Fieldwork kept a teenaged Christian Begeman out after sunset, and he was walking the half mile back to the family ranch house. He had a flashlight to help navigate, but as darkness descended over Dewey and Ziebach counties a full moon rose high in the sky, and stars as bright as millions of tiny flashlights danced overhead. He didn’t need his battery-powered companion. “As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I recognized that I could see a lot more than expected,” Begeman recalls. “The dips and ridges cast dark pools of shadows, which caused me pause to step into them. Then I realized it was the same path I already knew and soon I got up to nearly a full run without the aid of any light but the moon. It may have been a foolish thing to do in hindsight, but it was quite a rush.”
Diane Knutson, pictured with her husband Andrew and daughter Bridgette in the Badlands, is an advocate for preserving South Dakota’s dark skies. Photo by Steven Miller
Begeman fell in love with dark skies on that West River ranch and today spends his evenings photographing their beauty. The lesson he learned that night has become a main tenet among dark sky advocates today: the artificial light of ever-growing urban areas, oftentimes installed under the guise of improving safety and visibility, doesn’t always accomplish those tasks, and in turn, hampers our ability to appreciate the stars.
South Dakota boasts some of the darkest skies on Earth. Portions of the Black Hills National Forest and the Slim Buttes in Harding County are considered Class 1 locations on the Bortle Scale, a measure of night sky brightness developed by amateur astronomer John Bortle in 2001 that spans from 1 (the darkest) to 9 (inner city). Badlands National Park and several state recreation areas — located far from the lights of our biggest towns and cities — are Class 2.
Organizations like DarkSky International, founded in 1988, aim to slow the spread of light pollution. Diane Knutson is the association’s former president. Today, the Sioux Falls mother of two does volunteer work for the organization as a DarkSky Fellow. “The dark sky is best experienced rather than explained,” Knutson says. “It just kind of grabs hold of you.”
Knutson grew up in Dakota City, Nebraska, just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, Iowa, a city of nearly 90,000 people and a metro area encompassing nearly 150,000. Still, the urban glow didn’t hamper the love for stargazing that began in her backyard. “As a kid I would go outside and see the night sky, run around with fireflies and experience it in its natural state,” she says. “That drew me in, and I’ve always had that inkling to keep that relationship. The dark provides us an invitation to personal solitude, stillness, silence and reflection.”
But it’s disappearing. Knutson says light pollution is increasing about 10 percent a year, and the pace is quickening because of advancements in artificial light technology, such as the development of LEDs. “LEDs are great in some respects, but because they use less energy, we use them more. They are more accessible and not as expensive to use, so we don’t think as much about turning them off.”
Knutson says it’s important to remember that artificial light doesn’t simply stay where the switch is. When traveling east on Interstate 90, she can often spot the glow from Sioux Falls — our largest city at nearly 210,000 people — before reaching Mitchell. “Light pollution is easily solvable. There are so many issues that are big and hard to reverse, but light pollution can be reversed with the flip of a switch, or a timer, or just not using it. It costs less money, it helps our health, it helps our experiences and connections with each other. The night as a whole ties us all together because it stretches across time and space. We can connect with people who lived millennia ago because we each have that sky we can connect with.”
After decades of dark sky advocacy, Knutson thinks South Dakotans are beginning to understand light pollution and are taking steps to address it. Several years ago, Rapid City began celebrating Dark Sky Week in April with festivals, speakers and programs. A section of downtown streetlights is extinguished, a small nod to reducing the city’s skyglow. The Badlands Observatory in Quinn offers night programs and the public is invited to star parties during the summer months hosted by the Black Hills Astronomical Society at the Hidden Valley Observatory just off Hidden Valley Road northwest of Rapid City. Badlands National Park’s annual Astronomy Festival (July 18-20) includes star parties each night, activities during the day and a scale model solar system tour and walk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.” Fortunately, the heavens are a wonderful, mysterious gift that unfold before our eyes every night — and nowhere more clearly than in the delightfully dark spaces of South Dakota.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
Bobby Joe Holman has been to music’s proverbial mountaintop, and he believes he found its peak in South Dakota
By Bernie Hunhoff
BOBBY JOE HOLMAN’S face is weathered and whiskered. But it’s a fresh face to the Black Hills music scene and, as Muddy Waters would sing, Holman has his mojo working.
The country/blues artist has been entertaining audiences across the USA for most of his 76 years. He arrived in Rapid City in 2021 to be closer to his wife’s family. After playing in America’s bigger cities, some may wonder how he likes the small mountain towns of the Black Hills. Attend one of his gigs and you’ll hear the answer in every song.
“My heart and soul are happy,” says the Santa Claus look-alike who sometimes plays five or six nights a week in various venues throughout the Hills. “The body is giving out, but the mind is hanging together and I am at peace.”
Yes, that’s how Holman speaks — his sentences sound like verses to a Willie Nelson song, and these days the title could be “Lovin’ Life in South Dakota.”
Surrounded by military memorabilia, The Bobbys entertain at the VFW Club in downtown Rapid City.
Holman was born in the west Texas town of Seminole. He spent much of his childhood in southern California, where he strummed his first guitar. He was serving in the Navy, aboard a submarine during the Vietnam War, when he began a lifelong love affair with the harmonica.
“I love the harmonica because it never sounds the same,” he says. “It almost plays itself. I start a tone and one note leads to another, it’s not all that structured stuff.” He started out with the diatonic harmonica, but soon grew to also love the chromatic, which has a wide range of notes.
After his military service, he studied music in Mississippi and became a successful blues singer, playing in Nashville and on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. He signed with Monument Records and found work in both radio and television.
He co-hosted a show called Across the Pond that featured U.S. and European jazz. Holman also became a successful author of “how to play” texts for the harmonica and taught the instrument at public schools, colleges, music stores and prisons. But commercial pursuits often interrupted his original love for a simple song.
“I’ve had a little bit of success,” Holman says of his career. “But the business end can suck you up. They’re always saying, ‘you should do this’ or ‘you have to do that.’ Now I don’t have to do anything but play the songs I love for people who want to hear them.”
Holman and his wife, Janet, came to Rapid City to live near Janet’s daughter, Genae, and her family. Genae’s husband is Bobby Sundby, a well-known local realtor and businessman. The two Bobbys became good friends, and soon they teamed up as a duo known, naturally, as The Bobbys.
“I needed a name I could remember,” Holman says with a laugh.
