Infinite West : travels in South Dakota (edition 2012)

British travel writer Fraser Harrison knows most travelogues are written with the writer's home country in mind. He admits, though, that he didn't necessarily aim Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota at British or other readers. He also is addressing "the people who inhabit the exotic land through which I journeyed." Although writing as a tourist, he intends to describe the face of South Dakota to those who live here.

The extent to which Harrison succeeds may be in the willingness of the reader to accept Harrison's outsider and more objective view of the state and its history. Don't be mistaken. Fraser is infatuated, if not in love with South Dakota. It's just that he occasionally makes factual and historical observations perhaps no longer apparent to many of us who live here may be somewhat immune. This recurs throughout the book, whether from his visit to a town named Harrison (simply because he has the same name) to exploring part of the Lewis and Clark trail to the Badlands to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. What these things have in common for Fraser seems to be how they reflect the state and its people.

Another theme running through Infinite West is Fraser's use of his travels and experiences in South Dakota to recall episodes of is own life. He not only tells us of his fascination with the American West growing up, but it is not uncommon for his geographic tales and descriptions to inspire reminiscing that isn't directly connected to the state.

Still, it is the face that South Dakota presents the world that comes through. Take the town of Harrison, for example. Located west of Corsica, it is representative of many small towns in South Dakota -- and many that have already disappeared. With a population of less than 50 in 2010, it is "an old person's town." In 2000, more than half its residents were age 65 or older. Although it has a variety of well-kept homes and two churches, there are no businesses. And what struck Harrison in visiting with the town's residents was their tendency toward certitude. "They had been taught by their church and their parents that the Bible contained answers to all the philosophical questions that might otherwise have disturbed them," Fraser says, "and I felt I was confronting a mind-set that, for all its friendliness, had not changed since 1884, when the original settlers had founded their church."

While many South Dakotans may not say so out loud, few of us who have spent any time in the state's small, aging and declining communities can deny this. Whether pioneer spirit, a strong streak of conservatism or, as Fraser says, "the product of a particular set of historical circumstances that was no longer available to South Dakotans," this is often the face the state's smaller communities may present.

It isn't as though South Dakotans are blind to change. In fact, his journey to Deadwood recalls the reaction of many of the state's residents to its conversion to a "town-sized casino." Although Fraser believes the town gained some "probity" since his first visit there in 1992, there still is evidence of how we tend to disguise aspects of our history. For example, a tourism brochure describes Dakota Territory as having been "fairly uninhabited" before gold was discovered by the Custer expedition in 1874. How many of us have asked the question that struck Frasier: "why did a simple reconnaissance expedition require the protection of a thousand soldiers, three Gatling guns and a cannon?"

This also is seen in Fraser's visit to the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, one of several he's made on his various journeys to the site. It is a place he believes everyone should visit. To him, Wounded Knee "is the quintessential locus of the Sioux's subjugation," and historically crucial.

[Wounded Knee] represents a symbol not only of the Sioux's final, conclusive defeat, but of the last perceived challenge to the white population's acquisition of the Sioux's traditional lands. The latter aspect of its symbolism is not often acknowledged... South Dakota was wrested from its American Indian occupants, a fact that does not deserve to be erased by tourism's need for an inoffensive account of history. Among other things, Wounded Knee is a monument to the country's completed transition to white authority, and it is therefore worth seeing because it quantifies the price of that transition and shows who paid it.

It would be wrong to conclude that Fraser doesn't see beauty and good in South Dakota and is people. In fact, Infinite West often seems a paean to the state. Still, one of his goals was to perhaps those of us who live here to see it from an outsider's perspective. Although some may take offense at them, views such as those set out above are necessary for that goal. After all, looking at ourselves in a mirror does not always reveal what others see.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

I requested a copy of Infinite West from Early Reviewers as the write-up sounded quite good and I was interested to see the British author’s take on an area in the US that as another Brit I knew very little about. Although I may well never visit South Dakota (though I have noted a few places to try to see – or to avoid – if I am ever there) I now know a lot more about it.

The author writes well, even though the introduction was, for me, a bit long. He makes the book quite personal, often talking about things such as his childhood in Liverpool and schooling in Shrewsbury as background to his descriptions of the places he visits and the people he meets in South Dakota.

