昔は金鉱、今は観光地としてにぎわう街

　Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised to see Abraham Lincoln standing there chatting with visitors. After all, his visage is one of four 18-meter-high presidential heads sculpted onto Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, which stood just behind him. Then again, President Lincoln's been dead for almost 140 years.

　　During his lifetime, Lincoln was known as "Honest Abe,"so to be honest, I'll confess that this Lincoln was a look-alike re-enactor named Everett Stadig. But Stadig wasn't the only actor to show up here. During spring 2007, Nicolas Cage with the cast and crew of "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" filmed their movie at Mount Rushmore.

　Apart from Lincoln, the other presidents that artist Gutzon Borglum sculpted on this monumental outcrop of granite were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

　Stadig explained, "The mountain was known to Lakota Indians as Six Grandfathers. The Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota tribes were all branches of the great Sioux Nation."

　Stadig sounded sorrowful when he said, "The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie gave the sacred Black Hills to the Lakota forever, but the U.S. took it back after the 1876 Black Hills War. Native Americans are still upset about that."

　For this reason, Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski in 1939, asking him to create an even greater Indian monument. The result is Crazy Horse Memorial, still being constructed today, just an hour from Mount Rushmore.

　Arriving there, I met Bryan Akipa of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, who makes and plays traditional red cedar flutes. Bryan knew Japan well, having given a concert in Osaka in 2002.

　"Crazy Horse was a famous Oglala Lakota warrior killed by soldiers under a flag of truce," Akipa said. "The head alone is 27 meters high, so when completed, it will be the world's largest sculpture."

　Crazy Horse was one of the Sioux leaders who wiped out 260 soldiers led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand.

　"At the Custer Battlefield National Monument not far from here," Akipa told me, "the steep, lonely hillside appears much as it did in 1876. It's kind of ghostly. Headstones mark the place where each man fell, so it's easy to imagine how the desperate, doomed soldiers must have felt during the battle."

　Custer State Park, in the same region, shelters 1,500 bison (commonly called buffalo), who roam the prairies and often stop traffic. Here, you can experience chuck wagon cookouts with musical cowboys at the rustic Blue Bell Lodge.

映画に出てきた建物も

　Akipa recommended stopping at nearby Rapid City to see its dinosaur park and Stavkirke Chapel, a reproduction of a 12th-century Norwegian church. Inside the 1928 Hotel Alex Johnson, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Dennis Olivier's Landmark Restaurant specializes in stylishly presented native game dishes such as elk, buffalo and pheasant.

　Akipa recommended stopping at nearby Rapid City to see its dinosaur park and Stavkirke Chapel, a reproduction of a 12th-century Norwegian church. Inside the 1928 Hotel Alex Johnson, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Dennis Olivier's Landmark Restaurant specializes in stylishly presented native game dishes such as elk, buffalo and pheasant.

　East on Interstate 90, "1880 Town" displays 30 buildings constructed for Kevin Costner's 1990 movie "Dances with Wolves," and furnished with genuine relics. Whereas Deadwood is mostly three-story brick buildings, 1880 Town is an assembly of rough wooden shops, bars and hotels.

　They rent costumes, so visitors can photograph each other in period dress while exploring the grounds.

　In Mitchell, there's a bizarre building with onion domes and minarets called the Corn Palace.

　Every spring since 1892, its exterior has been covered with large murals made entirely from 12 colors of corn, grain and grasses, delighting people, birds and squirrels alike!

　The largest city on the Great Plains is Sioux Falls. Although it was almost obliterated by Indian raids and a plague of grasshoppers in its early years, the city is thriving today. Just outside town, John and Sara Steever offer comfortable family-style accommodations in their Steever House Bed and Breakfast, a reconditioned Queen Anne Victorian home.

　A final surprise in Sioux Falls was Shoto-Teien Japanese Gardens, built in the 1930s. It was amazing to find the sublime beauty of a Japanese garden here in one of the wildest and most remote corners of the United States.