1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die (78 page)

Thirty-five miles north of Medora, Elkhorn Ranch was the location of Roosevelt’s second ranch and principal home in the Badlands, though today only the foundations of the house remain. It’s reached via a 20-mile dirt road (inquire at the visitor center about road conditions before attempting the drive).

The park’s much less visited North Unit is 70 miles north of Medora. A 14-mile road takes you to the Oxbow Overlook, which lets
onto a great view of the Little Missouri River. You can also get to it via the 18-mile Achenbach Trail, which takes you up clay buttes dotted with sagebrush and through river bottomland (you have to ford the river several times).

If you’re visiting in summer, spend a night around Medora and head for the Pitchfork Fondue, an outdoor cowboy-style steak-and-potatoes dinner cooked on a pitchfork, with a sunset view of the surrounding landscape. Afterward, enjoy the Medora Musical, with Western music, dancing, yodeling, and the beautiful Badlands all around.

W
HERE
: The South Unit is 130 miles west of Bismarck. Tel 701–623-4466 (south unit) or 701–842-2333 (north unit);
www.nps.gov/thro/index.htm
.
P
ITCHFORK
F
ONDUE
& M
EDORA
M
USICAL
: Medora. Tel 800-MEDORA-1 or 701–623-4444;
www.medora.com
.
Cost:
$23 for 14-oz ribeye; musical tickets from $24.
When:
June–early Sept.
W
HERE TO STAY
: in Medora, the Rough Rider Hotel, tel 800–633-6721 or 701–623-4433;
www.medora.com
.
Cost:
from $99.
When:
June–Sept.
B
EST TIMES
: sunrise and sunset at the Painted Canyon; early Dec for Medora’s Old Fashioned Cowboy Christmas (
www.medorand.com/xmas.htm
).

Color and light dance across the face of the Badlands in Theodore Roosevelt National Park’s Painted Canyon.

Where America Took Its First Steps West

Washburn, North Dakota

In mid-October 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed into the North Dakota Territory on the first leg of their great expedition, directed by Thomas Jefferson to find “the most direct and practical water communication
across the continent.” Traveling up the Missouri River, they arrived at the Mandan Indian villages of Mitutanka and Nuptadi, which were major trade centers for numerous Native tribes and European traders. Here they spent the winter, building cabins and a palisade wall that they named Fort Mandan in honor of their hosts, who supplied them with food in exchange for goods.

Among the Indians they met there was Sakakawea, a Shoshone woman believed to have been born in the Rocky Mountains and kidnapped in 1800 by Hidatsa Indians. Later she married French Canadian fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau. As she spoke Shoshone and Hidatsa, and Charbonneau spoke Hidatsa and French, Lewis and Clark hired them both as interpreters. On April 7, 1805, the party set off west, Sakakawea carrying her infant son, Pomp, on her back. As it turned out, her presence was invaluable to the expedition, not only as an interpreter but as a pacifying influence on Indians who had never seen a white man before:
In Native culture, a war party never traveled with a woman, especially not one with a baby.

The original Fort Mandan was destroyed by fire, and the remains were lost, but a full-scale replica was built in 1972 amid riverbank cottonwoods near the location of the original fort. In 1997, the interpretive displays were added, and today it’s open to the public year-round, its rough furnishings and supplies mirroring those of the expedition’s members during their winter residence.

In Washburn, the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center includes a complete historical recounting of the expedition, with Indian artifacts, including a 30-foot hand-hewn dugout canoe, a buffalo robe you can try on, and a replica of the cradleboard in which Sakakawea carried her son. The Bergquist Gallery displays the works of Swiss watercolorist Karl Bodmer, who from 1832 to 1834 traveled the American West. Bodmer’s paintings are considered among the most important visual records of the North American Plains tribes in the early 19th century, before the effects of American expansionism and imported diseases began to take their toll.

This enormous dugout canoe at Fort Mandan was carved from the trunk of a large cottonwood tree.

A few miles upriver, Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site preserves the ruins of several Indian villages, including Sakakawea’s home. The site contains village remains going back thousands of years, as well as a reconstruction of a Hidatsa earth-lodge, a museum and visitors center, and 11 miles of trails.

W
HERE
: 40 miles northwest of Bismarck.
Lewis and Clark Trail info:
www.nps.gov/lecl
.
F
ORT
M
ANDAN AND
L
EWIS
& C
LARK
I
NTERPRETIVE
C
ENTER
: Tel 877–462-8535 or 701–462-8535;
www.fortmandan.com
.
K
NIFE
R
IVER
I
NDIAN
V
ILLAGES
: Tel 701–745-3300;
www.nps.gov/knri
.
B
EST TIMES
: April 7 for a reenactment of Lewis and Clark’s departure; 3rd full weekend in June for Lewis & Clark Days in Washburn; last full weekend in July for the Northern Plains Indian Culture Fest at the Knife River site.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Buffalo Nights

Oklahoma

When Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959, he had designed over 1,000 buildings, with some 400 built, including the fabled Guggenheim Museum in New York City (see p. 184). His legacy included just one
skyscraper, and serious lovers of architecture have long been coming to this small prairie city to behold Price Tower, Wright’s elegantly streamlined 19-story high-rise. Converted into a hotel, it is the ultimate mecca of modernism.