He starts by visiting Harrison, a town that shares his name, then follows some of the route of Lewis and Clark, before moving on to more famous locations such as the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Wounded Knee and Deadwood. The last chapter, ‘Sketches’, collects together a few other pieces/places that did not really fit elsewhere.

The blurb on the back cover makes comparisons with Bill Bryson, which is to my mind a fair comparison. Both have a slightly rambling style and quirky sense of humour. My husband read a bit of the book and complained that the author seemed to take a long time to get to the point – but I liked the style though just occasionally a bit more editing may not have come amiss.

So, all in all, I was quite positive about the book. The main negatives as far as I was concerned were that there was no map provided (a black and white outline map with some of the places, rivers etc would have saved having to get out an atlas) and the fact that although it was written by a British author the spellings were American. (I realise that the publisher is in the US and much of the market may well be there, but I found the US spelling and word usage distracting when coming from the ‘mouth’ of someone I knew to be British.) ( )

A slim travelogue by a Brit, with sections on Deadwood, Wounded Knee, and the Badlands. Harrison writes well and wryly, although much of the time his subject matter doesn't allow for humor. I enjoyed this book quite a bit.

I received this book as part of the Librarything Early Reviewers initiative. It was a pre-pub proof.

This book contains the impressions of the author as he travels to various sites in South Dakota, along with bits of history. I found the writing generally of a high quality, and I learned things about this area of America that I hadn't known before.

The biggest issue for me was the lack of a structure to connect the various chapters. There was very little sense of continued journey, or of a plot to give the episodes any coherence. As such, it felt like an eclectic collection of essays on various aspects of the geography and history of South Dakota.

As someone not very familiar with the geography of the US, I would have found some maps useful. ( )

Fraser Harrison’s Infinite West is a difficult book to classify. As a book about an outsider’s travels around a place, it would superficially seem to be a travelogue, but at least as much of the book is devoted to history as to Harrison’s own impressions, and in the end it’s perhaps most appropriate as a view into “how others see us” for those already familiar with the South Dakotan locales described. He opens with an extended explanation of how he, and other Brits of his generation, became fascinated with the American West, which I appreciated (I’d previously found this baffling, when I learned that a British friend’s father wrote Westerns, and fulfilled a lifelong dream of his by visiting Tombstone, Arizona).

Most of those locations - Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, Deadwood - would fall on anyone’s short list of tourist destinations in the state. Some, particularly Harrison’s first stop in his “namesake” town of Harrison, surely would not be. As a former South Dakotan, however, I’ve been to most of those more obscure destinations as well, and found the outsider perspective riveting, as he points out to fish that water is wet.

For most readers, even within the state, Harrison the town (with a population under 100) will stand in for the dying small towns across the Great Plains - an aging population, no economy to speak of, with the churches the only public buildings remaining. (At one point in his stay in the town, the author sees kids playing in a yard and happily labels them an exception to the generally elderly population; as someone who spent quite a while in a town a few miles away from Harrison when I was a child, my first thought was that they were somebody’s visiting grandkids). For me, though, this section was far more personal. My grandparents attended one of the churches in Harrison, and are buried in the graveyard the author visits at the end of the chapter (though their name isn’t one that he notices). Reading about the author’s conversations with the locals was a reminder of just how strange that part of the world, so utterly familiar to me, must seem to most people. While the author’s choice of Harrison is coincidental, I’m glad that it was included, if only as a representative of a way of life that is now nearly extinct.

From Harrison, the author moves on to a more familiar, touristy (and, except for a stop on the Lewis and Clark trail, entirely West River) itinerary. This is where the balance shifts to place more of a focus on history, and I was pleased to see Wounded Knee included - certainly not a common stop for most non-Indian tourists, but an important piece of history that deserves notice. I enjoyed ticking off places that I’ve been (though the list of places mentioned that I haven’t been would have been shorter!) The major sour note comes in his self-congratulatory eye-rolling at the American attitudes toward Mount Rushmore. Admittedly, I roll my eyes at those attitudes as well, but not quite so obviously.

I found the concluding ”Sketches”, brief observations that were too short to warrant chapters of their own and which didn’t fit neatly into any of the other chapters, to be uneven, with the Hill City and Crazy Horse sections by far the strongest.

