In the nature center, we found the skin of a bull snake, a big one...remember Lukie touching the bull snake at the zoo in March...well, he still thinks it's a good idea to have one for a pet...
Lukie and Lex patiently walked around the old agency, listening to me tell what would have gone on there (before and after 1862), but Kieran would have loved the history...
Here they are looking at the restored employee duplexes...
Another employee duplex (all the buildings were destroyed during the conflict in 1862)...
Here they're looking at where the Annuity Center was, this is were the Dakota would have been issued their annual goods (provided of course the government or Indian agents would be giving what was promised to them...many times they weren't). During this time, the annual annuities weren't given out fully (apparently due to the Civil War) and the Indian Agent of the time went to local traders trying to get more supplies to the Dakota. One trader, Andrew Myrick, essentially said "if they are hungry, let them eat grass." Early on in the conflict, Myrick was found dead with grass in his mouth...
Of course we found time to take a picture with the sign...
From there, it was time to start the hiking club trail, listed as 4.3 miles...taking us through a variety of terrain. From grasslands, woodlands, up and down the Minnesota River bluff...it was a fun hike...
Of course we found the password (Lukie's hiked more than 40 miles, Lex is a little more than 30 as part of the hiking club..Kieran is still less than 25)...
Near the end of the hike we found a pretty large painted turtle, who really just wished we weren't there...
If you want to see our hike, take a look at the video below...
From there it was time to get to the campground and our new experience...
We were going to be sleeping in a tipi...which was awesome...it was cool getting the fire going with several tipis around (and relatively few people)...I cannot imagine how awesome Sitting Bull's village in June, 1876 would have looked (it was probably the largest village ever on the Great Plains...it had thousands of tipis and a pony herd approaching 10,000)...
I even had someone else willing to cook the hot dogs...
And Lukie and Lex spent over an hour trying to perfect the roasted marshmallow (many, many were burned in the process)...
It rained the next morning for about an hour or so, some water got inside, but didn't really affect us. When the rain stopped we hiked about 1.5 miles roundtrip to the confluence of the Yellow Medicine and Minnesota Rivers (Yellow Medicine is on the right, the Minnesota on the left)...
I even went back up the bluff to get a sense of scale with Lukie and Lex at the bottom, you might have to look closely...
It was fun...we'll be sleeping in a tipi again...
No comments:
Post a Comment