crEasing into Retirement: Mobridge

At age 92 my Mom is no longer driving the distances she used to drive, so when we stayed with her last week, we took her for a drive to the community she often visited for appointments and groceries. Some new geocaches had been placed in Mobridge since we last visited and an Adventure Lab was placed by our friend ruthav. Mom has gone along with us on some road trips when we have stopped to geocache. We thought it might be a fun outing for her as she might see things she has not seen in Mobridge.

I had read about the John Lopez fish sculpture in Mobridge. I finally got to see it. You can read about his sculptures and how sculpting from metal scraps became his passion. John Lopez

Jeremiah Smith Monument

An interesting story about Smith not on the plaque:

"Smith and his party were the first Euro-Americans to explore the southern Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. While looking for the Crow tribe to obtain fresh horses and get westward directions, Smith was attacked by a large grizzly bear. Smith was tackled to the ground by the grizzly, breaking his ribs. Members of his party witnessed him fight the bear, which ripped open his side with its claws and took his head in its mouth. When the bear retreated, Smith's men ran to help him. They found his scalp and ear ripped off, but he convinced a friend, Jim Clyman, to sew it loosely back on, giving him directions. The trappers fetched water, bound up his broken ribs, and cleaned his wounds. After recuperating from his bloody wounds and broken ribs, Smith wore his hair long to cover the large scar from his eyebrow to his ear. The only known portrait of Jedediah Smith, painted after his death in 1831, showed the long hair he wore over the side of his head, to hide his scars." ~ Wikipedia

The first bridge across the Missouri River at this location opened in 1924, but the building of the Oahe Dam in the late 1950s would flood the original bridge connecting East River and West River in the northern part of the state. The building of the dams along the Missouri would actually flood and destroy 5 other bridges built in the 1920s. The current bridge was opened in 1959 and rebuilt in 1980.

Sacajawea and child

Sacajawea Monument across the river

near the Sitting Bull Monument

"After his death in 1890 in a shootout with Indian police at his home on the Grand River, Sitting Bull's body was buried at Fort Yates on the North Dakota end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation."

"Tatanka Iyotaka, better known by the English translation Sitting Bull, was a Hunkpapa Teton spiritual leader who organized a concerted resistance movement to United States expansion on the treaty-reserved lands of the Lakota in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Years after he surrendered to the United States in 1881, Sitting Bull was shot to death December 15, 1890, by Indian police executing an arrest warrant issued by Indian Agent James McLaughlin to prevent the Lakota icon from attending a Ghost Dance revivalist ceremony.

Sitting Bull was originally buried at Fort Yates, but a group of businessmen from Mobridge, South Dakota, endeavored in the 1950s to move the gravesite to their town to attract tourists. They obtained the support of the son of one of the Indian police officers who arrested Sitting Bull, Clarence Grey Eagle, who was also a relative by marriage of the Lakota leader. Although the Fort Yates gravesite had been woefully neglected by the state, North Dakota officials refused to allow the expatriation of the remains. The South Dakotans then obtained an opinion from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that the descendants of Sitting Bull should determine his final burial site. On April 8, 1953, the South Dakotans used the BIA letter as justification for sending a team of men to dig up Sitting Bull's bones.

Less than five months later, South Dakota dedicated a memorial to Sitting Bull on the site of the relocated remains, sparking a long-running controversy between the two Dakotas and among competing memory groups, including descendants of Sitting Bull. Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski agreed to create the memorial only after a heated argument over the exploitation of Native Americans, the consent to the project of Sitting Bull's heirs, and a commitment not to exploit the monument as a tourist site. Creating further controversy, the artist boycotted the dedication of the monument because he felt that South Dakota Governor Sigurd Anderson was exploiting the ceremony for political gain.

The monument at Mobridge now stands on a hill overlooking the Missouri River, the bust of Sitting Bull resting atop a nine-foot pillar of granite. The statue is in an isolated area that, while serene and impressive, has suffered from both neglect and vandalism. A competing monument at Fort Yates, a boulder on a platform with a large plaque on the side, was built in an attempt by North Dakota to reclaim part of Sitting Bull's memory. It has since been turned over to the Standing Rock Reservation for management.

The Mobridge site was purchased in 2005 by the Sitting Bull Monument Foundation, which launched a $12.7 million fundraising campaign to create a more fitting memorial. After a life and death marked by controversy and conflict, Sitting Bull's final resting place thus became equally contentious as a result of competition between different memory groups. It seems that at last, both monuments are in the hands of those who genuinely wish to maintain Tatanka Iyotaka's historical legacy."--Research by Curtis Johnson, HIST 489, NDSU, Spring 2007

There may have been a huge fund raising to develop the area, but I can tell you it looks no different than it did in 2013 when I last visited the Sitting Bull Monument. It is a sadly neglected area with a beautiful view of rolling grass covered hills on the west side of the Missouri River, near his original home area.