Overall, I’d recommend this to anyone with a strong interest in South Dakota, resident or otherwise, but it’s too detailed to be a generally entertaining travelogue for someone without such an interest. ( )

I received this book from ER and looked forward to seeing South Dakota through an Englishman's eyes. What started out as more about the author turned into a look at the history of several tourist destinations but with, what seemed to me, an emphasis on what happened to the indigenous people when settlers and gold hunters arrived.

This is a very personal story but I did learn some of the history of places like Mount Rushmore; Deadwood and Wounded Knee. This is not so much about the experience of travelling but the places you travel to. I must say that I would have appreciated some photographs in the book, especially as the author talks about the pictures he took in the Badlands and other places, but this was an ARC and maybe the publisher will consider including them in the completed book. ( )

I selected this book to learn more about South Dakota, but the long introduction tells about Fraser Harrison, the author, a British man obsessed with the “wild west” and especially South Dakota. I learned more about him than I ever needed to know. The first chapter, also rather long, tells about the South Dakota town Harrison, of interest only because it has the same name as the author. He calls it his “namesake town.” No other connection, just the name. By this time I was tired of both Harrisons, so I put the book aside and gave myself to more satisfying reading.

It's not just that I have no particular interest in learning about Fraser Harrison. It's that primarily what I learn about him is that he is wordy, talky, self-centered, and ponderous in his prose.

Needing to write this review, sometime later I picked up the book and turned to the next-to-last chapter, on Wounded Knee. What a difference. Fraser’s strength in this and other chapters lies in his recounting the history of famous South Dakota sites with the verve and detail that a tourist wants to know. That alone makes the book worthwhile, but he goes beyond that to discuss the current status of these legendary sites and to trace the way these places have been preserved (and sometimes exploited) by contemporary aficionados. Tourism, he tells us in the detailed chapter on Wounded Knee, is rapidly overtaking agriculture as the dominant industry in this sparsely populated region. Two telling statistics: the 2010 population of South Dakota is just over 800,000 (and, yes, they still get three votes in the electoral college, freebies for the Republicans), and the income from tourism in 2010 was $1,059 billion! (If my arithmetic is accurate, and I entered the right number of zeroes, that averages over $1300 per local citizen.)

In his account of the woeful attack at Wounded Knee, Harrison rises to a peak. It is moving, surprising, informative, objective yet conveying the sense of outrage that this incident inspires. This chapter should be required reading in all American history classes. US patriotism needs to be tempered with the sense of shame and a need for national atonement in one form or another.

Chapters on Lewis and Clark, Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, and Deadwood are similarly informative: authentic history and accurate analysis on contemporary culture. (Well, there’s still a little more about Harrison himself and his traveling companions than one needs to know, but not enough to be bothersome.)

Personally, I’ve never traveled extensively in South Dakota. Now I don’t think I need to; I feel as if I’ve already been there – without putting all those miles on my SUV, without elbowing all those other tourists, and without supporting the locals who exploit South Dakota history and topography. Thank you, Fraser Harrison, for the experience.

Oh, if I ever do make it into the state, the one town I’ll be sure NOT to include on my itinerary is Harrison. So I’ll miss the Calvinism of the Reformed Christian Church. The First Christian Church is served by the same pastor, with services still held in both church buildings but on alternating Sundays, though they each maintain their separate doctrines. Hmm. Now, that’s a new way to be ecumenical – and a very practical one at that. So be it. ( )

At my wife's church in America, I was once witness to one of the most bravura forty minute performances I have ever seen in my life. I'd just had to witness what can only be described as a rather painful Christian "hoe-down" worship session which had lasted half the service in this church I'd never previously been to and I'd have hoped would have embarrassed as many Americans as it did this solitary Englishman. I'd never been to an American church before and sincerely hoped that this worship session wasn't going to be how the rest of the service was going to go. I'd come from a much more staid, traditional background and this wasn't... quite what I was used to. But then... oh my... then the sermon started.

