Posted on by — 1 Comment

Roaming the Tall Grass

  • First pasque flower bloom pushing through the grass in Deuel County.
  • Inside a pasque flower.
  • Wilson’s snipe near Jacobson Fen.
  • Pasque flower in Deuel County.
  • Pasque flower in Deuel County.
  • Prairie smoke near Jacobsen Fen.
  • Small white lady’s-slipper orchid that seemed to be half nibbled off at Jacobsen Fen.
  • A small blue butterfly at Aurora Prairie Preserve near Brookings.
  • Sandhill crane with two chicks in the prairie hills of Grant County.
  • Regal fritillary on a blazing star at Aurora Prairie Preserve.
  • Blue-eyed grass near Jacobson Fen.
  • Wood lily in the Coteau Hills of Deuel County.
  • Green orchid at Jacobsen Fen.
  • Wild strawberry at 7-Mile Fen in rural Deuel County.
  • Great Plains ladies’-tresses orchid photographed at the Sioux Prairie Preserve.
  • Fawn in tall grass along with black-eyed Susan in bloom.
  • Bumblebee working for a blue lobelia’s nectar.
  • Just over the state line in Blue Mound State Park, the very rare western prairie fringed orchid blooms in July.
  • Touch the Sky Prairie near Blue Mound State Park is another tall grass haven.
  • Bottle gentian at sunset photographed in the Sioux Prairie Preserve.
  • Monarch on blazing star near Aurora Prairie Preserve.
  • Hard to find late season blooming downy gentian at the Sioux Prairie Preserve.
  • Late season little bluestem backlit by the setting sun.
  • A tall grass sunset silhouette taken at Makoce Washte Prairie Preserve near Wall Lake.

By Christian Begeman

The May/June 2026 issue of South Dakota Magazine features a story on the few tall grass prairie remnants remaining east of the Missouri River. When I was asked to help illustrate the story, I was surprised by how many photos I have taken in and around these places.

I grew up in short and mixed grass country along the Dewey and Ziebach county line west of the Missouri. Only in wet areas or in wet years did the grass get so high that you couldn’t see where your boot fell, which is an important thing in rattlesnake country. When I first began exploring the tall grass preserves with camera in hand, it was unnerving to not be able to see the ground below … and whatever sinister critters may be lurking. Turns out plenty of creatures call the tall grass home. My favorite are the colorful and elusive butterflies. From monarchs to tiny eastern-tailed blues, I have been known to spend hours on the trail seeking that perfect close-up shot.

I also discovered the beauty of the grass itself when peering through my macro lens at blooming sideoats grama florets at the Sioux Prairie Preserve near Colman. Big bluestem, cordgrass and many other tall grass regulars all flower during the summer and photographing them can be nearly impossible due to the wind that we regularly endure on the Northern Plains. To be honest though, a good breeze is welcome in that it keeps the gnats and mosquitos mostly at bay. Yep, it’s not all butterflies and flowers in tall grass country. Myriads of insects live there and a good breeze plus insect repellent is a must when exploring.

After gathering photos for the article, I was asked to gather again for a flyer promoting the new prairie grass area at Good Earth State Park. As I waded back into the archives, I noticed the crescendo of forays into tall grass preserves started slowly about 10 years ago and reached full throat when I was challenged to find and photograph the elusive green orchid. Until that point, I thought wild orchids only grew in exotic tropic locales. Thankfully, I was wrong. South Dakota is home to over 20 orchid species depending on who’s counting. The tall grass preserves are a haven for these beauties and their allies, all of which are a paradise for a camera guy with a macro lens.

Earlier this month, I was out finding the season’s first pasque flowers in the Coteau Hills overlooking Jacobson Fen in Deuel County. As I got up close to frame a few fuzzy portraits of our state flower, I got the idea to share these new photos along with a few other tall grass favorites I had gathered but did not make the final printed story. I hope they convey the sense of wonder and enjoyment I get while out roaming the tall grass remnants.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Aberdeen’s Graveyard Girl

By Bernie Hunhoff

Tasha Tietz, like all nurses, has a caring soul. She believes people should be remembered even after they’re gone.

Walk through a cemetery with Tasha Westby Tietz and you soon learn that tombstones represent life.

The same happens when you visit Tietz’s Facebook page. Watch her YouTube channel. Catch one of her talks or peruse her research on websites like Find a Grave and Ancestry.com. Tietz considers herself”a loner,” but the vivacious Aberdeen nurse is quickly becoming recognized as an authority on cemeteries. She even has an online persona,”Graveyard Girl,” though she shares the moniker with a rap musician and a fashion and beauty YouTuber — interesting company for the introverted daughter of an Aberdeen bricklayer and a beautician.

“I couldn’t even speak at my own wedding,” she laughs,”but I just spoke at the genealogy society and at the Aberdeen library. I can’t believe all that is happening.”

Tietz’s interest in the deceased began when she was working as a nurse’s aide at Mother Joseph Manor, an Aberdeen nursing home. She soon grew to love the Presentation sisters, and she worried that they might be forgotten when they die because they don’t have children and spouses. Even to this day, one of her favorite cemetery walks is a section of Sacred Heart Cemetery in Aberdeen devoted to deceased Presentations.

But it wasn’t long before she took an interest in more grave sites: those of other patients at the nursing home, her own ancestors and eventually perfect strangers.

“There is a quote that says a person is truly forgotten when their name is spoken for the last time,” she says.”That makes me believe that every person should be remembered and one way to do that is to be sure they have a tombstone.”

And in today’s online world, every tombstone should be searchable. Seven years ago, she began to enter tombstone photos on Find a Grave; today she is among its busiest contributors. She has posted more than 2,400 memorials and obituaries and 5,000 photos.

Aberdeen’s four cemeteries are her favorite places. She has documented many of their markers on Find a Grave.

Her paternal ancestors are buried at Claire City and Sisseton, so she has also visited them for years.”I try to take a bouquet to all my direct grandparents on Memorial Day,” she says.”I like to go to Claire City in September and visit the graves at Sica Hollow.”

In 2021, she found three tombstones of the Roy family, some of the first white settlers, among the autumn foliage of Sica Hollow. Most of her explorations have been in northeast South Dakota, but she has also roamed cemeteries as far away as Washington, D.C., Canada, Arizona and Texas.

She includes”graving trips” on family vacations when her husband, John, and their three daughters — Chloe, Claire and Charlotte — are willing.”The girls are not super-impressed yet,” she says.”John is also not a fan, but he’ll take me. We went to the Black Hills last summer and we explored Mountain View Cemetery at Keystone. I picked it because some of the Mount Rushmore carvers are buried there, and the actor Bobby Buntrock died and was buried there. There is also a Native leader, a medicine man, an artist and some kind of a wild Old West guy. It’s the only cemetery with a view of Mount Rushmore.”

She recently visited the De Smet cemetery where Charles and Caroline Ingalls are buried, along with their daughters Mary, Grace and Carrie.

Her social media posts also include information she gathers from other sources, including a recent bit about the Jewish custom of placing stones rather than flowers on tombstones. She also spotlighted a report of an Iowa cemetery that features three pyramids, built by the local newspaper editor who planned to be buried in one of them.

Graveyard Girl’s Facebook page now has more than 6,000 followers. Her sites have grown so much that they earn her small amounts of money, some of which she has used to help pay for gravestones on unmarked graves. If the revenues continue to grow, she plans to also invest in camera equipment and research materials for the ever-growing avocation.

She finds genealogy research the most rewarding aspect of being Graveyard Girl. People from across the nation have sent her notes of appreciation for her assistance in finding the graves of their ancestors.

Still, her favorite part of being Graveyard Girl is the time spent in cemeteries.”I like to be out in nature, and I am pretty much a loner. I think I’m also an old soul. I’m happiest when I’m with my family, outdoors in a beautiful cemetery.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Scoping the Missouri

By Cora Van Olson

Members of the South Dakota Ornithologists Union look for birds at Union Grove State Park between Beresford and Elk Point.

Roger Dietrich was scoping along the shore of Lake Yankton when a Rapid City woman approached him with a question about the tiny Ross’s gull, which had been sighted in the area.

“I’ve gone to Alaska twice and I didn’t see the bird there,” she said.”Is it still around?”

Dietrich pointed to a gull, sitting on ice in the middle of the lake.

