Dispatch XVII

Hill City to Sturgis, South Dakota

Day 53 - November 17, 2021

Sturgis South Dakota doesn't have the flare of some of its western counterparts like Tombstone and Monument Valley, Cripple Creek or Dodge City. It’s named for a Union Colonel, Samuel Davis Sturgis * (briefly a general) whose career was as prosaic as the name the town took.

Why the founders of Sturgis attached the colonel to themselves seems to have something to do with it being located at nearby Camp Sturgis in the 1870s, around land the colonel bought. The original cluster of people thereabouts was then known as Scooptown, but once it appeared people were planting themselves permanently, the name Sturgis got applied.

Despite its uninspiring name, it is today a beloved place in the American west, the motor cycle capital of the world where every summer the town of 7,000 morphs into a metropolis of more than 600,000 fun-loving, hard-drinking, hog-roaring bikers.

The Wild West rides again.

Getting to Sturgis from Hill City involves being wound along Route 16A where the Black Hills split left and right among the heights of Cathedral Spires, the place that inspired the idea for Mt. Rushmore. We could see the lenticular rocks from miles away, ancient eruptions from the pine forest that looked like the spine of dragon. As we drove nearer, the formations took on the look of stately fléches or gargantuan monks heading one after another to vespers.

Our jaws dropped, and we stopped. I got out of the car and wandered up to a sign that explained that right at this tight bend the Historian Doane Robinson had stopped too to cool his overheated Model-T Ford in 1923 (see Dispatch XIV). That day 98 years ago he saw, not my cloaked monks, but a place to sculpt the likes of Lewis and Clark, Chief Red Cloud and Kit Carson (a variety of famous explorers were discussed). Do this, and thousands would flock to the West and South Dakota, said Robinson, which was a big goal at the time. But Cathedral Spires’ granite is also loaded with feldspar and quartz and mica, too friable for shaping giants, and so the location was moved to Mt. Rushmore.

I gazed at the steeples and thought of the four presidents and Crazy Horse and wondered which was better, hand-made mountains or the natural versions. It was a tough decision so I got back in the car and put the idea aside for another time. After awhile I came to conclusion that a few massive sculptures were an improvement, but only a few.

We snaked past and around the spires and made our way beyond to Rapid City where we picked up Interstate 90 and bent north. Less than an hour later the big hillside outside of Main Street Sturgis revealed itself, home to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and Races, the world’s most famous motorcycle event.

There isn’t much around Sturgis when it’s not being overrun by summertime motorcyclists. It’s cutout in a grid with boulevards broad enough to handle the ox carts that rolled up and down its short byways 150 years ago. These days it’s all about Harleys and Kawasakis and all the other varieties of two wheeled vehicles that have made Sturgis famous.

We parked in winds gusting to 50 mph (I felt like I should somehow tie the car to a hitching post) and wandered the streets until we found The Knuckle Trading Post, so filled with souvenirs, rally shirts, hoodies, motorcycle and wild west chachkis that you had to move sideways too get through.

A small woman with thick, wild hair was running the store that day wearing a Knuckle Saloon hoodie. I asked her what it was like when the hoards arrived.

She shrugged. “All hell breaks loose, but business is good.” Like most westerners, her speech was concise.

“How does a town of 7000 people find room for nearly 100 times that many when they show up for 10 days?” I asked, secretly wondering how the town’s overloaded plumbing system managed to survive every August.

“You name the place, and it’s rented,” she replied. “Nothing is available.”

Later, the receptionist at the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum & Hall of Fame confirmed this. She was a slim, quiet woman with a child’s bright eyes.

She told me very flat piece of real estate anywhere in the valley was annually sold out for the benefit of the incoming cyclists. “People stay as far away as North Dakota and Montana,” she said.

“Where do the people that own the property go?”

“Oh, most of them get out of town,” she said, and pocket the income. In 2015, 739,000 cyclists enjoyed Sturgis’ environs, an all-time high, and put $800 million into the regional coffers.

“It’s both good and bad,” said the wild-haired woman, back at Knuckles.

I looked around the Trading Post. “I’m surprised they didn’t name this place the Knuckle HEAD Trading Post and Saloon.”

“Oh,” she said, “the three locals who founded the place tried that, but couldn’t get the naming rights so they had to go with just knuckle.” They bought it on property once owned by Colonel Sturgis himself.

It was around noon so we asked if there was place we could get a bite, and our hostess shot an arm out and pointed us at a door to the left.

“Right there,” she said. “Best meal in town.”

We followed the arm through a covered but otherwise open air theatre of sorts. In a pinch maybe 300 people could make room for one another there. Clapboard walls, wooden floors and beams held it all together, barn-style. I imagined it was a place for bands to sing, dancers to dance and beers to be swallered. At the far end two Santa’s legs bent beyond the edges of a faux chimney. It was getting near Christmas time.

