Day 22 (D-39) Rapid City / and Dan O'Brien, the writer we'll meet

Not much driving on the fourth day, about 70 kilometres (miles?) between Custer and Rapid City where we'll spend two nights.  Here's just a little information about the city first. It is the second-largest city in South Dakota (after Sioux Falls).  Population: 67,956 (2016); 80% white, 12% American Indian.
It's named after the Rapid Creek, a tributary of the Cheyenne River, on which the city is established.
I found it interesting that Wikipedia in English also gives its name in Lakota (Mni Luzahan Othunwahe, meaning Swift Water City) but Wikipedia in French gives its Cheyenne name, Haeohe-mahpe, mahpe meaning water... haeohe?
We'll be returning to the Cheyenne people on the blog after we leave South Dakota.

Two reasons to include this stop on our trip: 1) The Badlands to the east which we'll visit on our fifth day and 2) A very interesting American writer who lives here, Dan O'Brien.  We'll be visiting his ranch in the afternoon of this fourth day and we'll learn about his project.

Dan O'Brien is an owner of the Cheyenne River Ranch just west of the Badlands National Park and north of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.  He lives and shares his life on the ranch with his wife Jill, and their old friend Erney Hersman.

I discovered him last year through one of my colleagues at Uiad who suggested that I read Dan's book Buffalo for the Broken Heart, just after we had welcomed another Wyoming writer to Grenoble for the Printemps du Livre, the Spring Book Festival.  We'll return to Dan's book and project tomorrow.  

I learned that Dan O'Brien and I are close in age and we both hail from Ohio, although my birthplace is Louisiana. We both attended universities in Ohio in the 1970s.  I read that he got his first degree in math at Findley College, where he was the chairman of the first Earth Day, April 22,1970.  At the end of my studies, I headed east for France; the echo of Horace Greeley's "Go west, young man, go west," had him heading in the opposite direction. He earned a Masters Degree in English Literature from the University of South Dakota, then returned to Bowling Green University in Ohio for a degree in biology.  All this is really pertinent to who is his and what he is doing in South Dakota today.  His book, his story, his project fascinate me and I'm really looking forward to meeting him.

He has been a wild life biologist and rancher for more than thirty years.  He is also one of the most celebrated falconers in America today, and he was a prime mover in the restoration of peregrine falcons in the Rocky Mountains in the 1970s and 80s.
In addition to writing, Dan divides his time between working on the ranch, teaching ecology, and writing and serving the Black Hills branch of The Nature Conservancy.

He is one of the most powerful literary voices of the Plains. 
Some of his novels include The Spirit of the Hills (a Western mystery novel, 1988), In the Center of the Nation, The Indian Agent and the Stolen Horses. His non-fiction books Buffalo for the Broken Heart and Wild Idea tell of his contribution to the restoration of the Great Plains.  We'll come back to that tomorrow.

My best,
Jane
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--hail from = come from
--chairman = the head, like a president of an organisation
--falconer =  a person who trains falcons