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Having returned from a three-week, 4,751-mile trip, I thought it would be a good idea to explain where I was and why I didn't have any stories in the Daily News during that time.

Late May and early June I took a trip to the Pacific Northwest with an eye toward checking out my land that I bought in Elk City, Ore., about a year and a half ago.

On a trip out to the Northwest two summers ago, I spotted what I thought was a parcel of county property that had been advertised for sale online. I put in a bid and got it.

So I set out the night of Thursday, May 21 for a cross-country trip to check out the property and see the countryside.

So here's what happened.

The first night I stayed at my sister's in Dell Rapids, S.D., to get a little jump into South Dakota the next day. Friday I got under way into South Dakota proper.

Having grown up in South Dakota, I always asked myself as a boy where the real West started. That's a pretty relative question, depending on where you live. If you're an Easterner, it could be anywhere west of the Mississippi. To me, it's where the long grass prairie yields to the short grass, where the corn and soybeans end and the pasture and beef cattle begin.

With that as a working definition of the "West," or feeling as though you're in a different part of the country, the West starts just west of the James River in South Dakota.

The change is immediate. It seems as though the long grass ends on the east bank of the Jim and the short grass picks up on the west.

At the Missouri River, the change is even more dramatic. If you're traveling on Interstate 90, you suddenly plunge down toward the Missouri, travel across Lake Francis Case, then to the other side where you'll find one of the two places in South Dakota that serve a cup of coffee for a nickel, Al's Oasis. The other is Wall Drug, just a couple hours to the west.

That night I stayed with an old friend in Belle Fourche, Sandy Larson, whom I've known for probably 25 years. Sandy's father, Rodney, was one of the pioneers of Butte County as were his ancestors.

I remember Rodney on his ranch just east of Belle Fourche. He was the epitome of the Western cowboy. He always wore his stetson when he drove his Cadillac. When he said something, you knew he meant it. That's just the way he was.

Since he was a Dane, you might wonder why Rodney spelled his name Larson. Well, according to Sandy, when one of his ancestors got off the boat and gave his name, the people writing everyone's names down spelled it as Larson instead of Larsen. They told him he could change the spelling if he paid a dollar though.

Since money was hard to come by, he decided to leave it as Larson and the Larson name has been spelled the same ever since. And that's how the Larsons, not the Larsens, came to settle in Butte County, Dakota Territory, in the 1870s.

It was that sort of thrift and hard work that helped the Larsons build the country in Butte County.

Today, a life-sized sculpture of Rodney Larson at the High Plains Heritage Center in Spearfish, S.D., reflects the vision that he and his ancestors had in building their part of the West.

Also in Belle Fourche, I stopped to visit an old friend, Paul Hennessey, who is now living in an assisted living complex in Belle Fourche. Paul did his time in the Navy in World War II, went to college, and taught at country schools in Wyoming for years before embarking in his real passion, writing about the West. He wrote a number of books about colorful characters, one devoted to Tipperary, a bucking horse that was indomitable with practically every rider that challenged him.

Paul was in the middle of reading a Western when I saw him. I'm not sure if he remembered me or not. Paul didn't seem quite as robust as he was the last time I had seen him, probably 13 years before. Paul has made a name for himself among Western writers with his books on Tipperary and Tin Horn Hank. When I saw him that Saturday, he still had that mischievous Irish twinkle in his eye. "I have to get back to this and see if they catch the bad guys," he said.

So I left him to his Western.

The next morning I took the Highway 212 cut-across. If you're heading west, 212 is a huge time saver and it shows you a real nice part of the country.

Highway 212 heads northwest at the north end of Belle Fourche, cuts across a corner of Wyoming, then into Montana. Just across the Wyoming line I saw a pronghorn grazing peacefully beside an abandoned missile site and just into Montana line I saw the first magpie, both sure signs that I was in the West.

The magpie is a very curious bird. Strikingly black and white, magpies are scavengers like the much-larger eagle. The magpie has a long, black feather that it uses as a sort of rudder as it swoops down on its road kill de jour.

Just where 212 joins Interstate 90, you'll find the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, formerly known as the Custer Battlefield.

The name change reflects the change in our society's attitudes toward Native Americans over the past few generations.

I remember that when I was a boy Custer was considered an unabashed hero. In fact, in one of my first childhood books, Roy Rogers' Western Stories, the story said the Indians had not touched a hair on the head of General George Armstrong Custer because they feared and respected him.

Well, that just wasn't true.

In his presentation, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument Supervisor Marvin Dawes described the days before the battle as well as the June 25, 1876, battle itself and its aftermath.

Custer was part of a larger command with the mission of bringing the Indians back to the agency.

"This battle was quick, fast," Dawes said. "In a matter of minutes, it was over."

In the battle, the 7th Cavalry lost the five companies (C, E, F, I, and L) under Custer, or about 225 men. Between the other companies of the regiment, under Reno and Benteen, 53 men were killed and 52 wounded.

The first burial detail to come to the battlefield buried the soldiers where they fell with Custer's, the deepest grave, only about a foot deep.

Two years after the battle, 190 enlisted men were buried in one spot now marked by a monument. The officers were buried in various placed throughout the country, with Custer finding his final resting place at West Point.

"This battle here, we don't know what happened," said Dawes, whose ancestral people are the Crow, allies to the military during the campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne.

Despite their assistance as army scouts, the Crow really fared no better than the Sioux or Cheyenne. Once spread across 33 million acres of ancestral lands, they're now limited to a total area of 2 million acres.

The final resting place for the officers under Custer's command seems fitting for the tragedy that happened there 133 years ago. The lonely, rolling hills seem to cry with sadness with what happened, a sadness of not only the massacre but also of the many years of embittered relations that followed between natives and whites.

In conciliation, another monument stands just on the north side of the monument to Custer's men. It tells the story of the various Indian tribes that took part in the battle as well as those tribes such as the Crow who were allies to the army.

It tells another side of the story, the story of a people who were subjugated and whose lands were taken. But a people who have lived on the same lands for hundreds, even thousands, of years, still seem a part of them. As M. Scott Momady, whose traditional people were the Kiowa, said it, the land lies like a blood memory.

As Crazy Horse said, "My lands are where my dead lie buried."