Dec 03, 2006 - 04:07:29 CST
Bear Butte is a lonely spur of the Black Hills. It rises from the plains in majestic relief a few miles northeast of Sturgis, S.D. If you squint just right it can be seen to resemble a recumbent bear. For centuries it has been regarded as a sacred place by the Indian peoples of the Great Plains. If you hike up the trail to the top, you will see thousands of small colorful prayer bundles tied to trees and shrubs all along the way. Indians from throughout the region - and beyond - come here to pray, fast, dream, dance, renew and find solidarity with other pilgrims.Bear Butte is a sacred mountain. It also is a South Dakota State Park. And it is close enough to Sturgis to be a victim of the annual motorcycle festival, which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world.
There is something powerful at this place. If you go silent and stand still there, you can feel something in the grass, hear something in the wind. On my lists, Bear Butte ranks as one of the five most magnificent places on the Great Plains.
I drove past Bear Butte (on South Dakota Highway 79) recently on my way from Rapid City to Dickinson. My goal was to photograph the butte in the November morning light. In the past 20 years, I have driven past Bear Butte a hundred times, and stopped to climb to the top on more than a dozen occasions. Whenever I have something really important to ponder or work out, I drive to Bear Butte and climb up to the top of the mountain (technically a volcanic laccolith 4,422 feet high, 1,253 feet above the surrounding plains) to brood while gazing off at the vastness of the Great Plains. I never drive past it in the daylight without stopping to take photographs.
The other day about 9 a.m., I came up over the rise expecting to see the stark and lonely magnificence of Bear Butte as it always has been and always will be. But what I saw instead was a scar as red as lipstick that marred, perhaps even ruined, the view.
The scar is a biker bar.
Last summer, a man named Jay Allen built a 22,000-square-foot, three-story roadhouse bar 21/2 miles north of the base of the butte. It's called the Broken Spoke. Its garish red metal walls shout down the subtle drab pastels of the plains. It's an eyesore. It's an open affront to American Indians. The parking lot looks like one you would find at a baseball stadium or special events center. Allen plans to carve out a 30,000-seat amphitheater at the site where he will host rock concerts during the annual Sturgis rally. According to press reports, one regular feature of the Broken Spoke will be a Best Breasts contest. You get the picture.
From a beer, biker and boobs perspective, it makes perfect sense. It would be hard to imagine a Great Plains bar with a better backdrop. According to the protocols of American free enterprise, Allen has a perfect right to buy private land anywhere he wishes and do with it anything that is permitted by law. He saw opportunity, invested heavily, and expects to prosper. It's the American way. It's important to remember, too, that many of the bikers who gravitate to Sturgis feel an affinity with American Indians, especially the defiant Crazy Horse, who visited Bear Butte in 1857, and vowed to devote his life to resisting the white invasion of Oglala Sioux country. Hundreds of bikers each year climb Bear Butte to experience its medicine power and exhibit their respect for American Indian culture.
But the Great Plains are a big platform, and Allen could have built his biker bar in any number of places close to Sturgis without offending Indians or impairing the Bear Butte viewshed. He chose to locate his bar in the shadow of Bear Butte for the express purpose of using the magnificent mountain to extract money from the pockets of the bikers who flock to Sturgis every August. In other words, he believes he will earn more money at a roadhouse that fronts Bear Butte than one located on the undifferentiated plains directly east of Sturgis. In doing so, he is appropriating something that belongs to the American Indian community, something sacred, for his personal profit. He is extracting beer sales from Bear Butte, just as surely as the Homestake Mining Co. extracts gold from the Black Hills. It's a very old pattern in American history.
The Lakota and Cheyenne, among other tribes, exerted what influence they could to dissuade Allen from building his roadhouse so close to a place so important to their historical traditions and their religious activities. In choosing to ignore their passionate entreaties, Allen violated no laws, but he did commit an act of grotesque insensitivity. It would be like building a striptease joint near the foundation of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican in Rome, or a Wal-Mart at the base of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Or, if you prefer a secular analogy, it would be like throwing up a waffle joint beside the Lincoln Memorial.
Civilization has chosen to protect the precincts of St. Peter's, Notre Dame and the Lincoln Memorial from adverse economic development. So why do we show so little respect for the magnificent and sacred places of the American West?
Open a porn shop next to the new Lutheran mega church on north Washington Street and all of Bismarck would rise up to force the shop's relocation. Build a wet T-shirt bar in the precinct of the Indian "cathedral" of the northern plains and most of the white community shrugs its shoulders and gets on with life. We need a more mature and sensitive land ethic on the Great Plains. We need to designate the places that are unique or infused with natural or cultural heritage, and write reasonable laws to restrain insensitive economic development in their vicinity. What is so glaringly occurring at the base of Bear Butte also is unfolding in less dramatic fashion in the Badlands of North Dakota, near Devils Tower in Wyoming, at the base of Lewis and Clark's Pompeys Pillar in Montana, on the Missouri River north of Bismarck and Mandan - wherever there are scenic vistas to be seen through McMansion windows, wherever money can be made from a business's proximity to grandeur.
Respect and cultural sensitivity are not legally enforceable. They are habits of the heart. But rational zoning laws make sense, just as neighborhoods establish covenants about acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Once you destroy the aesthetics of a place, there is no turning back in any human-scale timeframe. Now Bear Butte always will be impaired by the Broken Spoke, which could just as easily be located in Denver, Reno, or for that matter Rapid City. But Bear Butte only can be located here. And it has priority on every scale - except that of heartless capitalism. On the strength of Allen's precedent, other roadhouses are being planned for the shoulders of the butte.
The Lakota and Cheyenne Indians, together with 60 other tribes, discouraged and then fought the project and attempted to convince the Meade County Commission not to issue a liquor license to Allen. Their goal, which from their point of view is entirely reasonable, is to create a five-mile buffer zone around Bear Butte to prevent just such developments as the Broken Spoke roadhouse. The local tribes have been buying up land around the base of the butte - more than $1 million worth so far - but they were unable to purchase all of the requisite land before Allen started to lay down asphalt.
My Bear Butte experience the other day was a wake-up call. If this trend continues, the future of the Great Plains is not going to be decided by good sense and community consensus, but by the arrogance of money and power. It's going to be a battle royal. If you love the beauty of this place, you had better suit up for the fight.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
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