By Delia O’Hara / Chicago Sun-Times Travel Section
Our family saw marvelous, stirring things last summer on a trip to Yellowstone National Park, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and other spots in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. But the high point for our 7-year-old daughter was our encounter with a dead skunk on a sparsely traveled road on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.
Now, when she talks about the trip, she says her favorite thing was the animals we saw in Yellowstone —the many elk, the single bull moose we joined a huge crowd to gawk at across a lake, and the two bison that hung around our cabin in the park’s Grand Canyon area. At the time, though, I would have bet the cost of our rental car that it was the skunk that captured her heart.
We saw it first on our way to what is purported to be the grave of Sacajawea, the young Shoshone woman who served as a guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806, a journey that opened up the American Northwest to settlement after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added vast new territories to the country. There is some controversy about where and when Sacajawea died; according to this version, she lived to be nearly 100 years old, and is buried in a cemetery near Ft. Washakie, a town on the reservation.
“Oh, look, a dead skunk,” I said.
“Where?” our daughter asked.
“We’re past it now.”
“Let’s go back.”
“It’s just a skunk. It’s dead.”
“I want to see it.”
We stopped the car and backed up. She opened the door and leaned out over the little carcass. A front leg stuck up in a jaunty salute; the smell could have dropped a horse. “That’s a skunk, huh?” she said.
The Shoshones share this reservation with the Arapahoes, who were their traditional enemies. The two tribes have reached an accommodation, coming together in a Joint Tribal Council and hosting several powwows throughout the summer that have become a favorite with tourists.
On the return trip from Sacajawea’s grave, we stopped at the skunk again.
“Don’t touch that thing,” my husband said.
“I’m not touching it,” our daughter replied.
The route through the Wind River Reservation is a great way to get to Yellowstone from the south; the area is rife with history and natural beauty. Here, near the friendly town of Lander, the Oregon Trail crossed over the Continental Divide at South Pass.
Nearby South Pass City, a restored gold-rush town that is a State Historic Site, was the first place in the United States to give women the right to vote, in 1869. Then, William Bright, South Pass City’s representative to the Territorial legislature in Cheyenne, wrote the bill that gave Wyoming the distinction of being the first territory to enfranchise its female citizens, also in 1869.
And scenic Sinks Canyon State Park is near one end of the road that leads through a relative wilderness northwest, culminating in some of the most spectacular scenery in the country, in Grand Teton National Park, just south of Yellowstone. (Wyoming miners called valleys “holes.”)
While in Lander, we missed some of the local sights because they did not lie along the road with the skunk. We went out of our way more than once to see it, and it always seemed to greet us merrily with its upstretched paw.
Eventually, though, we moved on to Yellowstone. There, our daughter yawned as her father read a plaque that described the park as a geologic “hot spot,” where molten rock bulges up close to the surface, accounting for the plethora of natural wonders there. She would not get out of the car to see the spectacular Lower Falls. She complained lustily about the rotten-eggs smell on our one family hike, which took us through the geyser-strewn Norris Basin, and she finally refused to go on — though that wasn’t actually an option halfway out.
Things that were past their prime continued to intrigue her, though: She hung around to watch formerly proud Minute Geyser piddle up barely a foot, after learning that vandals had stunted its spout by throwing debris into it. She did love all the animals, the live ones too, and she was fascinated by the effects of the 1988 fires that burned nearly 800,000 acres in Yellowstone. She learned to enjoy some new foods on the trip, including salad dressing. (We’re hoping she’ll try salad one of these days.) And she got her Junior Ranger badge fair and square, going to lectures and learning the required nature lore, then gathering an obligatory bag of trash on the park grounds.
After what at least two of us considered a wonderful week in Yellowstone, surely one of the most remarkable places on earth, we drove out the top of the park into Montana, on our way to Little Bighorn.
Ah, Little Bighorn. It was a hot August day. My husband and I were fascinated by the place, and we spent half the day there, listening to lectures, looking at exhibits, walking out over hills parched the color of old gold, and alive with grasshoppers.
Little Bighorn is the site of the greatest Indian victory in the long campaign that the eventual victors referred to as “winning the West.” Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry troops that were wiped out here in a brief battle joined June 25, 1876, to force Sioux and Northern Cheyenne groups to live on reservations like the one at Wind River.
The Indian warriors were particularly nervous because they had their families with them, camped on the banks of the tiny Little Bighorn River. On the military side, there were many more Indians than the soldiers were expecting. Communications broke down, orders were disregarded, reinforcements failed to materialize. Indian warriors like Gall, Crazy Horse and Two Moon distinguished themselves in the brief battle. When the dust cleared, Custer and all his soldiers were dead.
The American people called for reprisal, but when Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan led troops out after the Indians, he found that the band had dispersed. The rolling battlefield above the Little Bighorn became a national shrine almost overnight. It used to be called the Custer Battlefield National Monument, but American Indians, over the Years, waged another successful campaign, this one for hearts and minds, pointing out that two groups of Americans fought and died at Little Bighorn.
By the time we learned all this, our daughter had hit the wall. “I want to go to McDonald’s,” she said.
“This is such an exciting piece of American history,” we said. “Someday you’ll be glad you were here.”
In the end, we did go to McDonald’s, which happily was just down the road from Little Bighorn. We hope that one day what we said will be true, that our daughter will be glad she saw not only Little Bighorn but also all the amazing, beautiful and singular places we visited on our trip.
August 20, 1995