Category: columns-culture

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A Decade of State-U

By Christian Begeman

Just under decade ago, on an overcast and cool November afternoon, I got into a small two-seater airplane, camera in hand, and lifted off for a memorable and unique photo opportunity. Drones with cameras were not quite a thing yet, so to capture aerials of the renewed SDSU-USD rivalry football game — on hold for nearly a decade as each school transitioned from Division II to Division I — I was obliged to open the side window while the pilot circled the stadium and occasionally dipped the left wing so I could lean my lens out into the air and start snapping. I found myself reminiscing about this experience during halftime of this year’s rivalry game in Brookings, a 28-3 Jackrabbit victory on October 8. Ten years has seen a lot of change, but much remains the same.

This game always draws a crowd, but this year’s nearly set a record. The 19,332 people who packed Dana J. Dykhouse Stadium created the second largest crowd ever assembled in the Mount Rushmore State to watch a football game. Since the rivalry was renewed, I’ve attended and recorded media at all but three of the games. Since 2012, both stadiums have undergone major renovations and upgrades, resulting in larger capacity, better lighting and bigger scoreboards, all of which make this game an even better experience.

Over the last decade, these games have also showcased talented players who have gone on to the NFL. SDSU tight end Dallas Goedert is now with the Philadelphia Eagles. USD quarterback Chris Streveler won a Canadian Football League championship and now plays on the New York Jets practice squad. I also remember admiring the athletic prowess of SDSU running back Zach Zenner in 2012; he subsequently played with the Detroit Lions. As for memorable plays, just last year we witnessed a Hail Mary for the ages inside the DakotaDome that propelled USD to an upset victory and made the rounds on national TV and social media.

Every game of this magnitude is fun to work, but the meeting that really stands out happened on a cold and bitter day in November of 2018. The temperature topped out at 16 degrees before kickoff and steadily declined throughout the game. The 10-mile-an-hour breeze cut right through my multiple layers of clothing by the second quarter, but the light was gorgeous. The cold made every exhaled breath a misty work of art, and the icy atmosphere added elements in the air around the players. It is ironic that the most physically trying day of photographing this series was also the best day to have a camera. That said, I left sometime in the latter half of the third quarter. The sun had set behind the stadium, so I lost the good light … as well as the feeling in my fingers.

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.

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Tournament Time

By Christian Begeman

This column has been almost exclusively dedicated to outdoor and nature related photography. This month that changes. I have good reason to do this. First, I haven’t been able to get out into the great wide open much over the last month and second, I HAVE been able to get back into a couple of our premiere conference basketball championships held in Sioux Falls and fire off thousands of photos. Part of my job at Midco is to support the Midco Sports crew and one of my favorite aspects of this is to document the team pulling off their superb live coverage of both the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Tournament and the Summit League Conference Tournament. The team pulls out all the stops for this coverage including upwards of 30 staff each session, a pre-game and post-game show, extra cameras (like the one attached to a 24-foot jib) and special graphics.

In addition to shooting time lapses of the venues to be used on air and behind the scenes photos and video of the hard-working crew, I also get to capture action photos to support player shot charts used on air and Midco Sports’ overall social media presence.

From my grade school days through college, basketball was first and foremost on my mind. As soon as I couldn’t play anymore, I started learning to take action photos. When I lived in Mitchell in the 2000s, I started a side hustle before side hustles were a thing, taking photos of high school athletics and providing images to parents who would rather enjoy the game than bother with pictures. From that gig, I learned all about wrestling, hockey, volleyball and soccer, all sports of which I had very little knowledge. But my first passion has always been, and likely always will be, basketball.

Over the years, I have learned a few pointers to get better action imagery. First, bench celebration shots usually make the best photos. They are fun, full of passion or angst and really tell a story, particularly the bigger the game gets. Generally, a photographer tends to think that the better action photo is getting as close to the action as possible. I fall into that rut as well. However, I’ve often had to relearn that shooting wider, particularly in the biggest games, tends to be the way to go. For example, late in the Summit League Championship game between North Dakota State University and South Dakota State University, Zeke Mayo, a true freshman for SDSU, drove baseline and floated a high arcing jumper over the defense. The Jacks were up by one and needed to score to stave off a hard-fought Bison run. When shooting this play, I stayed wide enough to see the bench about to react and the crowd watching intently to see if the bucket would go in. It did, by the way, but capturing that frozen moment of intense anticipation is something that helps cement why we love the drama of basketball around these parts come March. I’m already excited to do it again next year.

