After a roughly ten-hour drive from Chicago on Saturday, I arrived in Vermillion, South Dakota, where reader Hugh Britten, his wife Lynn (both biologists at the University of South Dakota) and their daughter Caitlin greeted me with excellent hospitality, including two cats, a d*g, and a lovely get-together with other faculty and great noms. Here’s the family; note the tabby between Lynn and Caitlin:
A closeup of the tabby, named Dobby:
And the other cat, a black fluffball named Jedda (they also had a friendly and ancient d*g named Isabelle, but I don’t have a picture of her):
Before the soirée, we had time for a quick visit to two nice sights around the town. The first is the National Music Museum (formerly known as the “Shrine to Music,” a much better name), which is a world-class collection of instruments and music-iana: a stunning collection for a small school. Grania has, I believe, posted some of the photos I took with my iPhone (mostly Guitars of the Greats), and here are a few more.
This, I was told, was one of only two surviving guitars made by Stradivarius. I can’t vouch for that independently (the label below says it’s “one of a handful”), but I had no idea he made any guitars. This one must be worth millions.
The information about it:
And here’s his signature on the peg head:
Another Strad, this time a viola (at least I think that’s what it is):
I was told this is the oldest harpsichord in the world that’s still playable. (UPDATE: In comment #11 below, reader M. Janello tells us a little about this instrument and then links to a video of the harpsichord being played.)
The information:
Moar harpsichords (the Museum has several rooms of these and their descendants, the piano and the pianoforte):
After the Museum, we visited the famous Spirit Mound, a natural mound that was visited by Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition (1804-1806: the first non-native expedition to the US west). We know this is the place, for it’s described accurately (including the view, which at the time included no trees) in Clark’s journal. The visit was on August 25, 1804, and you can read more about their ascent of the mound here. The local Native Americans considered a kind of sacred place, but one inhabited by malicious demons.
Here’s the mound, which isn’t very tall but affords a long view of the flat prairie:
And me, standing exactly where Lewis and Clark stood. Note the bench on which the pair rested after mounting the hill 🙂 I think it’s traditional for visitors to point in various directions when they reach the top:
They’re restoring the prairie in the area to the state it was in before settlers came in and planted other stuff, including trees and non-indigenous plants. Here are some of the native flowers. I know these, but I’ll let the readers identify them. The last one, however, is hemp (wild marijuana), locally called “ditchweed”:
Ditchweed (Cannabis sativa; apparently too low in the active substance to be worth smoking); it is, of course, hemp, used for making cloth and many other things:
A fine fat toad we saw along the trail (at least I think it’s a toad; the difference between toads and frogs always eludes me). Perhaps a reader can identify it.
And finally, I posed on the restored prairie to show how tall the grass was. Imagine this kind of vegetation, interspersed with wildflowers, extending all the way west from the Mississippi to the Rockies! What a sight it must have been for the pioneers who first encountered it, and then, at the end, encountered the huge and daunting wall of the Rockies.
Jerry, the instrument you called a viola is actually a cello! I’m glad you visited the music museum–great place and I’ve been there many times. (I taught violin for a semester at USD, filling in for a friend.) Glad you’re having a good trip so far!
Bufo cognatus, the Great Plains toad, perhaps?
I just googled south dakota amphibian field guid from icwdm.org
also read Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie by Richard Manning several years ago, worth a read, but you’ll never look at grasslands or wheat/corn fields the same ever again. He points out that people have posters of wheat fields on their walls, but never an image of a clearcut forest, but in reality, wheat fields are basically “clearcut” prairie.
Yes, you’re right. A really charming toad. The males sound like they’re operating miniature jackhammers when they call in the spring – deafening (but nice to hear when you are an environmental consultant conducting amphibian surveys – also nice to hear in my neck of the woods anyway, as they are quite rare here, reaching their northern range limits in the southern Prairie Provinces).
It has the typical pissed off face of a toad. I think toads find humans really irritating.
Maybe I’m one.
Me too!