The Missouri River is a bird-watching paradise. Hundreds of species of ducks, geese, gulls, loons and other birds congregate in parks, woodlands and farm fields that border its 443-mile corridor. But it still helps to know for what you’re looking.

Every habitat attracts different birds, says David Swanson, professor of biology at the University of South Dakota and author of Birder’s Guide to South Dakota, and habitats vary dramatically along the Missouri as it winds from Nebraska to North Dakota.

Following is a guide, from south to north, of habitat patches and the surprises that await birdwatchers, both the serious birders looking for the rarest”lifer” bird and those who are happy spotting sparrows and swallows.

The Adams Nature Preserve attracts wading birds such as blue herons.

Adams Nature Preserve

Southeastern South Dakota

The Adams Homestead and Nature Preserve near North Sioux City includes many trails.”It has a variety of habitats,” Swanson says.”It has an extensive cottonwood forest that borders the river, and there’s also a little lake called Mud Lake that’s attractive to waterfowl. The ring of trees surrounding Mud Lake can be good for woodland birds, too.”

Mud Lake is approximately a quarter mile from the Adams Homestead parking lot, so a brief hike is required to access it. Wooden observation blinds lie along the trail with a view of the lake.

“The other habitat at the park is a restored open prairie,” he says.”It’s one of the few sites in the southeastern part of the state where you can find Eastern meadowlarks. The common meadowlark in South Dakota is the Western meadowlark, but the Eastern meadowlark is expanding its range in the southeastern part of the state and Adams Homestead is one of the places where you can find those.”

Since first being sighted in 2017 by Swanson and his ornithology students, the Eastern meadowlark has made regular appearances in the open-prairie habitat, often with multiple birds singing among the scattered trees.

“I wasn’t aware at the time that Eastern meadowlarks had started to expand their range, and I heard these Eastern meadowlarks calling,” Swanson says.”I go, ‘That is very unusual.’ We kept walking and saw them and everybody in the ornithology class got to see me geek out over it.”

Though birdwatching at the Adams Homestead is enjoyable year-round, it’s best in spring, summer and fall.”Mostly, it’s hiking the trails during migration and seeing a variety of birds at that time,” Swanson says.”It’s lots of warblers and sparrows, so the migration periods are late April to mid-May. Then in the fall, from mid-to-late August into about mid-September is probably the peak for warblers and vireos, some of which migrate all the way down to Central and South America.”

Sparrows that migrate to the southern U.S. and Mexico slightly later in the year can typically be seen at the Adams Homestead from mid-September to mid-October. Along the river and at the lake, birdwatchers encounter ducks and geese, as well as wading birds like herons and egrets.

“In the cottonwood forest, there are Eastern whippoorwills,” Swanson says.”Those are birds that don’t really get too much out of the southeastern part of the state. Of course, they’re nocturnal, so they don’t start calling until it starts to get dark.”

Least terns can be found on sandbars below Gavins Point Dam.

Gavins Point Dam

West of Yankton

Gavins Point Dam, the southernmost project on the Missouri’s system of six dams, is surrounded by unique bird habitats.

During the summer, hundreds of American white pelicans can sometimes be seen near the dam, while on the river itself, there are piping plovers, still considered a threatened species in most of the U.S., and the least tern, North America’s tiniest tern, often seen flying low over the river and hovering before plunging for prey.

“One of the reasons I like birding is the idea that it would be so cool to fly, and least terns are just the best flyers,” says Roger Dietrich, a local authority on ornithology.”They’ll fly and they’ll see a minnow, and then they dive straight down in the water — and splash!”

In winter, the 2-mile-long earthen dam creates an unusual condition for birds and birders.”Some years, when it doesn’t freeze, like lately, there’s been lots of open water above the dam,” Dietrich says.”Some years, we get lucky and even the Lewis and Clark Marina doesn’t freeze over real early. So, that’s a popular spot where some grebes and loons will stop.”

Black scoters, surf scoters, white-winged scoters and long-tail ducks, which are mainly ocean birds, are known to visit the lake and river in winter.

“I tell people from other places that we have those birds here and they’re just not believing it, because they don’t think of the center of the United States as a place where these birds would show up,” Dietrich says.”And when I say they show up every year, usually, for a fairly long period of time, they just can’t believe that we’re so lucky.”

The common loon migrates through the area, as well as a number of gulls — including Sabine’s gulls, kittiwakes, black-legged kittiwakes and even the Ross’s gull, which is associated with the remote arctic. Crest Road, which passes over the dam, is a good place to observe such birds. It requires no special pass or permit.

“Scan for the birds with binoculars or a spotting scope and chances are, you’ll find something different,” Dietrich says.”Sometimes there are huge flocks, and you can spend hours just scoping the birds there,” he says.”So, if you see somebody there with their scope out or binoculars, stop and ask them what they’re seeing. I’d say 99 percent of the people will be glad to point things out to you, and maybe even let you look through their scope to see what they’re seeing.”

Several snowy owls hung out along the dam road a few years ago.”They were feeding on the flocks of coots that were there.” Wintertime also brings large flocks of lesser scaup, which birdwatchers will scan for specimens of greater scaup, a polar bird that tends to prefer saltwater and is rarely seen inland, Dietrich says.

“It’s the same with the big flocks of common goldeneye,” he says.”People try to scope out the Barrow’s goldeneye, which is another species. It’s more of a West Coast bird, but once in a while, we’ll get one here — always a highlight.”

Bald eagles frequent Gavins Point Dam and some now nest year-round in the tall cottonwoods that border the Missouri.”They’re used to a lot of people around and some of the trees they perch in are right along the local roads,” Dietrich says.”You can see them in action, swooping down and picking up fish. I’ve seen eight or nine at a time on the ice up above the dam, eating the dead snow geese they’ve picked off.”

A pair of Barrow’s Goldeneyes at Fort Randall.

Fort Randall

Pickstown

Fort Randall Dam also hosts a large congregation of bald eagles. Below the dam is the Karl E. Mundt National Wildlife Refuge, which provides habitat for the eagles.

Kelly Preheim, a kindergarten teacher in Armour and a well-known local birding enthusiast, especially likes the wooded area around the Fort Randall Dam.”We’re mostly on agricultural grassland in southeastern South Dakota,” she says.”But the dams have a lot of woodland, forested areas, and I enjoy walking on the trails.”

She found 71 bird species on a recent camping trip to Pickstown.”In the morning, oh my goodness, the singing,” she recalls.”My husband’s like, ‘I can’t get any sleep. It’s so loud here!'”

A hike to the tailrace, the channel below the dam that carries water away, will often be rewarded.”Fish that go through the dam come out somewhat stunned in the tailrace,” Preheim says.”Then, all these birds, like gulls and eagles and certain ducks, eat those fish.”

Like nearby Gavins Point, Fort Randall Dam is also home to many types of waterfowl in autumn and winter.”There are a lot of different ducks on the scene, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of different ducks there at a time,” Preheim says.”I saw a brown pelican one time. That’s actually an ocean bird.”

Other surprise visitors at Fort Randall include a yellow-billed loon, typically associated with Alaska and America’s western coast, and a great black-backed gull, which is an Atlantic coastal bird, Preheim says.

Scarlet tanagers are often found in South Dakota but summer tanagers, a rare visitor, might also be seen around Fort Randall.

Pelicans near Big Bend.

Big Bend Dam

Fort Thompson

The best birdwatching at South Dakota’s northernmost dams — Big Bend and Oahe — occurs from April through May and from September to November, according to lifelong birdwatcher Ricky Olson, who lives at Fort Pierre.

Big Bend has fewer access roads and trail amenities than Oahe and the other dams, but it has its own charms. Ospreys nest below the dam and brown pelicans have been spotted.

“Once in a while, in the wintertime, you get a Brant goose at Big Bend,” a seacoast bird.”I run down to Big Bend at least every two weeks in the winter to see what’s there,” Olson says.

Big Bend also attracts smaller goose species, including snow geese and white-fronted geese, both of which are common to the area.”In the fall, it’s neater to go to Big Bend,” Olson says.”Also, the shad and minnow species will be in the shallows then, and you’ll get all kinds of cormorants and pelicans and hundreds of gulls in these frenzies where they’re all feeding, and the gulls are trying to steal from everybody.”

Canada geese along the Missouri River.

Oahe Dam

Central South Dakota

Ring-billed gulls, herring gulls and California gulls may be sighted at Oahe, as well as the arctic tern, a mega-find for birders.