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.

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“Giants” is a South Dakota Classic

By John Andrews

Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth was inspired in part by the experiences of his father-in-law, a Norwegian immigrant.

Fall always puts me in a literary mood, perhaps because the South Dakota Festival of Books is held in late September or early October. I relish the opportunity to listen to writers discuss their books and always leave inspired to work on new projects.

Last year, as we found ourselves sticking close to home due to the uncertainty of the pandemic unfolding around us, I had time to revisit some of my favorite South Dakota books. I compiled a top 10 list for our November/December 2020 issue, thinking our isolating and socially distancing readers might be searching for ways to occupy their time.

I was reminded of wonderful books like Buffalo for the Broken Heart, the story of Dan O’Brien’s transformation of his West River cattle ranch to buffalo. David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard brilliantly retells the tragic story of the 1888 storm that killed more than 200 people, many of them students trying to find their way home through the blinding snow.

My list was not a ranking, but if it had been I wouldn’t think twice about placing Ole R¯lvaag’s Giants in the Earth at the top. A friend told me that several years ago she convinced her brother to read Giants in the Earth.”He was so mad,” she said of his reaction upon finishing.

I completely understood.

I still get a little angry when I think of the conclusion to R¯lvaag’s”saga of the prairie.” I won’t spoil it, but it is heartbreaking.

Giants (1927) tells the story of four Norwegian families who establish a small community along Spring Creek in southeastern Dakota Territory in 1873. They confront hardships that threaten to destroy their livelihoods: blizzards, locusts and the loneliness that comes with leaving your homeland thousands of miles away — knowing you’ll never return — and entering a place completely deserted, where”there isn’t even a thing that one can hide behind,” in the words of Beret, one of the main characters.

I was drawn to Giants because I’ve always been curious to know more about my great-grandparents’ homesteading experience. They arrived in Dakota Territory in 1882 and were among the 800,000 Norwegians who emigrated to North America between 1825 and 1925. Reading the scenes in R¯lvaag’s novel conjured countless questions I wish I could ask: Did you only eat porridge? Did anyone try to jump your claim? How close were your nearest neighbors? What did it feel like to hold your first church service?

Their real-life experiences may not have strayed far from the novel. Many of the stories are based on conversations R¯lvaag had with his father-in-law, Andrew Berdahl, who settled in northeastern Minnehaha County in 1873. His was one of eight families that made the journey in 11 covered wagons from Fillmore County in Minnesota to the spot along Slipup Creek about 8 miles west of Garretson.

The opening pages of Giants depict the scene as Per Hansa, Beret and their three children cross into Dakota Territory, traversing chest high prairie grass that has never seen a plow. R¯lvaag describes the sound of the wind rustling through the tall and spindly stems.”Tish-ah, tish-ah.” During summer, I open the window of my home office. Across the road is a field of corn, nearly 7 feet tall.”Tish-ah” it says, as the breeze trickles through the leaves, and I think of Giants and the shared experiences of thousands of our ancestors.

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A Tradition of Stewardship

By Michael Zimny

On a Sunday in June, a group of former Boy Scouts and troop leaders gathered at an austere grave site, hidden in a corner of Badlands National Park, and commemorated the interred with a Psalm reading and a chorus of”The Old Rugged Cross.”

The grave is where the Tyree family — who homesteaded in the Tyree Basin before it became incorporated into a national park — buried Eugene Tyree, who lived only a few hours after his birth in 1916. His twin brother Howard survived.

The Tyrees migrated to this arid landscape from West Virginia in 1911. James Tyree, son of Howard, recalls stories his father told him of how they lived here. “They attempted to do a little bit of everything,” he says. “They captured wild horses and broke them, sold them to the military. They did some work for the railroad. Back then they used to have problems with the coal-fired trains starting fires on either side of the track. They would have people that would take a big drag line, like a farming disk — I heard they were twenty or twenty-five feet wide, and they were usually pulled by a six or eight horse team — they would go out to a certain point on the railroad line and drive till the end of the day. Then at the end of the second or third day, they crossed the tracks again and came home the next day.”