Built in 1956 for the Price Company, a pipeline and welding firm servicing the oil business, Price Tower embodies Wright’s ideal of a skyscraper surrounded by open space. It has many beautiful but practical features, such as
the signature green copper louvers to provide shade from the hot prairie sun. The Inn at Price Tower now occupies six of the upper floors, with 21 ultramodern guest rooms recently refurbished and honoring the Wright aesthetic.

Bartlesville is hometown to Frank Phillips, the ultra-successful oilman who founded Phillips Petroleum. You can visit his imposing 1909 neoclassical mansion to get a remarkably intimate look at the life of an extremely wealthy family back in 1930.

For fun, Philllips and his wife entertained some of the country’s brightest stars (Rudy Vallee and Will Rogers visited) at their lodge at Woolaroc, a 3,700-acre fantasy retreat just outside Bartlesville. Named for the woods, lakes, and rocks found so abundantly in the rolling landscape, Woolaroc was created from the 1920s to the 1940s, and has all been preserved as it was: The free-roaming herd of buffalo are descendants of those brought here in 1927.

In 1929 Phillips started a museum at Woolaroc. It is a curious hodgepodge of shrunken heads from Ecuador, one of the world’s finest collections of Colt firearms, a great array of Western art, including six mural-size paintings by William R. Leigh, and all the bronze statues that once lined the road to oil baron E. W. Marland’s fabulous mansion (see p. 649). Enjoy one of the Phillips’s favorite meals, a barbecue sandwich made with Woolaroc bison, the pinnacle of local specialty.

Arrive at or leave Bartesville by way of one of the country’s most dramatic drives, due west on Highway 60 toward Ponca City. It passes through the Osage reservation and along the Nature Conservancy’s Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, 38,700 acres of this distinctly American ecosystem and a refuge for free-roaming buffalo. It’s easy to imagine a lone Indian on horseback, or cowboys moving cattle toward an impossibly distant horizon.

Wright called his 221-foot-tall skyscraper “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.”

I
NN AT
P
RICE
T
OWER
: Tel 877–424-2424 or 918–336-1000;
www.innatpricetower.com
.
Cost:
from $145.
F
RANK
P
HILLIPS
H
ISTORIC
H
OME
: Tel 918–336-2491.
When:
Wed–Sun.
W
OOLAROC
: Tel 1–888-WOOLAROC or 918–336-0307;
www.woolaroc.org
.
T
ALLGRASS
P
RAIRIE
P
RESERVE
: Tel 918–287-4803;
www.nps.gov/tapr
.
B
EST TIME
: June for the OK Mozart Festival in Bartlesville.

“Queen of the Prairie,” Preserved

Oklahoma

Guthrie sprang out of the prairie dust when Congress opened the Oklahoma Territory to settlers in the 1889 Land Run. Prosperous and nicknamed “Queen of the Prairie,” Guthrie soon became the territorial capital
.

But when Oklahoma City snatched away the title of state capital in 1910, the city slipped into a deep sleep, inadvertently preserving its Victorian architectural legacy. It is now the largest contiguous district on the National Register of Historic Places, extending 400 blocks and containing 2,169 buildings.

Chief among them are the brick buildings downtown, many housing treasures still intact, including the Blue Belle Saloon, Oklahoma’s
oldest saloon and the smoky spot where the great cowboy silent film star, Tom Mix, tended bar from 1902 to 1904. Conveniently located upstairs is Miss Lizzie’s Bordello, where “the girls all purty and they was clean,” according to some of Guthrie’s old-timers. The bordello is now a souvenir and gift shop.

A rare collection of flashy, jazz-age banjos are on display at the National Four-String Banjo Hall of Fame Museum, which celebrates banjo music of the 1920s and ’30s at the Guthrie Jazz Banjo Festival on Memorial Day weekend (it’s worth booking your trip around it). There’s also picking aplenty at October’s Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival, organized by three-time national fiddle champ Byron Berline, who still performs at his Double-Stop Fiddle Shop and Music Hall.

Take a guided tour of the city’s architectural apogee, the outlandishly grand Guthrie Scottish Rite Masonic Temple—one of the world’s largest. Built at an eyebrow-raising cost of $2.6 million during the oil boom of the 1920s, a time when almost every man in town was a Mason, the neoclassical building is a massive complex covering 6 acres of floor space.