Look out for the guy carrying the cross.” My son Alexander, 16 and newly licensed, slowed and gripped the wheel nervously. Until now, he’d been enjoying doing 80 on the straight, featureless highways of South Dakota. The roadside pilgrim, dressed in fluorescent shorts and wheeling a large crucifix along the hard shoulder, was the first human being we’d seen in almost 50 miles.

“Where does he think he’s going?” I asked.

“To heaven, probably,” Alexander answered.

So were we, if rumour was to be believed. Our destination, the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming, is considered one of America’s more beautiful locations.

The bizarre sight of the pilgrim proved an oddly appropriate introduction to the region, which was invaded in the 19th century by cross-carrying Europeans who had very different ideas about the land from those of the native Indians they conquered. As we were about to discover, these two cultures — represented by the towering figures of George Armstrong Custer and Crazy Horse — are currently battling throughout the region to tell their respective histories.

We caught our first glimpse of that conflict at the Badlands National Park, in southwestern South Dakota. Near its entrance, we passed that ultimate symbol of the conquering white man — the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, where adventurous souls can now take an elevator deep into the earth to tour a disused nuclear launch silo.

A few miles later we arrived at the Badlands themselves, surely one of the nation’s eeriest locations and a hint of what the world might look like should nuclear missiles ever be used. Here, the gently undulating prairie of the Dakotas was suddenly interrupted by a landscape of dramatically eroded, multicoloured buttes.

The hour-long drive is like moving through some vast geological cake, an effect intensified when we got out to hike over the brittle, crumbling rock. It’s easy to see why the Lakota Sioux consider this land sacred — and also why their white conquerors thought it would be a good place to hide weapons of mass destruction.

From the Badlands we moved west into the misty, densely wooded Black Hills, which were also considered sacred by the Lakota. Unfortunately for them, its rich mineral deposits were coveted by white men, especially after traces of gold led to the Deadwood Gulch rush of 1876.

Evidence of man’s thirst for a quick dollar was still apparent on the approach to the region’s most famous spot, Mount Rushmore, as we passed petting zoos, water slides, chainsaw-sculpture dealers and the National Presidential Wax Museum. Further complicating Alexander’s driving were thousands of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts who had descended upon the nearby town of Sturgis for a week-long celebration of beer guts and midlife crises.

Their insignia suggested that many were military veterans, a reminder that this land had been subjugated by the US Cavalry. Further evidence of that domination came when we arrived at Rushmore, the ultimate in-your-face symbol of the Great White Father.

Although it’s one of the planet’s most recognisable sights, it was still startling to encounter it in person. The monument’s four presidential faces, carved over a 14-year period by an obsessive artist named Gutzon Borglum, proved surprisingly distinct, even luminous. It is the sort of outrageously naive creation one would expect from the nation that brought the world Hollywood, jazz and Michael Jackson. It also must stick like a broken arrow in the souls of the Indians who see the Black Hills as sacred.

We found an attempt to remedy this insult 10 miles to the southwest at another massive rock monument, the still-unfinished Crazy Horse Memorial. Its overall effect proved oddly dispiriting. Initiated at the request of local Indians in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski, the Boston-born son of Polish immigrants, the 600ft-high sculpture shows little sign of being completed any time soon. (The sculptor died in 1982; his wife and children have taken over the project.)

Only Crazy Horse’s face is finished, though we sort of wished it wasn’t. It could just as easily be John Prescott as the great Sioux shaman. In fact, the entire proposed sculpture seems grossly amateurish — the model outside the visitor centre looks like something one might have found on the bonnet of a 1950s Buick.

Even more distressing is the sense that the monument is as much about Korczak (as he is cultishly called) as Crazy Horse. Not only is the sculptor’s image everywhere, but there is also a peculiarly white American ethos behind the notion that the best way to commemorate sacred Indian land is by dynamiting the hell out of it.

Perhaps most disturbing is Korczak’s widow’s refusal to accept any government funding for the project in honour of her husband’s strident belief in free enterprise — especially given how free enterprise worked out for Crazy Horse’s people, who saw their land stolen, so many slaughtered and their culture destroyed to make room for enterprising miners, ranchers and fur traders.

