Category: columns-culture

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Remembering a Small-Town Boy

By John Andrews

John E. Miller was a professor at South Dakota State University from 1973 to 2003 and a longtime historian of South Dakota. He passed away on May 1.

My high school friends were giddy before we began our first semester of college. No more waking up before noon. With the newfound freedom of assembling our own schedules, everyone sought classes that met in the afternoon, leaving mornings set aside for quality time asleep.

When I was a freshman in the fall of 1998, I signed up for History 152: United States History Since 1877, which met three days a week at 8 a.m. I harbored some doubts that maybe I should be following the lead of my friends, but I also an interest in history and maybe a slight desire to rise and shine. Not a day has gone by in the last 22 years that I’ve regretted the decision.

The teacher was Dr. John E. Miller. Little did I know at the time that he was one of South Dakota’s preeminent historians. All I knew after those first few classes was that he was a small-town guy who loved American history, just like me.

Dr. Miller died on Friday, May 1, of an apparent heart attack at his home just a few blocks from campus in Brookings. He was 75. His death leaves a gaping hole in the study of South Dakota history that will take years to mend — that is, if it can ever be truly filled.

I remember very clearly the day, just a few weeks into class, when he asked how many of us grew up in what might be considered a”small town.” He asked us to think about how our hometowns were laid out and had us sketch them. Then he put his own drawing of Monett, Missouri, on the overhead projector. (Monett was one of his hometowns; he lived in several due to his father’s work as a Lutheran pastor.) We saw Main Street running across the page with a schoolhouse at one end and railroad tracks running perpendicular on the other. It was a perfect T. That’s exactly what Lake Norden looked like, and, I suspect, the hometowns of 90 percent of my classmates. History tends to be unfairly characterized as boring, but this was his way of engaging the class and making history become real, a method for which he had a true knack. Fellow historian and former student Jon Lauck has recalled the day when Miller got down on one knee in front of the class and lamented,”Say it ain’t so, Joe!” when discussing Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox scandal of 1919. I don’t recall those particular theatrics, but former students know that yes, that’s exactly what he would have done.

After that, I signed up for every Miller class I could: U.S. Between the Wars, U.S. Since 1941, American Economic History and Methods and Philosophy, for which I wrote a paper comparing stories that appeared in major newspapers to what was being said on the Nixon tapes. Oddly, I never took History of South Dakota from him, but it proved to be a stroke of luck in the long run. While working on a master’s in history at the University of South Dakota, I took the course with Herbert Hoover, Miller’s counterpart and another extremely knowledgeable South Dakota historian who sadly passed away just 14 months ago. Both of them helped me as I wrote my thesis on Richard Kneip and South Dakota politics in the 1970s.

I learned a little more about Dr. Miller through every class. He’d gotten his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, where he wrote about that state’s Progressive governor Phil LaFollette. He’d been in Vietnam. He’d had heart problems before (I remember him telling me how he ate fewer Big Macs for lunch and played more pickup basketball in The Barn). And he loved baseball, especially the St. Louis Cardinals and Stan Musial, the team’s star of the 1940s and 1950s. That led to a lot of ribbing when he discovered my affinity for the Chicago Cubs, longtime rival of the Cardinals. Over the weekend, as news of his sudden death struggled to sink in, I thought of my favorite Stan Musial stat: he collected 1,815 base hits in home games and exactly 1,815 hits in away games.”Did Dr. Miller know that?” I wondered, as I stared out of my kitchen window. Of course, he would have known that.

After a year of teaching in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Miller and his wife Kathy arrived in Brookings for what was supposed to be a short-term job at SDSU. But the family settled right in, and Miller seamlessly became part of the South Dakota fabric.

That’s evidenced in the books he produced. Looking for History on Highway 14 came about through a desire to study small-town life, searching for comparisons or commonalities, as he told fellow historian and former student Jon Lauck. Searching for some sort of geographical organization, the idea of writing about the towns strung along Highway 14 emerged.”It has the capital, the state university, the state fair, the”most historic spot in South Dakota” (Fort Pierre), Wall Drug, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harvey Dunn, Theodore Schultz (born, at least, in Arlington). It just seemed like a no-brainer,” he said.

More study and lengthier writing on Laura Ingalls Wilder came out of his Highway 14 research. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend appeared in the years following his Highway 14 book.

His final published article, which you can read here, reflects a passion I saw firsthand when he spoke at the last Dakota Conference at Augustana University in Sioux Falls in 2019. Caroline Fraser published Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder in 2017, and Dr. Miller — the author of several articles and books on Wilder — had a lot to say about it. Miller was famous for handouts, and he did not let us down. We got page upon page of passages photocopied from Fraser’s book — some underlined, some highlighted with notes filling the margins — to help navigate his way through fully scrutinizing the arguments she made. As I recall, he didn’t quite finish. He was also famous for tangents.

To say he retired in 2003 is using the term loosely. I’ve never seen anyone busier with research, interviewing, traveling, reading and writing. Long after I left college and landed at South Dakota Magazine in 2007, he never failed to send his newest books, including the one he’d talked about as an idea 20 years before: Small Town Dreams: Stories of Midwestern Boys Who Shaped America. To me, this was the book he was born to write. There are chapters on Bob Feller, Mickey Mantle, Johnny Carson and Ernie Pyle, among others — all important figures who were perhaps made so by their Midwestern upbringing.

