According to Lakota legend, all of the universe was given a song and each part of the universe was given a piece of the song, but only in the Black Hills can the whole song be heard. Those lines echo in my ears throughout the Black Hills of South Dakota. Truly, there is a sense of the metaphysical here. I can feel the pulse of the earth as the sunrise begins to sneak above a woolly layer of clouds and bands of orange add an intensity to the amber of dry grass across hills that seem like waves frozen in mid-roll by some god bent on preserving a moment too breathtakingly beautiful to let pass. Three pronghorn bucks take turns chasing a doe across the hillsides, loping through the sun-burnt meadows, then zigzagging across a dry creek bed trimmed in burr oak, cottonwood and aspen, themselves adding to the palette of yellows before me. We await the main event, the annual buffalo roundup, early each October, in Custer State Park near Rapid City in western South Dakota.

I am on one of the larger hills, a rise that dips to a U-shaped pass through which the buffalo will be herded, then funneled into corrals where they will undergo exams, calves inoculated, some of their numbers culled to be auctioned off as breeding stock and some for meat. We are told the park can sustain about 1,500 and the herd grows beyond that each year. Since our arrival, this morning, as part of a 40-SUV caravan headed by a vehicle carrying Mike Rounds, South Dakota’s governor, there has been an endless stream of visitor vehicles. They are directed into lots in a number of locations. Hundreds of spectators now line the hillsides, most standing, some seated in portable fold-up chairs, many with binoculars and/or cameras with telephoto lenses. A TV transmission truck with a dish antenna sits behind me on the hill where I pace in the morning chill.

The balled-up clouds burn off in the rising sun, whose gorgeous angular light paints the hills first in orange then fading to yellow. The scrub plants and wildflowers hugging close to the ground in the chilled breezes create patches of amber, brown, chartreuse across the hillsides. A small flock of mallards does a strafing run over the stunted trees along the creek bed, while a string of whitetail deer angles down a clay-colored slope. A trio of burros scampers down behind them. The burros seem an anomaly. An omen.

Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary

It is the pronghorns that telegraph the approach of the herd, their ambles interrupted by a frozen immobility. When the first of the big, black beasts appear like inkblots on the most distant hillside, the pronghorns take off like rifle shots, in a ruler-straight line away from the approach of the herd. The thunder of hooves begins to grow louder. Cowboys ride the flanks, keeping the herd on course, although small groups break away from time to time and must be directed back. Pickup trucks also patrol the edges of the herd, now raising great billows of dust in these drought-dry hills.

I am hypnotized. First a couple of dozen, then a couple of hundred, then hundreds of bison rumble down the hillsides, then through the pass directly in front of me. It doesn’t take too much imagination to imagine the ghosts of Sioux hunters in the thick of the chase.

With the settling dust, we are herded into pickups and head for the corrals, where the scene morphs into an agricultural domesticity that belies the action preceding. There are four chow lines, spooning out sloppy Joes, garnished with bags of chips, with hot coffee chasers. I sit at a picnic table, one of long rows set out to accommodate the spectators. The warming sun feels wonderful, the ersatz cowboy grub nothing short of a gourmet feast in this setting.

Deadwood Redux

Cowboy, Hill City Depot

So, what about the cowboys? Well, having dinner above Saloon #10, where a sore loser in a card game shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back . . . that’s . . . interesting. As an unapologetic (more on that in a minute) fan of the HBO series "Deadwood," I wasn’t even sure there was such a place until I saw it on my itinerary. But the real town, smack in the midst of Black Hills gold rush country, is a revelation to be sure. Many of the old – or rehabbed to look old – places are still there. Some of them clearly make the most of the cast of characters associated with the town and now popularized in the TV series: Sheriff Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane and the ubiquitous ghost of Wild Bill. Statues, paintings, prints, even actual photos of Hickok appear to pop up everywhere, perhaps the most impressive the bronze above his grave at Mount Moriah Cemetery. His final resting place sits right next to that of Calamity Jane, who apparently idolized him.