Howard Tyree was the youngest of seven children. At some point, the family moved closer to the town of Conata. “I was told that Conata was a place where they had early rodeos, that were just out in the plains, in the open,” James Tyree recalls. “They didn’t have the big bleachers and gates and stuff like that. My dad was quite a horseman. He was kind of a horse whisperer. There never was a horse that he couldn’t train. In the rodeo he did the bulldogging, bronc riding, bull riding, calf roping, whatever.

“He got disqualified one year out there from calf roping. He had adapted a method of throwing his rope underhanded and he could catch three feet in one loop, yank him up. And then when the calf was in the air, he’d throw two half hitches overhand and tie the knot. So he never got off his horse. He was disqualified for that, which was rather unique.”

Eventually the family moved to Minneapolis. Howard Tyree and the other Tyree brothers enlisted in the service (Howard in the Air Force) during World War II. Later, Howard ran a small ranch in Golden Valley, Minnesota, where James was raised.

In 1954, Howard Tyree drove his family out to the old homestead and visited the grave site of his twin brother, Eugene, marked only by a pile of rocks. “He took a bottle,” James says, “and he wrote a note identifying the site and set it in the pile of rocks. Sometime later the Boy Scouts came along and they found the grave site and they contacted my dad.”

Bill Tines was part of that scout troop, based in Wasta. “The Scout leader was George ‘Junior’ Gunn. His dad had homesteaded not very far from the Tyree grave and Junior knew about the grave. And somehow our Scout leaders decided that’d be a good project for us to fix up his grave. So probably in the late fifties or so we went down and we found the grave and we put the posts up and the cross and everything.”

“My dad and [his brother] Roy went up there for that,” James Tyree recalls. “And a few years later, when I was older, they had a reunion out there from the group that took care of the grave site. My dad, Roy and I went out there, around 1960, and we rode horseback in there and spent a few days out there.”

Over the years, Scouts became troop leaders. Wasta could no longer support Troop 30. Bill Tines moved to New Underwood and led the Troop there. The tradition of stewardship over the infant’s grave continued, as did the relationship with the Tyrees.

When Howard Tyree passed away in 2007, James Tyree, accompanied by his son Danton, honored his request to scatter his ashes at the site of his twin brother’s grave. Bill Tines and several generations of Scouts joined the family at the memorial.

Last year, Sioux Falls resident Lance Smith was running the unmarked Sage Creek Wilderness Loop in the Badlands when he came across the lone grave site. He made it a personal mission to do some maintenance and set out to contact the Tyree family.

In May, Smith and some other volunteers, accompanied by Danton Tyree, Bill Tines and some former Scouts, made the trip to repair the fence — which bison use as a scratching post — around the site. Many of them returned for the reunion and memorial service, more than 60 years after Junior Gunn decided to improve upon the Coke bottle and note left by Howard Tyree.

“They always say things happen and you wonder, ‘Lord, why do you do this?'” Tines says. “I’m sure when that little baby died, they thought, ‘Lord, why do you do this?’ Well, a hundred years later, there’s people going down to take care of that grave. We’d like some of these young kids from these families that have been down there to kind of take it over and keep it going. There’s four generations in my family that have gone down there to the grave and took care of it.”

“There’s so much I don’t know, or didn’t know, about my grandfather and his growing up that this all kind of brought up,” says Danton Tyree.”So hearing stories with the Scouts has been fun, and hearing those things from my dad specifically. Sometimes you don’t start thinking about those things until they’re gone.”

“Not very many people have their name on a map, where there’s significance to the land, from your ancestors. There’s not a lot of people that can have that connection. And for me it was kind of lost. Then when Lance came around, he just completely reinvigorated the whole thing for our family. There’s a lot of grave sites out there. And for this one, for some reason, to draw the interest that it has, it has certainly benefited me and my family.”

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Bridges to History

By John Andrews

John Timm as Governor Arthur Mellette.

No South Dakotan alive today shook the hand of our first governor, Arthur Mellette, or stood with Valentine McGillycuddy atop Black Elk Peak. But we can still gain insight into the men and women who helped shape our state through the people who study and portray them today as historical re-enactors.

About five years ago, I asked several re-enactors for their favorite stories about the characters they have come to know so well. Here are two anecdotes that have stayed with me since the story appeared in our January/February 2017 issue, mostly because of the implications they may have had on our state’s history.