Bobby Sundby is well-versed in the Black Hills music scene. His brother, Johnny, is a notable photographer who plays music with a country-rock group called The Lonely Rangers. Their late father, John, was a popular Rapid City businessman and pilot who sang for decades with the Shrine of Democracy Chorus, a barbershop group.
“Our family has always been involved in music,” he says. “Our dad probably never said the word ‘gig,’ but he would love what we we’re doing and the way the music connects with people.”
Sundby says Holman is “one of the most upbeat, positive, encouraging and supportive human beings I’ve ever met. He’s opened up a new world to me, by encouraging me to play the guitar and sing. I started out playing drums at Augustana College. I love that I don’t have to haul the drums around anymore, but more importantly, it’s wonderful to grow as a musician.”
Sundby introduced Holman to the Black Hills. “When he married my mother-in-law, I heard about him playing in California. I didn’t know then how accomplished he was. The first time I heard him sing, we were hanging out as a family in the kitchen when someone asked him to play the guitar.
“I happened to be playing gigs with Wild Bill Days in Deadwood, so I invited him to join in and he was great. He has a comfort level and a gift for gab that the audience loves, and as a musician he has a rare quality. He likes to play a song a little different each time, and that makes it more fun and interesting for the musicians and the crowd. If he makes a mistake in front of people he’ll just laugh, and they like him all the more.”
Bobby Joe Holman is a fun-loving blend of Willie Nelson, Burl Ives and Ray Charles.
Sundby says Holman is a charming man, whether he’s having a private conversation or playing to a full house. “A friend of mine said he’s like a favorite grandpa that everyone loves.”
Holman laughs at such compliments. “Bobby likes to brag on me,” he says, “but the reward is all mine. And I couldn’t do this today without him.” He credits Sundby and South Dakotans as a whole for giving him a fresh start at his age, and he’s determined to learn all he can about the musical traditions of his new home.
He especially appreciates the band-friendly practices of the nightclubs that book The Bobbys. “Music-wise, there are a lot of events and venues, and they all try to pay you a fair wage here,” he says. “In Los Angeles, they treat you like a dog because they know that if you won’t do it there’s somebody else waiting in line.”
He also appreciates the cultural makeup of his new state. “I love that we have two cities, and all the rest are these little towns, and every town has its own soul, and the people have their own ways of seeing themselves. There is something beautiful about the way people get along here.”
Holman hopes to contribute the only way he knows — with his music. “I know I gotta stay healthy,” he says, “so I drink non-alcoholic beer. I love alcohol but it’s made me make a lot of really bad decisions. Now I practice every day and I learn new songs. I am blessed to have the dexterity and the voice to do what I love at this age.”
The Bobbys entertain at some of the Black Hills’ best-known venues and attractions, including the 1880 Train depot, Deadwood’s historic Landmark Casino, the Firehouse in downtown Rapid City and the Mount Rushmore KOA Resort, where they play outdoors on summer nights.
The Bobbys are still an unknown band to many in the Black Hills. They were booked to play at Terry Peak a few months ago when a typo in the advertisement listed them as The Boobys. “Every biker from a hundred miles around showed up,” Holman quips.
They also play at lesser-known places, including nursing homes where senior citizens in wheelchairs nod their heads to the blues. “The rest homes are such a rewarding experience,” Holman says. “Some of them are on their last roundup but you can see they are listening. The songs are touching them.”
He also likes to entertain at the VFW club on Main Street in Rapid City, where he banters with other veterans who mostly sit at the bar, far from the stage, but applaud every song. “I’m a proud lifetime member of the VFW, the Vietnam Veterans and the Sons of the American Revolution,” he says. “It’s a privilege to play there.”
Regardless of the venue or the demographics of his audience, Holman makes an impression. Sarah Smoke, who manages the 44 North Bar at the Baymont Inn in Sturgis, says The Bobbys have quickly become a crowd favorite. The blues music is amazing, she says, and Holman’s ability to connect with a roomful of strangers is rare. “He has a unique voice and he’s very skilled with the guitar and the harp, but it’s more than that,” Smoke says. “He is so comfortable with the music, and he creates an environment that is special and warm.”
Rural America never takes its musicians for granted because small town fans know a favorite singer or guitar player may be just one song away from leaving for the city. But Bobby Joe Holman came from the city. He’s been to the music world’s proverbial mountaintop, and now his only goal is to stay healthy and sing for the people of the Black Hills.
Editor’s Note: Readers can find upcoming gigs of Holman and Sundby on their Facebook page, which is titled The Bobbys: Two Guys, Two Guitars.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.
Yankton’s strip along the river has become a destination, and now the mall is re-opening. Is the town big enough for both?
Yankton’s entire commercial district by the Missouri River is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with 20 structures and landmarks. The corner of Third and Walnut (above) is considered the architectural core of the district.
By Bernie Hunhoff
Cathy Clatworthy remembers overhearing a customer who answered the phone while at the counter of her home décor shop in downtown Yankton.
“We’re doing The Strip!” laughed the customer.
Clatworthy says the customer explained, after ending the call with her husband, that it’s what she and her friends call a six-block stretch of stores and shops that parallel the Missouri River on the south edge of the old city.
“They love to walk from one end to the other and back,” she says. That would have been a short walk until the last few years because it seemed that mall shopping, big box stores, the COVID-19 pandemic and online shopping would end independent retailing forever. Forever, however, is short in today’s fast-changing economy.
A decade ago, Yankton still had JC Penney, K-Mart and other chain stores; most were in the Yankton Mall, 19 blocks north of the river. The riverfront seemed destined to become a financial district with a scattering of bars and antique shops.
“When the mall was really active, all the downtown retailers were just trying to get people to stop by the downtown stores when they were finished at the mall,” recalls Clatworthy. “I remember that we wanted to rent some display space in the mall to invite the shoppers to come downtown, but Dial Enterprises in Omaha, who then owned the mall, wouldn’t let us.”
Today, most of the retail giants are gone and small shops — including a big selection of clothing stores and a half-dozen stylish home furnishing shops — have opened in their wake. Every time a big box store closed, a few small shops popped up — mostly along Second and Third streets near the Missouri.
Cathy Clatworthy operates LilyCrest on Third Street.
Clatworthy traces the downtown district’s most recent resurgence to a community brainstorming session in 2017. Onward Yankton, a local nonprofit, recruited the state’s architectural community and Dakota Resources staff to meet with more than 100 Yankton activists. Together, they shared ideas and even made drawings of how the downtown area might look.
