Man I wish we had eaten before. The museum was absolutely fascinating, but our stomachs and blood sugars were yelling at us to cut it short. There's a tram that you can ride to the top of the Arch which Lauren had wanted to take, but the line to get tickets was as insanely long as the line for the tram itself. Instead, we opted to spend about an hour reading a timeline history of the American settlement. One thing that I found interesting was the way the museum phrased their little historical snippets. Somebody who had turned their brain off for a minute wouldn't realize just how badly we screwed over the Indians as we claimed more and more land for ourselves. For instance, one blurb would say that in such and such a year, "Seminole Indians ceded Florida to America." We all know that the rest of that sentence should probably read, "....under the threat of extermination." Elsewhere it would say, "Cherokee Indians are given a patch of land west of the Mississippi." The museum left out the part that explains how that patch of land was probably a swath of barren desert. One thing I would have liked the museum to include was an exhibit explaining the dark side of the Westward Expansion. I know it was good and important for this country, but at least acknowledge and pay respect to the people who caught the raw end of it all.