John Timm began performing as Arthur Mellette in 2005 after a historian at the Mellette House in Watertown suggested his facial features closely resembled those of the former governor, who served from 1889 to 1893.

One day, Mellette received a letter from a young man who had just graduated from law school in Mellette’s home state of Indiana. The new lawyer was inquiring about business prospects in Dakota Territory. Mellette said he could do well here and invited him to stay at the Mellette home in Watertown.

That Fourth of July, Mellette was invited to give a speech in Clark, about 30 miles west. He was unable to attend, so he asked the young lawyer to go make a speech in his place.”There was a big demand for lawyers at the time with all the homesteading and claim jumping, so the people in Clark asked him to stay,” Timm told us.”One night a terrible storm came through, probably a tornado, and the town’s sewage got mixed with the fresh water supply, setting off this great plague of cholera. As they cleaned up the town, no one remembered seeing their new attorney for quite some time. They went to his law office and sure enough, there he was — and more dead than alive.

“They sent a telegram to Mellette in Watertown that it looked like he wasn’t going to survive. Mellette took the train to Clark and brought him back in a boxcar, and he notified the young man’s family in Indiana. His dad came out by train, and between him and Mellette they nursed him back to health until he was well enough to go back to Indiana to finish his recovery.

“After he recuperated, he came back to Clark to practice law. Eventually he sent for the girl who would become his wife. Of course, we know that Mellette later became South Dakota’s first governor, and the young man he helped to save, Sam Elrod, became South Dakota’s fifth governor.”

In Rapid City, Wayne Gilbert portrayed Valentine McGillycuddy for several years through a partnership with Historic Rapid City, a preservation organization currently restoring the McGillycuddy House. McGillycuddy was the physician who tended Crazy Horse’s mortal wounds at Fort Robinson in 1877. He was among the first white men to climb Black Elk Peak in 1875 (his ashes are interred atop the mountain), was president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and later mayor of Rapid City.

McGillycuddy also served as Indian agent on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1880s, the decade before the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.”He quarreled frequently with Red Cloud because McGillycuddy was trying — for good or ill — to enforce the government’s policy that the Lakota needed to be turned into farmers,” Gilbert said.”But despite that, he really was quite sympathetic to, if not aligned with, Native practices, cultures and beliefs, and at the very least tolerant of them and not willing to discourage them.

“McGillycuddy was ultimately relieved of his duties, and his replacement was new to Native culture. So when the Ghost Dance movement began he was terrified, and asked that the Army be brought to Pine Ridge. McGillycuddy was strongly against that. He said, ‘When the Seventh Day Adventists put on ascension robes and went into the mountains to await the second coming of Jesus, we didn’t call out the Army. So we shouldn’t call out the Army because these Native people are putting on ghost shirts and practicing their religion.’

“He met with Red Cloud and others and they asked him to intervene, but he told them his words didn’t have the power they once did. He did what he could, but it wasn’t enough. And it was at that point that Red Cloud said, ‘You and I never got along, but I can see now that you may have been right. You are wasicu wakan,’ loosely translated as the Holy White Man.

“Later, state historian Doane Robinson said that had McGillycuddy been the agent, or had his advice been followed, the Wounded Knee Massacre would not have occurred.”

A different governor? No Wounded Knee? We’ll never know what South Dakota might look like had either of those scenarios played out, but thanks to the re-enactors who preserve stories like these we’ll always have food for historical thought.

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Forever Close to Home

By John Andrews

You could always hear his voice above the crowd.

Every Fourth of July, hundreds of people come to Memorial Park in Lake Norden to cap off the city’s Independence Day celebration with an amateur baseball game and fireworks. It’s a popular time for school and family reunions, so people who grew up in Lake Norden often find their way back. The ball game is a good time to catch up if you missed the pork barbecue the night before, so there’s a constant buzz of conversation humming throughout the park as the game is played.

Mel Antonen

Mel Antonen’s voice always stood out. He’d grown up in a house right across the street from the ballpark and did every job imaginable as his father, Ray, managed the Lake Norden Lakers: groundskeeping, announcing, scorekeeping and, eventually, playing. It was small town baseball that launched him on his career as a journalist covering Major League Baseball for USA Today, Sports Illustrated and, most recently, Sirius Radio and Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in Washington, D.C. But no matter what major league city he found himself in, or what superstar he was interviewing, his thoughts were never far from Lake Norden. He came back on the Fourth of July as often as he could; it pained him to miss even a single year. He sometimes regaled friends with stories from his reporting, but more often than not they relived their own days on the diamond or reminisced about the colorful characters they all remembered. He stayed connected to Lake Norden, and in doing so became a mentor to many of us who grew up there.

