Interesting to see that today is the anniversary of Devil's Tower as a national monument. Seems like it is mostly an attraction for rock climbers, judging from the NPS site. I have this stamp in my collection.
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
Beautiful stamp.
ReplyDeleteBrinkley said that while TR never visited Devils Tower he may have seen it since he visited Gillette and another Wyoming town Brinkley lists. I've driven through Gillette many times and have never seen the Tower -- I'm wondering if this is another one of Brinkley's weird assumptions or if it's really that big and I just wasn't looking for it. I'll have to check it out next time....
I imagine tourism peaked back in the late 70s when Spielberg made Devil's Tower the centerpiece of his movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
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