Crap, crap,… I’m also evidently a toad.
Crapaud🐸
Looks like the genus (unfortunately!) has been changed–Wikipedia & the IUCN Red List have it as Anaxyrus cognatus.
Now I’m dying to know how it earned “cognatus.”
oh, come on! Damn scientist, always doing their sciencing! Can’t the just pick a name and stick with it?!
I know, right?! I’m convinced they do so just to annoy me; to heck with precedence or splitting or whatever excuse they come up with.
I think it’s designed to sell field guides. Every few years we have to buy another Peterson’s just to keep up with the new names for the same old birds at the feeder.
Aha! Yet another angle to this rotten custom!
I think that Anaxyrus is a resurrection – there was a major revision of the anurans a few years ago, and the authors wound up splitting a lot of large genera up on the basis of genomic data (Rana got split up – the leopard frog is now Lithobates pipiens. I think that they resurrected a lot of Edward Drinker Cope’s names, as these would have had priority if the older name no longer applied. Cope was an inveterate splitter and a workaholic, so he left lots of names available, that had been suppressed when someone reviewed his work but turned out to apply to what were suddenly revealed to be valid taxa after all.
Yes, such changes are so often resurrections! Poor old Cope didn’t live to see his vindication, eh?
No, and then his skeleton was kept in his office by Loren Eisely, who decorated it with tinfoil every Christmas and then lost the skull.
Well, why not have a little fun when you’re dead?
I will definitely have to learn more about these chaps! 😀 (Well, Eisely’s not new to me, but that side of him is.)
He never mentioned this in any of his own writings – I read about it in his biography.
I may have to track that down. 🙂
http://www.amazon.com/Fox-Woods-Edge-Biography-Eiseley/dp/0803264100
Thank you, that looks most intriguing.
Back in the ‘70s, we worked with Arne Larson, founder of the original Shrine to Music, which was housed in the same building as USD’s W.H. Over Dakota Museum. When Arne moved his collection to Vermillion from Brookings, SD, he needed five large moving vans to hold everything. He was such a wonderful, enthusiastic musician – I don’t think there was any instrument in his huge collection that he couldn’t play.
I lived on the south flank of Spirit Mound, one long hot summer. It was visible for miles in every direction, and in the summer the cliff swallows hunted along its slopes from dawn till dusk. Lewis and Clark also visited the mound, on August 25, 1804, and wrote:
“…by the different nations of Indians in this quarter is Suppose to be the residence of Deavels. That they are in human form with remarkable large heads, and about 18 inches high, that they are very watchful and are arm’d with Sharp arrows with which they Can Kill at a great distance; they are Said to kill all persons who are So hardy as to attempt to approach the hill; they state that tradition informs them that many Indians have Suffered by these little people. So much do the Maha [Omaha], Soues [Sioux], Ottoes [Otoes] and other neighboring nations believe this fable, that no Consideration is Sufficient to induce them to approach the hill. One evidence which the Inds give for believing this place to be the residence of some unusial Spirits is that they frequently discover a large assemblage of Birds about this mound…”
That description of the Deavels matches these guys from the movie The Mummy Returns. Those little guys cracked me up.
Very interesting additions! Larson must have led a very happy life.
Were you doing research on Spirit Mound?
Funny how birds tend to be more prevalent when there aren’t a lot of humans around. 😉
oh, and I’ll guess some species of Asclepias (butterfly weed), Rudbeckia, and phlox, aka wild sweet William, of some species or another. perhaps someone else can home in on the exactitudes, but they are similar (if not the same) as what we get here on the edge of the tall grass prairies in Missouri, though I don’t know how much species overlap there is into the shortgrass prairies of the West.
Is it not Asclepias tuberosa? It does look like North Dakota may be just outside the species’ range. Is there another candidate with a more plausible distribution?