Locals agreed with the guest architects and designers that the town needed more downtown apartments, a sharper focus on historic preservation, better public gathering places and more shopping. Nothing happened overnight, but Clatworthy says all the goals are slowly being addressed.
Apartments and lofts above the storefronts are now home to hundreds of renters, and a new four-story apartment complex with 104 units called Gurney Flats just opened on the riverbank. Construction began in May on a seven-story loft that will alter the Yankton skyline.
Even the city’s once-sleepy bars have picked up the pace. Rock and country music bands entertain on weekend evenings in the variety of establishments, from the historic O’Malley’s and the Walnut (also dubbed the Dead Animal Bar because taxidermy mounts are the main décor) to newer places like Ben’s Brewing Company (a few blocks north of downtown) and the Boat House, a fun establishment with axe-throwing, music, darts and pizzas.
Onward Yankton members are raising money to restore the 1902 Dakota Theater. They even plan to reattach the theater’s unique, yellow 1940s Art Deco façade.
Kids and families love the splash pad near the foot of the historic Meridian Bridge.
The Black Steer, one of South Dakota’s oldest steakhouses, still serves filets and ribs, while several new eating establishments have opened — again, mostly within a block or two of the Missouri.
Today’s downtown entrepreneurs are scrappy. Clatworthy once had 20 antique vendors in her store. “Today’s generation doesn’t even want their own family heirlooms,” she laughs, so she refocused on picture framing, art and home furnishings. “I still keep a few antiques because they fit my building.”
Drew Delvaux and Zeke Matthews started an online furniture restoration business in 2017 and soon moved into a brick-and-mortar store called River City Relics, with a big selection of home décor, art and clothing. Sales were modest until they persuaded officials at lululemon, a fashionable apparel company, to join forces with them. “That’s a big brand that you won’t usually find in small towns and small stores,” Delvaux says. “But we kept working with them until it happened and it has been life-changing for us.”
Rita Houska stared selling jewelry and purses from the back of her father’s antique shop in 2007; she had her own store a year later. Today, she and her daughter Mandi stock two floors of surprises into one of Yankton’s many historic buildings. The basement ceiling is only 6 feet, 6 inches high, and the floor is wood planks, but no one minds because the inventory is one-of-a-kind, a blend of country and chic. You can buy everything from fine art and funky t-shirts to bread mixes that call for a can of beer and stylish cowhides ($275 for the biggest).
Carla Mueller runs Ninth Street Clothing on Second Street, near the scenic Riverside Field at Bob Tereshinski Stadium and its river view. She started the business in 2017 on Ninth Street at the edge of town (thus the name) and moved downtown in 2023 when she and her husband built a new building.
Carla Mueller (left) and Tracy Pravecek fashion summer hats at Ninth Street Clothing.
Mueller’s original location was an old, quaint building — like most of the independent stores in the neighborhood. She tried to incorporate some of that aura in the new store, with a vaulted ceiling and big windows that look out on the ballpark.
She loves the vibrancy of the downtown. “I can’t believe the number of young people who are going into business,” Mueller says. “They are invested in our community, and they are making it work. It’s a team thing. I love that it’s not a competition but a collaboration. If they can’t find something here, we point them to the other clothing stores, and I know they do the same.”
Ninth Street is the newest building and newest business downtown. The oldest is Boston Shoes to Boots, founded in 1915 and operated today by Mandi Gause and Brennan Ewald. The sisters bought the shoe store eight years ago. “Our dad pushed us into going in business for ourselves because he and Mom had worked demanding jobs, and always worked for ‘the man,’” says Mandi.
Their dad must be proud. Five years ago, they also bought a home décor store called Monta’s, renamed it Forte and have become young leaders of the loosely knit strip.
The downtown district also includes a small soap factory, an apothecary for holistic health, wedding venues, medicinal marijuana dispensaries, a ReStore shop run by local Habitat for Humanity volunteers and a new coffee shop called Muddy Mo’s, named for the ever-present river that flows a block away. (The coffee shop is operated by South Dakota Magazine.)
As downtown redevelopment happened, the Yankton Mall dwindled to near emptiness until 2023 when, ironically, a local entrepreneur named Matt Evans bought it from the giant Dial Enterprises of Omaha. Evans cleaned and aired out the cavernous mall, unlocked the doors and reopened the movie theater to much applause because it had been closed since the 2020 pandemic.
Evans has welcomed local shops, but he has 200,000 square feet to fill, so he is also recruiting chain stores. Thanks to support from the city commission — which has now voted twice to provide a sales tax rebate to assist with remodeling — Hobby Lobby, Five Below and Marshall’s plan to open before Christmas of 2025 and other announcements are expected.
In the 1980s, before the age of online shopping, there were more than 25,000 malls in the United States. Today there are only 1,000, and Capital One Research projects that the number could drop to 150 by 2032.
The Yankton Mall, and shopping centers like it, are now the underdogs of retailing. Meanwhile, Clatworthy and the other independent store owners are anxious to see whether a mall and a downtown can co-exist in a town of 15,000.
Neon lights still shine in Yankton, including at the historic Dakota Theater, built in 1902.
“It’s all unpredictable, we’ve learned that through the years,” she says. “There are fears based on past experiences and fear is dangerous. It’s natural but you don’t want to act on it. The chains are coming here because we have a market. Hopefully they do attract some new shoppers and if so then the market will grow for all of us.”
Carla Mueller of Ninth Street Clothing agrees. “We are all going to feel it initially when the big stores open, but then I think it’ll die down. In the end, they’ll bring new people to town and there will be two kinds of customers,” she says. “We are selling service as much as anything, and the bigger you get the harder it is to take care of the customer.”
Plus, Mueller says, it’s hard for a chain store or big box store to compete with the architecture, history and natural beauty of the river district.
Mandi Gause, the shoe store owner, agrees. “I believe we have one of the most beautiful backdrops a downtown could have, and it does make us unique.”
She’s also wondering about the return of the chain stores. “Early in our ownership, the previous owner told me there used to be several shoe stores downtown. I told him I was thankful that wasn’t the case anymore. His reply was blunt. ‘It’s better if there’s more competition because that means more people are in town looking for shoes.’”