South Dakotans appear conflicted by the popular, and critically acclaimed TV series, its unabashed profanity, sexuality and violence presenting a dilemma for a population that prides itself on its congeniality. The dilemma being that the program has clearly placed South Dakota in the national, even international spotlight, but has done so in the earthiest of contexts. (Two men from the U.K. I met on this trip were big fans.) At the Adams Museum and House, a wonderful place to gain insight into the town, its origins and personalities, the website traffic went from 800 hits the day before the initial program aired to more than a million the day after. According to exhibits curator Darrel Nelson, much that appears on the show is carefully researched. Exhibits at this vest pocket museum are well worth a few hours of your time. Among other things, they layout how the area’s famous Homestake gold mine came about and how it operated. They also have a wonderful, original N.C. Wyeth drawing of Wild Bill, guns ablaze. And, to establish the veracity of the seeming anomaly that the Black Hills were once part of an inland sea, there is a skeleton of a 90-million-year-old, 20-foot-long, flippered Plesiosaur in the basement.

Historic Franklin Hotel, Deadwood

As we pull up in front of the historic Franklin Hotel, I am confronted with an assemblage of cowboys, cowgirls and assorted geezers and bluehairs rocking in chairs on the colonnaded front porch. They await, I am told, the daily gunfight about to take place in front of the hotel. In an odd contravention of the movement of time, a Wyatt Earp type character is very impressed with our GMC Yukon, then drifts off to shoot it out with his fellow re-enactors in just another day in the life of Deadwood. I am assigned the William Taft suite, one of the many rooms at the hotel named for famous personages who visited there. The list is impressive, indeed, ranging from Babe Ruth to Buffalo Bill, John Wayne to Jann Wenner, Jack Dempsey to Kevin Costner. The octogenarian elevator operator is sipping an A&W root beer between rides. My suite looks as if President Taft may have been the last visitor. It could easily serve as a set for the TV show with its red velours, dark woods, antique furnishings, photos of women in bonnets and muddy street cityscapes. Opened in 1903, the hotel is a classic example of turn-of-the-century design and décor. And, oh yes, the slot machines. You’d be hard-pressed to find a seat anywhere in town that doesn’t belly up to a slot machine.

Rushmore and more

Of course, ask anyone to give you a reason to go to South Dakota and the answer, more often that not, will be Mount Rushmore. For the ride up to the mountain, we take the Black Hills Railroad out of Hill City. I can’t help but be a little suspicious of the cowboys in period costume milling about the train station before we depart, chugging away behind a vintage steam locomotive and a half-dozen antique railroad cars. Two women and a preacher out of some century-old time warp board the train with us just before the more ominous looking characters disappear behind the station house.

We chuff off, gliding past vast stands of the dark-needled ponderosa pines that give the Black Hills their unique look and their name. Layers of limestone line the cuts that allow the railroad to knife through the hills. The thin topsoil is dressed in blue harebells, goldenrod, wild rose, chokecherry and late-blooming blue aster. Burr oaks counterpoint the stands of ponderosa. Deer hop off through the woods. We pass a farmyard with four giant Percheron plough horses. Poles that once supported the old telegraph lines are descending to earth at odd angles along our route, their now useless wires swaying in the breezes. Suddenly, our worst fears are realized when the desperados who had milled about the depot appear out of the woods fire upon the train, order the engineer to halt, remove the strong box and take the two women and the minister hostage. It all ends amicably when they ride off into the late afternoon, aboard SUVs, substituting for sleek black stallions.

The sight of four of our greatest statesmen carved into the top of a dramatic, granite-faced mountain is a patriotic moment indeed. South Dakota’s marketing tagline is "Great Faces Great Places," and the state bills itself as the place where men carve mountains. But the result of all of the above is not necessarily uncontested good will. The native peoples, it seems, have a problem with man altering a place they hold sacred. Without wading into the midst of that controversy, I am awed by what the sculptor Gutzon Borglum was able to pull off at Rushmore. The 60-foot-tall heads of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln tower above you in a panorama that Americans have become familiar with since grade school, but to see the real article is to deny any sense that photos could do it justice. Add to the spectacle, an approach of marble columns, listing all the states and an amphitheatre positioned directly below the mountain and the whole affair takes on a classical, colossal Greco-Roman aura.

Crazy Horse Memorial

Apparently not to be outdone by Caucasians chiseling four white men onto a sacred mountain, the Native Americans have a project of their own going on . . . and on . . . and on. The Crazy Horse Memorial, itself being carved into a granite peak, will be 563 tall and 641 feet long when it is completed. Those dimensions are more than nine times taller than the faces on Rushmore, even eight feet taller than the Washington Monument, and more than twice the length of a football field. But size alone doesn’t begin to describe this monument. Crazy Horse sits atop his horse with his left hand pointing off into the distance. Scale models at the impressive visitor’s center at the base of the mountain present an awesome image of what the final product will look like. The question is who alive today will get to see the final unveiling? Begun 57 years ago, the sculpture thus far includes only the unfinished head of Crazy Horse and a tunnel beneath his arm. The project was born in the early 1940s when a Lakota elder named Henry Standing Bear approached the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski with the idea to do a memorial that would announce to the world: "the red man has great heroes, too." Clearly, a decision was made to outdo Rushmore. Work was begun in 1948. Thankfully, Ziolkowski had 10 children, seven of whom, along with his wife, Ruth, still keep the project moving forward. Korczak died in 1982.