A spectacle occurs during flooding when Oahe Dam’s hydraulic turbines are running.”It’s a feeding frenzy. You get thousands of gulls, maybe 20,000, below the tailrace in a half-mile stretch,” Olson says.”It’s like a snowstorm. Thousands of people come to watch the ‘gull snowfall.'”

Oahe also has cliff-dwellers.”In the sand layers in the cliffs, in the holes, there are barn owls nesting,” Olson says.”They dig their own holes, and often, they’re near where colonies of bank swallows have dug holes.”

In autumn, Sabine’s gull may be spotted.”It’s very pretty. It’s black and white with half a diamond on the wing,” Olson says.”We also get Bonapartes and Little gulls, which is a little gull, and we get some of the big ones. Once in a great while we get the great black-back, which is the biggest gull.”

Gulls breed on a few islands along Oahe, Olson says.”There are only a few places in South Dakota where that happens.”

Another rare visitor to Oahe, among the sea ducks like the scoters and the long tail duck, is the occasional coastal harlequin duck in the tailrace.

“We get loons,” Olson says.”Sometimes we get the Pacific or the yellow-billed or red-throated loon, which are rare for our state.”

Further north on Oahe, retired biology teacher Stan Mack says opportunities are available even in Mobridge’s city limits.”There’s a walking trail along the south side of town. Just follow Main Street to the river and walk west and you’ll see the ducks and geese and gulls that sit on the water.”

Mack says Indian Creek (east of Mobridge) and Indian Memorial (across the river to the west) offer trails and habitat.

Mack doesn’t walk well enough to explore like he once did, but the birds will come to him.”I’m doing a feeder watch for Cornell University. Right now, I’m looking at a collared dove — we never saw them before — and I see about 16 more picking up seeds on the ground.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Winyan

By Chuck Raasch

Elizabeth Winyan (standing) was long associated with the Riggs family, caring for young Thomas in Minnesota and later joining him at Oahe Mission.

On a spring day in 1830 a family, including a 3-year-old girl, was harvesting sweet syrup from maple trees along the banks of the Minnesota River near present-day Mankato. Suddenly and viciously, they were attacked by an unidentified rival tribe.

The girl’s father was one of several Dakota Sioux killed in that attack. The young girl’s mother realized she could not escape the deadly melee while running with two children, so she emptied a pot of boiling water and hid the girl underneath. She then picked up her son and ran to safety.

For two days and one night the little girl stayed silent under the kettle. Then, her mother crept back and retrieved her.

“Even in her old age,” wrote historian Thomas Hughes,”Winyan never forgot that terrible experience and how, when her mother lifted the kettle, the moonlight showed on the bloody faces of the outstretched dead, her father among them.”

Winyan, who would later be given the name Elizabeth while working with Dakota Territory missionary Stephen Return Riggs, spent the rest of her life serving others. In Dakota, Winyan means mother and protector. She lived the name. Winyan was a human bridge over the most difficult waters of Dakota Territory and early statehood, when the federal government sought to force rapid assimilation of Native people, in part by creating reservations. By the time she died six decades later, Winyan was a legend among Native people, white missionaries and settlers on the Dakota frontier of the 1870s and 1880s.

Oahe Mission Chapel, next to the Riggs family home, was built in 1877. When Lake Oahe flooded the site it was moved to the Oahe Dam Visitors Center, where it stands today.

She often traveled the preaching circuit with the Riggs missionaries, blending her mission work with knowledge and practices of her own Dakota people. The Sioux, with a rich oral history tradition, have tried to keep stories like Winyan’s alive, but in the written annals of Dakota Territory her works are sparsely mentioned.

“She was amazing in her time,” says Winyan’s great-great-great granddaughter, Lora Neilan, of Summit.”And it is sad that it got forgotten.” When Winyan died in 1890, the noted Dakota Territory missionary Mary Collins, a good friend, wrote,”She was one of the grandest women I ever knew.”

Even my introduction to Winyan was accidental, a result of research into an entirely different woman on the Dakota frontier. In 1989, I spent a year studying political migration during a journalism graduate fellowship at Stanford University. While there, I did considerable research on the American frontier, which included paging through countless editions of 19th century newspapers in the archives. One advertisement in an 1888 edition of Minnesota’s St. Paul Daily Globe caught my eye. In huge type, I read:”SHE LOVES A SAVAGE!” It was an advertisement for a dime museum appearance of Corabelle Fellows, a young white missionary, and her new husband, Sam Campbell, a mixed-race man of Dakota Sioux and white blood.

I suspected there was a good story behind this headline. I tucked away a copy of the ad and years later, decided to investigate. I have often been surprised by how few female and Native voices are used in the telling of the history of Dakota Territory. I thought Corabelle may have something to say. This hunch — and years of research — resulted in my book Life Painted Red: The True Story of Corabelle Fellows and How Her Life on the Dakota Frontier Became a National Scandal.

The book follows young Corabelle and Sam as they set out on the sideshow circuits and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to make ends meet after Corabelle’s family disowned her for marrying a man of mixed blood.

During my research I also discovered Winyan, who had played a role in Corabelle’s early missionary work. In the winter of 1885-1886, she was in her third year of teaching and serving in missions in Nebraska and Dakota Territory. That winter, one of the coldest and harshest on the Plains, she lived and served with Winyan from a rough-hewn cabin at the Oahenoua village on the Cheyenne River, northwest of present-day Pierre. It was one of the most isolated posts on the frontier, serving people who had recently returned from exile in Canada with Sitting Bull. By then, Winyan had gained a reputation as one of the physically strongest women in the territory. She built the log cabin she lived in, hauled water uphill from the river and traveled long distances through harsh conditions to nurse the sick or dying.

Thomas Riggs.

Living with Winyan that winter, Corabelle, whose mother immediately disowned her after the marriage to Campbell, began calling Winyan”Ina,” or mother. Winyan had initially gained notoriety when, as a young woman during the bloody Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862, she secretly swam food to an island in the Minnesota River where Riggs and a small band of fellow missionaries and Sioux friends had hidden with their families. After her father died, Winyan had been taken under the tutelage of Riggs and his fellow missionary Thomas Smith Williamson. When the Dakota people in Minnesota were pushed west to reservations, the missionaries went with them, so Elizabeth gave up her life among the lush fauna of the Minnesota River valley to the harsher, starker and more expansive high plains of western South Dakota.

The granddaughter of the legendary Dakota leader Sleepy Eyes, she had grown up with a strong connection to the natural world. Winyan helped raise several generations of Riggs children, nursed the ill with herbs and practices passed on to her from her ancestors and sat with the dying when others were too afraid of evil spirits.

Tales of her physical strength spiced Sioux oral histories. Stories of her quiet mercies were also abundantly shared.”Winyan was a woman of strong character, fine mind and a natural leader,” the historian Hughes wrote.”Her great desire was that her people should hear the Gospel, so as the years went by, her work widened, and she was sent to various fields. She held meetings, discussed the Bible, visited the sick, buried the dead, and occasionally addressed conferences of white people. Even the Indian men held her in the highest esteem.”

Collins, the missionary, was struck by Winyan’s loyalty, her knowledge of her people’s past and her understanding of the natural world, particularly the constellations in expansive prairie night skies.”She is a faithful friend, true to her character as a Dakota,” Collins recalled.”She enjoys camp life with us, and evenings, as we sit by the campfire, she will tell stories of her early life, or fables, or legends of the stars. She is quite an astronomer. She reads the sky like an open book.”

Together, during that rough winter of 1885-86, the broad-shouldered Winyan teased Corabelle — barely 5 feet tall — about being able to keep up with physical work. Hauling water from the river to the cabin, Winyan would balance two large buckets on her shoulders, often while plowing through new fallen snow. Corabelle would follow with one pail, struggling, but rejoicing in Winyan’s eventual approval.”She always looked me over skeptically when we reached the house” after hard work outdoors, Corabelle recalled.”Invariably, when she found me unbroken, she would put her hands on her hips and laugh so hard that I was obliged to join her.”

Thomas Riggs established Oahe Industrial School in the 1870s as a training school for girls.

One night in the middle of that winter, Winyan fell asleep while Corabelle was teaching a group of young Sioux men. One of the men later returned to kidnap the bewildered Corabelle, catching her as she came outside to do a chore before bed. Winyan, awakened by a rush of ice-cold air from an open door, plowed through snowbanks to catch up with the young man, who had wrapped Corabelle in a blanket and was carrying her to his home.

