A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles / Suzanne Barta Julin

One of the things I like to do in my reading is to occasionally pick up a non-fiction book about something almost completely random. This practice enables me to learn something about stuff outside my normal range of intellectual curiosity. The last week or so I read A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles published by the South Dakota Historical Society about Black Hills tourism in the early part of the last century. When the book showed up on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, I requested the book precisely because it seemed outside of my normal interests, but still possibly filling in lots of useless bits of knowledge.

Both my grandfather’s and my stepfather’s families hail from the Dakotas. However, I’ve only visited a half dozen times, all when I was fairly young. On one trip, my family first visited southern California where some of mom’s high school classmates lived. Then we drove diagonally to Bismarck where dad’s family lived. Only three things remain of my memories of that leg of the trip: a bit of camping near St. George Utah, camping on top of a mesa in western Colorado, and seeing Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills.

Mount Rushmore is certainly very memorable, and the entrepreneurs of South Dakota designed it, and quite a bit of their whole economy, in an attempt to get people to come to the area and spend money. As soon as the gold rush waned after 1876, folks saw the possibilities of bringing in outside money in addition to their mining, ranching, and forestry interests. The scenic landscape provides a natural draw, and local hot springs were an initial impetus to get health minded tourists to come.

Julin’s book tells the history of the growth of the industry from 1880 until World War II. A large portion of her history concerns Peter Norbeck, state legislator, governor, and U.S. senator. At each level he championed Black Hills tourism, primarily Custer State Park, but also nearby national parks and monuments. But in addition to being a champion of public lands, he micro-managed these lands. He maneuvered to see that people he approved got the jobs running the parks, and not just for patronage reasons. Norbeck had an aesthetic in mind and he wanted like-minded people implementing it. So when he thought burros would be a bonus for the parks, all he had to do was let his hand-picked people know. From World War I until the Great Depression, Norbeck was the driving force behind Custer State Park.

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles focuses mostly on the movers and shakers as well as the business owners and entrepreneurs. The politicians who feuded over visions of the Black Hills. The towns competing for tourist dollars who would remove other towns road signs. The hucksters and Native American tribes that sold phony and simulated experiences to eager middle-class white people.

I also quite enjoyed the numerous photographs included. I believe all of them are from the period. I’m particularly taken with photos of the landscape as well as photos of the tourists who came to the Black Hills. While most of them are of the stiff overly-posed variety that was required by photographic equipment and then contemporary style, they still give a really view into just what the experience might have been like at the time. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that.

A couple things I felt were missing though. I never got a sense that I understood how the regular people, those not involved in building the tourist economy felt and lived through it. Those who worked as ranchers or mere workers. But more importantly, the experience of the actual tourists really felt like it was missing from this story. They come into the narrative mostly in the context of being sold the Black Hills, not so much as how they experienced it themselves. What was a day trip to the Black Hills like? How did a tourist experience Wind Cave? Why would they come to Rapid City rather than Deadwood? Sometimes the questions are touched on, but mostly so far as how the entrepreneurs catered to these choices.

I’m not too surprised those were missing though. Julin wrote her graduate school thesis about the political foundations of tourism development in the Black Hills. This appears to be the book version of that; the politics is much more heavily covered than anything else.

This well-written history will appeal to folks who already have an inclination for the subject matter, or for those who like me get into random curiosities. I enjoyed reading it. Pretty awesome stuff, particularly the photos. But for a random person, I don’t think there’s enough to grab them if they aren’t already gravitating toward the subject.

Title: A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941
Author: Suzanne Barta Julin
Cover creator: Rich Hendel (designer)
Imprint / publisher: South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 183 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-9798940-6-0

South Dakota State Historical Society Press provided me a review copy through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I have donated the equivalent price ($19.72 on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.