Vermillion is in the far SE corner of South Dakota, just across the river from NE and considered to be part of the Sioux City IA combined area (area slightly larger than the metro). It’s 200 miles from North Dakota
Unfortunately I have no idea. That was my very uniformed, very uneducated thought as well, but I hesitate to put my foot in my mouth as we tend to have a great number of very well educated readers of professional pedigree, and I was hoping one would chime in.
“What a sight it must have been for the pioneers who first encountered it,…”
Especially, with endless herds of bison grazing on it.
Jac – wait’ll you get to the Badlands. You DO have a sample of that on the itinerary, don’t you?
Hopefully you have time to visit the Black Hills as well as the Badlands. Both very worthwhile visits in South Dakota.
South Dakota…one of our finest rectangle states.
Indeed a fine state, but it’s a rectangle with a dongle. And Vermillion’s in the dongle.
Does one play with one’s ding a ling in the dangling dongle?
b&
The first plant, with the clusters of orange flowers, looks to be in the milkweed family (Asclepidacea). I found that it looks like
Asclepis curassivica.
One can recognize the weird flowers of this family, even though different species range from broad leafed plants –> vines –> convergent evolution on cactus.
Yes, it’s called butterfly weed.
The yellow daisy-like plants is probably black-eyed susan. Funny how many of our ornamentals are really also native plants.
It’s different to what I know as black-eyed Susan, but different countries often have different common names, so that means nothing.
It looks like what I know as calendula.
The internet shows calendula has having lighter centers. But still, the name is a lot nicer than ‘black eyed susan!’ ( 😉 )
Not Calendula. Definitely Rudbeckia.
Does anyone know why the guitar has 10 strings, as opposed to the usual 6 or 12 string guitar?
I noticed that, too.
It has five pairs of strings, with the strings of each pair tuned the same.
Is that also how 12 string guitars are tuned?
A simplistic answer is that basically the baroque guitar and modern guitar are tuned the same way, with open strings E-B-G-D-A (from the highest to the lowest). The bottom string (E two octaves below the top string) was added to the guitar in the 19th century.
The 12-string is usually tuned with the top two pairs of strings in unison, and the bottom four tuned an octave apart. I think the baroque guitar uses pairs of strings simply to increase its volume, whereas the 12-string is uses the octave tuning scheme to create a fuller, more “orchestral” timbre.
Wikipedia has decent articles on both instruments (and at the bottom of the page on the baroque guitar there’s a photo from the National Music Museum that shows part of their Stradivarius mandolin, another rare and precious holding!). You will see that there were a number of standard tunings for the baroque guitar — probably some of these were used preferentially depending on whether the instrument was used for strumming chordal accompaniment, or for playing solo instrumental music.
New concepts, new vocabulary… What a great introduction to the subject! Thank you, Peter.
Never thought about actually tuning a 12-string. Sounds like a PITA!
A well rounded day, and it is nice to see the cats take so good care of their servants!
Ha, the mysterious pointing in photos. (We don’t have that here, I think.)
Here is a recording of that particular harpsichord being played:
Oldest Playable Harpsichord
it’s a lovely instrument, and in amazing condition (I don’t know how much restoration work was needed for it to be made playable, though).
It’s an example of the early Italian type of building where a very light instrument comes with a heavier protective outer case. Later, instruments were built that looked like this but the instrument didn’t actually come out, called ‘false inner-outer’ a kind of strange evolutionary mimicry, lol.
1. Asclepias tuberosa, butterfly milkweed. (A. curassivica is tropical.)
2. Probably Rudbeckia hirta, Black-eyed Susan.
3. Phlox pilosa, Prairie Phlox.
4. Cannabis sativa, planted all over the midwest to make fiber for ropes for the navy.
Many a mid-Western teenager secretly explored illicit drugery with good old ditchweed; only to be mildly ‘tweeked and disappointed.
At best a sizable headache.
Great work, Sedgequeen! What about the lush plants in the foreground of the photo of the Spirit Mound? At first glance I thought it was a marijuana crop but not the plants resemble echinacea or something.
*but NOW*
Hard to tell without flowers, but these could well be Sawtooth Sunflower, Helianthus grosseserratus. Big, right kind of leaves, and they should be common near Vermillion.
