Nowhere is the American West fantasy slathered so thick as the homestead fantasy that is Wall Drug. Nestled near the Badlands National Park and in the town of Wall, it is a testament to every cliche and glossy stereotype propagated by the Silver Screen western. Hundreds of miles of billboard advertising beg and cajole the Highway 90 traveller. It is a vivid portrait of nostalgia, denial and an earnest effort to shill cheap memorabilia in the rural obscurity of South Dakota. In short, it is an absolute must-visit for anybody travelling through.
The building takes up a full square block of Wall. Although it is not large (any Wal-Mart will easily surpass it in square-feet of space), Wall Drug uses every inch. The density of gift shop accessories is so intense, the cartoon-style maps they provide are required in order to negotiate the walls of refrigerator magnets, glass buffalo paperweights, soda fountains, wood-carved eagles, "Black Hills" gold, and a heinous assortment of T-shirts in every style of Tacky known to man. If I had visited this place as a kid, I would have felt that I had been dropped into Heaven. Wooden carvings of Wild Bill Hickok, cotton candy stands and ice cream floats- an idyllic, pre-adolescent, land of adventure and guns. As an educated grownup whose scope of knowledge extends beyond the reruns of Gunsmoke and Gene Autry flicks I watched as a kid, the mystical legends being peddled felt just a little bit trite.
There was one, unbelievable treasure for an adult who wants to get a sense of what the American West was like back in the day. It was located at the back of the store, where few customers visited and fewer lingered more than 10 minutes. That was roughly the amount of time that separated each performance of the herky-jerky animatronic T-Rex consumed one end of an extended hallway, framed by clusters of kids and, a few yards away, the parents. Along the walls of this reverential space stood a stunning wall of photographs. Taken in the late 1800's and early 1900's, the photographs were a sober testament to the hardships of immigrant homesteaders and the horrors that befell the Native Americans. Tribesmen and women stood along muddy stretches of road as they awaited U.S. government rations. Tents dotted valley floors or along the ramshackle sketch of a small town. Young men, barely of high school age, leaned against chuck wagons and gave thousand-mile stares that only adorn the battle-scarred veterans and hurricane victims of today's America. Proud chiefs and warriors at the sunset of proud traditions stood stoic and still for the camera. A pair of side-hallways, barely wide enough for two people, continued the black and white tale. Beneath the pictures were typed captions.
As the alarm siren rose and T-Rex began to rumble behind his plastic prison, a cluster of blond boys raced between me and the wall of history and anguish with nary a glance at the pictures. Kat and I stared at the pictures for quite a few rounds of dinosaur rage and I, for once, couldn't have agreed more with old T-Rex.
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