Farther on, we entered the saloon itself, a massive restaurant and bar. The Knuckle boys had several names for their emporium: a saloon, restaurant, brewery and museum. Together with the trading post and theatre it all rambled the full length of the town’s country-western block, a good half a football field long. Inside we found pool tables and dart boards, a bull-riding machine, every kind of motorcycle, maps, offbeat posters, western wisdom and art. Car grills, clothes, bicycles, hubcaps, hurricane lanterns hung from the ceiling. Old gasoline pumps and every kind of spirit and beer adorned the wall behind “South Dakota’s longest bar.”

Beef was not in short supply at the Knuckle Saloon. There were abundant variations of burgers, chili, and steaks, chicken wings, pizza and the famous Knuckle Sandwich, “definitely the biggest, most mouth-watering burger in the Black Hills” according to the owners who promised that somehow a full pound of beef could be crammed between the sandwich’s two buns. We saw no evidence of broiled fish or sprouts, carrots, arugula, beets or, God help us, kale. The one vegetable not in short supply was the potato, long, fried and crispy.

In November, the number of patrons was sparse. I might have expected a couple of truckers or cowboys, farmers or motorcyclists to be swapping lies about life on the prairie, but instead I overheard a woman nearby discussing the work she was doing on a neutrino detector. Really? In Sturgis - an enormous and enormously complex apparatus that plays at the edges of quantum physics? I wagged my head. Never make assumptions. You hear the most unexpected things in the most unexpected places. That, I decided, was one of the great advantages of travel.

While Cyn and I ate, I got thinking again about the number of people who annually descended on Sturgis. All the beer, all the hamburgers and french fries and steaks, the trash when more than half a million souls seemingly apparate from all corners. Why did people do this? Why join the crush? But it then came to me that congregation is in the human genome: think of Woodstock or the crossroads of the spice trade in the Middle East;  or the regular assemblies among plains Indians to exchange goods and celebrate the change of season; or Druidic visits to Stonehenge to do who knew what. Even Icelandic Vikings met regularly at the Althingi to amend and enact their laws, and that was over 1000 years ago. Maybe the Motorcycle Rally was a religious ritual, or was it a marketplace, or simply a party, or all three? I’m sure the dirt bike races and hillclimbs are a central appeal, but in the end I decided it was about bonding; a common love of the machine that brought the faithful together. Personally, I had never ridden a motorcycle, except for one brief trial decades ago, and I had to admit it was liberating. I could imagine zigging and zagging on the open road free and easy, through the Rockies or Appalachians, or pushing the throttle flat out over the Texas plains. But at the time, I lived in Los Angeles and knew that if one crazy California driver made a sudden lane change in front of me on the 401 Freeway I’d go from human to grease spot just like that. Still, I imagined what those cyclist must feel riding the wide, snaking roads of the American West before converging in Sturgis to share in the machinery and liberation. It was pilgrimage on wheels, and Sturgis had become Mecca.

By general consensus, Clarence “Pappy” Hoel  is the reason people began make this pilgrimage, though it’s not certain all of therm know it. Hoels was a South Dakota native who began his career providing ice for iceboxes in the 1920s. Being an intelligent man, he quickly saw that business was going the way of the buggy whip, so he opened an Indian motorcycle shop, considered America’s first true motor cycle. (Harley wouldn’t give him a franchise.) This was in 1936. Even in those days motorcycles were adored in the west.

Hoel was charismatic and enthusiastic. He loved the two-wheeled beasts, and in his own words was generally drawn to “tricks, fun and damned foolishness.” Once in the business he helped found the Jackpine Gypsies motorcycle club, pulled together races and hillclimbs at the Meade County Fairgrounds and in August 14, 1938 held the first rally. Not long afterwards, he and other enthusiasts created the Black Hills Motor Classic, and that was the start. Two hundred people participated. Growth afterward was immediate. By the time Pappy died in February 1989, nearly 100,000 cyclists would arrive that summer. And today, even after a COVID hiccup, they keep on coming.

Following a visit to the Harley-Davidson store and the Hall of Fame, we prepared to depart Sturgis. The wind was still gusting as we jumped into our car to head north on US Route 85 to Medora, ND, a place near and dear to Theodore Roosevelt. We were speeding along when I saw a sculpture that stopped us cold. I had to get a picture as it road the horizon above the parking lot of the Full Throttle Saloon—another vision of the Wild West and another symbol of its wide open spaces.

FOOTNOTE: *Samuel Sturgis graduated in the middle of his West Point class of 1846 with a few more famous officers among him on the lists: George McClellan, who briefly headed all Union forces during the Civil War, and two Confederate generals of note, George Picket and Stonewall Jackson. He’s probably best remembered as George Custer’s commander when Custer died with much of his 7th Cavalry at Battle of Little Big Horn. Sturgis’ son, James, a second lieutenant, died too, not far from Custer.

This is a series about a Vagabond Adventure - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.

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As of this Dispatch …

We have travelled 4800 miles, across four ferries, on five trains, visiting three World Heritage Sites, through 13 states, three National Parks and memorials, one National Historical Landmark, and three Canadian provinces, in 28 different beds, and seen more different kinds of hotel keys than there are prairie dogs on South Dakota’s Badlands.