Horses roam freely

Given the significance of the horse to both the Caucasian and Native American cultures, a visit to the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary is a must. Here, more than 400 mustangs run free on 11,000 acres of prairie, rolling hills and valleys. The refuge replicates the old west so closely it has attracted filmmakers who don’t have to work at all to recreate the mood, among them directors of "Hidalgo" and "Crazy Horse." My trip around portions of the refuge with its founder, 80-year-old Dayton Hyde is amusing as well as enlightening.

"We know what poor is," Hyde allows, "but you couldn’t buy this way of life."

Having started the sanctuary some 17 years before, Hyde points to some equine denizens who were there from the outset, horses 40 years old or more. When they do go to die, he says, they pick a favored spot, then lie down and succumb to hypothermia. His attachment to the wild horses is obvious throughout our tour.

"Old cowboys, of which I am one," he says, "bred horses for racing, rodeos, dressage, that sort of thing – not for smarts. These animals are highly intelligent."

He points out some he calls "sorreias," a Portuguese breed he says was first introduced by the earliest explorers.

Digging at the Mammoth Site

The history of the Black Hills, of course, dates back a bit further than the clash of European and indigenous cultures, witness the Plesiosaur at the Adams Museum. One of the best places to see what sort of remains are being uncovered here is the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs. Here, under a nicely constructed enclosure, experts and volunteers are digging into a former sinkhole that is nothing short of a treasure trove of remains from some 26,000 years ago. To date, the bones of 52 Columbian and woolly mammoths have been uncovered; the largest concentration of such skeletal remains ever unearthed at a site where they died. The fortuitous result of the collision of a construction site bulldozer with a mammoth tusk some 30+ years ago, the site was originally a watering hole for the mammoths and more than 45 other species whose remains have also been uncovered. The prevailing theory for the concentration was an attraction of the animals to the watering hole, their falling on the slippery wet shale that surrounded it and their inability to get back out. The site is fascinating with many of the skeletons largely uncovered and still in place, a veritable "gold mine of paleontology," as assistant bone-bed curator Mellissa Reisma describes it.

The limestone sediment that built up over eons beneath the inland sea in this region was eventually forced to the surface during one of those cataclysmic geological uplifts. Then, for millennia, water flowing through fissures in the subsurface eventually hollowed out caves throughout the Black Hills. I visit one of them, Rushmore Cave, where I join a group that penetrates almost a mile and a half into the hillside. Tight squeezes alternate with huge chambers decorated in stalactites and stalagmites. We stop at one point and quiet to a total silence that is both uplifting and eerie. Then we do a lights-out that darkens so totally I can’t see my hand waving in front of my nose. At a constant temperature a few degrees below 60, I wonder if the Native Americans didn’t use such natural shelters during the brutal winters on the plains. There is no evidence they ever used this one.

Indian Chief at Tatanka

Kevin Costner, whose Academy Award winning movie, "Dances with Wolves," did wonders presenting the story of the conquest of the plains, from the perspective of Native Americans, is heavily invested in this part of the Black Hills. He owns a casino in Deadwood and a place, not far from town, called "Tatanka-Story of the Bison." Here, at an interpretive center and around the grounds, Native Americans tell of their long history of association with the bison. There is also a magnificent, life-size bronze sculpture of Indians driving the bison over a "buffalo jump," one of the principal ways they killed these animals, which provided them sustenance, clothing and shelter.

In the course of many years traveling and writing about my adventures, I have heard, many times, a place described as "the best kept travel secret." I think, this time, I’ve found it. Ask a hundred, a thousand people, where they would like to go on vacation and what are the odds of South Dakota being mentioned at all? On the other hand, in a world where so much of tourism is geared toward man’s need to "improve" upon the natural world, in South Dakota you are exposed to nature’s rebuttal. I return to the Lakota pronouncement: only in the Black Hills can the whole song be heard. I would add: and the video be seen. The images and the sound track play over and over in my mind.