It seems that another chapter in this book could have been written about John Miller himself, for he was at heart a small-town Midwestern boy who certainly shaped South Dakota, if not the entire Midwest and beyond. He helped us understand who we are as South Dakotans, and why being from here matters. Our state will never be the same without him, but thank God we had him, at least for a little while.

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Our Favorite Trees

By John Andrews

The Gurney Elm stands in downtown Yankton near Ben Brunick’s carpentry shop and the old Gurney Seed and Nursery Company. It’s believed D.B. Gurney planted the Siberian elm, a native of central Asia, to prove they could grow in South Dakota’s climate.

When I was a kid, my dad planted four spruce trees in our backyard. As a grade schooler they were as tall as me. But then Dad started running a garden hose from an old cistern behind the house and pumped gallons and gallons of rainwater to spur their growth. They are among the tallest trees on the block today.

For some reason, I didn’t give these trees a second thought as I wrote a story last fall about some of South Dakota’s most famous trees. Instead, I mentioned a tree to which I unintentionally set fire in my youth — a memorable tree, for sure, but only because of one incident that caused some neighborhood excitement. Its poor stump is no longer even there. But those spruce trees endure, and every time I look at them, I think of the care Dad put into making sure they survived.

During the course of writing that story it became clear that I was not alone in my fondness for trees. South Dakotans from border to border have stories about trees past and present that have shaped their lives in some way.

Joni Groeblinghoff told us about one such tree that stands in rural Spink County. Her father, Howard”Bill” Thomas, grew up on the family homestead southwest of Conde. One day, road crews told Bill’s father about plans for a new township road that required the removal of a young cottonwood that the family had begun calling Bill’s Tree. The elder Thomas objected, and the route was altered to save the tree, now a stately landmark that is well over 100 years old as well as a point of pride for both locals and the Thomas family. Occasionally, when Groeblinghoff — who lives in Groton — and her siblings get together, they go to Bill’s Tree.

Geraldine Evans shared her memories of the Bead Tree, a low, sprawling oak that once stood near Hermosa. Evans said she first encountered the tree as a young girl in the 1920s and 1930s. The tree had long ago been used in Indian burials; family history told of one chief who had been elaborately dressed and lain on a board among the oak’s branches when he died. For years thereafter, Evans and other children would search for tiny colorful beads that had fallen from the chief’s clothing into the dirt. The Bead Tree was eventually felled to make way for a road, but 12 little beads are among Evans’ most prized possessions today.

After our story appeared, we heard from readers about even more trees. Jerry Kobriger wrote to us about an old cottonwood on the Vernon and Betty LaBau ranch about 5 miles east of Lemmon called the Pig Tree. In the 1940s, Betty was struggling to keep pigs out of her garden, so she hammered a live cottonwood branch into the ground at an especially vulnerable spot in the fence. The branch took root and grew into what everyone called the Pig Tree. It thrived for more than 60 years until its death, possibly due to herbicide drift, coincidentally just months after Betty passed away in 2003.

If you stop and think for a few moments, chances are you’ll remember a tree that holds special meaning for you. Maybe now it lives only in your memories, but it might even be in your own backyard.

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A Creative Utopia in Aberdeen

By Michael Zimny

Dan Cleberg, co-owner of The Red Rooster in downtown Aberdeen, works on the early stages of a painting during a recent Aberdeen Fallout Art and Music Fesitval.

There’s something different about Aberdeen. This off-highway town of 26,000 or so, built on a swampy, windswept lowland by the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, hasn’t just survived the overall decline of the rural, Midwestern railroad town. The Hub City still thrives, and not just economically.

Many Aberdeeners point to local coffee shop the Red Rooster as a percolator of contagious creative vibes. Brother and sister team Dan Cleberg and Kileen Limvere started the venture in 1996. The town/neighborhood coffee shop can be a clichÈ, a place where “outsiders” gather and form their own “in-group,” a kind of anti-Applebees struggling — against its own constraints — to be outrÈ. The Red Rooster is something else — a place as inclusive as a Walmart, but where people gather for a higher purpose than Black Friday scrapping over a hot dog roller.

The Rooster — and its offspring the Fallout Creative Community — has become an incubator for local cooperative arts, taking care to welcome everybody, whether you’re fashion-challenged, differently abled, even people who listen to Don Henley. Fallout is the antidote to the corporate-sanctioned “creative” world monoculture, a place where everybody has value — people who maybe couldn’t monetize a hot dog hawking their online commodi-self — can still contribute. Millennials screamlessly interact with elders. Free-range children roam. Working class people redefine what it is they “do.” Unabashedly un-Hollywood people effortlessly flaunt their own self-worth.

Aberdeen’s Fallout Art & Music Festival is unique. There is no stardom in South Dakota. “Influencers” are so rare here, their influence itself must get stopped at the state line. Still, the ideational equity you’ll find at the Fallout is something to see, like a primitive communism of the personae where likes are distributed to each according to need. The whole scene at the Fallout Festival is so casually inclusive it could almost invoke emotions.

“The Fallout starts back shortly after the coffee house, which was ’96,” recalls Dan Cleberg. “I wanted the coffee house to be a place where we could have art — so we had a space for a gallery — and music. I had a little stage here for folks who play. And, so of course artists and musicians lined up. Eventually people started stepping up who weren’t identifying themselves before as artists and musicians. So this really cool scene started happening.

Chess at the Fallout Festival.

“And I had lived in a community in Chicago that served street people, people who needed service. I got this community bug and I came back and started talking to folks back here in Aberdeen about the idea of putting our efforts and resources together to serve the community at large.