“What bad thing is this!” Winyan shouted, shooing the man away.”Now you stop!” Her unwelcome suitor dropped Corabelle in the snow. Winyan wrapped her in a blanket and escorted her back to the cabin, where she consoled and soothed her with an herbal bath. Winyan scolded Corabelle for carelessly ignoring her warning to never go outside alone.

Corabelle and Winyan talked long into that night, marveling at how this white missionary and the Native missionary ended up together after growing up in such different worlds of culture, customs and religion.”How we talked,” Corabelle remembered.”Really talked, there in that crude cabin, shut away from the rest of the world. She asked and answered, and I asked and answered until that day, with its closeness of spiritual touch, became a highlight of my whole life.”

Missionaries and newspaper reporters alike simply called her Winyan. Eventually, she had a son, Edward Phelps, a minister, who along with his wife, Ellen, became missionaries and served rural South Dakota churches.

In her 50s, Winyan began speaking more frequently to donors and churches, traveling as far as Chicago. Neilan, Winyan’s descendant, has collected photos and articles that highlight her impact. Winyan’s life spanned the great events of the 19th century frontier: the government’s many treaties with the Sioux; the 1862 uprising in Minnesota, in which hundreds of white settlers and Native people were killed, and which ended with the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men; the many battles and massacres between U.S. Army forces and Native people on the Northern Plains in the mid- and late-19th century; the last stand of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry on the rolling Montana hills in 1876; and the rapid settlement and statehood of South Dakota in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Louisa Riggs considered Elizabeth Winyan (standing) a colleague. She is pictured with Mary Collins (second from right), another missionary.

“She was a legend,” Neilan says.”What I found out, in the time frame that she lived, with the racism she faced and everything that had happened, I am most proud of how she rose above that, of how she left her mark and how many other ones did as well.”

Even while helping Native people adapt to relocation to the reservations, she often quietly longed for her childhood life along the Minnesota River.”She missed it so much,” Neilan says. Once, when sitting with fellow missionary Collins, Winyan told of something she had just seen that”well represents our present condition as a race.

“A man named Longfeather, dressed in Indian dress paint and feathers, was teaching some boys the Indian dance and song,” Winyan told Collins. There were three boys: One with long hair and painted face and Indian dress, one with shirt and leggings and a white boy’s shoes and stockings on, the third dressed well in entirely white men’s clothes.”One represents the past, the second the present, and the third the future,” Winyan said.”I know it has to be, but to me the one dressed all in the Indian child’s clothing looked the best, but I’m only an Indian.”

Neilan finds inspiration in her ancestor even today. She says she and her daughters (Lauren, Bailee and Falon) have also begun to study native plants, and to learn about the constellations that illuminate our prairie nights.

“She was a beacon,” she says,”a beacon of power in her own self.”

Chuck Raasch is a native of Castlewood and a graduate of South Dakota State University. He has written for the Huron Daily Plainsman, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and USA Today. Raasch has also authored two books, Imperfect Union: A Father’s Search for His Son in the Aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, published in 2016, and Life Painted Red: The True Story of Corabelle Fellows and How Her Life On the Dakota Frontier Became a National Scandal in 2023.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Finding the Wilds of Winter

By Christian Begeman

Spotting winter wildlife on the Northern Plains can sometimes seem impossible. Frigid temperatures, relentless wind, snow and ice usually keep critters out of sight during the diminished daylight hours. When I was in junior high, I spent a good chunk of an afternoon sitting in what I thought was a pretty good hiding spot overlooking a stock dam bordered by a chokecherry thicket. A recently deceased cottontail was on the edge of the ice, placed as a lure. I think I hoped a hungry coyote or maybe even a hawk or eagle would arrive. Nothing did. All I heard was the wind though the thicket and all I saw was gray and sullen clouds overhead.

I’m not sure when I figured out that the golden hour was when wildlife is most on the move. Maybe it was deer hunting with my brother or simply noticing more things after I shut the tractor down for the day. This tip generally still holds true when I’m out looking for wildlife with my camera. Not only are there more opportunities to see wildlife, but the golden hour provides beautiful light. Win-win.

It has been my family’s custom to find time to survey the countryside when we get together for the winter holidays. To this day, I keep this tradition alive. Sometimes I’m with my dad, sometimes with brothers and nephews and sometimes it is just me and my camera. This year, I spent three days looking for wildlife in Badlands National Park, Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park between Christmas and New Year’s Day. And yes, late afternoon and early morning proved to be the most fruitful times.

I arrived in the Badlands around 3 p.m. on December 27. This may seem like mid-afternoon, but winter light is short-lived and angled low and lovely, which is a photographer’s delight. At 3:20 a great-horned owl was out on a ridge waking itself up in the sunlight. About a half hour later I spotted a golden eagle riding updrafts near the Sage Creek Wilderness Road. After photographing a few solitary bison bulls, I headed west and got to Custer State Park with very little light left on the western horizon.

Overnight, a skiff of snow fell in the Southern Hills and there was frost on the grass as I headed to a favorite spot along Highland Ridge Road in northern Wind Cave National Park before sunrise. There were elk below the ridge and bison on the horizon as the sun appeared with warm tones even though the temperatures were well below freezing. As the day lengthened the light brightened, the wind increased and the frost fell to the ground. After driving a few of my favorite routes, I ended up calling it day fairly early. I repeated this routine for the next few days, and it was glorious. Here are some of my favorite photos from that vacation. I’m already counting down the days for another foray or three into South Dakota’s winter wilds.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

From Ashes to Art

By Bernie Hunhoff

Randall Blaze lost his home and art studio to fire, but the Pine Ridge Reservation sculptor is rising from the ashes.

Pine Ridge artist Randall Blaze hurried home from a grocery trip to Rapid City on an April evening in 2020 because he was eager to watch a TV documentary on Ernest Hemingway. Blaze lit a candle and set it on the arm of an upholstered chair. The next thing he knew, the chair was a ball of fire and within minutes the entire house was burning.

Flames were surely visible for many miles around because Blaze’s property sits atop Cuny Table, a mesa on the southern edge of the Badlands. However, nobody was watching. Nobody came to his rescue. The nearest fire truck was an hour away in any direction, and within minutes the entire studio was afire.

In the morning, Blaze surveyed the smoldering rubble. Sculpture tools, brushes, bronze artworks, furniture and business records were all lost. Though the fire didn’t spread across the grassy prairie, it did blacken a cottonwood tree that provided shade to the west side of the house. It was the lone tree on his 100 acres.

Cuny Table was settled by the Cunys, who arrived from Wyoming in 1880. Several of the young men married Native women; 50 years later, more than 100 families called it home. Many were Charles Cuny’s descendants. They had a school, church, dance hall and a few stores.

However, most were forced to leave in 1942 when the U.S. Army appropriated 340,000 acres in the Badlands for a bombing range. Families were given two weeks to pack up and go. Many of the young men joined the military.

Cuny Table and the entire region continued to be a practice range for the U.S. Air Force until 1958, and then was used by the South Dakota Air National Guard until 1974 when tribal leaders began to negotiate with the government for a return of the confiscated property.

Though Blaze was born and raised in Montana, his mother was a Cuny.”It turned out that Mom owned 17-and-a-half acres of trust land,” he says.”She and her family were moved out for the bombing range, and nobody came back. Every time a relative died, the executor of the estate would urge us all to sell, but I always objected.”

Myriad art faces are embedded around Blaze’s land on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Blaze joined the Navy and served on a refrigerated cargo ship during the Vietnam War.”One of the nicest things that ever happened to me was the GI bill, which gave me a month of education for every month I served.” He studied art at the University of Montana and was fascinated to learn about a variety of materials from Rudy Autio, a renowned ceramics professor and artist whose work garnered international acclaim.

Early in his career, Blaze devoted his creative energies to making jewelry, but he grew disillusioned by his customers’ lack of appreciation for the art form.”All they saw was a product, and it became all about the money.” Like Autio, he began to experiment with various materials, including bronze, metal and ceramics.

He also began to explore his Lakota roots at Cuny Table and started to buy his relatives’ small holdings; over the course of several years, he acquired 100 acres. Inspired by the solitude and the natural environment, he dreamed of building a studio and home there in the early 1990s, though he didn’t have the resources. Then came a visitor.

“One day my friend Rich Red Owl stopped over and said, ‘I hear you need a studio.’ I told him that I wished I could build one, but I didn’t have the money,” Blaze said, recalling the conversation.

