Livingston, Montana

Since I last wrote on the blog we have had several adventures. The last 2 nights were spent in Sheridan, Wyoming. The day before we drove to Sheridan we visited Devil's Tower in Sundance Wyoming. The name Sundance may be familiar to you from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Apparently Sundance  got his name from the town where he was incarcerated for 18 months for theft. Devil's Tower, the first national monument, is a large 800 ft. mountain of igneous rock. Visitors can walk around it and adventurous souls can climb the parallel, vertical cracks that extend from the top to the bottom. We did neither. By the way, there is a KOA campground at the base of the monument that plays Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind on a nightly basis. (Have I said this already??)

After visiting the monument we drove to a town of 300 plus souls called Hulett, Wy. I had read about a gallery/museum called Rogue's Gallery that I wanted to investigate. When we arrived, it was closed. As we stood in front of the gallery, a young man started talking to us and we quickly learned that he was the owner. We convinced him to open it for 5 minutes. It was an amazing shop  full of western and native American lore from the 1800s as well as rodeo posters and paintings done by the owner. We quickly bought a rodeo poster before we could be ushered out of the store. As we were leaving we learned that the proprietor was on the way to Sheridan to observe the first National Indian Relays. Since the relays were continuing the next day we decided to go after we drove to Sheridan.

The Relays were held in the fairgrounds. We sat in the stands and watched individual Native Americans from various tribes compete in relay races with their horses. Each rider had three horses and rode bareback. He had to race around a track, jump off the first horse and jump onto the 2nd and eventually the 3rd horse while competing with 4 other individuals. It was pretty manic. Some riders fell off horses, horses ran without riders, collided with other horses, and some of the horses even fell down on the dirt track. It was a great event that we learned about by happenstance.

Yesterday we drove to MN to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. 263 whites died while attacking an Indian village that had @8,000 Sioux and Cheyenne residents and approximately 2000 warriors. The soldiers were on a mission to force the native Americans to reservations. This happened several years after the white citizens of the US invaded the Black Hills in search of gold. This was negotiated Indian land, but needless to say, they were evicted from their own land without any reparations. These Indians wanted to live in freedom, but were eventually forced into reservations within 2 years after their victory at the Little Bighorn.

We spent most of the day driving through Montanna to Livingston. We are camped along the Yellowstone River with mountains surrounding us. Tomorrow we leave for Helena and new adventures.

Indian Relay race

Devil's Tower

Rogue's Gallery

Indian Relay