A more sombre and appropriate monument to Native America can be found 120 miles to the southeast at Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, site of two seminal events in the sorry history between Indians and whites. In 1890, the US Cavalry massacred 300 Indians here; and in the 1970s it was the scene of sporadic violence that left two federal agents and three members of the radical American Indian Movement dead.

From there, we moved on to the town of Deadwood, nestled in a particularly striking valley surrounded by fog-laced hills that, on the overcast morning we arrived, truly were black. Legend (and HBO) has it that this was a place of frontier justice, larger-than-life characters, gunfights and gambling. Now, only the gambling remains, though mostly in the form of digital slot machines appended to chain hotels.

Visitors would be better staying in one of the nearby campgrounds. We left almost immediately and pressed on into Wyoming, where we soon encountered another jaw-dropping eruption of ancient geology — the Devil’s Tower (made famous in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

Guarded by prairie dogs, the naked rock column rises 1,267ft and, like the Badlands, seems like the earth’s mutiny against the numbing sameness of the surrounding prairie. We hiked to its base to watch Matthew McConaughey lookalikes scale its rockface, while I experienced fatherly alarm at my son’s urge to join them.

As I stared up at the striations of rare phonolite porphyry stretching into the vast Wyoming sky, I also felt deep relief that no Borglum or Korczak had been allowed to blast the tower into human form.

And then it was into Montana and our final destination, Little Bighorn, scene of the destruction of Custer’s vaunted 7th Cavalry by a coalition of Indians under Sitting Bull. We decided to abandon the interstate for two-lane Route 212, which took us through the dauntingly barren desert of southeastern Montana.

In Broadus, a down-at-heel tumbleweed junction, we discovered the Judge’s Chambers, a fine restaurant that could hold its own in most big cities. As we lunched on pork medallions and pasta diavola, three ranchers at the next table sipped chardonnay, and I contemplated how suddenly this apparently featureless land could surprise the visitor.

To get to Little Bighorn, we had to travel through the Crow Indian Reservation, a dreary spread of mobile homes and rusting cars whose numbing poverty reminded us that the 1876 triumph was a pyrrhic victory for the Indians. The park itself, however, is well maintained and lucidly laid out to allow visitors to follow the chaotic, bloody battle.

As at Wounded Knee, we had the sense that the story of the region’s native inhabitants is being honestly told: in 1991 the site’s name was changed from Custer Battlefield to Little Bighorn National Monument, while an Indian Memorial has been dedicated and red-granite markers commemorating the native dead have been placed alongside the white headstones that have long stood for white soldiers.

As my son and I soberly retraced the frantic steps of the dead amid the eerily quiet grassland, we were once again reminded that there is more than one history in the West, no matter what the men with the dynamite would have you believe.

Stephen Amidon stayed as a guest of Newton Fork Ranch, Billings Hotel and Convention Center, and the Resort at Paws Up

Getting there: there are no direct flights from the UK to Rapid City — the best gateway for the Little Bighorn — but Delta (0845 600 0950, delta.com ) has good connections from Heathrow and Manchester via New York, and Continental (0845 026 4800, continental.com ) has good connections from Heathrow and Gatwick, plus six regional airports. Expect to pay from £390.

Getting around: Dollar (dollar.com ) has a week’s inclusive rental from £130. Or try Alamo (alamo.com) or Hertz (hertz.co.uk).

Where to stay: in the Black Hills, Newton Fork Ranch (00 1-605 574 2220, newtonforkranch.com ; two-bedroom cabins from £91), at Hill City, offers quiet cabins not far from Mount Rushmore. Billings Hotel and Convention Center (800 537 7286, billingshotel.net; doubles from £66) is best for Little Bighorn. The upscale Resort at Paws Up (406 244 5200, pawsup.com/resort ; “glamour tents” from £278 per night, two-bedroom cabins from £326), outside Missoula, Montana, offers guided hunting, fishing, horse riding and whitewater rafting.