“So I had this apartment building that had upstairs, main floor, basement and these guys move into it and instead of being three apartments, this became one big house. And we started seeing what we could do to help out the community. Back in that time, the high school was still just down the street from us. All these high school kids were coming and going around downtown. And we decided to invite a bunch of high school kids over to the house every Thursday. We’d get a little food from the Salvation Army. They’d hook us up, we’d feed them, and we have conversation. That was the only agenda. It was an experiment in community building.

“For this group of about thirty to thirty-five high school to college age kids, this was a really important thing. They’d go in, they apply for a job and they write it on their application, “I have to have Thursdays off.” That’s how important it was to them. So out of that group, we started doing some — like we throw up a party in the yard with a lot of art supplies, a stage, four bands, acoustic things or poetry and some crazy sport type thing like wrestling on old mattresses or bowling where the ball hits a ramp and smashes into a car or something like that. That would draw about eighty to a hundred people to these parties.

“So all this really cool creativity and community building stuff was happening. Now we need a mission. There’s a lot of energy, but what’s the point of us being here? I kind of pitched that to everybody. At some point, some guy who hung out at the Coffee House came to me and said, long story short, he wanted to play on our stage. I’ve never known him to do any music at all. So we’re going to get Richie out of his isolation.

“And that made me think of this other guy, Bruce [Likness], who had been hanging out here since we opened and he’s another guy with some mental and physical disabilities. We got him some paints and canvases and he did this really cool kind of outsider art. “Then he started telling me about his background. He doesn’t know who his parents are, so he made up this — based on science fiction movies — ideal background story. His mom was an alien from outer space that comes down and takes on human form. His dad’s a professor who doesn’t believe in aliens. They fall in love, she keeps it hush-hush. But then the bad aliens come down and kill his parents. He gets adopted, and that’s where he grew up. And, uh, he was always a little different, because he’s half alien.”

“I had the story of Quadman in my mind for years,” says Likness. “I like the stories from different sci-fi shows and movies like Star Trek, Aladdin, Batman, Xena and Gargoyles and I took ideas from those stories and made them my own story.”

A martial arts demonstration.

“So we started making a film out of it with this little camera,” Cleberg recalls. “In the meantime, all these creative people start hopping on board, and the story started expanding. This film that we thought we would show our friends in a week took about a year to complete. We had this full on opening… the red carpet and there’s a line down the street.”

Tom Black was one of those people who didn’t get in to that first showing. “I had just moved back from Phoenix,” Black recalls, “one night just driving down Main Street. There was a line of people all dressed up going into the Red Rooster. I tried to get in, but it was sold out. And I just wanted to go in out of curiosity. It was the world premier for a very independent, guerrilla-produced film called Quadman, and I thought, wow, that’s pretty cool. Then a few months later, a friend of mine said something about how Aberdeen had really no presence in independent film.

“So I thought, let’s just start a short filmmaking competition to see what comes from that. And we did. We just started a filmmaking competition that still runs today called the Fischgaard Short Film Project.

“Then the genesis of the South Dakota Film Festival came from that. We sat in a room at the Capitol Theater and had a conversation: ‘Hey, do we want to do an independent film festival here in the state? In Aberdeen?’ And the consensus was yes. Less than six months later we had the first festival on the ground.”

The story demonstrates how the arts institutions of a place like Aberdeen, like South Dakota as a whole, can originate, not from the pronouncement of some mega-celebrity, but from a scheme cooked up over coffee.

“Meantime with Bruce,” says Cleberg, “it turns out, you get a guy out of isolation and get him in community around friends and let him be creative, that does a whole lot of good for him.”

“Being in the Fallout helped me make friends and gave me many chances to do creative things,” says Likness. “And helped me to overcome negative habits and thoughts by getting me to focus on positive things. I had a new life that included friends and music and writing and filming. My life wasn’t just about work and problems with my disability.”

“So I’m thinking about Richie,” Cleberg recalls. “I’m thinking about Bruce, thinking this could be our mission: find people who are on the outskirts, adapt ourselves to include them. So I pitched this idea to the group and they were like, ‘Of course, that’s kind of who we are already, we just need to be more intentional about it.'”

Community members work on a soon-to-be colorful mural.

Over the years that mission has manifested in a range of creative projects, from the weekly Arts & Music night to the annual Arts & Music Festival, Cap’n Ralf & the Convocation’s Loud X-Mas Concert, and the touring, anybody-can-join band, Better Ride. Some of those projects, like Better Ride, hit the road on occasion, but the Fallout community’s ground central is still the Red Rooster.

Amy Sanderson, the Adult Clinical Director at Northeastern Mental Health Center, has witnessed positive impacts on the Aberdeen area through the Fallout community’s efforts to creatively engage people who might otherwise have been isolated. “I think Fallout has created a place where people can find community,” Sanderson says, “where people can feel connected, and belonging and purpose. For our clients here — with mental health issues in particular — we know the benefit of having positive art outlets, and it’s been a nice opportunity to get involved with some of those activities.”

Fallout pulls in a wide range of people, not all of whom are differently abled. Originally from Milwaukee, family members convinced William MacDonald to move to Aberdeen for work. He did, then the family moved away. He says Fallout is the reason he’s stayed. “Ever since I found the Red Rooster,” says MacDonald, “I fell in love with it and what they’re doing.”

He volunteers frequently helping set up or tear down for events, occasionally singing with Better Ride. The Fallout is now his only connection to Aberdeen, and that seems to be enough. “It’s just the love of doing something for our community,” says MacDonald. “It’s better than church to me. I fell in love with Aberdeen once I got to the Rooster, that was it for me. I don’t care what job I have. There’s a lot of things going on down here that’s good for our community and I want to be a part. I’m a hundred percent, no turning back for me.”

