We spent the day and night in South Dakota's first and largest state park. It was a first for us and we kept asking ourselves, "What took us so long?"

Bison wander the park’s 71,000 acres, which they share with pronghorn antelope, elk, mountain goats and a band of begging burros. Our animal sightings began almost immediately. Giddiness ensued.
Our first stop was at the Blue Bell Lodge, an early 1930's CCC project.

We were there for the coffee, and ironically, the buffalo sausage! Both were delicious.
A fun pause was at Prairie Dog Town where black-tailed prairie dogs live in social “towns”. The colonies help shape the prairie by clipping vegetation and turning soil, which attracts bison, burrowing owls, hawks, badgers, and snakes. Thankfully, we only saw the darling dogs.

These guys were a treat.  The burros are descendants of pack animals brought to the Black Hills by miners in the mid-1870s.
Sylvan Lake Lodge once used the donkeys to carry tourists up to the summit of Black Elk Peak. When the tourist rides stopped in the late 1920s, the working burros were released into the park to live in the wild.
They were incredibly friendly.

Our next stop was so informative. Completed in 2022, the Bison Center brought the story of the North American bison to life and answered so many questions we had.
The free roaming herd of nearly 1,400 bison at Custer State Park is one of the world's largest publicly owned bison herds.
All of these magnificent beasts are here because of a 1914 purchase of 36 Bison from a forward thinking rancher. Wow.




This is my favorite traffic jam... ever!

We only saw one pronghorn antelope but that was special enough.
And how about this amazing building? C.C. Gideon opened the Game Lodge on August 8, 1921. Only 72 days later, it burned down but was resurrected by the following June. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge and Mrs. Coolidge spent three months at the Game Lodge calling it the “Summer White House”. How cool.
A stroll around the shore of Sylvan Lake ended our day of sightseeing.
We enjoyed a peaceful night at the aptly named Center Lake Campground, nestled in the center of Custer State Park. Poet Badger Clark described it as a place "where one can still be an unworried and unregimented individual, wear any old clothes, sit on a log, and get their sanity back again." We will return to this South Dakota treasure one day. 

From movies watched and stories read, Deadwood has always had an allure.

It was here, 152 years ago, that the discovery of gold in the southern Black Hills set off one of the great gold rushes in America. In 1876, miners moved into the northern Black Hills. That’s where they came across a gulch full of dead trees and a creek full of gold and Deadwood was born.
Practically overnight, the tiny gold camp boomed into a town that played by its own rules that attracted outlaws, gamblers and gunslingers along with the gold seekers. Wild Bill Hickok was one of those men who came looking for fortune.

Wild Bill is probably the most famous Deadwood resident, even though he was only in town a few short weeks.  James Butler Hickok arrived in Deadwood, along with Colorado Charlie Utter and Calamity Jane, in July of 1876.  He was a well-known gambler and gunslinger, participating in many shootouts before coming to Deadwood. He was killed on August 2, 1876 when Jack McCall shot him from behind while playing poker. When he died, Wild Bill was holding a pair of aces and eights, that series of cards became known to poker players all around the world as the “Dead Man’s Hand."

Poor Calamity Jane. Born Martha Canary in 1856 and orphaned 9 years later, Calamity Jane survived by any means possible, meaning she followed railroad, military, and gold camps across Wyoming Territory.  She was on the Newton-Jenny Expedition in 1875 and General Crook’s expedition of 1876.  Calamity Jane would dress in soldier’s uniforms to avoid detection.  She joined the Wagon Train that included Wild Bill and Charlie Utter in Fort Laramie, WY.  Jane was loud, profane, and often drunk – she was also widely known.  She worked hard to fit into a man’s world, and made her living in a variety of ways by cooking, cleaning, waitressing, dance hall girl, and as a prostitute, but she had a soft side – she tended to the sick (smallpox epidemic).