This is a traveller's tale about "How the Midwest Was Won", and a handful of half-crazy idealists and individualists carving a niche "literally and figuratively" in South Dakota's Black Hills, old stomping grounds of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill and Jesse James, all larger-than-life characters drawn to big horizons. It's also about less hardy souls, myself included, humming Home, Home On The Range out of tune, as they trundled across the great plains towards the land of the Sioux and giant steaks.
"Hey, everyone! Buffalo!" I pointed at vague brown lumps to veteran photographer Joan Dunlop by my side. "I see a deer and an antelope." "And look, they're playing!" says Joan, with a playful sneer.
Trust me, if there's one big cliche about vacations across America, it's Mount Rushmore. Begun by visionary sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1927, it immediately became America's number one tourist destination, skulking behind tacky "Flying Jackalopes" postcards and movies, ringed by motels. For Borglum, "American" was synonymous with "colossal" for his four 60-feet-high faces. To him they represented the "beacon of American democracy". Even before work stopped in 1941, the dawn of Mr Ford's motor industry and "The Little House on the Prairie" beckoned Mom and Pop to throw the kids into the Model T for a tootle along Interstate 90.
So liberating Mount Rushmore from trashiness is the mighty challenge any park chief must meet. To see if it could be done, this motley crew of pioneers rolled towards Mount Rushmore's superintendent Dan Wenk, with Mona Mesnereau from the Park Service as our guide, and husband Tom at the wheel. We were also meeting Crazy Horse's Ruth Ziolkowski, to survey the most ambitious project undertaken in this neck of the Badlands since Custer took on the Sioux.
As the outline of Rushmore's heads grow closer, our van lurched around the bends of Highway 16, a hint that improvements are still under way, despite the fancy-pants new parking and fee that infuriates locals.
"Of course people complain," says "Supe" Wenk, who's weathered everything from Greenpeace protests to El Nino. The US Park Service attracts idealists, because it doesn't pay well and requires stamina. "Supe" Wenk is no exception; and satisfactorily for all, he's raised $56 million in private funds to perfect his Mount Rushmore makeover with educational features about American democracy and the presidency, in record-making time, too. He's launching the "new" Rushmore with fireworks for the fourth of July, crowning years of work and decades of Mount Rushmore's Preservation Fund.
If you're looking for Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint, you're out of luck - Hitchcock was using a set for North By Northwest. But under Bruce Van Vor's handiwork, the new gift shop and cafe are tempting, from espressos and fudge to the famous "black gold" that was Dakota's Gold Rush specialty - rose, white and yellow gold for earrings and watches - and a terrific book section.
The spanking new cafeteria is tasteful, all polished granite and floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows framing America's most famous view. Between windows hang portraits of US presidents with notes about their lives. History is dished up with spaghetti bolognese or meatloaf, plus a chance to vote for your favourite president in a real-life voting booth. Then it's a short trot through the new Avenue of Flags, past the bust of sculptor Gutzon Borglum by his son Lincoln, and a canopy of state flags up to the Grand View Terrace, where Borglum's favourite view of his handiwork used to be blocked by a gruesomely kitschy gift store. The new terrace affords an open view, and stairs that lead down to a new interpretative centre with two theatres, and to an open-air amphitheatre where an evening "lighting ceremony" introduces "son et lumiere" shows.
After that, visitors follow a dreamlike Presidential Trail, improbably made from recycled milk-cartons, through scenic Ponderosa pines. What "Supe" Wenk is doing for the mountain represents an initiative towards their educational value, one he hopes will prove inspiring.
What of those other settlers, already here when Jefferson was honing his quill? Clutching a copy of Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, I set off for home-made brunch of hash browns and eggs with the Crazy Horse Monument's no-nonsense grandmother, Ruth Ziolkowski. Ruth served us in the log cabin she and her husband Korczak built 50 years ago when he began the fifth colossal granite head of "Paha Sapa", as Lakota call the Black Hills.
The monument commemorates the Sioux warrior, easily outscaling Rushmore as the world's biggest sculpture, and its face is emerging from the pinkish granite of Thunderhead Mountain. It's taken half a century to make it visible.
A Polish orphan who grew up in Boston, Korczak Ziolkowski was working here under Borglum in 1947, when he was befriended by Chief Standing Bear. The Lakota Sioux wrote to him: "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes too," and asked him to commemorate Custer's foe. In no time, he was "shopping for a mountain", as Ruth puts it.
Korczak Ziolkowski envisioned the scourge of Little Big Horn as 563 feet tall, with a head over 90-feet high - the feather is going to be a problem - and 263-feet arm pointing southwest. In his version of Crazy Horse, the warrior is pointing at the Black Hills, saying: "My lands are where my dead lie buried." Korczak died in 1983, leaving Ruth to carry on with their dozen children. Until her decision to finish the face, his vision meant a leap of faith. Hundreds of tons of granite was dynamited, yet there was nothing to see. Every summer, dedicated visitors walked up Thunderhead. The ultimate plan may never be completed; but work on dynamiting out his arm begins this year, so the "Volkmarch," as it's known, won't reach the tip of his finger again. Crazy Horse has its Indian Museum and cafe; visitors are encouraged to take pink-veined granite away as souvenirs. "So we're saved the trouble ourselves!" laughs Ruth. I grabbed Rex Alan Smith's Moon of Popping Trees about the Indian Wars, as we
headed for the Badlands, a landscape of weird rock formations that shelters the shades of the Ghost Dancers. Bizarrely striped with pink and orange, and dotted with buffalo and prairie dogs, revealing its past through abundant fossils, understandably, Badlands is in demand as a location for films like Dances With Wolves.
Tourism officers Wendy, Lynn, and Sandy took us around Rapid City's pride and joy, a state-of-the-art museum called The Journey. We'd been talking about the enthusiasm of European visitors for Native Americana, an enthusiasm unmatched by most non-native Americans, although Paulette Rooney is an exception.
The Journey starts with the Abyss, a "star-studded womb of darkness" where the Black Hills and Badlands unfold in a display of creation. Travelling through time, grasping earphones in several languages, we pass a holographic Lakota woman delivering tribal stories, and pass Wild Bill Hickok as he plays poker in a Deadwood Saloon, hear thundering buffaloes and Lakota songs, pull out drawers of embroidered and beaded cloaks trimmed with porcupine quillwork. A replica of a trading post captures the spirit of the earliest pioneers. We learn how many bearskins it costs to buy a rifle. The Museum is empty except for us and two Lakota teenagers.
Next, we visit the Badlands most extraordinary draws. In the tiny town of Wall is the rambling drugstore begun during the Depression by Ted and Dorothy Hustead, and now carried on by his son, Billy. In 1931 the Husteads toured Dakota in their Model T until they found a run-down drugstore for sale in this one-street town. Mount Rushmore was appearing along Highway 16, and Dorothy had the bright idea of putting up signs announcing "Free Ice Water". "They surely did work, we've never been lonely for customers since," said 95-year-old Ted Hustead, over beef at their Western Art Gallery Dining Room. Ted has taken to a wheelchair, but loves to say he and Dorothy proved "there's nowhere on earth that's Godforsaken."