On August 25 the National Park Service is celebrating its 100th birthday.

To mark the occasion, my traveling partner and I set out from Dayton on June 25 for an eight-day whirlwind tour of some of the Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota National Parks, national historic memorials, and other places of interest for a westerner to see.

The first leg of our journey took us 622 miles across the aptly-named "Big Sky Country" of Montana, where there is plenty of "elbow room," to the historic site of the Battle of Little Big Horn, near the Wyoming border.

At that site on June 25, 1876, five companies of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of George Armstrong Custer, came to a fiery end at the hands of around one thousand Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians, led by an Indian named Crazy Horse.

Standing on Battle Ridge looking down into the valley toward the Little Big Horn River, it was easy to imagine Chief Sitting Bull's seven thousand strong Indian encampment by the river, and feel the horror of the soldiers when they realized they were trapped on the hill, soon to be overwhelmed by the Indians who surrounded them on all sides.

When the park ranger at the visitor's center wrapped up his battle talk, he said that only three of Custer's soldiers survived the onslaught.

(No – he didn't mention Dayton's own Frank Finkel.)

Leaving the Little Big Horn Battle site, we pushed on into Wyoming.

Can you say Wyomin'? If not, you will be identified as the outsider you are!

Here's an interesting fact about Wyoming: The state has no professional legislative body. Instead, it is made up of citizens, working part-time, for little, or, no, pay.

It seems that when corruption was rife during the Gilded Age, Wyoming's founders decided to keep politics in the hands of the very local populace.

Hmm...What if we could apply this bit of wisdom to other legislative bodies we know?

After we left the Battle of Big Horn National Memorial, we spent the night in Sheridan, Wyo., the "King of the Cowboy Towns," where we enjoyed the best steak and the western ambiance of the town.

The next morning, we headed to Devil's Tower National Monument on U.S Hwy. 14 from I-90. Devil's Tower was established as America's first national monument in 1906 by President Teddy Roosevelt.

The tower looms large, rising 1,267 ft. above the eastern Wyoming plains, on the Belle Fourche River.

I have to say, the closer we got to it, the more impressive it was – even more impressive than it looked in Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind!

From Devil's Tower we advanced steadily toward Deadwood, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok had only been in Deadwood for six weeks when he was shot by Jack McCall in the back of the head and killed on Aug. 2, 1878, at the #10 Saloon.

McCall exacted a revenge killing on Hickok for: either killing McCall's sister, or wiping him out in a poker game the night before, as the story goes.

McCall was apprehended soon after, delivered a speedy trial, and was hanged.

Now heavily commercialized, Deadwood's streets are lined with casinos and retail shops, and are crawling with people, like me, hoping for a peek into the Old West.

The closest I came was at the gravesites of Hickok and Martha Canary, aka "Calamity Jane", in the Mt. Moriah Cemetery overlooking the town. There didn't seem to be any romance on his part, but it seems Jane carried a torch for Hickok, because it was her dying wish to be buried next to him. And she is.

That night we camped out in Rapid City, S.D., our jumping off point to Badlands National Park, Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, and Custer State Park.

In the morning we made a short stop at Wall Drugstore on I-90 before entering the Badlands National Park.

Wall Drugstore touts itself as the Largest Drug Store in the World. It was certainly the busiest place in the world!

We made a quick visit inside one section of the store, and then we beat a hasty retreat to the Badlands. We entered the park at the Pinnacles Entrance Station, which is the start of a 23-mile scenic loop drive, going east.

The sedimentary rock layers in spires, humps, swales, and canyons against the blue sky were eerily beautiful.

Leaving the Ben Reitel visitor's at the east end of the drive, we headed to the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on U.S. Hwy. 27, and continued on to the historic site of the Dec. 28, 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

Not much marks the site of the massacre, except for a bright red sign, which tells the story.

When Sitting Bull was killed by a police agent on Dec. 15, 1890, his remaining warriors joined Chief Big Foot and his band on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which should have been fine.

Enter the Seventh Cavalry, who had been sent to keep a watchful eye over them.

When the Indians began dancing a Ghost Dance to protect themselves from the Bluecoats' bullets, tensions escalated. A shot rang out, and the warriors rushed to arm themselves. In the ensuing battle three hundred Indian men, women and children were killed by the cavalry.

Before I was able to extract myself from the car to take a closer look, I was set upon by a 10 or 11-year-old Indian girl, wanting to sell me a $20 dream catcher.

