Crazy Horse's story runs through six places: Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming, the Rosebud and Little Bighorn battlefields in Montana, Fort Robinson in Nebraska, and the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota. The Oglala Lakota war leader helped defeat the army from 1866 to 1876, then surrendered and was killed at Fort Robinson in 1877.
The route follows his campaigns in order, then turns to what remains: the burial legend near Wounded Knee Creek and the unfinished mountain carving that many Lakota oppose.
In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today.
This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.