“Do you have $1,500?” Red Owl asked.

“I have about that much,” Blaze said.

“Then let’s get started,” said Red Owl.

Blaze got a lesson in Indian-genuity. Red Owl showed him how to salvage and scavenge for inexpensive building materials, and before long he was moving into a 3,000-square-foot home that became known as the Oglala Art Center.

His career began to grow. He won fellowships at the Smithsonian and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, and his bronzes were featured at exhibitions in Japan, Germany and Australia. He authored a book, Heartdreams and Legends, on the contributions of indigenous artists of the United States and Australia. Seven Council Fires, a nonprofit that exhibits Native arts and crafts, marketed his sculptures worldwide.

Though he traveled the world, Blaze found that he was happiest when creating art at his humble studio. He rented most of his land to neighboring farmers but maintained a buffer of wild grass between his home and the crops.”After seeing what Agent Orange did to some of my friends in Vietnam, I just wanted some space between me and the chemical sprays,” he explains.

When a neighbor’s cattle trampled his yard and damaged some tipis that he had created as mini studios, he started a fence of driftwood to keep out the cows. Soon he assimilated art into the fence. Often, his pieces show faces of figures, perhaps in a spiritual search. Maybe they represent relatives who were driven from Cuny Table generations ago, or ancestors who were killed at Wounded Knee, which is just 20 miles to the east.

Blaze has gained attention in his home state over the past 20 years as a popular participant in the state arts council’s Artists in the Schools program.”I love working with the kids,” he says.”I am always amazed at what they can do.” He often incorporates his trademark faces into his teaching, and sometimes he takes samples of the students’ works back to Cuny Table and finds a place for them in his fence and wild garden.

When the original studio burned in 2020, he wasn’t sure, at the age of 71, that he had the energy or resources to rebuild. His friend Red Owl is now too elderly to help. But other support has arrived. Someone gave him a camper trailer. He salvaged what he could from the old house and became a regular shopper at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in Rapid City.

Blaze built a driftwood fence around his Cuny Table home to keep cattle away from the studio. The fence has become part of the art.

“That place is wonderful. But I was paying whatever they asked for windows and doors until my grandson suggested to me that I could dicker with them,” he grinned.”Guess what I paid for this window? It had been there for months, and I told them it wasn’t selling very fast. I got it for $95.”

In 2023 he was awarded a $5,000 fellowship from the South Dakota Arts Council to help fund the next studio. His adult grandchildren came from Utah to help install windows and start a deck.

He recognizes that his style of architecture and the isolation of living on Cuny Table are acquired tastes. He was married and he’s had several lady friends,”but not a lot of women want to live out here where a toilet is a luxury.” Winters are long, even for the solitary artist; he spent the last few at St. Petersburg, Florida, because he hasn’t yet restored electrical service or plumbing.

“You can get stuck out here for six weeks or more in winter,” he says.”The wind blows all the time, and when it snows it can be incredibly beautiful, like waves on the ocean. St. Petersburg has art galleries and studios and people everywhere, but I get lonely there and by spring I’m happy to get back here.”

He likes being visited by badgers, coyotes, bobcats and deer. A sense of quiet permeates the outdoors; he can hear Canada geese approaching in the sky long before he can see them.

While winterizing the studio in preparation for his trip south, he saw that the cottonwood tree that burned in the 2020 fire had sprouted leaves on its bottom branches.”I thought that was dead after the fire,” he said.

The same might have been said about his studio. Though its reincarnation is primitive by Florida standards ó by just about any standards ó it fits nicely on Cuny Table.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

If Our Trees Could Talk

Story by John Andrews

Photos by Paul Schiller

A pair of oak trees known as the Twin Oaks are among the trees chronicled in Paul DeJong’s book on the Sioux Falls urban forest.

“Have you been here before?” asks Paul DeJong as we sit around a small conference table inside Touchmark at All Saints, a senior living community in one of Sioux Falls’ most historic buildings — the former All Saints School. The massive, four-story granite building in the heart of the city was finished in 1884 under the direction of William Hobart Hare, the first Episcopal bishop of South Dakota. The all-girls boarding school was designed to serve the daughters of missionaries who were serving the sparsely populated Dakota prairies.

But that’s not where this conversation is heading.”Some of the most majestic trees in the city are right outside,” DeJong says.”There’s a catalpa and a ginkgo tree on this property that were probably planted in the late 1800s or early 1900s.”

It stands to reason that the trees would be at least as old as the building itself, and of course DeJong would notice them. He worked at Landscape Garden Centers for more than 30 years, first as an employee and then its owner. He’s had a hand in selecting trees for nearly every neighborhood in Sioux Falls, an accomplishment made even more impressive considering the city’s rapid growth.

He seems to know every inch of soil beneath South Dakota’s sprawling metropolis. His quick and encyclopedic knowledge of trees allows him to tell you exactly why an American sycamore would thrive in one neighborhood but not another.

The book publishing team includes (from left) Jeremy Brown, Paul Schiller, Paul DeJong, Heather Kittelson and Mike Cooper.

The urban forest of Sioux Falls became his passion, and now, with help from friends, he’s finishing a book that he hopes will inspire future generations to appreciate the diversity of the city’s arbor culture. If Our Trees Could Talk: Discovering the Urban Forest of Sioux Falls is a 172-page coffee table book, completed in collaboration with the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, that traces the development of several historic Sioux Falls neighborhoods and the trees that give them life and character.

The idea for a book has been in the back of DeJong’s mind for at least 10 years, but it’s coming to fruition at perhaps the perfect moment. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at age 53. He retired from ownership at Landscape Garden Centers in 2018, though he continued to work part-time until 2022. Eventually, he sold his home and moved to Touchmark.

The urgency of such a diagnosis led to the creation of a team to help make the book a reality. Heather Kittelson is the self-described”connector” of the team. She met DeJong in March of 2023, while both served on the board of directors for the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, a 155-acre greenspace tucked next to the Big Sioux River just off Highway 42 on the east side of the city. As she learned about DeJong’s health challenges (which included a serious car accident and a bite from a brown recluse spider earlier in life), she was inspired by his drive to persevere.

DeJong was equally impressed by Kittelson’s energy and positive attitude. She subsequently invited him to be a guest on her podcast called”Fortitude,” in which she interviews people who have overcome adversity. DeJong’s is among the most listened-to episodes.

After the podcast, Kittelson asked DeJong if he had any dreams he would like to see fulfilled. The answer was a book about the trees of Sioux Falls.”It really was a dream,” she says.”He just needed someone to help execute it. I love being resourceful and a connector, and I wanted to see Paul’s dream come to fruition.”

The rest of the team quickly formed. They include Mike Cooper, the arboretum’s executive director and a retired city planner for Sioux Falls; Jeremy Brown, the head of Throne Publishing; and well-known regional photographer Paul Schiller. Cooper and DeJong drove many miles around Sioux Falls, identifying neighborhoods and trees, and Schiller captured them throughout the year.

McKennan Park in spring.

DeJong wants the book to be an educational tool and hopes it will direct more attention to the arboretum. It could also be the culmination of a life devoted to the outdoors.

DeJong grew up on a farm between Sheldon and Hospers, Iowa. He got an associate degree in business and marketing from Northwest Iowa Community College and then headed to Sioux Falls, looking for opportunity. He stopped by Lakeland Nursery and noticed they were hiring.”Having grown up on the farm, I had a general knowledge of trees,” DeJong says.”They were taking applications and I needed money fast, so they said I could start working there the next day. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and in a couple weeks’ time I had found my passion working with trees, landscaping and outdoor living areas. You’re enhancing everybody’s opportunity to spend more time outdoors with their families as opposed to sitting in the house.”

He threw himself into the work, getting to know our native and non-native species and talking with both residential and commercial customers about the trees they wanted and the trees they needed — which were not always the same thing. DeJong is a huge advocate for tree diversity, and that can be challenging in South Dakota.”We can beat up on ourselves for not diversifying, but we are a prairie state with a mix of prairie grasses, so we’re limited in what species thrive here,” he says.”Trees weren’t necessarily by God’s hand meant to grow in South Dakota.”

An American larch in McKennan Park.

