Mount Rushmore–and me

 

 

We had a Petticoats & Pistols Fillies Retreat in Deadwood, South Dakota. Then a huge book signing called Wild Deadwood Reads.

It was epic.

And speaking of EPIC!

I went to Mount Rushmore.

Some interesting facts about Mount Rushmore.

They were supposed to carve the presidents down to waist length…but settled on just heads.

With fillies, Winnie Griggs and her daughter Lydia, Julie Benson, my writer friend and South Dakota resident Jan Drexler, and me. Someone should carve us into a mountain. We’d be great.

Interesting fact, Mount Rushmore took 14 years to carve…but actual carving only took 6.5 years, the other eight years were spent waiting out bad weather. South Dakota Winters are brutal.

It cost just under one million dollars.

At first Thomas Jefferson was on Washington’s other side but after almost two years of carving the rock they were working with started crumbling (or somehow failing) So they ‘erased’ Jefferson’s face and put him on the other side. Man, I feel bad if I have to delete a paragraph in my book!!!

The sculptor Gutzon Borglum was involved in carving Stone Mountain in Georgia…but he got in a dispute with a woman’s group called, The United Daughters of the Confederacy Stone Mountain Memorial Association (there’s your long title!!!). the group saw the model he’d created and insisted the soldiers all be carved holding their hats. Because ‘these are southern gentlemen and they would not wear their hats in front of the ladies’.

Borglum disagreed and in the ensuing battle of wills, he quit and destroyed the models he’d already created. The association insisted those belonged to them and he’d destroyed their property. He insisted they were his. Also he was a Yankee. They practically refought the Civil War over it. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he had to run to get out of the state. Tennessee refused to extradite him.

He ended up in South Dak0ta and the Stone Mountain Memorial ended up being carved with men carrying their hats.

All that stuff in National Treasures II is borderline true. And by ‘borderline’ I mean not true at all and yet based on a grain of truth. there really is a ‘secret room’ carved into the mountain that was created as a hiding place for America’s founding documents. But it was never used…OR SO THEY SAY!!!! (conspiracy theory alert)

I saw two mountain goats and, I guess, they are on Federal Park lands and therefore cannot be hunted…I say ‘I guess’ because those goats looked at me with SUCH an attitude. I mean they were all, “HAH, you can’t touch us. WE ARE PROTECTED!!!!” I didn’t take a picture, partly because they were little snots, but also because they were honestly pretty scruffy looking. They were either shedding off their winter goat hair or dying of some dread disease. One of those two. But neither inspired me to snap a picture.

I also went to the Crazy Horse Memorial.

I just used the above picture to prove I was there, but that IS Crazy Horse in the background. Also including ghastly selfies of me keeps me humble and I guess that’s a worthy result.

I went to the Black Hills once as about a sixteen year old. It seems to me like they had this much of Crazy Horse done back then. And oh, trust me, sixteen year old Mary??? That was a long, long time ago.

This sculpture in the foreground is what they want it to look like. You can see the actual mountain in the background. While I will admit that horse is cool, I think they’d better just call it done. They’ve been carving since 1948. Math isn’t my strong suit but…isn’t that about 75 years? Just give up already. It’s a face. Like Mount Rushmore.

And one final thought. What is with South Dakota carving up mountains? C’mon. Live with that beautiful sculpture there, declare Mountain Carving to be in the rear view mirror and just stop already.

They’re both very cool though. I’m glad I saw them.

Laws of Attraction

Wyoming Sunrise Series book #2

Can they risk giving in to the attraction between them while their lives are on the line?

If widowed seamstress Nell Armstrong has to make one more pair of boring chaps for the cowboys in her tiny Wyoming town, she might just quit the business altogether! So meeting Brand Nolte, a widower struggling to raise three girls on his own, seems like her dream come true. Brand has no idea how to dress the girls properly, and Nell finally has a chance to create beautiful outfits while also teaching the girls to sew.

But Nell is much more than a seamstress, and the investigative skills and knowledge she picked up alongside her late lawman husband soon become critical when a wounded stagecoach-robbery survivor is brought to town. As danger closes in from all sides, Nell and Brand must discover who has a target trained on them before it’s too late.

“A richly detailed adventure that captivates till the end.”–Publishers Weekly on Forged in Love, Wyoming Sunrise Series book #1