For Cleberg, the Fallout is an all-around reciprocal operation. “We’re not helping anybody. We’re building community. And within community, everybody has their own ability. You just look at a human being and you get to know them as a friend, and eventually you see what their gifts are and then you tap into that and you and they appreciate that because now they’re being useful within the community.”

He hopes that fallout from the Fallout will flower in other communities. “I want to figure out a way to duplicate our model anywhere. That’s part of what we do is when we take our festival and we shrink it down into a trailer. We go to other communities around South Dakota and just kind of tell our story and hopefully plant a seed of the idea that this can happen in other places.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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A Somber Anniversary

By John Andrews

An estimated 146 of the roughly 300 Lakota men, women and children who were killed during the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 lie buried in a mass grave. Survivor Joseph Horn Cloud traveled the country raising funds for a stone marker that was placed at the grave site in 1902.

We were about 30 minutes late getting to Leonard Little Finger’s house because we had gotten lost on the Pine Ridge Reservation. After nearly bottoming out our Chevy Impala on a road that could barely be described as minimum maintenance, we knew we were on the wrong track. We headed back to Oglala, where some friendly youth at a school told us that Leonard was their Lakota language teacher. They kindly gave us directions, and soon we found Little Finger in his home just on the edge of town, patiently waiting for us.

The first things we noticed upon going inside were photographs — dozens of them — hanging on his walls. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren smiled down at us. But there were also black and white images, and they were clearly very old. One was a photo of his paternal grandfather, John Little Finger. Another showed his maternal grandparents, Joseph Horn Cloud and Millie Bald Eagle. Next to that was a photo of Horn Cloud’s brothers, Daniel White Lance and Dewey Beard.

They were all survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which took place on Dec. 29, 1890. We had come to Pine Ridge to find people just like Leonard: descendants of Wounded Knee survivors who could tell us stories that their ancestors passed down about that day. Little Finger was the first person we met and held by far the strongest connection to the massacre.”I had 39 relatives there at the time,” he told us.”Only seven survived.”

In all, roughly 300 Lakota men, women and children died at the hands of the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry. They were members of Chief Big Foot’s band, who fled the Standing Rock Reservation after Sitting Bull’s death on Dec. 15. They were traveling to a peace conference with Chief Red Cloud at Pine Ridge when the cavalry met them near Wounded Knee Creek.

The Little Finger family name stems from an incident that occurred during the massacre. According to family oral history, as soldiers explained their plans to bring the Lakota to Pine Ridge, one cavalryman said he would show them what would happen if they tried to run. He shouted a command and another soldier lowered his weapon, which they claimed was not loaded.”When he pulled the breach back, my grandfather saw a bullet go in there, and it locked,” Little Finger told us.”Then he barked again, and they all came up.” That’s when the 14-year-old John Little Finger swung and knocked the soldier to the ground, breaking his little finger. The boy ran, and soon gunfire erupted.

We also met cousins Ingrid One Feather and Fred Stands. Their great-grandfather, Peter Stands, survived the massacre and lived with several others in a cave for much of the following year. One Feather said she knows that Stands’ wife and two of their children were killed, but he rarely talked about that day because he feared reprisals from the government.

Myron Pourier is the great-grandson of the Lakota holy man Black Elk, who also survived the massacre. Much of Black Elk’s recollections were published in a book, Black Elk Speaks, in 1932, but one story not recorded in those pages tells of Black Elk’s encounter with Red Willow two days after the massacre. A soldier, still pursuing Lakota warriors, shot Red Willow’s horse from under him. Black Elk lifted Red Willow onto his own horse and together they rode to Red Cloud Agency.”We’re still close to the Red Willow family,” Pourier said.

These families, and many more, will forever remain connected by the tragedy. Dealing with it in their daily lives can still be burdensome, even after 129 years.”Let’s say you look at time as a cloth,” Little Finger explained.”Then along comes some violence and tears it. You can stitch it, but you can never tear the threads that consist of that fabric. I come to that every day. I already know the impact that it had, but it can be historical trauma if you don’t understand it and know what it was. There’s a spiritual side to it. There’s no one person who represents this fabric. It just depends on who you talk to. One is going to be very historically traumatized, and the other is going to say, ‘It happened. It’s over, and we have to get on with life.’ And all in between.”

December in South Dakota can a joyous month for families gathered to celebrate the holidays. But it also marks a somber anniversary for the men and women who still live with the effects of our state’s darkest day.

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Christmas for White Swan

By Bernie Hunhoff

Chris and Shelly Saunsoci and their daughter, Chloe, stand by a dike that was built to hold back floodwaters at White Swan.

Lake Andes has receded slightly, but it is still at record levels and the surrounding land is soggy.”High water” marks are visible on many of White Swan’s structures, including an old stone shed near the pow wow grounds. Many homes, though still inhabited, are black with mold. Children and adults are suffering respiratory diseases, ringworm, impetigo and other infections and ailments associated with moldy conditions.

The original White Swan community was flooded when the U.S. Corps of Engineers finished Fort Randall Dam in 1952. It was in the bottomland forest on the east side of the Missouri River, just a few miles above old Fort Randall. Named after a Yankton chief who lived there in the 1860s, the community had a dance hall, stores, two churches, two cemeteries, a cannery, post office and ferry in the first half of the 20th century. The residents gardened, hunted, fished, raised livestock and generally lived off the land. They were not consulted on plans for the dam, and then forced from their homes by the BIA and Corps of Engineers.