My grandad was a preacher, but his sermons tended to be very much off the cuff personal sketches - mainly because he couldn't read or write. But as far as improvised messages go, his were tidy twenty minute jobs. This was a forty minute epic of meandering, wandering thoughts and ideas... utterly engaging but quite utterly bemusing. This lovely bloke wandered to the pulpit and started his message with a long, convoluted story about how he and his brother had once gone fishing... we never quite got to find out what the point of this anecdote was going to be because at various times in the next five minutes he'd gone on quite epic diversions about his brother, a friend of his brother, another fishing trip, a driving trip with his wife, a time he'd gone to buy doughnuts and some sort of story about a dog. About thirty seconds into each of these stories he'd suddenly draw to a stop with "oh wait a minute now, I'm losing my way..." He'd then pass into silence for a moment before dragging a new anecdote out of his mind and wandering down that avenue of thought for a bit. Often he'd bring his faith into it, but frequently he'd not. Sometimes he'd be very aware he'd not brought God into the message for a bit and awkwardly foist religion into his meanderings. But it was never boring. In fact it was hugely, hugely entertaining and even joyous and although I never quite worked out what the thrust of his message was intended to be, I think it shone through with his warmth and openness of heart.

Now what is the point of this ramble to my review of "Infinite West"? Well it's because in many ways this book is the absolute antithesis of that sermon. The book is described on the back as being in the vein of Bill Bryson and I can see something of this point of view - but it's unfortunately a massively pedantic Bill Bryson. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but - oh my - I can imagine Fraser Harrison could be a very, very tiresome man to spend time with.

Harrison is an English writer who has spent a great deal of time in America. We know this because he tells us all about those times... in great, tiny, pedantic detail. Harrison is one of the most pedantic writers I have ever read and at times this pedanticism is very entertaining. Take the introduction for example, which details Harrison's childhood love of America and his early trips to the states. He goes into quite painstaking detail about these trips and frequently wanders off the point to detail how much he disliked, for example, his schooling. But in the hands of many writers this would come across as unfocused... that's never the case here. Harrison has an uncanny knack to wander completely from the point for several paragraphs but always, always comes back to his central point. Which is in many ways admirable, but also often comes across as rather joyless.

He kind of reminds me of those parents who can only humour their children so far before they start pointing out inherent practical problems in the games. There's a priceless passage in the first chapter, where Harrison visits a town in South Dakota of the same name and meets the aging population. As with all the books, there's some tremendous writing and research in here but by god it needs an editor. Because to me the section I'll remember is when he can't bring himself to talk to a very religious near centurion without rather dourly explaining why he can't possibly believe what she does and goes into tremendous detail about how Europe really isn't very religious these days. Rather than mention this in a sentence or two, he goes on for about three or four paragraphs in tremendous detail about it. It's very funny, but it was almost certainly not intended to be.

Basically it comes down to this: Harrison is an interesting, fascinating writer who has some great insights to make. But he's also way too dry for his own good and sometimes painfully unaware of how dull he's being. He needs a good editor because once he's met him then he may well make a book everyone can enjoy.... nice try though. ( )

This is a book by an English writer about his travels in South Dakota in 2011. He has incisive chapters on Harrison, SD, a town of 43 in Douglas County, SD, on Lewis & Clark and their time in what was to become South Dakota, on Mount Rushmore--its creator expected it to endure for a million years!-- and the Badlands, and on various towns in the Black Hills, etc. The author is at times deprecatory or cynical but not insultingly so. His chapter on Wounded Knee is expectedly very condemning. One must be appalled that 20 Medals of Honor were given to the Army men who perpratratd that massacre! He brings a fresh view to things we all know about and I found the book unfailingly fresh and insightful. ( )

I truly enjoy when non-US citizens choose to write about marvels contained inside America's borders, especially those that US-born authors traditionally spend little time on. I appreciated Harrison's attention to the prairie landscape and geology, which must almost appear to be something from another plant to a British citizen. My favorite parts were his stays in the towns with less than 100 peopleI and his interviews with some of their aging lifetime residents. My only substantial criticism is that the author spent approximately 20 percent of his pages (roughly 37 out of 188) telling his reader why he chose to write about South Dakota. I think describing the actual things he saw there would have acccomplished that more effectively and economically. That being said, I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the American West, Indian affairs, or any tourist headed to the Mount Rushmore area. Thanks again to Early Reviewers and the publishers for making this type of material available. ( )

I was initially surprised to realise that Fraser Harrison was like me a Brit. 'Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota' is moreover aimed at the American rather than the foreign reader trying to understand more about a foreign land. I can't comment on how it would feel to read as an American. As a Brit, I warmed to the recollection that created his interest in the American West, the childhood games of Cowboys and Indians with which I also grew up, the cultural assumptions that flavour my knowledge of Wounded Knee, Deadwood, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. And generally I enjoyed Harrison's ramble through the state. At times his meanderings failed to draw me in (he does return more than once to his thoughts on aging). But those meanders aside, he sees with a humourous and engaging eye and his descriptions of and clear love for this part of America shines through. He makes a warm and companionable partner for this wild west tour.

Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota
by Fraser Harrison

When Bill Bryson travels, either in his native United States or abroad, he spends as much time flashing back to former adventures as he does discussing the subject of his essay. The digressions illuminate rather than distract from the subject and his point of view entertains even in his serious moments. When Fraser Harrison veers from his stated topic of the state of South Dakota, it's time for a nap or a quick skip over a few paragraphs or, in the case of the endless introduction, pages.

Harrison claims a lifelong obsession with the old west yet he spends as much if not more time regaling the reader with stories from his childhood or his home in Suffolk, England than on the sights he's seeing. A visit to his "namesake" town of Harrison leads to a treatise on the lack of religious devotion in his homeland. Sizing up the Missouri River transports him (and, unfortunately, the reader) to the rivers of his youth.

Not that all the essays are horrible (though none are wonderful). The tales of Lewis and Clark's exploration of the Missouri, punctuated by excerpts from letters and journals of members of the expedition, is engrossing (once you've safely returned from the rivers of England), as is the background information on Mount Rushmore, the Badlands and Deadwood. But the essay on Wounded Knee was a little too self-congratulatory for my taste (Americans are idiots with no knowledge of their own history, yeah, yeah, I know) and the concluding "Sketches" were just painful to read.

I never really understood the point of this book. Is it supposed to give the reader a taste of South Dakota? Or are we supposed to be moved and amused by Harrison's fish-out-of-water adventures (of which there are few)? Which brings us back to Bryson, a writer who often mixes the two. Bryson, however, is interesting and amusing whether his subject is or not. Harrison suffers when his subject is not bold enough to overcome his bland reporting.

Fraser Harrison may want to rethink his marketing strategy: He thinks his target audience is in the U.S., but the book may play better in his native U.K. ( )

“Giddiup!” I yelled, slapping my own buttocks to get Hey-Ho Silver up to her top speed as I galloped across the Infinite West of my mother’s lawn into the ‘Bad Lands’ of my father’s vegetable allotment across the muddy cinder alley, to tie up my maid of the West with my Mum’s washing line (the author’s called Leanore, mine a more simple Joan), his in Liverpool from 1944, mine in the Thames estuary from 1943 – my gallop through the years led to me to a marriage to an Harrison, (always pronounced without the H of course). Both of us, author and reader, grew up to the thunderous smell of our cap pistols, creating an echo of that “Wild” West of America that we imagined – with the help of Hollywood.

Fraser got to play the game again, for real, in South Dakota as a journalist … I got to play again too, as a businessman in a hired car many years later … and both of us were aghast at the reality of the truly infinite West, recognizably the Wild West of childhood. Harrison finds he is close to Harrison, a town named for the Presidential candidate of the time, peopled by families mostly of Dutch stock, and firm followers of the Christian religion. Indeed he soon finds that the Bible Study classes of the two churches in this small – and diminishing - farming community constituted most, if not all, of the education of the now elderly residents. He has to explain his own, and most of Europe’s atheism to one elder who is saddened and rather credulous, never, she claims, ever having met an atheist before … ”although sometimes’ she adds mischievously ”you think you have.”

Harrison soon crosses a trail of two of my personal heroes, Lewis and Clarke … theirs is surely one of the most exciting adventures in exploration … and he finds he can relate to them best by locating the many points mentioned in their famous journals in South Dakota. Harrison wanders on – in his travels, not his narrative which drives the reader on – to Deadwood Gulch, finds traces of Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, Custer, echoes from his childhood imaginings, and then empathizes with the pathos of Wounded Knee.

This book will give many re-readings to any reader of history, is written in a very human voice, and is – simply – fascinating.

A highly engaging account of travels through a part of the US known mainly for its wild west past with towns like Deadwood, and the impressive Mount Rushmore. Harrison, an English journalist serves as a gregarious guide as he shares his thoughts on his travels, often being diverted on odd tangents relating to his past and personal thoughts on things. While this could have been annoying, it is actually quite a lot of fun to read.

The copy I have is an uncorrected proof, so I am going to assume that the mistakes I came across will be fixed by the time the book is published. ( )