That’s the very same optimistic and independent spirit that prompted Matt Evans to rehab an empty mall — and that shoppers seem to appreciate when they walk “The Strip” along the river. Yankton leaders are hoping that this time, everyone can coexist and grow together.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
Our July/August issue is out, and it’s packed with stories that celebrate our vibrant arts culture.
Written in collaboration with Arts South Dakota and the South Dakota Arts Council, this 148-page issue also serves as our annual South Dakota Arts Journal. Here’s some of what you’ll read inside:
This Land in 1776: Through Artists’ Eyes
Charlie Brave Heart’s Artistic Vision for Pine Ridge
There’s Something for Everyone at Custer’s Art Expressions
Printmaker Michael Baum Advocates for Wild Spaces
Fellowship Flourishes at Fleurish Flower Farm
How a Tragic Fire Reinvigorated Deborah Mitchell’s Art
James Van Nuys: Rapid City’s Man of Many Talents
Red Cloud’s New Chatku Arts Center
Photographer Cheryl Halsey Searches for Truth
Paul Horsted Shows Us South Dakota Yesterday and Today
Custer’s Hjem A.M. Delights the Eyes and Taste Buds
An Artistic Salute to the Barn
Plus Events, History, Travel Tips and Culture
Subscribe online or call (800) 456-5117 to start your subscription today!
1. Rooted: A Prairie Arts Weekend(July 10–12, Geddes) Head to the Missouri River region for this three-day celebration of art, music and place. Authentic Arts 605 in Geddes is hosting original art, workshops, demonstrations, wellness experiences, heritage stories, live music, food and prairie-inspired gathering spaces. A perfect weekend for slowing down and soaking in the landscape. Our publisher, Katie, will be heading there tomorrow morning. Say hello if you see her!
2. Brookings Summer Arts Festival(July 11–12) Pioneer Park in Brookings comes alive with art, food, free entertainment, living history demonstrations, antiques and a dedicated kids’ area. A great family outing if you’re in the area this weekend.
3. Wall Celebration(July 9–11, Wall) The Wall Rodeo Arena is hosting a rodeo, concerts, a parade and kids’ activities for the annual Wall Celebration. It’s an authentic taste of a West River summer.
While home on leave in July 1942, Don Smith attended the Black Hills Roundup in Belle Fourche with his parents, Laura and A.W. (Doc) Smith. That November, Smith died in a plane crash in England. His is buried in Belle Fourche’s Pine Slope Cemetery.
By Paul Higbee
In April 1942, South Dakotans Henry (Hank) Potter and Don Smith were key players in one of history’s most daring military feats. Half a century later another South Dakota native, Curt Hills, traveled halfway around the globe to trace their adventure, finding both physical remnants and Chinese citizens who were part of this World War II adventure.
The 1942 operation was the famous Doolittle Raid, where 16 U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 planes struck back at Japan, 134 days after that country’s military bombed Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The American raid has often been cited for providing a tremendous morale boost for the United States, facing a real possibility of losing the war as it engaged strong foes in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. But historians note that the Doolittle Raid also stunned Japanese citizens who believed their home island to be immune to air attack because it sat isolated in a wide sea. Japanese leaders were forced to realign their far-flung Imperial Navy fleet to better protect the homeland, which created an advantage for America and its allies later in the war.
The air raid was planned and led by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, a California-born aviation pioneer who set well-publicized airplane endurance records in the 1920s, experimented constantly in hopes of improving aircraft safety and efficiency, and who, against long odds, in the 1930s convinced the Army to switch to higher octane fuels to increase engine power. As it turned out, Doolittle would use every drop of his high-octane fuel for the raid that bears his name. In fact, he would have been better off with a few more ounces.
Doolittle’s B-25 dropped four bombs on Tokyo industrial targets at about noon on Saturday, April 18, 1942, and then swooped low and sped west to escape Japanese air space. In escaping, he credited his navigator — Hank Potter — for plotting “a perfect course.” Potter grew up in Pierre, and then attended Yankton College.
Potter lived long enough for Hills, part of the group who traced the raid, to meet and travel with him. “He was very honest, sincere and caring,” Hills says. “He had those qualities that made it easy to believe he came from South Dakota.”
Don Smith, the other Doolittle Raider from South Dakota, mirrored those qualities. “A straight arrow,” recalled his flight engineer, Edward Saylor. Smith, a pilot, was born at Oldham in 1918, spent most of his childhood in Belle Fourche and graduated from South Dakota State College (now SDSU) in Brookings after winning football’s Little All-America honors as Jackrabbit center. His B-25, dubbed TNT by its crew of five, dropped bombs on Kobe factories more than an hour after Doolittle hit Tokyo.
Don Smith (number 26) played center for the South Dakota State College Jackrabbit football team
What baffled Japanese leaders (and the general public in the United States) for months was how 16 B-25s got into Japanese skies in the first place. The closely guarded secret was that Doolittle and Army brass decided the attack was worth risking something that had never been attempted: launching fully loaded medium bombers from the deck of a ship, the carrier Hornet. “It was such a bold plan,” recalled George McGovern, South Dakota’s long-serving U.S. senator who was just preparing to enter the Air Corps himself. “I don’t think anyone but Americans would have tried it.”
Taking off from a carrier meant pilots had to use less than 500 feet of deck instead of 1,000 feet of runway, as was typical on land. Smith practiced steep-angled takeoffs on land in Florida. At sea on April 18 he used fewer than 300 feet of deck — the best mark of the day. In fact, it can be said Smith flew a perfect mission: a takeoff that military aviators could only have imagined weeks before, finding and hitting his industrial targets and executing a smooth water landing 13 hours after launch.
Still, nothing went exactly according to plan that day. After a Japanese trawler spotted the Hornet, all planes took off early, adding 600 miles to their flights. That meant they could get to the safety of China after their bombing runs thanks only to a stout east-to-west tailwind and the quality fuel for which Doolittle had argued.
The Raiders soon learned that China wasn’t as safe as they had hoped. No lighted airfield or fuel awaited the planes on April 18, either because of a communications mix-up or because the Nationalist Chinese government grew leery of helping Americans in the face of likely Japanese revenge. Like the United States, China was at war with Japan, and Japanese troops controlled sections of the country. The American pilots had little choice but to parachute out of their planes with their men or make crash landings (although one crew drew Doolittle’s ire by landing in Siberia where the Soviets seized the B-25).