Today’s White Swan community was rebuilt on the southern tip of Lake Andes. This year, Lake Andes suffered major flooding and White Swan was flooded once again. The water woes continued all summer and fall, and even today groundwater continues to plague the homes and buildings. “Our community is literally drowning,” said tribal leaders in August.

Shelly Saunsoci, a local woman, took on the responsibility of running a food kitchen so the White Swan people would at least have a hot meal and a safe, healthy place to eat and socialize. She was feeding about 100 people a day until mid-December, when children came home from boarding schools. Suddenly, she and three other volunteers were feeding more than 200.

Members of the YHS Humanitarian Club who helped at White Swan on Saturday included (from left) Kelsie Faulk, Cecilia Kouri, Aly Fedde, Josie Krajewski, Krystabelle Kosters and (center) Jon Syla.

“YOU SAVED OUR CHRISTMAS”

How Yankton came to the aid of White Swan

When Aly Fedde started the Humanitarian Club at Yankton High School, she could not have imagined how it would end up changing the holidays for families at White Swan, a flood-ravaged community near Lake Andes on the Yankton Sioux Reservation.

The club began to help the people of White Swan in November when they delivered 48 cases of drinking water and other supplies. They followed that up with a project to make bookmarks and collect books as gifts for the children. Several adult members of Yankton’s United Methodist Church got involved to help the teens, including retired physician Tom Gilmore of Utica, who provided OB/GYN services on the Yankton Sioux and Rosebud reservations for decades.

Gilmore and his wife Jane became acquainted with Shelly Saunsoci, a native of the reservation who has been running a food kitchen to provide nutrition for the families at White Swan.

“You delivered me,” grinned Saunsoci. It turns out, the retired doctor delivered many of the young adults in the area.

“You looked different then!” laughed Dr. Gilmore.

“So did you!” Saunsoci retorted.

Tom Gilmore (far left), a retired doctor, delivered Shelly Saunsoci (front, center) 43 years ago. They met again this month as the Gilmores and other Yankton area peoples rallied to help Saunsoci, who leads a food kitchen at flood-ravaged White Swan.

Laughter has resumed at White Swan, in part because of the connections that the community has made with the people of Yankton, many of whom were oblivious to the tiny community’s situation until the YHS Humanitarian Club began its outreach.

In mid-December, Saunsoci was worried what the Christmas season might bring for the children — especially those who would be coming home from boarding schools at Chamberlain and Flandreau. Would she have enough groceries for the food kitchen? Would there be any gifts for the young children?

When the Yankton teens, the Gilmores and others brought those concerns back to Yankton, the entrepreneurial nonprofit Onward Yankton volunteered to start a fund drive for food supplies. An online Go Fund Me page was created on Onward’s Facebook page. Local media spread the word, and within days people from near and far had donated over $7,000. Donations are still coming.

Lisa Ryken, chief volunteer at Yankton’s Toys for Tots, heard about the efforts and called to say that her organization had some surplus toys. She packed dolls, footballs, trucks and games for White Swan even as she and her team were still wrapping gifts for Yankton families.

Last Saturday, the Humanitarian Club members and other Yankton residents traveled to White Swan with the toys, other donated supplies and grocery funds. Then they spent the morning helping Saunsoci and others sack candy and peanuts as gifts for area families. After completing nearly a thousand sacks, the teens took a break and shot baskets in the White Swan community center gym, where Sansoci has been running a food kitchen for weeks.

Saunsoci, wearing a Santa Claus apron, watched the Yankton youth playing basketball and smiled.

“You saved our Christmas,” she said quietly.

No one knows what the New Year holds for White Swan. The houses are flood-damaged and moldy. Roads and other infrastructure are deteriorating from the flood waters and high ground water. Another wet spring would be a devastating blow.

But this week, the children are enjoying gifts and hearty meals and their parents and grandparents many find some peace in knowing that — thanks to a sequence of events that began with students in Yankton — they are not forgotten.

Eunice Penton and other White Swan residents have been busy sorting and wrapping toys delivered for the children of the community.

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Pheasant Tales from South Dakota

By Katie Hunhoff

Redfield recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of South Dakota’s first official pheasant hunt. Hundreds of men and women marched the cornfields of Spink County and then gathered for a prime rib dinner and some wonderful storytelling. The festive event prompted us to remember some of our favorite pheasant tales from the last 35 years of publishing South Dakota Magazine.

Madison wildlife artist John Green once told us the story of when he went afield with some out-of-state sportsmen who had only seen jackalopes in pictures and gift shops. As they neared the end of a corn row, a jackrabbit with tall ears — but, needless to say, no antlers — jumped from the corn and hopped away. One of the hunters yelled out,”Don’t shoot! It’s a doe!”

Lots of famous people have come to South Dakota to hunt pheasants. That makes for some interesting conversations, especially for the Zoss family. Adolf Zoss was hunting near Letcher in 1945 when an old Ford came down a dirt road. It was Lawrence Welk, the famous champagne music man, with members of his band. Welk asked Adolf if he knew where there might be birds, and the South Dakotan gladly guided them to several of his favorite spots.

Zoss couldn’t wait to tell his wife, Amelia, but unfortunately neither she or any of their 11 children believed him because he was known for telling stories.

As Welk gained greater fame and a national TV audience, Zoss told and retold the story to his doubting family until he died in 1957.