When settlers first arrived in Dakota, they would have seen a nearly treeless landscape, other than the occasional willow, elm, ash, box elder and the cottonwoods growing in the river valleys.”Cottonwoods are so towering and large, and they’ll grow in wet, boggy areas,” DeJong says.”They could be several miles away and see these stands of cottonwood trees in the distance and know that there was likely water nearby.”

As railroads moved into Dakota, it became easier for those settlers from Europe or bigger eastern cities to order the trees they knew and loved. Maybe that’s how the catalpa and ginkgo trees ended up in DeJong’s new backyard.”Ginkgos are a very slow growing tree, but this one’s probably 80 feet tall,” he says.”They originated in China and are disease and pest resistant. They’re actually prehistoric trees. They’ve got fan-shaped leaves, very distinctive. The catalpa has a large plate sized leaf. It largely remains silent except one week in June when it gets a hydrangea-like flower. That’s its one week of glory for the year.”

One of DeJong’s favorite neighborhoods is McKennan Park, which is filled with historic homes and majestic trees. Among them is a big bur oak planted after World War I to honor the returning soldiers. It’s also home to the largest silver maple in the state and a stand of American larch.”When I was a kid, they quite often planted windbreaks with American larch,” DeJong says.”I didn’t realize what they were at the time. In the winter all the needles were gone, so I thought they were dead. But they come back in the spring and turn a brilliant golden color in the fall. Then in the winter they go dormant again. They’re mysterious or haunted looking trees.”

The American sycamore in McKennan Park is an example of being in the right place.”There are microclimates in Sioux Falls, like McKennan Park and the Cathedral District,” he says.”There’s good soil; it’s not only cold hardiness. You get on the edge of town where the winds are more abrasive, you’ve got about two inches of black dirt and the rest is excavation clay, and you’re more limited in what species you can use. I would never recommend an American sycamore anywhere other than the core area of the city.”

Other trees stand out for different reasons, such as a concolor fir in the Riverview Heights district north of the Veterans Administration hospital.”I would say it’s 100 feet tall. The first time I viewed that tree, a deer and a turkey came running out at the same time. I bet the bottom branches spread 40 to 50 feet across.”

A stately cottonwood at 57th and Minnesota.

A cottonwood tree near Covell Lake is notable because its lowest branch is probably 50 feet off the ground. Another at the corner of 57th Street and Minnesota Avenue has been growing for more than 100 years and towers over other neighborhood trees. Black locusts in the Cathedral District shine in spring, when they blossom with droopy, lilac-colored flowers.

A stand of hackberries along South Cliff Avenue accents a neighborhood that began as a place for the city’s more affluent citizens to build second homes. A blue beech in the Maplewood District is rare for South Dakota.”It has very smooth bark and looks like an elephant’s leg because it flares out at the bottom. The smooth bark prevents insect infestation. If a tree has rough bark, it’s easier for insects to burrow into it, but the blue beech evolved over time. Trees are constantly under evolution. They’re just like human beings; they have to adapt.”

Everyone involved sees the book as a starting point that can lead to continuing education in K-12 classrooms and at the arboretum. DeJong envisions an”urban forest university” that encourages young people to get outdoors and learn about the trees surrounding them — not just because they might be pleasant to look at but because of their benefits for the environment and our health.”I spent a fair amount of time recovering from surgical procedures at the Mayo Clinic. I remember going through the gardens once I was able to get outside. The trees seemed to soothe my physical pain. It is true that trees reduce stress and promote physical and mental healing.”

Working with DeJong on the book has been rewarding for Cooper and Kittelson.”We’re all so busy going through life that we tend to forget how beautiful our surroundings are,” Kittelson says.”Paul has helped me to stop and be present and take in what’s around me.”

May we all slow down and learn to appreciate both the forest and the trees.

Editor’s Note: DeJong’s book is available from the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum in Sioux Falls. This story is revised from the March/April 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Yankton to Marty Trail

By Bernie Hunhoff

South Dakota Magazine intern Ava Brandt met Digger at Mensch’s Greenhouse in Avon.

A golden dog named Digger met us at the door of Mensch’s Greenhouse, his tail wagging like a windshield wiper. Two cats lolled on a flower worktable and a dozen colorful cockatiels chirped from two cages near the petunias.

Any traveler will crack a smile at Mensch’s Greenhouse in Avon — and that’s fortunate because for the most part this Yankton-to-Marty loop can be a solitary journey, even though it visits seven small towns in South Dakota’s populated southeast corner.

We began the loop early in the morning because of a tip that the Tyndall Bakery has amazing donuts and pastries, and some days they sell out. We had two stops to make before the bakery.

The Lakeport Church in rural Yankton County dates to 1884.

Chalkstone Church

We drove 8 miles west of Yankton on Highway 50 to 431st Avenue, then turned right to the Bruce and Donna Schwarz farm. Drive slowly through the farmyard — the Schwarzes don’t mind — and you come to a small church built of the yellow chalkstone found along stretches of the nearby Missouri. Neighbors keep up the church and mow the cemetery, which features Czech surnames still common in the area. This is Czech country, settled by pioneers from Bohemia and Moravia who began to arrive in 1869. Their first settlement was Lakeport; only the little yellow church, constructed in 1884, has survived.

A wooden church is among the historic buildings preserved at the park in Tabor.

TABOR: CZECH CAPITAL

A few miles further along Highway 50 is the town of Tabor (pop. 405), founded in 1872. Tabor is famous for its annual Czech Days celebration in June. Parking is more plentiful on the other 362 days of the year, so stop on Main Street and stretch your legs by walking through the quaint pioneer village which includes a tiny wood church that was built at Lakeport even before the chalkstone church. Now it is well-kept in the Czech Preservation Society’s heritage park along with several other antiquated structures.

Magazine interns Rose Lane (left) and Ava Brandt at Tyndall’s Eiffel Tower, a fancy flagpole that measures 100 feet.

TYNDALL’S TOWER

One wonders if Gustave Eiffel, engineer and namesake of the tallest structure in Paris, would be flattered to see the imitation in Tyndall.

Tyndall’s”Eiffel” is more than 1,000 feet shorter than Gustave’s, but nearly as old. It was constructed in 1898, just nine years after the original was completed to honor the centennial of the French revolution.

The replica stands on the lawn of the county courthouse, west of downtown on 18th Avenue. But before you visit the tower, stop at the Radack family’s bakery. We dilly-dallied too long, and the cases were nearly empty, so we missed out on the Tyndall Roll, a Bismarck-like pastry filled with white cream and topped with crushed peanuts. No one knows when the legendary roll was created, but the bakery traces its history to 1905.

Carol and Vern Tolsma at their Avon greenhouse.

AVON’S GREENHOUSE

Feeling lonely in southeast South Dakota? Just visit Vern and Carol Tolsma’s Mensch Greenhouse and Flower Shop along Highway 50 in Avon.

Carol’s grandmother, Ada Mensch, started the greenhouse in 1957. Imagine how many flowers have bloomed, thanks to Ada, in 67 years. And how many people have enjoyed the garden bounty that took root here.

The flowers and plants come with free advice. Did you know you should only water tomato plants when absolutely necessary? Vern says a thirsty plant sends roots deep into the soil, making it strong and adding taste to the fruit.

Digger, the greenhouse dog, wags and nuzzles anyone who’ll take the time. Cats and cockatiels also share the space. The cockatiels are orphans who lost their owners and found refuge here.

The Tolsmas tend a 2-acre garden near the shop, and they sell produce, canned goods and amazing pickles. They occasionally set out a table of freebies that need a home.

Some days, Vern wears a blue t-shirt that says it all:”I Love Gardening From My Head to My Tomatoes.”

Richard Langdeaux helps keep Wagner’s park looking beautiful.

A WALK IN THE WAGNER PARK

Follow Highway 50 northwest. South Dakota’s Czech heritage extends into Charles Mix County and the city of Wagner (pop. 1,603), the largest town on this loop tour. Wagner has all the amenities you might want — a coffee shop, restaurants and a grocery store.

On the west side of town, near Highway 50, lies a little lake and park that would be the envy of any city in America. The lake was created when a dam and rock structures were built in the 1930s by WPA workers. Today the park includes two walking bridges, flower gardens, trails and even a small waterfall. This is the best opportunity of the day for a walk.

Richard Langdeaux, a Santa Claus look-alike who was collecting trash in the park, told us that the stone buildings along the lake were once a Scout camp. Artesian springs keep the lake full year-round.

Wagner also offers an impressive museum, operated by the Charles Mix County Historical Society. The collection is known for its Czech exhibits, as well as artifacts from the Yankton Sioux culture that predates the pioneers.

