Today we took a drive up the Missouri River from Chamberlain into the Lower Brule Indian Reservation. Started up MI-50 to Crow Creek where we turned NW on BIA-4 to Fort Thompson. There is a tiny Indian casino in Fort Thompson and we noted there are some nice tribal buildings but the Native American housing is depressing to view. It reminds me of a line in the movie Little Big Man in which Dustin Hoffman’s character says “When you get to an Indian village you think ‘I see the dump but don’t see any village.'” I don’t know what problems these folks are presented with but their ability to cope with them seems frail.
From Fort Thompson we crossed over a hydroelectric dam to the west bank of the Missouri where we took some cleverly unlabeled roads to the town of Lower Brule, another community within the reservation with the same conditions we noted in Fort Thompson – nifty tribal government and tribal community buildings but shit housing. Lots of single-wide trailers with horrible siding dot the otherwise gorgeous landscape. Small conventionally framed houses are in various states of disrepair or collapse and quite a few residents seem to think that their trash should be stockpiled in their front yards and side yards but never the back yards which are reserved for rusting junk cars.
From Lower Brule, I flawlessly directed Peggy, today’s driver, to continue up a road which took us through some very nice farmland but ultimately ended in dirt roads that came to dead ends against the Missouri. We drove back for another fabulous trip through Lower Brule (there does not seem to be any Brule or Upper Brule – possibly because “lower” is no idle descriptor of the town) before turning on a road Peggy had initially intended to take before I gave her the bum steer. We continued on the road, BIA-10, down into a small river valley for Medicine Creek. This place, quite devoid of any reservation residences, is very pretty and we spotted large wading birds and turtles sunning themselves on logs in the creek. We crossed the creek and continued on BIA-10 until we got to SD-273 where we turned south to Kennebec.
In Kennebec we spotted a KOA campground we stayed at in 1981 and it has not changed much. From Kennebec we got back on I-90 and drove west back to our campground in Chamberlain, stopping only for diesel and a picture taking opportunity with a big fiberglass buffalo mounted alongside the highway in front of Al’s Oasis.
We found that if you stay out of the Indian community areas, the scenery along the Missouri and nearby sections of South Dakota are stunningly beautiful. We crossed through farmlands with abundant crops, Missouri River roads with gorgeous scenes of the colorful banks cut by the river, a dam with calm lakes both sides that had lots of aquatic birds feasting on the fish (although below the dam they may have been feasting on pieces of fish since the fish had just taken a trip through the turbines) and wonderful rolling grasslands. It is really quite pretty – another repudiation of my preconceived notions of this part of the world.