Imagine his survivors’ surprise, however, when an issue of Lawrence Welk Magazine was published in 1968 with stories about Welk’s days in the Dakotas and a picture and story about a successful pheasant hunt. There on page 56 was a photo of Welk with a shotgun, and sitting in the old Ford were his band members and a slightly bemused Adolf Zoss. No doubt they all had a”wunnerful” time.

The Brooklyn Dodgers came to Winner to hunt pheasants in the 1930s. After quickly limiting on birds, the players were looking for more to do so the hotel manager suggested they talk to David Busk, who told them about rattlesnake hunting. Busk was known for eradicating more than 3,000 rattlesnakes to protect local children. He took the ballplayers to the White River valley where they caught and killed quite a few snakes. The players came back for several years to help Busk in his mission, giving double meaning to the old Dodger saying,”Wait’til next year!”

Peggy Schiedel of Yankton remembers meeting Cary Grant when he came to their Faulkton farm to hunt. He was a friend of her uncle, who was a Navy captain in California.”My brothers and I slept in the mudroom so our guests could have our bedrooms, but we were still thrilled to have them because they brought boxes of La Fama Candy.” She says Grant taught them how to walk on stilts, and he showed her dad how to build them.

Monte James, a South Dakota farm broadcaster on the Ag Network, once guided some Coca Cola executives from Atlanta on a hunt near Vivian. Despite their enthusiasm, the Southerners couldn’t hit the proverbial barn. But they were determined to get some birds. Finally, James and his dog Ice Cream flushed some pheasants in some very high grass and the hunters emptied their shotguns to no avail. But James hollered,”You knocked a couple down!”

Then he and Ice Cream disappeared into the brush to look for the birds. He stealthily pulled a few birds from his own pouch. He sent one with Ice Cream and he carried the other himself. The hunters were giddy with excitement and left James a big tip, which he used in part to buy Ice Cream a buffalo ribeye.

Out-of-state hunters do, unfortunately, become the inspiration for some of our pheasant humor but they probably don’t mind — at least not any more than we mind the joke about the South Dakota cowboy who traveled to Kansas to see the Statue of Liberty.

These past 100 pheasant hunting seasons have been all about having a fun time and turning strangers into friends. Here’s to another 100 years, humor and all.

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Grottos of South Dakota

By Michael Zimny

The Midwest was host to a unique folk art movement in the early 20th century, as German-American Catholics brought with them the grotto tradition. There are two small grottos in South Dakota, on opposite ends of the state: Saint Peter’s in Farmer, and Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs.

The Midwestern grotto tradition was kickstarted by Father Paul Dobberstein with the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. Near-death experiences are a common theme in grotto-building origin stories. Father Dobberstein promised the Virgin Mary that if he survived a bout with pneumonia, he would build one. And he did. In 1894, he built a small grotto, Our Lady of Lourdes, at the Saint Francis de Sales Seminary outside Milwaukee.

He wasn’t done though. He began to amass a collection of boulders for his magnum opus, which he began in 1912 and continued until his death in 1954. A parishioner named Matt Szerence helped him from the start, continuing also until his death in 1959.

The two artists often made excavation runs to the Black Hills, returning with rocks removed by miners or railroads. They studded the surfaces with colorful minerals, gemstones, petrified wood and glass. The Grotto of the Redemption is actually a series of nine grottos that tell the Catholic story of Redemption, beginning with the Fall of Man and culminating with the Resurrection.

Perhaps the second most famous Midwestern grotto is the Dickeyville Grotto and Shrines, built by Father Matthias Wernerus in the eponymous small Wisconsin town between 1925 and 1930. Probably inspired in part by Dobberstein’s work, Dickeyville is a tribute to God and country, combining patriotic and religious themes. With his splashy use of color — utilizing semi-precious stones, glass and pottery shards — Wernerus prefigured later religious folk artists, working in different mediums, like Howard Finster at Paradise Gardens or Leonard Knight at Salvation Mountain.

The South Dakota grottos are neither as grand in scale as the Grotto of the Redemption, or as visually frenetic as Dickeyville.

Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs is the most austere, relying less on colorfully ornamented concrete, and more on the stone bounty of the Southern Black Hills to recreate a naturalistic cavern for the Virgin Mary. Father Gerhard Stakemeir, another German American priest, built the icon between 1932 and 1934, with help from parishioner Nick Bogner. According to the National Register of Historic Places, Stakemeir and Bogner utilized, “petrified wood and moss, and fossils taken from Wind Cave National Park.

“The car tunnels leading through Wind Cave National Park were being enlarged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which left vast amounts of debris … Bogner used a trailer and his Buick to haul the rocks from the passes to aid Father Stakemeir’s project.”

The bells no longer ring at Saint Martin’s, which closed as a church in 1999, a victim of rural decline. The property owner maintains the grotto, which receives few visitors.

Father Peter Scheier built the Byzantine-style Saint Peter’s grotto in Farmer between 1926 and 1933. Scheier may have been more influenced by his contemporaries in West Bend and Dickeyville than Father Stakemeir was at Oelrichs. The facade of the turrets and walls at Farmer are decoratively studded with thousands of fresh-water seashells and shards of colored glass, among the gathered stones. Like Stakemeir, and even Paul Dobberstein, Scheier made excursions to the Black Hills to gather materials. The Farmer grotto is cherished by alums and locals, some of whom took part in a restoration project in the early 2000s.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Lemmon’s Petrified Wood Park — one of South Dakota’s great folk art monuments, which could be seen as a secular take on the grotto movement, in which fossils and stone foster the contemplation of deep time (or at least put Lemmon on the map) rather than the glorification of God — was built during the peak of the Midwestern grotto-building era (1930-1932).

