Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota by Fraser Harrison (review)

British writer Fraser Harrison’s travel narrative departs from travelogue convention. Rather than describe foreign locations for readers back home, his aim is to “describe the face that South Dakota showed to the tourist, but with this twist: that [he] would also be describing the face to its owner.” Harrison thus directs his impressions toward South Dakotans themselves, particularly toward those who think they have nothing new to learn about the state.

Calling it his “homage to South Dakota,” Harrison divides his book into seven chapters: one dedicated to his namesake town of Harrison, South Dakota, another to Lewis and Clark’s expedition through the area, and others devoted to more famous (and infamous) locations—the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, and Wounded Knee. The final chapter “sketches” additional places he visited en route to his primary destinations.

In writing primarily of well-known locations for South Dakota readers, Harrison is especially effective at defamiliarizing the familiar. He notes that Mount Rushmore, America’s so-called shrine to democracy,” was sculpted by a man with connections to the Ku Klux Klan, that the legendary status of “Wild Bill” Hickok is more the product of dime westerns than history, and that twenty of the soldiers who participated in the brutal massacre at Wounded Knee received the Medal of Honor, the military’s most prestigious award. While Harrison, a former freelance broadcaster for the bbc whose articles have appeared in major newspapers in the United Kingdom, does not pretend to be a historian of the Great Plains, he sufficiently contextualizes the places he visits, offering details often missing from tourist books.

But the most engaging moments of the book occur when the narrative shifts from the historiographical to the personal. Harrison brings an aesthetic sensibility to his text, evidenced when he describes in rich detail the Badlands as a moonscape “composed of pink and cream rock piled in layers but scattered across the plain like remnants of an exploded ice cream,” or when he senses “a forlorn and abandoned air” in the well-preserved yet empty town of Yankton. Such artful prose often leads to personal reflection, such as when he compares the insularity of Harrison, South Dakota (population 45), to the English villages where he and his wife have lived, or when the eroding Badlands conjures feelings of his own aging.

Harrison is not immune to politicizing his impressions along the way. His characterization of the mass grave at Wounded Knee as “a construction of striking ugliness” furthers his broader assessment of this massacre site that effectively ended the American Indian wars as among the most neglected and grossly misunderstood locations within the state, a place where “a spirit of grief and rage still seems to hang in the air.” Similarly, he characterizes the grandiose style of Mount Rushmore as “reminiscent of the monumental classicism beloved of dictators in the 1930s,” confirming his earlier premonition that in some cases, art cannot be considered “in aesthetic isolation from its historical or biographical context.” In this case, Mount Rushmore appears to Harrison less a “shrine to democracy” than the expression of a sculptor who held a range of undemocratic beliefs.

Of course, such commentary will very likely turn off a few proud South Dakotans, despite his many gestures toward sensitivity. Just as he unsettles a pious ninety-one-year-old Harrison resident by divulging his atheism, so too might he aggravate a few readers when he draws a relationship between the religious certitude that typify members of Harrison (almost exclusively members of the Dutch Reformed Church) and their relative unconcern that the farm communities they know and love are quickly disappearing. His discussion of Lewis and Clark’s expedition may also trigger critical responses, particularly from the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota of the Great Sioux Nation whose ancestors’ lives and their own were radically changed as a result of the expedition. While Harrison acknowledges in one brief aside that Lewis and Clark “may have...