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.
