Why are the high places revered? There must be more to it than the panoramas they offer.
One can experience awe on the salt flats of Badwater Basin in Death Valley, the lowest point in North America. A painter can better capture an alpine scene with their easel placed in a valley than on a peak.
There seems to be an ingrained planarity in how we humans sacralize, or discountenance, the topographies we inhabit. Prophets don't ascend from ditches.
There is something of an equalizing effect in this. Our earthly rulers can only hold so much of the high ground. Most of us may never amass great wealth or power, but we can achieve physical uplift. Walk or crawl. Opportunities for planar enlightenment surround us. Is it any wonder they tell us to cower in our homes?
When people know the peaks, when our points of reference are venerable but also actual, mappable places on this earth, our mental geography expands outside this cerebral flat earth, the desolate planar prison inside these screens.
Turtle Butte is a hill in Tripp County, an Anglicization of Keya Paha, the name of the river that flows beneath. Lieutenant G.K. Warren first recorded the name in accounting for his 1855 "Explorations in the Dakota Country." He noted the presence of a small colony of ponderosa pine, deep inside country hostile to arboreal encroachment. These trees are recognized today as the easternmost periphery of the ponderosa's western range. In 1984, the Society of American Foresters named the 110-acre stand a natural area.
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology paleontologists discovered fossils of several land mammals from the Arikareean era at Turtle Butte in 1969 and 1973. Fossils from a mastodon were found several decades earlier near the Keya Paha River.
One turn-of-century photograph of Turtle Butte reveals a strikingly turtle head-like abutment at the crest of the sandstone formation. Later pictures demonstrated a major change, due to erosion or possibly human intervention.
According to a local compilation of Tripp County history, a homesteader named William Weston discovered that marl harvested from the butte had multiple uses — as a building material, plaster and scouring material for scrubbing pots and pans. He used the marl as a mortar in building a no longer extant post office in nearby Marlbank, Nebraska. In the 1920's, the Klenit Corporation of Winner, South Dakota marketed a hand soap made from pumice of Turtle Butte's volcanic ash. Harvesting of these materials undoubtedly changed the shape of the formation.
Several newspaper articles from the early 1900's reference rumors of treasure hidden by Black Hills' gold miners hidden somewhere in the vicinity.
Though the butte's resemblance to its namesake was lost long ago, the landmark still defined the area. Children attended Turtle Butte School until it was moved to Wewela in 1965, and Turtle Butte Hall held dances. Some locals still refer to the "Turtle Butte Area."
Maybe, in time, the wind will again erode a latent turtle head from its sandstone shell.
Thanks to Helen Turnquist for contributing research.