In its grandiosity of scale, Ole Quammen’s Petrified Wood Park shares more in common with the Grotto of the Redemption or Dickeyville than Stakemeir’s or Scheier’s smaller icons, nearly swallowed by the prairie and demography.

Saint Martin’s and Saint Peter’s remain modest reminders of an interesting moment in sacral folk art.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Feeling the Bern in Roscoe

By Michael Zimny

Linda Roesch’s Bernie-blue couch returns for another presidential election.

On a residential street in Roscoe (pop. 299), a weathered sofa stands as a solitary curb appeal for a President Bernie Sanders. As blue as its surrounding environs are red, the couch — now in its second Sanders campaign — has spurned conversations, if not many sit-downs — around Roscoe and online.

We caught up with resident sofa artist Linda Roesch to discuss the state of political sofa art in South Dakota.

Q: Why a sofa?

A: It was what I had. It kind of came about really fast. It was probably about three weeks before the [2016] South Dakota primaries and my brother and I had just gotten some different living room furniture and I’m going to take it to the dump in a couple of days and we just both kind of got the idea that, you know what, we can paint this and make it an art piece instead of just throwing it out.

At the time, I guess I didn’t really intend on keeping it for this long. I mostly thought that at some point the snow would probably demolish it. And then two winters went by and nothing seemed to be happening. So I’ve repainted it a little bit. I changed the year from 2016 to 2020 to make it more current. At one point the city wanted me to haul it away. We had to go before city council and explained that it was an art piece and not, you know, junk old furniture.

Now this has become current one more time and we’ll probably leave it up over the winter again and see if the snow makes it collapse or if it’s good for one more season.

Q: Have many people driven by just to take a look?

A: Yeah, we get a lot of people that stop and take pictures. Right now I’m teaching up in Jamestown, North Dakota, so I’m not around very much. But [my brother] says that at least probably twice a month somebody will stop and take a picture. The reactions from the locals have been amazingly positive — at least what I’ve heard. Even people who are not fans of the person think it’s kind of an interesting piece. It’s sort of become part of the city, I guess, whether they want it to or not.

Q: Does it ever lead to conversations, about politics or the piece itself?

A: I’m not really there that much. I don’t get a chance to really talk to the people who stop too frequently. Early on, in 2016, the night that I was painting it outside, one of the people from town was driving by and he stopped and it was just a blue sofa at that point. He engaged in conversation asking if I was doing any going door to door and campaigning for anyone. I was kind of apprehensive because I wasn’t sure where this conversation was leading. Anyway, after a few minutes, this person indicated that he really liked Bernie Sanders and he had wanted to host a watch party, but he wasn’t able to find anyone interested in the community. He indicated that he was kind of surprised that more people locally weren’t onboard with Bernie’s message and the things that he wanted to accomplish. So that that time it did lead to a very good discussion with someone in the community I never would’ve had that discussion with in any other way.

Q: If somebody in the neighborhood painted a bigger, grander, red #MAGA couch, would you get swept up into a couch competition?

A: Probably not. At this point, if someone wants to do that, great. It’s free speech. I would probably laugh about it.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Doomsday in Igloo

By Roger Holtzmann

Have you got your Bug Out Bag packed? Neither do I, but as soon as you’re done reading this I recommend you get right on that.

I sense your confusion. Let us step back, then, and consider how Bug Out Bags became a thing.

We live in an age of rampant paranoia, and how could it be otherwise? There are myriad sources of information available to us, and we carry in our pockets devices to access them 24 hours a day. They bring us news of natural disasters, terrorist attacks and Kim Jong Un’s latest tantrum as soon as they happen; when there is no new information to impart, talking heads fill the time reminding us in ominous tones that the potential for even greater calamities is everywhere.

There are those among us who, ironically, seek refuge from this daily litany of mayhem and woe in video games, movies and television shows set in even worse worlds. I’m not a fan of this genre and so can’t speak with authority on the subject, but most of the story lines seem to revolve around zombies.

Such is our world. Most of us cope by ignoring the bad stuff as best we can, but that’s not enough for some people. They need something to cling to in an uncertain, dangerous world. Hence the Bug Out Bag.

What is a Bug Out Bag? It’s a bag, for starters. Most experts — meaning people who have websites — favor military-looking backpacks with lots of drawstrings, zippers and Velcro closures. A quality bag is an absolute necessity; the last thing you want is to have a strap break when you’re on the run from zombies.

Once you’ve got your bag, the idea is to pack it with items that will help you survive for a few days — everything from energy bars to rolls of duct tape to water purification tablets — if the bottom falls out and all the mini-marts are closed. You keep it handy, and when the ball drops you grab it and flee.

Let us examine a garden variety Bug Out Bag scenario: some self-righteous psycho has unleashed a plague. It’s slowly advancing toward your neighborhood, so you strap on your bag and hit the road. You will be walking, of course, because every route out of the city is hopelessly gridlocked by stalled cars filled with sweaty people who had the same idea as you.

Day one passes uneventfully, giving you hope, but on day two your tent/tarp is shredded by the wind. Your duct tape repair doesn’t work because the roll has been sitting in your garage for 10 years and has solidified into a duct tape doughnut; you’re forced to take shelter in a highway culvert. On day three you eat the last energy bar. You use up half your purification tablets on water you scooped out of a ditch and your kids still refuse to drink it. You take a swig to show them it’s okay. You gag because it tastes like mud, oil and rotting weeds.

