fletcher’s blog

Thunder Mountain

On our first day we stopped at a Native American art site just south of Winnemucca, in a town called Imlay. The site is called Thunder Mountain, and some of the work was reminiscent of the famous outsider art installation, called the Garden of Eden, created by S.P. Dinsmoor. I have visited this site in Lucas, KS, a couple of times over the years.

This one had been severely vandalized and the Thunder family has had to put it behind fences to renovate it, but we were able to see most of the buildlings and statuary pretty well. It was built by a man who called himself Chief Rolling Thunder Mountain. Though his original name was Frank Dean Van Zant, which is a Dutch surname, he considered himself a full blooded member of the Creek Nation.