Buffalo Sorting and My First Gambling Foray

Early October I went to South Dakota for the first time since I was a kid. I have a friend from college whose parents own a cabin in the Black Hills which she and her boyfriend (also a college friend) go to a few times a year, and I’d been talking about going with them for some time. I landed in Sioux Falls. My friends were driving from Des Moines, so it worked out that they could pick me up from the airport and we set out from there.

Our first stop was the Badlands. The park was impressive but not nearly as entertaining as the gas station we stopped at beforehand, which abutted a colony of highly extroverted and rather rotund prairie dogs. Rotund because well-fed, well-fed because what you do at this gas station is you go in and buy a bag of peanuts (preferably salted) and take them out and stand among the prairie dog mounds and wait for the inhabitants to emerge. When they do, you toss a handful of nuts and watch the chunky suckers scramble. They aren’t shy, these prairie dogs. I was on the verge of feeding one by hand when my friend happened to mention that prairie dogs carry the Black Plague, and I decided to stand down. I’m pleased to say I feel fine. So far.

We stayed in Wall overnight and the next day drove on through to the Black Hills. My friend’s parents have an ATV, so the first day we took it up into the mountains on some truly hairy back roads near the Wyoming border, the upshot of which (if you survive the trip) is you get to a lookout where you have a 360-degree view of the Black hills in one direction and Wyoming in the other.

That little trek turned out to be the highlight of the trip, but what I was most looking forward to going into the week was Deadwood. You may know that Deadwood was a gold rush town back in the day, and more recently the subject of a well-regarded HBO series of the same name, which I’m rather fond of. Sadly, I was disappointed. Nearly every building in Deadwood that isn’t a shop is a casino, which I hadn’t remembered from my last visit. The upside to that was I’d never gambled before, and being in Rome (as it were), I decided it was as good a time and a good a place as any to check that item off the old bucket list.

We played slots. (There are few tables games in Deadwood, but I wasn’t interested in those anyway). I picked one of the older ones because I have an analog sensibility and it contained actual spinning gizmos instead of a screen, and it was probably for that reason that the machine seemed to have an almost halcyon glow about it—something alluring, something almost…trustworthy. Still, my faith in that sort of thing only goes so far. I decided I wasn’t willing to lose more than twenty dollars, so a twenty’s what I put in. I bet in two-dollar increments and I’ll be damned if I didn’t win eight-five dollars on my second or third spin. Score one for hunches.

Now, I don’t know much about gambling, but I do know that quit while you’re ahead are the words to live by when it comes to such affairs, and I’m proud to say I heeded them then. I wasn’t about to count on that machine being so generous a second time, so I hit the CASH OUT button and promptly went to another. I chose one on the far side of the room. My theory was that the farther away the new machine was, the less likely it was to have heard me win on the other one. Lo and behold, the new machine turned my eighty-five dollars into one hundred and twenty-eight. Again, this up from an initial twenty. Now we were in business.

I did seriously consider quitting at this point. I considered that it would be completely stupid to do so, given that I’d just made a hundred and eight dollars in about fifteen minutes, and since we had the whole day ahead of us, that meant I could easily have over twelve hundred dollars in my pocket by suppertime.

You can probably guess what happened next. My working theory was that if I’d picked two winners right off the bat the chances were good that I’d find another before too long. Well, that logic didn’t pan out. I wandered all over that casino and didn’t find a single machine that was as good to me as those first two had been. By the time we’d finished, I had forty-four dollars on my voucher.

Still, I’d started with twenty dollars if you recall, meaning I won twenty-four. For the investment strategists among you, that amounts to a 120% gain. Not bad by Wall Street standards. Still, my gain had I stopped at one hundred and twenty-eight dollars would have been 540%. Had I taken the time to do that math at the outset, I may have convinced myself to quit then and there and dinner would have been on me. As it was, we split the bill three ways.

The rest of the trip was exactly as relaxing and uneventful as it should have been. I’ll close with one more brief anecdote.

On the second to last day we went to Custer State Park with the idea of seeing some buffalo and driving up Needles Highway. What we didn’t know was that that was also the day the buffalo were being sorted, which is evidently a thing they do at Custer State Park. Every September the park rangers, accompanied by a number of volunteers, round up the herd so select specimens can be sold to various ranches and meat sellers. I didn’t know any of this, but it dawned on me after the fact that the bison burger I’d had in Wall must have come from somewhere.