Welcome to Hot Springs. Or not. Photo by Mark DeVies / Flickr
Stick horses and white elephants
By James Giago Davies What the heck is wrong with Hot Springs?!? Mniwoblu, Bubbling Water, that’s what the Lakota called Hot Springs, and the Mniwoblu Valley lies 12 miles west of the Pine Ridge Reservation, as the carcass circling buzzards fly. The Wasicu renamed the Mniwoblu the Fall River because of the succession of beautiful falls, and then used heavy equipment to destroy those falls, dropping the river ten feet down between retaining walls, because it flooded one time and got some Wasicu fat cat’s handlebar mustache wet. Many mountain tops look down on the valley, and one of them the Wasicu named Battle Mountain even though the battle they alleged was fought there between the Cheyenne and Lakota never took place. They should have named it Mustache Mountain because that’s probably where the fat cat sought refuge until his already too tight patent leather shoes dried out. Over the years the Hot Springs merchants have had a love/hate relationship with the Lakota—there is a nice Wasicu guy who makes really cool tipis, and that’s about all the love. A prominent attorney told me one time he had inside dope—a Lakota man was beaten to death in the Fall River County lockup in 1967, and then the body was dumped out at the Crazy Horse Festival site, which killed that annual celebration, but it was better than two law enforcement professionals doing hard time for murder. That’s an example of the hate. The most obvious everyday example would be the curious under representation of anything Lakota in Hot Springs; other towns that close to a famous Indian reservation, the tribe of Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, would have turned most of the town’s tourism over to anything and everything Indian. Not Hot Springs. It’s about the water, which isn’t even hot, tastes awful to drink, and it isn’t even about the water, but about a scheming cabal of rocking chair elite who own the main business making money off that water, and have blocked every attempt to develop the river for the benefit of the townsfolk, because that would require outside investors bringing clout and enlightenment, and they would lose their 19th Century stranglehold on the town’s destiny. Some Lakota try to change that reality, like hoop dancer Dallas Chief Eagle. He showed up about twenty years back, had a contract with the civic center, perform regular shows on stage. He had that spontaneous Lakota wit, like when his pet coyote took a dump on stage—“I said a hoop dance, not a poop dance!” The guy was good. But the Chamber wouldn’t promote him right so few visitors showed up and he even had to borrow $20 from me one day. He had this dream of putting a giant hoop dancer up on top of the peak just across the highway, and we thought you could even have the hoops lit up, with the colors of the four directions. You could have had a Mitakuye Oyasin cultural center beneath it, honoring all peoples as one. But Hot Springs had other plans. They hired a city engineer from Chicago, and they believed all the BS he fed them. Rumor has it his mother had recklessly deluded him into believing he was a man of destiny. So, he felt like he could do no wrong. He wore a great big cowboy hat, tromped about in loud cowboy boots, and an old man in town proclaimed him “the Stickhorse Cowboy.” Stickhorse bought himself some land. Yeee-hah. He built himself a pole barn, but put the cattle shoot too close to the house so no cattle could get into it. Had to move the whole damn barn!—must have built it to accommodate stickcattle. Then he talked the town council into a new sewage treatment facility which he built too close to town, first evidence of that being the God awful stink. The treatment ponds overflowed and raw sewage poured down the Fall River. He also talked them into building an expensive garbage processing facility. Forget a city dump, he told them, a new state wide law now forces towns to process their garbage, and they will have to come to us and pay us to do it! Sounded wonderful. A state senator from Custer warned the council that law could be overturned, but they believed Stickhorse, and built the facility, and then the law was overturned. Facility was worthless. Stickhorse wasn’t done. He talked the town into a new civic center, which he designed, said it would be heated by the warm waters of the Fall River. He said they could have a gym for state tournaments and a theater for conventions. But the gym wasn’t regulation size so the South Dakota High School Activities Association wouldn’t use it, and the theater was made too small so even the Jehovah’s Witnesses couldn’t hold their convention there. The pump clogged with sand from the river, so there was no heat, and because he didn’t bevel the foundation of the building, water seeped in everywhere. Not satisfied with that boondoggle of a white elephant he blocked a wonderful plan called the Gorge Project to develop the Fall River into something spectacular. The architect of the plan submitted it, free of charge. But Stickhorse had his own plans for river development. He built new sidewalks and with fancy lamp posts, but he made the turns all too sharp on the corners, so they had to be all torn up and redone! Even the fat cat with the handlebar mustache spun up out of his grave and chased him across town in his too tight patent leather shoes. Why didn’t they just listen to Dallas Chief Eagle? Had they built that Hoop Dancer it would be world famous, drawing millions every summer to learn the real truth about Lakota history and culture, and the town would be rolling in the dough. Instead a Stickhorse Cowboy played the whole dimwit bunch like a fiddle, and he didn’t even have the proper engineering degree. Dallas might have let a coyote poop on the stage, but the city council let a stickhorse cowboy poop on the whole town. (James Giago Davies can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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