Antonen died on January 30 at age 64. For 383 days, he battled a rare autoimmune disease called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) that became compounded by COVID-19 and lymphoma, a combination so unlikely that doctors told him he was probably the only person in world battling all three at once.

Antonen on the mound in Lake Norden.

As a kid growing up in Lake Norden, I loved it when Mel came home because I felt like it gave me an inside connection to the world of professional baseball. I’d ask about my perennially hapless Chicago Cubs, and he’d share some nugget he’d gotten at the winter meetings or through interviews. We’d talk about new ideas for exhibits inside the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame, which Ray was instrumental in bringing to Lake Norden and which remained a passion project for Mel.

Our relationship changed in the summer of 2007. I had finished school and was trying to figure out if more education was in my future or if I needed to find a job. With a wife and two kids, my sensibilities pulled me toward employment, so I brought my resume and a few writing samples to the South Dakota Magazine office.

Bernie Hunhoff told me they didn’t have a need for a writer, but there was a marketing position open and that he’d review my materials and get back to me. About a week later he called and offered me the job.

I knew that I probably wasn’t cut out for marketing, but this was South Dakota Magazine. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I needed advice. So I called Mel, who told me as politely as he possibly could that I would be an idiot if I didn’t take it. The marketing thing fizzled out, as I had suspected, but nearly 14 years later I’m still here, and I have Mel to thank, at least in part. I know he was there for others, too.

Suddenly I was working with Mel, which never felt quite right. Me, editing the guy who’d spent two decades at USA Today? I wasn’t sure about that.

He was always emailing me with story ideas. Even though his job took him to major league baseball parks around the country and interviews with the sport’s leading stars, he never stopped thinking about the next South Dakota baseball story he wanted to write.

The first major feature of his that I edited was about six longtime amateur baseball managers in South Dakota, and the dedication that it takes from them to keep a team going. We headlined it”Love for the Game” because it really seemed to capture the passion they all had for small-town baseball, but looking back I think it clearly reflected the passion of the writer just as much.

Brothers Rusty (left) and Mel Antonen as Lake Norden Lakers.

He worked through his illness, not only for his regular job on the East Coast but on pieces for South Dakota Magazine. Just last fall he finished a story that had long been discussed around Lake Norden but never written down. I’d grown up hearing about the time the great pitcher Satchel Paige came to Lake Norden on a barnstorming tour. The whole town was abuzz for the game, but it quickly turned to anxiousness when the time for the first pitch arrived and Satchel was nowhere to be found. Turns out that Satchel ran into two boys (one of whom happens to be my cousin) and they all went fishing together south of town. The rest of the story is in our September/October 2020 issue.

Sometimes Mel would email just to reminisce about playing baseball in Lake Norden. One day we got on the subject of the state amateur tournament. He told me he hit a double in his first state tournament at-bat in Madison.”I could hear Danny Olson’s play-by-play voice when I got to the plate. My knees were shaking,” he said. “I also remember striking out three or four times versus Dave Gassman of Canova in the quarterfinal game.”

Then there was the year the hometown Lakers lost to Eureka 6-5 in the semifinal game.”The game ended when manager Dale Jacobsen had our best base stealer, Mike Murphy, try to steal second with two outs in the ninth inning. He was out on a close call, and Jake argued and argued, following the umpire all the way to his car. Jake was still arguing as the umpire was taking off his equipment and putting it into the trunk.

“Chad Lavin, Steve Brown and I were pick-up players from Bryant’s Legion team. I didn’t play, but I’ll never forget the sinking feeling that goes with a season that ended like that.”

One day, he wrote to tell me about an amazing South Dakota connection he’d experienced in Washington, D.C.”I have been going to breakfast at a dive bar on the Hill for a long time,” he said.”The other day, I was there meeting a friend. The friend was late, and I ended up talking to one of the waitresses about baseball. She started talking about how her dad played ‘amateur baseball,’ but didn’t tell me where.

“‘You wouldn’t know where,’ she said.

