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Wind Cave: Place of origin of the Lakota

There is something special about Maka Oniye



Birds often feast on parasites while hitching a ride on the backs of roadside bison.

Birds often feast on parasites while hitching a ride on the backs of roadside bison.

WIND CAVE NATIONAL PARK — Iktomi, the trickster spirit, led the wolf, Sungmanitu Tanka, to the mouth of Oniya Oshoka, where the earth breathes inside, and the wolf descended into the winding passages of Wind Cave in search of the humans who lived there.

Once he found them, he opened a pack, which contained meat and buckskin clothing from the surface world, and despite Tokahe, “the First One,” telling people that Takaskanskan, the Creator, had counseled them to stay underground, those who had tasted the meat followed Sungmanitu Tanka back to the surface.

Park tour guide Nate Anderson engages the group with stories about the historic discovery of Wind Cave.

Park tour guide Nate Anderson engages the group with stories about the historic discovery of Wind Cave.

Takuskanskan was not pleased. He turned these people into “great, wild beasts,” and they became the first bison herd. Eventually Takuskanskan instructed Tokahe to lead the people to the surface of the earth, and on the way they stopped to pray four times. They found the hoof prints of the bison and Takuskanskan instructed them to hunt the bison because the bison would give them everything they needed to survive on the surface.

An approaching vehicle drives a vulture and a crow from their roadkill.

An approaching vehicle drives a vulture and a crow from their roadkill.

Takuskanskan then reduced the size of the cave opening, making it too small for most people to enter, to serve as a reminder so the people would never forget where they had come from.

This is the Lakota creation myth, and unlike the myths they have concerning Bear Butte and Devil’s Tower, the Wind Cave myths deal with the very beginning of the Lakota people and how they became who they are.

Modern knowledge—biology, geology, recorded history and archaeology— would obviously take exception to creation myth assertion: how can a wolf talk, how can people become bison, what about history and archaeology showing the Lakota people did not come from a cave, but come from, like all their fellow humans, Africa, originally?

But does it really matter whether creation myths are true? They speak to the imagination and traditions of our ancestors, they are the road map by which hundreds of generations of human beings journeyed from where they were in the beginning, to where they are now. They are the heartfelt expression of the spirits of long dead men, their hopes, their fears, their dreams, and when we retell them, we connect with who we were, who they were, and on these myths we have built the foundations of our culture and identity.

But other ancient truths speak to men of science, who hail from dozens of cultures, from all parts of this planet, across centuries of catalogued study. Scientists say water ate away limestone rock over tens of millions of years, creating the sixth longest cave system in the world, and according to the Wind Cave official website: “Today, we understand that the movement of the wind is related to the difference in atmospheric pressure between the cave and the surface.”

If we focus on verified scientific and historic fact, we see the Black Hills as they were millions of years ago, towering to heights that rival some Rocky Mountain peaks, rising up from the bottom of an inland sea. These mountains were eroded down by weather, a small river cut a deep gorge out onto the open prairie, which became the only natural entrance into the Black Hills, and is today called Buffalo Gap. Beaver dammed the stream, life sustaining ponds formed, wildlife were drawn to the Gap, and bison eventually made their way up the Gap into the high pastureland east and south of Wind Cave.

Bison evolved away from water and African buffalo ancestors between five and ten million years ago. Eventually some steppe bison crossbred with ancestors of the modern yak, and crossed over into North America from Asia over half a million years ago. That is the scientific explanation.

If any humans ever lived in the cave, or exited the cave, prior to 1881, there is no evidence of it. If any ever visited the cave, before Tom and Jesse Bingham stumbled across it in 1881, there is no evidence. The Bingham’s were not the first to enter the cave.

From the Wind Cave official website: “The first person reported to have entered the cave was Charlie Crary in the fall of 1881. He claimed to have left twine to mark his trail, and others entering the cave, later found his twine. These early explorers were the first to see a rare cave formation called boxwork.”

Over 95% of the world’s cave boxwork formations are in Wind Cave. These delicate formations are the signature expression of Wind Cave’s subterranean environment.

South Dakota Mining Company hired Jesse Mc- Donald to oversee their mining claims on the cave in 1889. Nothing commercially valuable was ever found but McDonald had a 16-year-old boy, Alvin, and in 1891 he began exploring the cave in earnest.

Alvin eventually wrote in his diary, he did not think he would ever find the end of the cave, and to this day, the end of the cave has never been found.