Michael Rouse helps maintain the ground around Marty’s St. Paul Catholic Church.

MARTY’S AMAZING CHURCH

Drive west of Wagner for 6 miles to 388th Avenue and turn south for another 6 miles to Marty. The one and only enterprise is a boarding school started by the Benedictines in 1924 and now operated by the Yankton Sioux Tribe.

Alongside the school is St. Paul Catholic Church, built by volunteers — Indians and non-Indians — in the early 1940s of Indiana sandstone, mined from a quarry near St. Meinrad Archabbey, which founded St. Paul’s.

The steepled church (167 feet!) is surrounded by tall trees and other structures, so it’s hard to appreciate from afar. Exit your car and walk about the churchyard, where there are statues of Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, and St. Theresa, patroness of missions. On most days, the church doors are open; inside, St. Paul’s looks like something you might see in a European city except that the murals, stained glass and other art are rich in Native American themes.

The tallest stone in Greenwood Presbyterian Cemetery marks the grave of Struck by the Ree.

STRUCK BY THE REE

Follow the road south of Marty for about 7 miles and a few curves. You’ll come to Greenwood Presbyterian Cemetery, where the tallest stone marks the grave of Struck By The Ree, a maligned and misunderstood leader of the Nakota. He was born in 1804, as Lewis and Clark came through the river valley. Legend says the explorers wrapped the baby in an American flag and proclaimed he’d be a great leader.

Struck By The Ree did grow to be a wise chief — an environmentalist, a feminist and a peacemaker. He urged pioneers to preserve the timber resources of the river valley. He pleaded that both Nakota and white men respect the Native women. And though he first fought the intrusion of the white civilization, he eventually recognized that it could not be stopped (ìthey are like maggots Ö”). He became a lead negotiator in the 1858 Treaty. Decades later, after the treaty was broken and his people found themselves hungry and hopeless, he was often persecuted; his cabin was burned, and his horses were stolen.

A tall memorial near Greenwood commemorates the 1858 Treaty.

Treaty Memorial

Continue south and you’ll soon come to another memorial, erected to honor Struck By The Ree and seven other Native American signers of the 1858 Treaty, which gave the government more than 11 million acres for $1.6 million and established a reservation for the Nakota.

The monument was constructed in 1907, topped with an obelisk. A few decades ago, vandals toppled the obelisk — a posthumous insult to Struck By The Ree, a century after his death in 1888. It has since been restored.

Springfield sits above a growing delta in the Missouri River.

A MISSOURI RIVER DELTA TOWN

Drive south from the treaty marker and you’ll come to the tiny community of Greenwood, once the hub of the Yankton Sioux Tribe. At Greenwood, if you are not in a hurry, turn right and follow the river for a mile or two for scenic views. Then return and continue east along the Missouri.

Eventually you’ll come to 312th Street, and then to Highway 37 which will lead you to Springfield, once South Dakota’s smallest college town. Thirty years ago, the University of South Dakota/Springfield was closed, despite furious opposition, and the campus was converted to a prison.

Townspeople feared that the prison would be the ruin of Springfield, but it has persevered. Norm’s, once a favorite hangout for collegians, still serves burgers and beer. A company known as Mr. Golf Car parks more than 200 golf carts along Main Street. A museum keeps the history of the college alive, and anglers come to fish the river.

Springfield still has a post office, bank and library — plus several eateries. On its eastern edge is a veteran’s memorial with a panoramic view of the river.

The highway sign lists the population at 834. That doesn’t count the 1,200 prisoners who live there.

Six unknown soldiers of Lt. Col. George Custer’s 7th Cavalry are buried in the Bon Homme Cemetery.

APPLE TREE ROAD

For a final treat on your loop, turn east onto Apple Tree Road (a mile north of Springfield).

A few miles down the road is a spot known as Apple Tree (though the state Game, Fish and Parks Department calls it Sand Creek). It consists of a campground and cabins, a boat dock and a little peninsula where you can walk out among the reeds and see where the invasive delta ends and Lewis and Clark Lake’s open water begins.

This was once a delightful place to enjoy the bellowing of giant bullfrogs. They were silent on our stop. Perhaps they dislike the phragmites, an invasive wetland plant that is taking over.

Continue east on Apple Tree Road and you’ll soon pass the tidy Bon Homme Cemetery where a large stone memorial marks the graves of six soldiers who traveled with Lt. Col. George Custer and his 7th Cavalry in 1873.

As Custer’s entourage camped at the nearby town of Bon Homme for four days, six became ill and died. Historians speculate that they contracted typhoid fever. The six were initially entombed at Snatch Creek and then reburied at the cemetery in 1893. In 1922 the large marker was built in the cemetery to give some measure of respect to the nameless six, who might otherwise have perished at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

A replica log schoolhouse stands near the Bon Homme townsite.

BON HOMME WAS A TOWN

Continue south on Apple Tree Road and you soon come to a curve near the old community of Bon Homme. At the curve is a monument to the first schoolhouse in the Dakotas. A small replica of the 1860 log schoolhouse was erected in 1910 by pioneers, and it remains there today. Care to skip a rock in the river (or fish or launch a boat)? Just follow the gravel road south at the curve for less than a mile and you’ll drive right up to the water’s edge and a sandy beach.

Back at the curve, head north to Highway 52. It will lead you east to Highway 50, which takes you past the chalkstone church and on to Yankton.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Grassland Delight

By Christian Begeman

“Here was the endless prairie, so rich in its blessings of fertility, but also full of great loneliness–a form of freedom which curiously affected the minds of strangers, especially those to whom the Lord had given a sad heart.”
‚Äï O.E. R¯lvaag, Giants in the Earth

There aren’t nearly as many places to look out over endless prairies as there were before immigrants arrived. Yet there are still a few places where it can be accomplished right here in South Dakota. From the farmhouse I grew up in, you could drive about 2 miles west over prairie dirt tracks to the rim of the Moreau River breaks and look out over what seemed like a vast wild land of hills, draws, cactus and grass. Thunder Butte hovered in the distance with an unknown number of prairie dogs, rattlesnakes and deer making their living in vastness between. Some years it was green for most of the summer, other years only saw it green for a few weeks in May. Even so, the views affected any and all who laid eyes on it, and especially me.

I saw my first Golden Eagle”out west” as we called it. It made a large wooden fencepost seem tiny as it slowly lifted off to catch the swirling wind. When night rolled in from the east, I heard my first coyotes sing to the evening out west. It wouldn’t be the last I’d hear that lonely song drift in. Rainstorms and thunderclouds seemed to always originate from out west. It wasn’t hard for me to understand why Thunder Butte was so named. This landscape of the open, mixed grass prairie got a hold of me then and I haven’t shaken it since.

From spring to late summer, the magic of the grasslands can often go unseen. The shy wildflowers don’t grow in vast numbers but instead sprinkle the grasslands with decorative color. Butterflies and songbirds are easier to spot in season, but still, you have to be intentional when seeking them.

I have now lived the majority of my life east of the Missouri, and I have come to appreciate the tall grass patches on that side of the state. There is not as much of it to be found since the soil is so conducive to growing corn and other small grains. Even so, when you can find a good patch of tall grass it is worth taking a close look. The hiking is a little harder as the grass is thicker. It took me many years to be comfortable putting my foot down where I could not see the ground. Thankfully prairie rattlers do not abide in tall grass country.

This column is a long look back at the few times I was able to get out and explore our state’s grasslands this past growing season. From Harding to Moody counties and points in between, please enjoy a few postcards from the prairie.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What About Doc?

By Paul Higbee

Doc Middleton was a Nebraska outlaw who gravitated northward to run saloons in southwestern South Dakota. His exploits included running in the 1893 Chadron to Chicago horse race, where he was pictured at the finish line.

TO BE CLEAR, Doc Middleton never earned a doctorate. Sometimes it seems that’s the only thing we know for certain about the outlaw.

Middleton spent considerable time in western South Dakota, first arriving nearly 150 years ago and variously described as horse thief, cattle drover, saloon keeper, murderer, sheriff and wannabe showman. For what it’s worth, he possessed one of the Old West’s best beards. In early photos, his facial adornment — maybe a foot long — could have made him the front man in ZZ Top. After it grayed, Middleton trimmed it; he then bore a resemblance to Buffalo Bill Cody.

