Black Elk Peak: The Highest Point East of the Rockies
Near Custer, South Dakota
The summit rising above the Black Hills at seven thousand two hundred forty-four feet is the highest point in North America east of the Rocky Mountains. It carries a name it received only recently. For most of the twentieth century it was called Harney Peak, after William Selby Harney, an Army general who campaigned against Indigenous peoples across the northern plains in the eighteen fifties, a man remembered in the historical record for considerable brutality.
In twenty sixteen, the United States Board on Geographic Names officially renamed the summit Black Elk Peak, in honor of Nicholas Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man whose life spanned the transformation of the Plains from free territory to reservation. Black Elk was born in eighteen sixty-three and lived until nineteen fifty. As a boy he witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn.
As an old man he gave the interviews that became the book Black Elk Speaks, written with the poet John Neihardt and published in nineteen thirty-two. In the book, Black Elk describes a great vision he received as a child in which the summit of the mountain appeared as the center of the world. He climbed the peak as an elderly man with Neihardt, praying and weeping, asking why the vision had not come true, why his people had suffered so much.
Today a stone fire lookout tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the nineteen thirties still stands on the summit. Hikers reach it by a trail of about three and a half miles from Sylvan Lake.