Antonen and his son Emmett at the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

“But we continued to talk. I found out she was from Arlington, and her dad was Hall of Fame pitcher Chuck Petersen. She’s donated money to the Hall. Her dad and my dad were close friends, teammates, rivals.

“I would have never continued the conversation had she not said, ‘amateur baseball,’ which is, in my mind, is a phrase that you only hear in South Dakota.”

And, for much of the last year, there were health updates.”Survived one near death disease and COVID-19 is next to be knocked out,” he wrote last April 23 with the hashtag #finntough, ever proud of his Finnish heritage.

“I am in hospital, but I am feeling fixed and should be able to go home today,” he wrote a month later, while double checking details of the Satchel Paige story.

“Still battling HLH, but we hope to have it in remission by the end of November,” he said in the last message I ever received from him three months ago. But in the end the diseases proved too much for even a tough old Finlander from Lake Norden.

One of my favorite stories about Mel came from an interview he did with Cal Ripken, Jr., the longtime shortstop of the Baltimore Orioles and the holder of baseball’s longest consecutive games played record at 2,632. Mel asked Ripken about playing in Baltimore and what made it different from other major markets like New York and Boston. Did he ever think about playing somewhere else?”Mel,” Ripken said,”you just don’t understand what it’s like to play baseball in a small town.”

Mel knew it better than the Iron Man ever would have realized. It’s what brought him back every Fourth of July. He stayed connected to Lake Norden and to South Dakota, the people and the stories, and we’re all richer for it.

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South Dakota’s Spooky Side

By John Andrews

It seems every town in South Dakota has a ramshackle old house that people believe to be haunted. In Lake Norden, it was just down the street from my house. It was small and had long been abandoned. It also had what looked like iron bars on one of the windows, which I’m sure fed the legends that older kids shared with us. I never ventured very close to it, and I always gave it a sidelong glance whenever I walked past on the street.

South Dakota boasts plenty of spooky places, where voices moan in the twilight and things go bump in the night. Several years ago, we spoke to Chris Hull about strange goings-on at Sica Hollow State Park near Sisseton. Hull is a Sisseton native who works for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks. Six generations of his family have lived around Sica Hollow, a beautiful woodland known for both spectacular fall foliage and haunting legends that date back to its very first Native American inhabitants, who christened the forest”sica” (bad, or evil). Visitors have reported hearing phantom drumbeats in the distance, and seeing bubbling bogs brimming with crimson-tinted water.

Hull and some friends planned to camp in the hollow one night. One member of the party returned home to retrieve a few forgotten supplies.”We were hiking and heard him yell from down in the hollow,” Hull recalled.”He must have yelled five or six times. We wondered if his truck had gotten stuck and he had started walking.”

Hull’s group walked to the bottom of the hollow, but their friend was nowhere to be found. They returned the campsite just as he returned.”He said he was at home, and he had all the sleeping bags and things he’d gone to get.”

Guests and employees at the Bullock Hotel in Deadwood have long reported spooky encounters. The hotel is said to have been haunted ever since its namesake, Seth Bullock, died in Room 211 in 1919. A Sioux Falls television crew visited the Bullock for a Halloween story and listened intently, albeit skeptically, to the staff’s stories. Then, while in the basement, the reporter heard a woman laughing good-naturedly in her ear. But when she turned around, there was no one there. Later, when they reviewed the videotape, the reporter’s voice was the only clearly audible sound — other than unexplained static at the precise moment the reporter heard the mysterious laughter.

We’ve also written about an eerie stretch of 424th Street between Carthage and Fedora that locals call Spooklight Road. For years, people living along that gravel road have reported seeing the bright headlights of a vehicle heading north at night. As they waited for the vehicle to pass their farmsteads, nothing ever showed up. One local legend says the light is the lantern from a wagon train of settlers that got caught in a blizzard and died.

If you’re feeling brave, take a friend and explore one of South Dakota’s spooky places this Halloween season. My only advice is to keep a safe distance.

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Growing Something Special

By John Andrews

It’s October, which means the hops have been cut and baled, the aronia berries shaken from their bushes and frozen and the flax swathed. No, agriculture isn’t all corn and beans in South Dakota.

In the September/October issue of South Dakota Magazine, we featured a handful of farmers who grow more unique crops. They include ancient grains, the tiny cones that give beer its flavor and perhaps the healthiest berries on the planet.

