


BACHING IN THE BAD LANDS 
‘*Unman-Stifled’’ South Dakota, from the Viewpoint of the 
Lonely Shackman 
BY S. B. MCMANUS 
IKE the man of 
facetious tradition, 
who was born at 
“Cape Cod and all 
along the shore,” 
so Indian Creek of 
South Dakota has 
a comprehensive 
and rather  in- 
definite borning 
place. Somewhere 
not far distant from the north end of the 
Bad Lands it is first seen—a collective com- 
pany of unpretentious little pools, whose 
apparent main object seems to be to at- 
tract as little observation as possible. It, 
or they, more properly speaking, sneak and 
skulk and hide as if trembling with fear of 
the terrible vicinity in which they find 
themselves. Now and then a _ monster 
silvertip, fairly making the ground shake 
as he walks, slouches down from the fast- 
ness of acavern lair in the cliffs and leaves 
deep sunk footprints on the margin of the 
pools where he has deigned to slake his 
thirst. He comes from whence everything 
is large and awful; where calamity abounds 
and tragedy holds carnival. ‘The terrible 
Bad Lands! A veritable hell of rock and 
gorge and sky. 
After a few miles of seemingly aimless 
wandering, the frightened pools come 
together, take hold of each other’s hands, as 
it were, and thereafter indulge in a dubi- 
ously joyous journey across country, where, 
after a rather picturesque and vagabond- 
ish wandering of perhaps twenty very long 
miles, the stream at.last crawls and sidles 
into Bad River, to be swallowed up and 
wholly obliterated in this not altogether 
pleasant stream, and appears to be glad 
of it. 
So much for its beginning and its end. 
It has had its little excitements and di- 
versions and humiliations and may be 
reasonably supposed to be content. It has 
crept by the shacks of the tenderfoot 
homesteaders and been eyewitness to 
their varied experiences, their elations 
and discomfitures, their modest uprisings 
and successes and their too fr quent down- 
fallings. Shack life can inte ;t anything 
or any one capable of a sensati ». Wag: er’s 
“Simple Life” is ‘‘not in it.” His arc nly 
kindergarten theories, not extraordi..arily 
well worked up either, compared to the 
real thing. Even clever people have their 
limitations. There is a pathetic grotesque- 
ness about this prairie shack life that makes 
an appeal even to the most obtuse. 
Then Indian Creek has sauntered along 
the great trails, hobnobbed with skinful 
arteries that carry the red blood of the 
congested East to the anemic West and 
make miners and ranchmen and cowboys 
and more or less hardy pioneers out of 
clerks, school teachers, lawyers, preachers 
and the like and in the main do a splendidly 
pious and sensible thing by the perform- 
ance. It crosses the famous Black Hills 
Trail, the great overland highway to the 
nelulous, vague West on which for hours 
in the day and months in the year the wagons 
and prairie schooners of westward-bound 
men and women are in hailing distance of 
one another. Onward, westward forever! 
And yet there is no West in the geography 
of the people. Fifty miles to the sunrise 
of the Black Hills, we are ‘‘ East” with a 
capital E. It is appalling what this gold 
and land madness will make people venture 
and endure. Heroism is not anywhere 
near dead, nor foolhardiness extinct. 
And again, our little, muddy creek 
crosses Spotted Tail Trail and attempts a 
diminutive effort at sentiment in the way 
of a feeble, throaty gurgle in memory of 
the chief after whom the somewhat devious 