You may be right. I’d love to see these in bloom. The plants look a little too bushy to be the obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana).
Yes, and Physostegia would have opposite leaves. I think these plants have alternate leaves.
Yes, you’re right again! Thanks.
Asclepias tuberosa butterfly weed. Used to be a small population growing out of sandy places and cracks in the rock near checker board mesa, Zion NP. Don’t know if they are still there. Tough times for old things.
I’ll bet that cat loves to play with socks….
b&
I hope there are no large deer populations to eat up all th grass and deposit their jerk ticks.
No, I think they’re all in Dutchess County, NY.
In the wide open plains, Jerry will perhaps encounter some very powerful thunderstorms with towering but beautiful storm clouds and perhaps funnel clouds and tornadoes. Those always make for a rather exciting although unplanned part of trips across that part of the country.
I spent part of a summer, many years ago in Jamestown, ND. There is no flatter surface I can think of. If you saw the movie Fargo, it was kind of like that, only summer.
For flat, try Newport News, VA sometime.
Just watched part one of the TV mini-series version of Fargo with Billy Bob Thornton. I think it’s going to be interesting…
The first time I drove through there, I passed an official looking sign on the side of the highway. It was the sort that might warn of road construction work, ahead, except this was quite literally read: “Mountain Removal Process Complete”.
That’s cute. 😉
Steve@9: Just like lutes, most early fretted, stringed instruments would double each “string” (called courses), and the number of courses would vary with the builder (and maybe the commission of the buyer). Lutes nearly always left the highest pitched string (the chanterelle) a singleton, whereas, as you see here, all courses are doubled. Additionally, many lutes would have lower pitched courses doubled in octaves. Check out the guitar page at Wikipedia; they’d identify this as a baroque guitar.
Oh yeah, I played one of those once. The guitar played really well, until I baroque a string . . .
Lovely pictures of your hosts and kitty overlords too. 🙂
sub
There’s a fine guitar collection at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, if you’re headed that way.
Sorry, Jerry, but I’m gonna have to go all pedant on this: “Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition (1804-1806: the first non-native expedition to the US west).”
I’m thinking Coronado in about 1539-40 who at least got to Kansas and maybe farther north, but came through New Mexico for sure. Not to mention Cabeza de Vaca, but that wasn’t intentional. But you have an out, since there was no “US west” in 1540.
Add “far” to the “west” & L&C are back on top.
I love it! Thanks! Have a great road trip, be careful, and post when you can. Ojala que te vayas bien, Diogenes!
It would seem strange to reintroduce the wild plants but not also bison, wolves, etc. Presumably they have plans to have grazing animals?
Most tallgrass prairie restorations have no plans at all to reintroduce grazing animals. It’s a matter of scale.
Bison were compatible with tallgrass prairie because they migrated during each year. The herd came through, grazed everything down, tore up plants with their hooves, made wallows, then moved on and might not return that year.
Big though a good quality remnant or restored tallgrass prairie may seem big to us humans, it’s small. One or a few bison or cattle walking over it every day, creating paths, grazing preferred food plants to the ground repeatedly, would encourage weeds and highly grazing tolerant Eurasian species such as the grass Smooth Brome (Bromus inermis). Bison are great, but let them eat Smooth Brome, I say!
Realistically, we can’t restore the whole tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Nonetheless, preserving or restoring these small patches of native plants (and associated insects and small animals) in a region where non-natives plants now dominate is a valuable accomplishment.
I always enjoy your inputs, sedgequeen.
Thank you!
Thanks for this comment. It helps put restoration efforts into perspective. I think we need to be realistic and not too idealistic about what can be achieved. I think E. O. Wilson would appreciate it.
Jerry, that Strad guitar is famous amongst guitar builders. It’s been copied many times. I think it is authentic (as authentic as they get). And: Lucky you to have seen it! I just saw another Strad guitar (along with the “Messiah” violin) at the Ashmolean.