McDonald partnered up with “Honest John” Stabler in the summer of 1891. Stabler had the business connections needed to improve the cave for visitation and “cave passages were widened and wooden staircases were installed. A hotel was built near the cave entrance and a stage coach provided rides to the cave.”

You just knew a partnership with someone named “Honest John” would not end well. After the death of 20-year-old Alvin McDonald from typhoid fever in 1893, court battles raged over claims to the cave between Jesse McDonald and Stabler. In 1899, “the Department of the Interior decided that since no mining nor proper homesteading had taken place, neither party had any legal claim to the cave. In 1901, the land around the cave was withdrawn from homesteading.”

A dollar could buy a lot in 1892, in fact, for many, it was about a day’s pay. But people paid that dollar to explore the cave by candlelight. The exploring was fairly exhausting, lots of crawling through narrow passages.

There are over 140 miles of explored cave passageways. Wind Cave is called a “dense” cave. Density is defined as passage volume per cubic mile, and by that definition, Wind cave is the densest cave in the world.

Wind cave is divided into three levels. These levels are all in the upper 250 feet of the Mississippian Madison Limestone: “Deposited in an inland sea, chert, gypsum, and anhydrite lenses within the limestone are evidence of high periods of evaporation. When sea levels dropped at the end of the Mississippian, dissolution of the limestone formed a Kaskaskia paleokarst terrain, complete with solution fissures, sinkholes, and caves.”

That’s the technical description of a cave experience that presents itself as winding passageways and dark descending tunnels, a natural catacomb like environment, with humidity that renders metal stair railings wet to the touch, walkways and steps rise and descend in many directions, and it is still possible to get lost in this cave, as one person did as recently as 1989.

Nate Anderson is a tour guide for the Garden of Eden Tour and he descends down 150 feet in an elevator, and passageways are lit by the flick of a switch, but Anderson wants you to know what the cave is really like without that artificial light and so he flips that switch off, and there is total darkness. When people are not traipsing up the walkways, much of the cave is left in total darkness. Once you are in this darkness, you realize the pickle you would be in if you had no flashlight or candle and no idea which way led out.

There are two tours, a longer Natural Entrance Tour, and a shorter Garden of Eden Tour, each taking over an hour, and the temperature down in the cave is about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of the outside temperature. The wind can howl in or out of the cave at over 70 miles per hour. You had better duck your head when moving along the walkways because low hanging rock is not uncommon. People are asked to please touch nothing besides the tour related surfaces, because cave environments are incredibly fragile.

The first thing Anderson does before the tour gets underway is respectfully relate the Lakota Creation story. When Lakota journalist Tim Giago toured the cave with family twenty years ago, he had to bring up the Lakota Creation story to the visiting tourists because it was not a part of the presentation at that time, but the park is quick to adapt and improve their presentation, and maintain respect for the people and culture that called this land home long before any American knew Wind Cave existed.

The National Park surrounding Wind Cave covers 33,851 acres and has over 30 miles of hiking trails. From the Wind Cave website: “The Wind Cave Visitor Center features three exhibit rooms about the geology of the caves and early cave history, the park’s wildlife and natural history, and the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the park. Elk Mountain Campground, located in a ponderosa pine forest, is about 1.25 miles (2.0 km) from the visitor center. There are 75 sites for tents and recreational vehicles.”

The Wind Cave bison herd is seldom out of sight, and can be seen on either side of the park, whether entering from the forested north via Custer State Park on Highway 87, or driving up from Hot Springs, ten miles to the south, on Highway 385. Besides bison the park is home to badgers, black-footed ferrets, bobcats, cougars, coyotes, elk, ermine, mink, pronghorn, prairie dogs, red foxes and skunks. Hawks, eagles, owls, bats, crows and buzzards circle overhead.

This draws people to the park, but what they come for mostly is to see the cave. There were an estimated 617,377 visitors in 2016. Cave tours are limited to 40 people so that is a potential for over 15,000 tours.

How does a fragile cave environment handle such traffic?

Over the long years, generations of cave management have done an excellent job preserving the natural beauty and environment of the cave because, more often than not, the awesome spectacle of such an immense natural formation awes people into a sense of conscientious duty, and that sense spans lifetimes and generations, connects people who could never know the other to a common cause and appreciation for something that is not even alive.

Yet Wind Cave seems alive, it seems to talk, and breathe, and without words the cave tells people this is my home, I have always been here, I will always be here, please stay and visit me for a time, but keep your feet off the furniture.

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com)


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