Small Wonders--Visit the Castles

On a single visit to Lemmon, South Dakota, you can see the whole world. Seriously.

You want joy? Once a summer they put a tent up in Lemmon—a beer tent—for a town festival. A whole lot of people celebrate with a whole lot of beer, so many people and so much beer the town sells a souvenir t-shirt with “I got bent in the tent,” across your chest.

You can buy that t-shirt any time of year, too. It’ll stop traffic. Even if people don’t ask, they’ll wonder, may even dream. “I got bent in the tent.”

But there’s more to the world. Right downtown Lemmon, an entire city block is petrified wood that's sculpted into shapes and figures so strange they’ll make you believe you spent far too much time in that tent, even in January.



Mid-Depression, a dreamer named Ole S. Quammen hired thirty or forty unemployed working stiffs to scour the land 25 miles around, land of a long-ago forest whose trees ever-so-slowly had turned into stone. Haul that petrified wood to town, he told them, and we’ll shape it into wishing wells, waterfalls, and pyramids.

Three-quarters of a century later, all that ancientness hasn’t aged much, and, quite frankly, the whole city block looks just as goofy as it ever did. All that being said, you can’t drive by. Just can’t. It’s a Twilight Zone of petrification. Lemmon’s got odd, all right. 

Up the road at a place called Slim Buttes, a cavalry attack on a Lakota camp turned into a bloody rout when 150 troops came up on a band of Lakotas the army called "hostile," even though most of the Natives wanted only to get on with the life they’d always led.

It was September, 1876, a few months after Little Big Horn. Captain Anson Mills had his men out scouting for food when they ran into a camp and attacked, even though their orders were to avoid engagement.

But after Little Big Horn, no U.S. troops were in much of a mood for peace. Some Sioux escaped the surprise attack by running up into the hills and taking refuge in a gully. Twenty troops volunteered to go get them. You can imagine what happened. When it was over, Mills’ troops cleaned out the Lakota larger and had their first big meal in weeks.

Compared to the battle at Little Big Horn, Slim Buttes was little more than bloody and ugly. Those Lakota who made it out alive went hungry. 

Let me tell you, today Slim Buttes--people call them "The Castles"--is just as gorgeous as it was in 1876. Their alabaster cliffs rise like a fleet of winged ships from a Dakota prairie where "the deer and the antelope play"--and pronghorn. Wildflowers carpet the grasses, while tall clouds sail like a tribute over the buttes.

We’re up in the far, far corner of South Dakota. There are no crowds. If you know the stories, the silence all around makes the whole world seem like a theater.

Thirty years before the battle, right here the famous Lakota warrior Crazy Horse spent a night or two amid the castles with a lovely woman who was a wife to someone else--let’s just call it a little camping trip. When her husband showed up at the tipi, Crazy Horse looked up the barrel of the man’s rifle and took a bullet in his face that left him with a permanent snarl. The woman he’d loved out here left with her husband. 

Crazy Horse, the man astride a mountain in the Black Hills--you can visit the monument, see if from miles away--that Crazy Horse lost face here because among the Lakota there was nothing noble about taking another man’s wife. He had to earn honor back again—which he did at Little Big Horn.

Likely as not, you’ll be alone at Slim Buttes' wonderful castles. You can sit and watch and listen out there all by your lonesome. I stopped by on a worshipful Sunday morning. Place was dead quiet. I hiked around a bit, found a stocking cap just off a path—camo outside, fluorescent orange inside. Nice. I took it home—a souvenir. I didn’t didn’t get a t-shirt, nor did I get bent in the tent. Not really. Still got the cap.

It was just something to be there amid the Castles that morning because I swear, just outside of Lemmon, South Dakota, amid all that petrified wood, if you know the stories and stand up high enough amid those magnificent buttes, you can see most all of the world right there, all around.