other Dakota is a make-believe state devoted to the preservation of wealth dynasties, and it should just go away" by Timothy Noah (The New Republic).

By the way: "It's one of the first things you learn when you move to South Dakota - the correct pronunciation of our state capital is 'peer' (like the one you fish off of), not 'pee-air' (like the first name of a Frenchman)."

"After 500 years of injustice, you can’t just put up a fake village manned by a token Indian and say, 'We’re good.' We want to meet with Biden and ask him to honor the treaties. We want to find out what he will do to stop the ethnocide of our people."

Said Phil Two Eagle, quoted in "The battle for Mount Rushmore: ‘It should be turned into something like the Holocaust Museum’" (The Guardian).

"South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said during a Saturday news briefing that Smithfield employees accounted for more than half of the active coronavirus cases in the state."

"About 240 employees are sick, she said, out of roughly 430 active cases in the state. Because of that, she and the mayor of Sioux Falls recommended that Smithfield suspend operations for at least two weeks."

From "One of the largest pork processing facilities in the US is closing until further notice" (CNN Business)("The Sioux Falls, South Dakota, facility accounts for 4% to 5% of the country's pork production and employs about 3,700 people, according to Smithfield").

"Why had I dragged my family — my wife and our Snapchatting 12-year-old daughter and our longhaired, talkative 9-year-old son — away from work and school to see, of all places, Mount Rushmore?"

Asks Sam Anderson in a NYT Magazine article with a title that caught my attention, "Why Does Mount Rushmore Exist?/This gargantuan shrine to democracy has never felt so surreal." How does anybody know the how surreal Mount Rushmore has felt over its close-to-one-century existence? Whose feelings have counted and why does Sam Anderson — speaking of feelings — feel that he should behave as if he's the arbiter of surrealism?

But now I'm wondering why he's taking his children out of school to go on a trip? Is truancy just some concept relevant to other classes of people than those who write for the NYT?

Here's Anderson struggling with the question in the post title:

I couldn’t say, exactly. All I knew was that I seemed to be suffering a crisis of scale. America was taking up a larger part of my mind than it ever had before. It was dominating my internal landscape, crowding out other thoughts, blocking my view of regular life. I couldn’t tell if it was reaching its proper size, growing the way a problem tends to grow just before a solution is found, or if it was swelling the way an organ does before it fails and bursts.

Is this about Trump? Wait. I get it. America, growing way beyond its proper size and failing and bursting. Big President heads carved out of a South Dakota rockscape in the 1920s and 30s are showing us the horror of Donald Trump's dangerously swelled ego that's about to blow.

And it began to seem foreign to me, our American obsession with size. We are born a fantasy of bigness. We are tall and strapping, with big hats and big hair and loud clothes and booming voices....

We are? 

Why does goodness have to be huge? It is a dangerous belief....

But who believes it?

Karl Rove's gratuitous and erroneous shot at Calvin Coolidge.

I don't know why this irks me so much. Something about an attack on an entirely undefended person. Something about propagating a factoid. Somehow it's my job to keep history straight and defend Calvin Coolidge.

It was "Fox News Sunday" this morning, and "GOP strategist" Karl Rove was asked whether Donald Trump's appearance on "Saturday Night Live" helped or hurt him. Rove says:

It helped. Everybody got their moment last night. He got to be marked by the Saturday Night Live crowd, and he got a chance to say he's a good sport and could take it in stride. I think we ought to go back and blame this, however, all on Calvin Coolidge, who was after all, the first president to appear on the White House lawn in an Indian headdress. And since then presidents have felt compelled to go out and occasionally mock themselves, and now presidential candidates have gotten in the habit of mocking themselves. It was, however, I have to say, not very funny.

There's laughter, and the moderator Chris Wallace says "Are you talking about Calvin Coolidge?" and Rove says, "No, I'm talking about last night."

Now, maybe some home viewers said: "The first president to appear on the White House lawn in an Indian headdress — were there others?" But I said: "That wasn't on the White House lawn! That was in South Dakota!"

Calvin Coolidge famously posed in a headdress:



This happened on June 23, 1927:

Coolidge, who was celebrated for signing the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, spent the summer of 1927 in the Black Hills region of South Dakota, working out of an office in Rapid City High School. When Sioux Chieftain Chauncey Yellow Robe, a descendant of Sitting Bull, learned the President would be there, he suggested he be adopted into the tribe. The Sioux County Pioneer, a weekly publication that came out every Thursday, reported that Yellow Robe... said: “The Indians are like anybody else, they are also anxious to see him come. Our population of more than 20,000 Sioux Indians, the first people of the Hills, will also open their hearts with most sincere and hearty welcome of President Coolidge to the land of the Dakotas and if the occasion should permit, President Coolidge will be adopted into the Sioux tribe. We hope he will find in these beautiful Pahasapas (Black Hills) rest, peace, quiet and friendship among us.”

Why, exactly, is it supposed to be funny for him to wear that headdress? In any case, this did not take place at the White House and it has nothing to do with present-day appearances in pop culture settings like "Saturday Night Live."

"I have now been to all 50 states as president — and I was saving the best for last."

Said Obama, finally getting around to South Dakota.

"The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures..."

Cones! The dreaded cones!

After I read that, this song verse played in my head:

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

ADDED: Meade reads this post and asks: "Was it even a federal highway?" Yeah, was it the interstate? Why don't they close down the whole interstate highway system? Obviously, they're not doing everything they can, they're just choosing particular things, trying to be annoying in just the right way to sculpt public opinion. They're poking at us. With orange cones. And we are annoyed. But which way are we annoyed?

AND: If the giant head of the President has blocked your sight line to the giant heads of the Presidents, here's another sculpture for you:



ALSO: The government doesn't seem to know that a lot of those visitors to South Dakota ride motorcycles. A motorcycle can get right in there between the cones.

IN THE COMMENTS: TosaGuy said:

I lived in South Dakota for five years. Orange comes don't stop anyone from doing anything in the land where every sign on a rural road has a shotgun blast in it.

Mr Obama, tear down your Barrycades!

Hagar said:

This has to be State Highway 244 that goes by Mt. Rushmore. U.S. Route 16A is farther away, and, of course, neither has anything to do with the interstate system. However, South Dakota, like every other state, receives Federal money for their highway systems through the FHWA, and per Murphy's Golden Rule, whoever controls the gold gets to rule.

That's not true in Wisconsin! Scott Walker resisted the pressure to shut down state parks.

No Federal money comes without strings, but in this case I think the FHWA would have to side with the Park Service, and I think it is not like they have any actual jurisdiction; all they could do would be to threaten to be difficult and withhold future funding for this road (and other projects?), I think.

Yeah, that too happened in Wisconsin, after Scott Walker rejected the federal money for a "high speed" train. But let's remember that at some point, conditions on spending count as coercion and the federal government cannot force state government to do its work.

"I failed for a long time in this project.... In some ways, really poor places are quite easy to photograph...."

The photographer, Aaron Huey, realizes he must take a point of view. The result is, of course, propaganda. Beautiful propaganda.

Imagine if he'd chosen a different point of view. What would that propaganda have looked like?

Clearly, from the artistic perspective, Huey chose the best point of view.

South Dakota.

The video....