Lead, South Dakota (pronounced "Leed")

We visited Lead, South Dakota (pronounced "Leed") before Spearfish. Lead is a gold-rush town. Like so much of the experience of settlement in the west, many came to find a better life, but only a very few remained, and those ended up with the land.

In the case of Lead, only one remained: George Hearst, father of William Randolph. George founded the Homestake Mining Company, which from 1877 to 1941 removed @ 40 million tons of gold ore from the underground mine. The mine closed when the mining expense/profit ratio became untenable.

It was closed until 1988, when it was decided to try strip mining. According to the infomercial video shown at the visitor center, strip mining yielded an additional "800 thousand ounces!" of gold before the mine was closed in 2001. Our photo shows the devastation caused by the strip mining. After we left, Will and Emily did the calculation necessary to compare the underground output with the strip-mining output. It turns out that 800 thousand ounces equals only 25 tons, or about 0.00006% compared to the 40 million tons produced from the underground mine. Or, for every 100,000 pounds of gold mined underground, six pounds was removed by strip mining. In other words, they destroyed a mountain for a less than a pittance.

This trip contains a great deal of such sadness for me. It is like a trip through the history of domination by wealth and power over whatever else might exist. In so many cases, those things seem to me to hold great value, like the wisdom of natural processes, the traditional cultures that still live in small pockets out here today, which seek to align their will with that natural wisdom. But as I write this,
nearing the end of our trip, the grief has been tempered by the understanding that the past is the past, and we can't change it. Yes the plundering of the west and the genocide and destruction of Indian culture was a travesty. But each one of us -- Indian or European descendant -- face the same reality today. We face the same disconnection from our traditional roots of unbroken spirit.

We are therefore similarly ill-equipped to live a life of unbroken spirit in today's world, when the plundering and the domination continues by the wealthy and powerful. But I now find hope that we share out predicament, that each of our cultures, and each of us individuals, possess resources we can put to use for the benefit of all. We need but to stay open to wisdom wherever we can find it,and to actively seek it.