In the Black Hills, a place long fascinated by notorious men like Wild Bill Hickok, Lame Johnny, Fly Speck Billy and even George Armstrong Custer, it seems as if Doc Middleton has fallen through the cracks. Not that he’s been completely forgotten. Look up Ardmore, South Dakota, on Wikipedia and you’ll see two people noted as playing roles in local history: President Calvin Coolidge, who visited in 1927, and Doc Middleton,”a former resident who was an infamous outlaw.”

What made Middleton an outlaw? It’s hard to top murder. He was indicted on that charge after shooting an Army private in 1877 during a dance hall brawl in Sidney, Nebraska. The charge never went to trial, says Rapid City writer Scott Lockwood, whose new book Alias: Doc Middleton, attempts to bring the somewhat mysterious Middleton back into the public consciousness. Horse-stealing did put him behind bars on several occasions.

Middleton’s thieving began at age 14 in his native Texas. One theory about his nickname is that he developed skills for”doctoring” horse brands. Or it could have stemmed from a sloppy signature with the initials for David and Charles scribbled together and mistaken for Doc. David and Charles, by the way, were not his actual first and middle names. He stole them. And Middleton, at birth, was a middle name and not his surname. His last name was Riley. Records show Doc was born in the Texas Hill Country, though he sometimes claimed Mississippi as his birthplace.

Rapid City author Scott Lockwood was introduced to Doc Middleton through his fascination with the town of Ardmore. Lockwood’s new biography traces the outlaw’s life as well as his connection to the Fall River County ghost town.

Doc’s life was so full of contradictions and outright lies that writing a book-length biography would challenge any author. But Lockwood embraced the historical detective work. As he was researching, Lockwood was asked if he liked Middleton. No, Lockwood replied. He can’t condone murder and won’t minimize it. He suspects the Sidney incident wasn’t the only time someone died due to Middleton’s violence. On the other hand, there were certainly not dozens of killings, as some exaggerated newspaper stories of the era claimed.

“For a while I didn’t really understand how bad horse stealing was in the 1800s,” Lockwood says. It deprived a person of transportation, perhaps their livelihood, and sometimes their closest companion. Some of Middleton’s early thefts may have been particularly nasty, taking animals from Oklahoma’s Indian Territory because he believed authorities wouldn’t pursue or prosecute. It’s possible he followed the same line of thinking on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in Dakota.

Lockwood was born in Huron and graduated from Custer County High School. He wasn’t particularly curious about history classes in school but, he says,”I was always interested in the stories about the ‘old days’ my elderly relatives and neighbors told me.” He worked for railroads throughout the country’s midsection, making and supervising track repairs, and eventually managing sections of Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s maintenance from Montana to Texas, and from Alabama to Illinois. When Lockwood retired, he came home to South Dakota and its”rhubarb and lilacs.”

Ardmore interested him in ways similar to the stories his older relatives and neighbors had recounted decades earlier. Virtually a ghost town now on the South Dakota-Nebraska line, south of the Black Hills, Ardmore similarly attracted Middleton in 1900. He bought town lots, served as sheriff for a while and owned a saloon. He may have failed in the liquor business in another town, Lockwood thinks, but by the time he arrived in Ardmore he had learned not to drink his profits.

Lockwood first learned of Middleton by reading the Wikipedia post linking President Coolidge and the horse thief. “I guess I was intrigued with him because he chose to make tiny Ardmore his home,” Lockwood says. And”he was able to steal hundreds of horses and escape vigilante justice.” Vigilantes operated outside the law, often lynching horse thieves and cattle rustlers in the Old West, including Middleton’s Nebraska partner-in-crime, Kid Wade. Middleton may have considered vigilantism more criminal than anything he perpetuated.

“He was such a restless man,” Lockwood says.”He liked to see his name in the newspapers and became a folk hero to many. He was great at promoting things he believed in.”

This is the earliest known photograph of James Middleton Riley, later known as Doc Middleton, taken around 1871 when he was 20.

Middleton obviously believed in Ardmore. But what he really wanted to promote was his own Wild West Show. There are stories claiming he performed briefly in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but Lockwood thinks Buffalo Bill Cody didn’t care for Doc Middleton. In Middleton’s mind, his own show, actually incorporated in 1904 in Rapid City, would be no less an extravaganza than Buffalo Bill’s. But it never happened. If it had, Middleton could have woven in plenty of his own real-life adventures: rounding up wild cattle roaming Texas after the Civil War, then becoming one of America’s original cowboys who drove herds north for public domain grass and less bovine disease. He rode through Kansas and Nebraska (the state that’s done the most to document Middleton’s outlaw history) and in 1877 he made it to the Black Hills, according to Lockwood. Middleton spent time in early Custer and Deadwood and was particular about whom he claimed as a friend or associate. Calamity Jane?”She ain’t my kind of people,” he reportedly said.

There’s an adventure the public would no doubt have demanded be recreated in abbreviated form as part of a Doc Middleton Wild West Show. That was a thousand-mile horse race from western Nebraska to Chicago in 1893. A Chadron, Nebraska, man promoted the idea as a hoax in an era of elaborate hoaxes nationally — ones that newspapers often reported, winning national attention for a community. In part, the news of a super-sized horse race spread because the idea appalled humane societies, and they took action to stop it. Middleton announced he would compete, and the Deadwood Pioneer Times entered into jokey reporting by remarking he should be ineligible because he would surely end up stealing other racers’ mounts.

Then remarkably, driven by the publicity, the race began to be taken seriously. In fact, humane organizations inadvertently boosted the competition when they said they would supply representatives to monitor animal health along the route. Middleton did, indeed, ride the distance on a gelding called Jim Fisk. Some observers predicted a win for Middleton. Strangely, Lockwood says (or maybe not so strangely when you consider the strong-willed contestants), the race didn’t begin until 6:15 one evening because of an argument over eligibility. The date was June 13, 1893. John Berry, riding a horse from Sturgis called Poison, first reached Buffalo Bill’s Wild West grounds near the Chicago World’s Fair on June 27. Berry wasn’t declared the winner, though, because in Chicago the eligibility issue flared again, and Berry had played a role in selecting the route, giving him an unfair advantage. Middleton finished about 27 hours behind Berry. Of eight riders who completed the long course, Middleton came in sixth.

Newspaper accounts of Middleton’s participation in the thousand-mile competition likely surprised some people. Reports of his death had circulated numerous times over the years, usually owing to gunshot wounds but once due to smallpox in Ardmore. It was as if the press was certain that Middleton would meet death at an early age and was ever ready to pounce on the news. While Middleton liked newspaper stories, even those maudlin and false reports, he had no use for anyone proposing a book about his life. He wanted that writing assignment reserved for himself, although he never got around to it.

“He even threatened to come after anyone attempting to write a book,” Lockwood says.

The Middleton family in 1899 included (from left) Doc; children Joseph William, Ruth Irene and David Wesley; and his wife, Irene.

Middleton married three times. In 1911 his third wife, Irene, died at Hot Springs after gallbladder surgery. Funeral services were conducted in Ardmore and then her body was interred about 30 miles south in Crawford, Nebraska. Certainly that’s where Middleton believed he would someday be buried, in prime horse country. Crawford sits a short canter from Fort Robinson, a major base of operations for the U.S. Cavalry during Middleton’s time.

But Middleton never made it to Crawford. He was occasionally involved in unauthorized alcohol sales and that landed him in jail in Wyoming in December of 1913. He died on December 27 at age 62 from a bacterial infection complicated by pneumonia. A burial plot at Douglas, Wyoming, was supposed to be temporary, but it’s where Middleton lies 112 years later. In 1968 a group of Nebraskans petitioned to move the body but didn’t gather many signatures. Lockwood, during his railroad career before he ever heard of Doc Middleton, lived in Douglas just blocks from the gravesite.

Knowing the geography of Middleton’s life was a plus for Lockwood in writing this book. So was newspapers.com, which allowed for electronic access to papers that Middleton knew and admired.”Sometimes I’d be so excited about what I found that I couldn’t stop at dinner time,” Lockwood says.”Other days I’d walk away and not care if I ever looked again.”

Such mixed feelings are to be expected about a man as conflicted as Middleton. Readers who love Western lore and the Black Hills — and are eager to rediscover a man nearly lost to history — will be glad he stuck with it.

Editor’s Note: Contact Scott Lockwood at b735198@gmail.com to purchase a book or to schedule an author talk. This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.