At this point you’re barely 20 miles from home, and a number of critical questions occur. Who drank all the bottled water? How bad can the plague be? Where exactly are we going?

South Dakotans are fortunate in a couple respects. We are too spread out to make for efficient carnage, so anyone looking to make a point through death and destruction is likely to look elsewhere for a target. This also makes Our Fair State the kind of place Bug Out Baggers dream of reaching: a spot far from the madding crowd where they can ride out the storm.

Which brings us to South Dakota’s newest and most unique settlement: Vivos xPoint, which calls itself”The Largest Survival Community on Earth.”

From Nostradamus to the Hopi Indians, prophets and seers have been predicting that”epic global catastrophes will befall the Earth,” according to the Vivos website.”We have been warned of Armageddon, Nibiru/Planet X, a sudden pole shift, future plagues, an EMP blast, a solar kill shot, a super volcanic eruption, major earth changes, killer asteroids and comets, mega tsunamis, an economic meltdown and even the anarchy that will certainly follow any one of these events.”

Vivos is located at the former Black Hills Ordnance Depot in Fall River County. There aren’t many people in the neighborhood, which is why the army thought it would be a good place to stockpile bombs until we needed them. They built more than 500 storage bunkers, half-circles of reinforced concrete tucked into the prairie sod; some thought they resembled igloos, which is how the nearby town came to be named Igloo. If you feel the need you can purchase one of these bunkers and convert it into a doomsday refuge.

Each bunker is equipped with heavy steel doors that were originally intended to contain an explosion if something went wrong. In this iteration, the doors will keep all manner of bad stuff outside — including people who didn’t plan ahead. You and your loved ones and the supplies you laid up for the inevitable catastrophe can sit inside, smug, safe and sound.

Just remember to bring fresh duct tape.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Pheasantless Huron?

By Michael Zimny

The World’s Largest Pheasant has been a mainstay in Huron for 60 years. Now its future may be in doubt.

Pheasants Forever is the name of one pheasant-concerned conservation group, but can any pheasant — even the World’s Largest Pheasant — truly live forever?

The World’s Largest, a prominent piece of Huron’s skyline since 1959, has sustained serious damage to its structural integrity in its 60 years, and that damage — paired with the fact that the ringneck’s perch is not on city-owned property — presents Huron with the possibility of a pheasant-free future.

The city has a lease agreement — which requires some light pheasant maintenance — with the owners of the structure built around the bird. That lease, negotiated 20 years ago with prior owners of the property, expires in 2020. Meanwhile, current ownership wants to sell the property.

Laurie Shelton is President of the Huron Chamber and Visitor’s Bureau. She says the phesant’s future is subject to the whims of any potential new owner. “If that owner did not want it there, then we have looked at what the cost would be to build a new pheasant, and then to put that on city-owned property,” Shelton says.

However, a move might not be an option. “We have had engineers look at it,” Shelton says, “and they do not feel, because of the integrity of the fiberglass, that it would be able to be moved soundly.”

Schaun Schnathorst is an engineering technician for the city of Huron. He has repaired and repainted the bird twice in the last eight years. (The last touch-up was just a few weeks ago). He agrees that moving the bird would be a risky endeavor. “When you can lean up against that bird and you push it in — in almost any given area because that’s how thin the fiberglass is — it’s definitely going to be a challenge to move it,” Schnathorst says.

Over the course of 60 years, the fiberglass pheasant has been nested in by hundreds of pigeons, bombarded with UV rays and hailstorms, infiltrated with water, and even taken a lightning strike to the head. “If you look up inside that pheasant you can see daylight,” says Schnathorst, adding that some of the original steel mesh frame inside the fiberglass is nonexistent. “So how are you going to strap on to a pheasant and lift it, and not have it cave in with its own weight?”

The Chamber conducted a local survey and found broad support for preserving the pheasant as long as possible. “We like the old pheasant,” Shelton says. “If we could work something out as far as the lease, that would probably be the least expensive [option]. It’s really kind of a dilemma, and it’s not one that’s been easy to deal with. We wish that it was on city-owned property because then we wouldn’t be having these discussions at all.”

“I really think, through social media and how many likes and comments it got after I did a little touch up to it, that the people of Huron want to try to keep it, and keep it in good shape for as long as they possibly can,” Schnathorst says.”Unfortunately, there will probably come a day when it’s just run its course. It’s not Mount Rushmore. It’s not made out of stone.”

Huron commissioned sculptor Robert Jacobs of Idaho to create the city’s massive fiberglass pheasant in 1959. The ringneck stands 28 feet tall, and measures about 40 feet from beak to tail.

The dedication ceremony, held on the pheasant season opener, starred former governor and pheasant hunting enthusiast Joe Foss, who reportedly fired several blanks from his shotgun at the bird as he departed in his helicopter. Sen. Francis Case and Congressman George McGovern were also on hand.

The initial funding for the project was provided by the local Jaycees, but the owner of the Plains Motel, in front of which the bird stood, had to cough up an outstanding $5,000 at the last minute to keep the disgruntled sculptor from torching his bird.

The World’s Largest Pheasant still makes headlines, and for that reason, you can’t count it out. The bird weathered adversity as new owners took over its roost. One such scare in the late 1990s even had other towns giving him the poacher’s eye.

He stands for now, barrel-breasted, proud-beaked, with a fresh coat of paint, unfazed by the uncertainty in the ground beneath his feet.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.