Potter, Doolittle and the rest of the Plane One crew bailed out into the pitch-black night and survived. Smith approached the China coast, sensed his plane didn’t have enough fuel to climb over a coastal mountain range and made a remarkably smooth sea landing a few hundred yards from Tantou Island (also known as Tantouschan, just off the coast of China). He and his crew had eight minutes before the TNT began sinking, which was time enough to climb out while pulling an inflatable raft with them. After two hours in the water they got to the beach with a cold wind piercing their flight uniforms. Eventually they found shelter in a livestock pen before the Ma Liagshui family spotted the men and invited them into their nearby hut.
Of the 75 Americans who attempted to leap or crash into China that night, one died due to a parachute malfunction, two drowned and eight were quickly captured by Japanese soldiers. The two South Dakotans, along with their 62 scattered peers, made their way hundreds of miles cross country to the Nationalist China capital of Chungking with help from Chinese friends — many of whom later died at the hands of vengeful Japanese soldiers. Potter recalled that he, “walked, went in rickshaws, sedan chair, rode a horse, went on a boat in the river, some sort of car, a so-called bus which was a truck we sat on, a train and finally a C-47 airplane at Chung-king.”
All of the Doolittle Raiders experienced crowds such as this one, gathered in Sanmen County, Zhejiang Province, to see Don Smith and his crew, who had ended up in China following their retaliatory airstrike against Japan in April of 1942.
Smith, to his great credit, took a detour on his route to Chungking. Through Chinese guides he learned the crew members of Plane Seven had been badly injured in their crash landing and were in a little hospital at Linhai. The raid’s flight surgeon, Dr. Thomas White, flew aboard Smith’s plane, and Smith decided he had to get White to Linhai over rugged foot trails. There can be absolutely no doubt that White saved Plane Seven pilot Ted Lawson’s life.
Smith returned home on leave in time for Belle Fourche’s Fourth of July rodeo, an event he loved growing up. Sadly, he died later in 1942 in a plane crash in England. Potter went on to a distinguished Air Force career, rose to the rank of colonel, and was commander of Bergstrom Air Force Base in Texas when he retired in 1970. He often made time to attend the famous Doolittle Raiders Reunion each April and took a lead role in organizing the 1978 reunion in Rapid City.
A few years after the reunion in his home state, Potter met Bryan Moon. As a boy growing up in England during World War II, Moon befriended American airmen stationed there, and developed a fascination for their planes. He grew up to become a Northwest Airlines executive based in Minneapolis and an acclaimed artist, specializing in aviation scenes. One of his paintings depicts what he guessed Smith’s TNT might look like beneath the China Sea.
The late Moon was also a true adventurer, willing to spend whatever it took to track down military history and, through an organization he founded called MIA Hunters, the remains of combat casualties interred overseas. In 1990 he led an expedition into China to find Doolittle Raid artifacts and organize ceremonies where brave Chinese people who helped the raiders could be thanked. Curt Hills — born in Chamberlain, raised in Mitchell and by then part of a real estate management group in Rochester, Minnesota — heard Moon speak at a Sertoma Club event. Hills decided he wanted in on the adventures. So did fellow South Dakotan Hank Potter, who represented the Raiders in thank-you ceremonies.
Moon and his fellow travelers met a woman named Zhao Xiaobao who, living on Tantou Island in 1942, helped hide, feed and clothe Smith and his four crewmates. She said her son, a fisherman, knew the exact location of the TNT because he had pulled up small scraps of aircraft metal. Also, islanders had noticed occasional oil slicks there. Moon contacted Smith’s copilot, Griffith Williams, and by Williams’ calculations the crash site matched the fisherman’s description.
But it wouldn’t be easy for Moon’s group to gain access. The island sat near a submarine base in a zone controlled by the Chinese military. Still, Moon wrote to request permission to dive, photograph and videotape. His request gained a boost when Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, in his 90s, wrote to the Chinese government endorsing Moon’s project. Permission was granted in September 1993 — the same month Doolittle died — and Moon dashed to organize an expedition the following April.
The Rochester Post-Bulletin wrote that Smith’s plane, “might be World War II’s most treasured aviation artifact.” Moon told the paper that, “the ideal scenario is we find the airplane in an ideal position,” meaning a wing might extend to within 15 feet or so of the surface. The worst scenario was that nothing would remain beyond a “pile of nuts and bolts.”
Moon’s group of 19 traveled to Tantou Island, 150 miles south of Shanghai, the next spring. Hills noted the island, in some ways, hadn’t changed much since Smith saw it. Its people mostly lived in poverty, eking out livelihoods through fishing and small subsistence farming. Moon’s group learned that a hill up from the beach where the TNT crew climbed to find shelter was actually more of a cliff.
Don Smith, wearing medals received for his role in the Doolittle Raid.
Moon had arranged for a retired military vessel that was positioned over the crash site and used sonar-equipped sensors to create images of what sat beneath. He brought expert divers from the United States, but, Hills says, “diving was quite dangerous. Very strong currents swept divers away. And we learned the plane is submerged much deeper than we expected.”
It is, in fact, about 50 feet beneath the surface. Local islanders had guessed about 30 feet. No part of the TNT extended close to the surface. While the plane is much more than a pile of nuts and bolts, Hills says, “it’s in deep mud and has been beaten by typhoons through the years.”
Raising the TNT was never discussed with the Chinese government in the 1990s, and the 1994 expedition proved that to be unfeasible in the future. Don Smith’s famous warplane will rest underwater until, in coming years, it is indeed a pile of nuts and bolts.
Hank Potter died at age 83 in 2002. His New York Times obituary mentioned a reunion in the 1990s with Zhu Xuesan, an English-speaking man who came to his rescue the morning after he parachuted into China. The reunion happened thanks to Moon’s group. “To be able to meet the man who helped me so much when I was wandering and tired and cold,” said Potter, “it’s just amazing.”
Don Smith didn’t live to attend Doolittle Raiders reunions or to understand how deeply his adventure touched Americans for decades. But 2019 has been a good year for him. The South Dakota Historical Society Press published a new biography called First Strike: Doolittle Raider Don Smith. And in April, Dick Cole — the last surviving Doolittle Raider — accomplished something meaningful just before his death at age 103. Cole kept in his possession one of 80 Congressional Gold Medals, struck for the families of each Raider. No one ever claimed Smith’s, whose widow and only daughter had passed away. Cole wanted the medal to go to South Dakota as a gift from him. With help from Sioux Falls author, filmmaker and aviation artist John Mollison, and others, the medal was delivered to the South Dakota Air and Space Museum, near Rapid City, on the raid’s 77th anniversary. Though Smith’s TNT will forever lie at the bottom of the China Sea, a tangible reminder of South Dakota’s role in one of the world’s most fearless military missions had come home.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
Nut trees can flourish in a sliver of South Dakota, but will their growers ever be more than hobbyists?