Jeff and Jolene Stewart initially thought chokecherries were growing on their farm in Idaho, but after investigating they discovered the tiny fruits were aronia berries. When they moved to a farm near Wagner in Charles Mix County, they planted a row in a windbreak just to see what would happen. The shrubs flourished. The Stewarts learned more about the powerful aronia berries, explored marketing and sales opportunities and now tend about 10 acres.

Aronia berries contain the highest antioxidant levels of any known cultivated berry or fruit. They are rich in anthocyanins, which give them a dark purple color and also promote joint health and improve circulation. A handful of aronia berries a day has also been known to help digestion and protect the liver from chemical damage.

Just a couple counties to the east on the edge of Yankton, Ryan Heine and his wife, Michelle Donner, grow 5 acres of hops on their 6th Meridian Hops Farm. Heine grew hops to use in home brewing when they lived in the Omaha suburbs, but when he and Michelle decided to give their children the rural life they had enjoyed (both grew up in northeastern Nebraska, just across the Missouri River) he greatly expanded his hops crop.

Hops grow as cones that are stripped from the plant, dried, baled and frozen. During late fall or early winter, the hops are milled into a powder and pressed into pellets, which are then sold to brewers throughout the Midwest. Their alpha acids act as bittering agents, used to help balance the sugary sweetness of the wort during brewing. Their natural antibacterial properties help reduce the chance of beer spoilage and contamination. They also impart a wide range of aromatics. More than 250 essential oils are found in hops, which give beers flavors such as citrus, pine, melon or stone fruit. 6th Meridian’s signature hop is the Dakota Challenger, a key ingredient in the West Side Park IPA brewed at Ben’s Brewing Company in Yankton.

In Clark County, Gene and Wanda Bethke were looking for a way to diversify their 1,200-acre corn and soybean farm, so about 15 years ago they tried flax.”Flax used to be grown on a regular basis around here, but it wasn’t grown for the seed,” Wanda told us.”It was grown for the straw. They made cigarette paper and different things out of the flax straw. Now we don’t do anything with the straw anymore.”

Flax is among the world’s oldest crops. It was cultivated as early as 3,000 BC. More modern research has revealed that flaxseed is rich in the plant form of omega-3 fatty acids called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), which has been shown to be heart-healthy. Flaxseed is also high in fiber and lignans, an antioxidant.

The Bethkes built their own packaging facility and sell flaxseed through their business, Purity Seeds USA.

Our feature also included garlic, flower and mushroom farmers who each add to South Dakota’s agricultural economy in their own colorful way. And there are no doubt many others who are working the soil and making a living by growing something special.

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The Windmill Man

By Michael Zimny

Mike Moeller has a unique skill set. Those iconic Aermotor windmills that populate the Plains, often in dilapidated, unworking condition? He can fix them. He can disassemble them, repair broken parts or fabricate new ones, and make them spin again.

For centuries, wind has been used for power. In Europe, wind was historically harnessed by grain mills. That tradition continued in America, though the need for water is what drove the proliferation of windmills across the American prairie.

According to T. Lindsay Baker’s A Field Guide to American Windmills, the first commercially successful American windmill was invented by Daniel Halladay of Marlboro, Vermont in 1854.

In 1863, the Halladay Wind Mill Company was bought out and manufacturing operations were moved to Batavia, Illinois. The market was in the Midwest, where fewer farms had access to water. Railroads, which used wind power to pump water for their steam locomotives, were another major customer.

The early commercial windmills were made with wooden blades, at first featuring larger, paddle-shaped blades, but designs quickly trended toward more numerous, thinner, rim-fixed blades. (Some farmers constructed their own windmills by hand, often utilizing designs much different than those commercially available.)

The manufacture of all-metal mills began in the 1870s and accelerated in tandem with the American steel industry. At the turn of the century, there were dozens of major windmill manufacturers in operation, mostly in the Midwest, making machines that many ordinary farmers could afford. Companies invested in beautifully drawn advertisements and traveling salesmen. Others sold their wares through mail order catalogues.

The Aermotor, introduced in 1888, was designed by Thomas Perry, who had experimented extensively with different models while working for the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company, the same concern that bought out Daniel Halladay. Aermotor billed its wind machines as more efficient and buyers apparently agreed. The company dominated the industry by the 1890s, and its logo is still recognizable on wind vanes of old mills, working or not, around South Dakota and beyond.

