Revolution

Nineteen thirty-five, and if you were out on the brown prairie you might have seen a car go by doing a fair seventy, racing the sun to the Badlands, with Paul Bellamy at the wheel and Frank Lloyd Wright along, out here because Senator Norbeck, still fighting for this country, had invited him. Wright had been about the world a lot, he said, and about four in the afternoon something rose on the horizon that set him bolt upright, staring at Bellamy to see if the man saw it too. "Oh," said Bellamy, "you've seen nothing yet." "But I had," Wright wrote. "I was totally unprepared for that revolution called the Dakota Bad Lands." That's his word as South Dakota History printed it. He called it "an indescribable sense of mysterious otherwhere," and he said they seemed to be floating on "a splendid winding road that seemed to understand it all and just where to go," which, if you're wondering, is the line Ben Millard, the hotelkeeper, had staked four years before. Wright asked Bellamy how he'd heard so little of this and so much of the Grand Canyon, and Bellamy, slyly, said, "We are not on the through line to the coast." Later, praising the Black Hills as a home for people, Wright said a harder thing, and you ought to hear it whole. "No home for man the Rocky Mountains, no, nor perhaps the Bad Lands, yet." I'll set one thing beside that letter myself. Wright came through in early September, and on the second Eva Stevens Roberts, a rancher's wife at Imlay, wrote a letter of her own, to the Park Service, and you should know her name. "After six years of crop failures on the so called submarginal land of Western South Dakota," she wrote, "we are facing financial disaster unless we sell our land to the government." Two letters, one month. "Delicate parallels of rose and cream," Wright wrote. "Crop failures," she wrote. And the road runs on between the two of them, seeming to understand it all.