Darrell and Martha Ausborn have experimented with nut trees on their 10-acre farm west of Yankton since 2008.
By John Andrews
Dan DeBuhr was 6 years old in the early 1960s when his grandmother returned from a vacation in Texas with two pecan trees. She planted them in the backyard of her Elk Point home — the same patch of land where DeBuhr lives today — not knowing what to expect. “They told her they couldn’t guarantee that they would make it in South Dakota,” DeBuhr says. “And they would never bear fruit.”
Today, motorists passing by on Interstate 29 can easily spot them because they are the tallest trees in town. In fact, measurements taken last June confirm that they are the two biggest pecan trees in South Dakota, both supplanting a 61-foot pecan in Rapid City.
A severe thunderstorm pelted Elk Point with baseball sized hail early last summer, greatly diminishing the year’s pecan crop. But near the end of most Septembers, DeBuhr wages a daily battle with squirrels to collect the prized nuts. The little critters clearly collect their share, evidenced by the tiny trees that spring up from pecans buried around his yard.
We think of more temperate places when we think of pecans, but they have a history in South Dakota. Pecans — as well as hickory, chestnuts, heartnuts, butternuts, English walnuts and maybe even pine nuts — can indeed grow in certain parts of South Dakota, and experimenters are working to create the best varieties for our environment.
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South Dakota is not a robust nut-producing state. Black walnuts are the only nut trees considered native, but John Ball, a professor at South Dakota State University in Brookings, says you can find butternut, American chestnut, English walnut, Manchurian walnut and even pecan, though the growing season is not always long enough to produce nuts. Far southeastern South Dakota, however, is another story.
“It is an unusual part of the state,” says Ball, who is also an SDSU Extension forestry specialist and South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources forest health specialist. “We should call it Western Iowa/Northern Nebraska, not South Dakota, and then it would fit. Growing pecans in those states would not be surprising, and southeastern South Dakota is kind of an extension of that. But it’s a rather abrupt line as we move out of there as to where something grows, where something’s a shrub and where something just never makes it at all.”
Our native black walnut provides a good example. “Black walnut is only native to eastern South Dakota, and really the southeast, though there is one population up in Codington County,” Ball says. “But it will even grow in Harding County. I’ve seen some trees out by Union Center and Bison. The difference is the ones down by Yankton and Vermillion can get a couple feet in diameter and 70 feet tall. The ones up in Bison get about 6 inches in diameter and maybe 20 feet tall. So while they can grow there, they grow very slowly. Down in the southeast, you can grow most of the nut trees that can grow out East, though not always as productively and not as quickly. And you have to really work at it. It doesn’t come easily.”
Any discussion of trees and plants and where they might succeed brings to mind the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, the reference that many gardeners consult before planting. The map is based on a region’s annual average extreme minimum temperatures, with lower zone numbers coinciding with colder temperatures. Much of the northern half of South Dakota lies in Zone 4b (-25 degrees Fahrenheit to -20), though some pockets, including Aberdeen, fall in 4a (-30 to -25). The southern half is largely 5a (-20 to -15), with some areas of 5b (-15 to -10) west of Yankton and around the Black Hills, including Rapid City.
But the map may be irrelevant. Ball says the more important factor for nut trees is the number of frost-free days. “I recommend throwing the zone map out when you get to South Dakota,” Ball says. “The zone maps were first developed in Boston. They started drawing the lines back in about 1927, and they did it without ever coming to South Dakota. The real difficulty is it is based upon only one climatic factor: the annual average extreme temperature, or, essentially, how cold it could get in January. That doesn’t do well here, because what really affects our nut production is our early frost in the fall, late frost in the spring, that cold snap that occurs in April after it’s already been warm or a nice mild fall and then suddenly the temperatures fall to freezing.”
The native range of pecan trees stretches from east Texas and Louisiana up through Oklahoma and Arkansas into portions of Missouri, southern Illinois and southern Indiana. They tend to follow river valleys, extending as far north as the Iowa/Illinois line along the Mississippi River. Those areas are most likely to give pecan trees the minimum 140 frost-free days needed for nut production. In South Dakota, those conditions are most likely to be replicated in the southeast.
Perhaps that’s why the DeBuhr pecan trees have flourished in Elk Point. Three more pecans purchased from Gurney’s Seed and Nursery in Yankton in the mid-1940s tower over Rick Gray’s home just north of Dakota Valley High School near McCook Lake. And Ball knows of a few pecan trees in Sioux Falls that produce nuts every few years. “While we do define areas and which trees will grow and perform well there, no tree has ever read a book,” Ball says. “We always get the outlier, the tree that’s growing where it shouldn’t, yet performing better than anyone would ever expect. And that’s the fun of South Dakota. It’s not like trees grow everywhere, and you really appreciate it when they make it.”
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John Goeden is an agronomist and self-described “collector of cultivars.” When he’s not consulting on corn and soybean hybrids for Channel Seed, he’s tinkering with trees on his 1.8 acres just west of McCook Lake. “My dad was a carpenter, and he loved hardwood trees, particularly walnut,” Goeden says. “That’s probably where it all started. I helped him take out a grove of about 100 walnut trees that were going to get ripped out of the ground and farmed in the late ‘90s. So in some ways, I’m paying for the sins of my father — and myself.”
John Goeden is a self-described “collector of cultivars.” His grove at McCook Lake includes at 25 pecan varieties.
He is particularly interested in pecan and hickory trees. He believes hickories were a prominent part of the river valley landscape until homesteaders began flooding the Plains in the 1860s. “We had a huge mass migration of people from east to west, and they came in wagon trains made of wood and iron,” he says. “When they were making and repairing things, they were all looking for the straightest, hardest, most durable wood they could find, and hickory was it. That’s probably a reason why we don’t have a lot of hickory remnants left. It’s also the best firewood.”
Historically, the Lakota were familiar with hickory from their time living in eastern Minnesota, before they were pushed west. Similarly, many Great Plains tribes had a word for pecan. “That means that they were either trading in pecan or making trips to where they were plentiful, which would be eastern Iowa, Illinois and Missouri,” he says. “They knew pecan.”