When Mike Moeller started working for Dakota Windmill, based in Hurley, most farm communities had electricity and no longer needed wind power to pump water.

But there are areas in Texas and the Nebraska Sandhills where ranchers are still drilling new wells and installing wind-powered pumps. Dakota Windmill sells components and services to the well drillers who do this work.

Moeller says that in South Dakota, in the 1990s, “People were selling their windmills left and right … cheap too. They couldn’t give them away sometimes. At that time, we’d go and take these down and sell them in Nebraska or Texas.”

When they couldn’t find working parts they needed, they’d rebuild broken parts or machine new ones.

In recent years, some people began to rediscover the aesthetic appeal of a working (spinning) windmill, even if it doesn’t power anything. Now Moeller spends some of his summers outside the shop, repairing or installing Aermotor windmills in the same areas where he used to buy them for scrap.

Moeller recently installed an Aermotor windmill with a 1927 gearbox at a farm near Parker. “These farms couldn’t have survived on the prairie, without windmills,” Moeller says. They supplied precious water where there otherwise would have been none. No longer needed for their original purpose, they have become totemic, decaying symbols of the rural past.

Here and there, though, the reverse happens. An Aermotor — with a shiny coat of red paint on the gear box, and that simple but ubiquitous logo on the tail — appears on the prairie, spinning like it was 1927. When that happens Mike Moeller might have been in town.

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Meet an Accidental Rancher

By Katie Hunhoff

Accidental Rancher is a collection of poignant stories gleaned from Eliza Blue’s life on a Perkins County ranch.

When Eliza Blue mailed me her manuscript about life on a West River ranch, I admit that I had some skepticism. The document sat unread in my inbox for a few days. Did readers want another perspective on ranching life?

Finally, I opened Eliza’s manuscript and I changed my thinking after reading just a few paragraphs. Her writing, like her songs, pulled me in. Even tales of mundane tasks, such as milking a cow or searching for missing livestock, fascinated me. Somehow, her words transform ordinary life in South Dakota into something enchanting. For days after I read the manuscript, I found myself narrating my life inside my head as if Eliza Blue was writing my story.

To make a long story short, South Dakota Magazine has proudly published Eliza’s book, Accidental Rancher. We worked on it through the winter, knowing South Dakotans would appreciate her storytelling.

Eliza’s fresh perspective comes perhaps from her background of being both a storyteller and singer/songwriter. She is now also a Bison rancher’s wife and mom. Eliza grew up in suburban Minneapolis, but much to our benefit she landed in Perkins County a few years ago and dived into ranch life. Somehow, she also finds time to contemplate and write about life on the high plains.

Too often, rural America’s stories and culture are interpreted by writers who visit for a day or a week, often to write only about the latest catastrophe — most likely a blizzard, a drought or a trade war. Trouble and woe are usually their themes, though there is so much more. A handful of rural West River writers have worked to dispel such myths. Linda Hasselstrom, Kathleen Norris and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn are good examples. Eliza Blue is a new voice, and she brings a musician’s grace. Her stories, like her songs, have a catchy way of grabbing attention.

One of my favorites is titled”Pigeons.” Eliza and her son discover baby pigeons in an abandoned grain bin. The mother had laid the eggs inside a plastic bucket, and her babies became trapped after growing too big to spread their wings. Eliza freed the birds, but noticed something amiss. The birds’ muscles hadn’t developed enough for them to stand, let alone to walk or fly. She and her son visited every day, and employed some therapy techniques to encourage them to move. You can imagine the joy — both of the humans and the birds — when the little wings grew strong enough to fly.

“I often fear I am a foolish woman,” writes Eliza.”Sometimes I know that I am. Like when I am climbing into a stinky, old grain bin to chase sensory-deprived baby pigeons around. But every once in awhile my foolishness pays off. How else would I have gotten to see the look that appears on a small boy’s face when he sees a fledgling bird fly for the first time? The look of surprised delight as he falls a little more in love with the world and all its wonders.

“For my part,” she finishes,”I value the reminder that small kindnesses are rarely small and learning to fly comes in many forms.”

Accidental Rancher is available for $14.95 plus shipping/handling. To order, call (800) 456-5117 or visit our online store.