Camping on the Cheyenne River

I'm not much for camping. I truly enjoy the outdoors, but I trulier enjoy a real bed and shower, a real toilet, and not saturating all my clothes with wood smoke. Truly!
But when I was a kid in high school, none of that mattered. We didn't even think of camping as "camping". To us, camping was just an exciting night or two away from home.
Most frequently, we camped in the Black Hills. The "Poet's Cabin" near Hill City was my favorite. The poet's cabin was actually the remains of three buildings - main cabin, servants quarters, and garage. The servants quarters had been built in such a way that 4 large pine trees stood in the corners and it had a huge natural stone fireplace. The fireplace was all that remained by the time we came along. The main cabin was still standing when we were there (it has since been demolished to stop local kids from having keggers). I remember laying on the roof of the main cabin one night watching the northern lights dance across the sky. Every once-in-a-while, a shower of tiny sparks floated from the chimney when someone stoked the fire below. I remember it like it was yesterday, not 45 years ago.
Another favorite spot to go jeeping and camping was the Cheyenne River, about 50 miles east of Rapid City. Ecologically, the Cheyenne River area was, and is, totally different from the Black Hills. The river ran through sun-baked prairie. The water was cool and the mud was hot. Somewhere near the spot where we used to camp, a tributary entered from the east. The bottom of that tributary felt like a cobblestone street. The cobblestones were concretions- each holding a fossilized treasure rolled up in an ancient ball of mud.
The river was only 2-3 feet deep so the jeeps could ford it fairly easily in spots to go exploring, but most if the time we stayed and played in the river. I used to search for a shallow pool that was isolated from the main flow. Even thought the river water remained pretty chilly, by mid-afternoon, the water and mud in those little pools would be in the 90's. I liked to get chilled in the river, then run over and lay down in that hot mud bath. Ahhh. I never paid for a spa experience that was as therapeutic and relaxing as those little mud puddles.
One night we camped on an island in the middle of the river. One of my friends, J. Farrar, decided to hit the sack earlier than the rest of us, so he walked down to the far end of the island to sleep. Eventually the rest of us dozed off around the camp fire. At about 3:30 in the morning, we awoke to find a small herd of cattle passing through our camp site on their way across the river. They didn't step on us and we didn't stampede them, so the meeting concluded without incident. After they passed, we went back to sleep. The next morning we got up, got the fire going again, and sat around musing about our middle-of-the-night "visitors". Only then did someone ask, where's Farrar? Oh no! Our immediate group-thought was the worst - he had been trampled to death in his sleep! We ran to the other end of the island looking frantically for the grisly remains of poor Farrar. Before long, somebody found him and signaled for the rest of us to come over. As we got closer, we could see that he was alright. In fact he was still sound asleep! He was laying on his back, mouth open, snoring peacefully, with a fresh cow pie the size of a pizza pan about 6 inches from his head! How does that commercial go? "WW-2 surplus Jeep, $250; gas, 32 cents a gallon; seeing Farrar sound asleep in the sand with a cow pie next to his head, priceless!"