Those species command most of his attention. By the summer of 2024, Goeden’s experiments with tree grafting had resulted in at least 25 different pecan cultivars, along with 15 hickory and four English walnut.
Grafting is a tricky process by which two trees are fused together. Scion wood from a donor tree is cut and attached to rootstock so that their corresponding layers of cambium — the main growth tissue located just beneath the bark — align. The graft is then tightly wrapped and kept moist until the tissues begin to grow together.
“We’re probably not going to extend the harvest to Timber Lake,” Ball says. “But they’re trying to improve the quality of the nut. The rule of thumb I always use is the better the nut, the less chance it has of growing here. You’ve really got to work to develop those qualities, and grafting is how we do it. Thank goodness for the hobbyists that are doing that work to help push the limits and extend the higher quality nuts to our area.”
It was a failed graft that led Goeden to learn about the process. “I had planted some English walnuts,” he says. “I had them in the ground nearly 20 years and they produced nuts. Well, if you look at the leaflets you can tell the difference between an English walnut and black walnut. Somewhere along the line — either before I got those trees or perhaps after — the graft died back, and the black walnut took over. That’s what I actually had.”
His interest in grafting led him to the Nebraska Nut Growers Association, an organization that since the early 1970s has worked on grafting nut trees and placing them in the northern landscape. Grafting is particularly beneficial when working with nut trees, because it can dramatically reduce the time it takes to bear fruit. Self-pollinated pecan, oak and walnut trees might not produce nuts for 15 to 20 years. A hickory might take 40 years. “But if you take wood from a pecan tree and attach it to a two-year seedling and it takes, chances are in eight to 10 years you can have a pecan in your hand,” Goeden says. “It takes the memory of that tree it was on and puts it on top of a seedling. It basically cuts the time in half.”
Grafting and selected cross pollination have resulted in dozens of pecan cultivars, each with different nut sizes, bearing times, percentage of nut meat within the shell and cracking ability. Goeden is growing several of them in his backyard. “My goal is to see what we can effectively grow here and what we can’t,” he says. “Pecans and hickories can grow here, and we’ll find out which ones will survive. I’m trying to get the biggest, best nut possible, and the way to do that is to look at a number of cultivars in your own environment.”
Several of Goeden’s grafted cultivars are growing on Darrell and Martha Ausborn’s 10 acres of land west of Yankton overlooking Lewis and Clark Lake. Ausborn is a retired forester who began in private industry in Florida and Alabama. He later transferred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs where he worked as a forester until retirement.
He and Martha, an Alabama native, chose the Yankton County acreage because, Martha says, “he needed a place to play.”
To stay busy in retirement, the couple set their sights on nut trees. In 2008 they planted a batch of grafted seedlings that included English walnut, black walnut, pecan, Chinese chestnut, heartnut and butternut. As they’ve experimented, the Ausborns have added cultivars from various nurseries as well as grafted cultivars from Goeden.
“For pecans, we’re about as far north as you can get,” Darrell says. “The trees do okay, but some years there aren’t enough summer heat days for the nuts to mature. Last year they did mature, and this year they are growing. We’ll see how far they make it into the fall. If we get a cool September or an early frost, the pecans won’t be there. But the rest of the nuts do produce.”
A visit to the Ausborns’ grove in early August found healthy hazelnut trees, the nuts still tightly wrapped within flower-like green husks. “You have to hunt for the hazelnuts,” Martha said as she searched the branches. “I like to pick them because it’s like looking for Easter eggs. They lay up underneath the leaves. The husk has to dry and turn brown, and the nut will be loose. When you can touch it and it will spin, usually the last week in August, that’s when you can harvest.”
Dan DeBuhr enjoys pecan trees his grandmother brought to Elk Point from Texas in the 1960s.
The Ausborns also boasted healthy crops of heartnuts, butternuts, English walnuts and Chinese chestnuts. A Korean pine nut tree looked somewhat out of place but seems to enjoy the Yankton County environment. “That was something out of pure curiosity, just to see if it would grow,” Ausborn says. “In about 30 years you might be able to taste a pine nut, so remember it’s here.”
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Nut harvests are modest. The Ausborns spend fall days using homemade equipment to gather, wash and shell their assortment of nuts. Goeden shares his pecans and other nuts with friends and family. They gather every winter with the Nebraska Nut Growers Association for an annual nut evaluation that measures each nut’s size, cracking ability, flavor and quality and quantity of nutmeat. The results help them determine what cultivars are working.
They are also willing to help others. “Without the knowledge and expertise of the Nebraska Nut Growers Association, Darrell and I wouldn’t have had the success that we’ve had,” Goeden says. “Grafting nut trees is an fading art that needs to be passed from one generation to the next in order to push yield potential.”
People like Goeden and the Ausborns will never grow rich from nut production. Ball says a commercial operation in South Dakota is likely not viable. Still, with the right trees, bags of South Dakota-grown hazelnuts or pecans could show up at farmers’ markets and craft fairs. “It’s kind of like farming has gone,” Ball says. “When I was a kid, a family of five could live on a 140-acre mixed farm. Now that’s a hobby farm. Nut production is the same way. It’s hard to get the scale to where you’re actually able to make a living out of it as opposed to supplementing your income. But for a supplement, yes, you can have a hobby that actually pays.”
Dan DeBuhr’s grandmother likely never thought of her tiny pecan trees as a profitable side hustle, but she loved all trees and encouraged her grandson to care for them long after she was gone. “My grandma told me, ‘I’ll never be able to see the pecans, but if you stay here long enough, you probably will,’” DeBuhr recalls. “‘Do me a favor,’ she said. ‘When the trees get big, take a chair on the hottest day, when there’s no wind, and go sit under the trees, because they’ll talk to you.’
“One day in July I was out here working, and it was so hot, no air. So I got a chair and put it right between those trees. All of sudden the leaves were just shaking. That’s what she meant by talking.”
Perhaps they were saying they belong here after all.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
Yankton photographer Dave Tunge’s aerial view of the delta shows its complex web of channels.
By Katie Hunhoff
Boaters and adventurers often shy away from the shallow delta that is overtaking the Missouri River by Springfield in southeast South Dakota.
They worry about snags and stumps in the water. The ever-changing channel is confusing. Dozens of sandbars create a maze, and in many places the swamp grass is 10 feet high, making it impossible to see the hills of the shoreline that could provide bearings. Water depths vary from 12 feet to less than a foot.
