Ode to Dorothy

This post goes out to my homie Dorothy Kaiser. A couple weeks ago the museum received some copies of the 2005 Traveler Magazine. This is a free tourist publication that highlights places of interest to visit, lodgings and restaurants, most of them in the Black Hills. As I picked up a copy of the Traveler last week I was instantly reminded of Keystone, Miner’s Motel, Dorothy and her love of one particular part of the Traveler Magazine.

I worked in Keystone, SD one summer between college and one season after I graduated where one of my jobs was working the front desk at Miner’s Motel. When I worked the evening shift Dorothy was most likely my companion.

She is from Sturgis, but during the work week she lives in a trailer attached to the back of Miner’s. Dorothy is about 80 years old. She is on the stout and on the shorter side. Dorothy used to be quite the smoker and now she has emphysema and has to use her inhaler quite a bit, even after just walking from her trailer in the back of the motel to the front desk. Dorothy drives around in a gray Dodge Caravan from the late 1980s with a Bear Country USA sticker on the back bumper.

She has short hair, except for one long thin braid dangling from her back lower right hairline. This braid is usually adorned with a variety of clips and barrettes. I loved it when Dorothy would quickly swing her head flinging the braid around to rest on the front of her shoulder just like someone who had a full head of long hair might fling his or her hair around.

Dorothy is also full of stories. I think some crazy things have happened to her, but I also think her storytelling abilities turn some of the more ordinary experiences she has had into epic adventures.

Dorothy used to tell me the reasons she like the Traveler so much were because 1) she liked looking for Miner’s Motel in the lodging listings under Keystone and 2) she enjoyed the Did You Know space-fillers interspersed between the ads and the area highlights. Many of the Did You Know facts were fuel for Dorothy’s stories. Here are just a few from the 2005 issue that I am sure Dorothy would find particularly interesting:

DID YOU KNOW
South Dakota’s state insect is the Honey Bee. Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.

Catfish have over 100,000 taste buds. South Dakota’s state Catfish record is 97 lbs. It was caught in 1959 and held the world record for over 40 years.

An Adult porcupine has approximately 30,000 quills, which are replaced every year.

The Crouch Line Railroad which ran up Rapid Canyon from Rapid city to Mystic from 1890 to 1947 would cross 110 bridges (about 4 bridges per mile), while bending and twisting its way through only 30 miles of the Black Hills, all the while negotiating turns and curves sharp enough to equal 14 complete circles. Passengers would often joke that the engineer could slap hands with people in the caboose as they passed.

In 1823, while hunting with the Ashley fur party, Hugh Glass was so terribly mauled by a grizzly bear that two members of the party were left behind to do what they could and to bury him when he died. Fearing for their own lives and believing his condition hopeless, they took his weapons and deserted him. Living off rain, wet tree moss, snakes, mice and bugs, Glass crawled for 3 months to make the 190 mile trek back to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri River to find the men who had left him. Today Glass is remembered in songs, books, a movie and a historical marker.

Deadwood’s Methodist Church was the first church ever visited by Calamity Jane. It was her own funeral.

Gold is so dense that a one ton cube would measure only 14.2 inches per side. A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court. The largest gold nugget ever found weighed 172 lbs., 13 oz.