When I asked her if the tiny medicine bundle carried powerful medicine, she looked at me as if to say: What on earth is this crazy woman talking about?

I asked her if I needed it, she said, emphatically, "Yes!" So, of course, I bought it.

I couldn't help but compare the colossal amount of money spent by the U.S. Government on the Battle of Big Horn National Memorial, the visitor's center and outbuildings with the barely-marked location of the Wounded Knee massacre.

Also, I couldn't help but notice how marginal the land on the Pine Ridge Reservation was compared to the lush grassland pastures on the cattle ranches in Montana, and Wyoming.

On the fifth day of our adventure we headed to Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, hoping to arrive at the memorial before the tour buses did.

Advancing through the Avenue of Flags prepared us for the thrill of seeing the likenesses of Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington carved in bas relief on the face of the mountain. It was simply awe-inspiring.

We decided to skip the $22 entrance fee into Custer State Park, and skirted the park on the west side where we caught a glimpse of the Crazy Horse Monument, and encountered several bison along the roadway.

These burly beasts seemed unconcerned about the cars lining up on both sides of the road, and the cell phones and cameras sticking out of car windows.

We stopped in the tiny town of Custer and went into a rock shop because we like to buy rocks for our rock garden from places we visit.

The proprietor of the rock shop, Dave, told us that the tourist trade isn't all it's cracked up to be. He said it is hard to make a living in South Dakota due to the declining manufacturing base.

We bought a piece of rose quartz that he mined locally with a buddy of his, and then we went on our way.

On the sixth day of the trip we headed for Cody, Wyo., which is situated at the east entrance to Yellowstone National park.

Cody is the historic home of its famous founder, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Pony Express rider, provisioner for the U.S. Army, Wild West showman, and avid booster for the place he called home.

A trip to Cody requires a visit to the five museums that make up the Buffalo Bill Center of the West: The Whitney Western Art Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, the Draper Natural History Museum, the Plains Indians Museum and the Buffalo Bill Museum, where one can see actual film footage of Buffalo Bill's Congress of Roughriders of the World, ca. 1900.

Our feet held up through only three of the museums during our one-day visit to Cody. The artist in me appreciated the works of Charles Russell, Frederick Remington, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt and many others.

Yesteryear's prairie duels by cow punchers on cattle ranches is now Big Business.

Cody bills itself as the "Rodeo Capitol of the World" and the Wild West came alive for us that night at the Cody Stampede.

The crowd went wild when PRCA bull rider Cody Rostockij received 86.5 points on Riding Summit Pro Rodeo's bull, Dark Denim. It was the highest PRCA circuit bull riding score of the year so far.

Now we get to the final leg of the journey – Yellowstone National Park.

We entered the park from Cody the following morning, passing through the eroded volcanic Absaroka Mountain Range. Lodge pole pine and carpets of wildflowers in varying shades of blue, purple, orange, white and yellow on the hills were in abundance. Elk were many, and there was one lone bison traveling down the center line of the road passing just inches from the driver's side door of the car.

Talk about letting off a little steam!

The central part of Yellowstone Park is a 30-by-40-mile caldera with magmatic heat powering the park's many geysers, hot springs, fumaroles and mud pots.

Yellowstone Lake is America's highest altitude lake. It looks placid and restful, but there are apparently underwater hydrothermal vents in it.

Stopping for lunch at the historic Inn at Old Faithful, we were on hand, with hundreds of other people, to "watch her blow." After much huffing, and puffing, she did, and it was an impressive display.

At Midway Geyser Basin we walked the boardwalk with many others intent on seeing the Excelsior Geyser Crater, the park's largest hot spring.

The colors and patterns of the springs were beautiful, ranging from rusty orange to turquoise blue.

We spent nearly the whole day in this most majestic park.

I'll wrap this travelogue up with the words of "Wild Bill" Cody in the Cody Sentinel for June, 1890. Cody wanted his town, and its environs, to be a place people would want to visit.

"Would it not be better for Americans to know something of their own country, its grandeur of scenery, its wondrous vistas, and its towering mountains, before going abroad? America, and not Europe, will eventually become the paradise of tourists," he said.

Truer words were never spoken, especially in light of the many international languages we heard spoken while visiting some of our western national treasures.

(This trip was a bucket list-inspired journey for me, and for my husband and traveling partner, Mike. I would like to thank him for humoring me in my search for the American West, and for a wicked game of pool at the Pour In in Deadwood!)