Snakes, snapping turtles and other critters add to the mystique of a place like nowhere else in the American West.
We wouldn’t explore the delta with just anyone, but Greg Stockholm seemed reliable. Stockholm knows and loves the rivers of America. The tall, cheerful 67-year-old has boated much of the Missouri and Mississippi, as well as the Ohio and numerous other lakes and waterways.
But he’s especially at home on the delta. He boated the Missouri with his dad as a boy, when the reservoir known as Lewis and Clark Lake was sparkly new. Water then extended from shore to shore — more than a mile wide and deep enough for him and his friends to experiment with five-man pyramids on water skis. In 1977 he was skiing with a kite on Lake Poinsett when it sailed skyward and dropped him hard on the water. He was hospitalized for eight weeks, but he was back in a boat almost before his injuries healed.
As a youth, Stockholm watched his father, Alfred, build a 21-foot cabin cruiser. His earliest memories are of taking the wheel of the cruiser at age 4. In 2022 he began construction of a 72-foot sailboat that he hopes to launch near Sioux City, Iowa. His plan is to motor the boat to the ocean, raise its 80-foot mainsail and set off across the Atlantic.
Springfield river rat Greg Stockholm guided South Dakota Magazine publisher Katie Hunhoff through the delta.
Stockholm has operated a body shop for most of his adult life. In his spare time — between fixing cars and building the big sailboat — he still found time to restore a classic 1975 Tahiti jet boat with a 389-inch Pontiac engine.
“Half the boats around Springfield never get in the water here,” he says, because the owners are leery of the delta. We climb aboard the Tahiti at the boat docks on the east side of town. The big engine rattles to life, sending vibrations throughout the little black craft.
Just as we leave the docks and enter the delta, Stockholm points to the Eagle depth finder below the steering wheel of the Tahiti. It reads 6 feet.
“We’re in the main channel right here,” he says.
But then we enter a water alley between two sandbars and the big engine sputters. The propellor has hit sand. The Eagle says we are in a foot of water.
It’s not a problem. Stockholm shifts to “R” and we reverse into a few feet of water.
We’d imagined a delta of grassy sandbars with frogs, toads, crawdads, crabs, flying insects and patches of brackish mud. That’s not the South Dakota delta.
The water seems clean and fresh and there is little mud. It’s mostly sand below the water and on the islands or sandbars. Growing on nearly all the sand is a tall perennial grass called phragmites, an invasive species that is spreading to lakes and wetlands throughout eastern South Dakota. Unfortunately, it creates a dense, nearly impenetrable jungle that deer and other wildlife try to avoid. Phragmites even affects fish because the massive roots dry the marshland and reduce habitat for minnows, frogs and other small creatures.
Stockholm says the U.S. Corps of Engineers, overseer of the Missouri River valley, sends helicopters with herbicide sprayers to attack the phragmites infestation in the Springfield delta. Once the reeds die and turn white, the federal authorities sometimes burn the sandbars. Their goal is to eliminate all vegetation on the sandbars so the endangered piping plover will have better nesting conditions.
It would be nice if the herbicide, which has been approved for aquatic use by the EPA, would enable cattails, Russian olives and wild grasses to regain a foothold, but on our trip through the maze it appeared that the phragmites are winning the war with the Corps.
We saw few signs of wildlife. A lone deer peeked out of the reeds. A massive old snapping turtle, 2 feet in diameter, balanced on a stump in the water.
Stockholm says the river has quieted in his lifetime. “I remember lying awake in bed in our house in town and hearing the honking of geese all night long,” he says.
The throaty baritone of bullfrogs was a regular sound of summer. Beavers, muskrats and other wildlife added to the cacophony of the river. On our outing, there was nary a sound when Stockholm shut down the Pontiac engine.
Still, he says, this is a wild place. “The river is alive. You can never outguess it. It’s always changing, and it probably always will be.”
Two main channels of the old river can be found in the delta, one on the South Dakota side and another below the yellow chalkstone bluffs of Nebraska.
Stockholm sped up the Tahiti for a 7-mile zig-zag journey southwest on the river to the little fishing village of Running Water. Phragmites are there, too, lining the shore by the boat docks. Just beyond Running Water is the Standing Bear Bridge, a 3,000-foot crossing that gives motorists an expansive view of the delta.
West of Running Water is the town of Niobrara, Nebraska, and the mouth of the Niobrara River, which brings several million tons of sediment into Lewis and Clark Lake every year — creating the unusual delta that is slowly creeping eastward. Experts predict that the grassy delta — with its phragmites-laden sandbars — could reach Gavins Point Dam at Yankton if an affordable solution isn’t found.
The sediment is considered a scourge in South Dakota and Nebraska. Ironically, it is badly needed in the Gulf of Mexico where the coastline is disappearing due to erosion and rising sea levels. Before the six dams were built on the Missouri River in the 1940s and 1950s, sediment from the 2,341-mile Missouri — North America’s longest river — flowed unimpeded to the Gulf.
Now it lays above Gavins Point Dam.
Upon reaching the Standing Bear Bridge, Stockholm steered the Tahiti northeast and motored back toward Springfield. Moving with the current, the big motor had easy work. The sun was now at our backs and setting low over the delta. Blue herons began to show up along the shore. Sometimes, the graceful birds craned their long necks and stared. Just one other boat was on the water that night, so we were a rare sight. A curious crane took flight and followed us down the river.
The water widens just west of the Chief Standing Bear Bridge.
“Sometimes I think they want to race the boat,” grinned Stockholm.
Other waterfowl appeared at sunset. A small flock of Canada geese flew in formation from the east.
When we arrived at Springfield, where we’d begun, Stockholm asked if we wanted to see where the delta ends and “the lake begins.” Of course, we did.
So we traveled east just a few miles — past another fishing village known as Apple Tree. A flock of perhaps 50 big white pelicans sat on a shallow ledge.
Stockholm pointed to the Nebraska shoreline, about a mile and a half away, and said he’s quite sure we could walk there. “I doubt the water is more than waist high all the way across.”
If the sediment continues to fill the lake, scientists say the delta will extend all the way to the Yankton dam, 15 miles away. The tallgrass phragmites will surely follow.
We rounded a sandbar and there was open water as far as we could see to the east — a fresh sight after spending hours in the claustrophobic delta.
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.
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.
