Category: columns-culture

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Spearfish’s Pot Pedaler

By Michael Zimny

Clay Dykstra in his Black Hills State University studio.

“This has got to be the best view in town,” says Clay Dykstra, gazing at Lookout Mountain from the windows of his Black Hills State University ceramics classroom.

Dykstra knows it well. He’s cranked his way up the mountain countless times since junior high, when the Spearfish mountain biking scene was growing out of its training wheels.

“Lookout Mountain was some of the first trail that a lot of us got to ride,” Dykstra says.”It’s close to town, so that’s kind of where you cut your teeth. For the most part in the early days it was a mix of hiking trails, fire roads and old logging roads.”

In a way, his potter’s wheel and all that two-wheel trail time share a common axis. When he moved back to Spearfish after college in Wyoming, one of the first works he made in clay was a trophy for the Dakota Five-O.

“It’s a really cool event and something that I’m passionate about. I just did it voluntarily. Then I started making mugs.” Twelve years later, he’s still making kiln-fired wares for riders at events like the Five-O and the 28 Below, in a town where mountain biking has become engrained in the local culture.

Dykstra Pottery has also expanded into making vessels for local independent businesses. You can find his mugs at Green Bean Coffee and Blackbird Espresso in Spearfish, Sturgis Coffee Company and Harriet & Oak in Rapid City. His tankards have been a feature at Flanagan’s pub in Spearfish for years.

Through homegrown connections and dedication to his craft he’s finding a way to make it doing what he loves. He’s also passing along the knowledge he’s acquired through the years as an adjunct professor at BHSU.

Lookout Mountain is the backdrop for Dykstra’s creative space.

He’s had some good teachers himself. “Dan Binder was the ceramics teacher at Spearfish High School. When I was a junior I thought it would be really cool to take a class from him. There were definitely a lot of kids that were better at it than I was. But I took a second semester in my senior year, and I’d go in during my free hour and make pots.”

He attended Northwest College, near Yellowstone, to study anthropology. “My goal at the time was to be an archaeologist. I’ve done a lot of volunteering with the Forest Service here and been on a number of digs in the area, so I thought being an archaeologist would be cool.” But the wheel had cast a hypnotic spell on him. “Pottery was open and unattended. They had a big box of clay and I’d go in and make some pots.”

“Then I kind of realized that the more I got educated, the more I’d be behind a desk. And it wasn’t the desk stuff that I liked. It was digging and walking around. I liked reading about it too, but I didn’t want to sit behind a desk most of the time. So I realized, ‘Okay, I think I want to be a potter.’ And I started getting serious about it.”

He continued his education at Casper College under the tutelage of respected potter and longtime ceramics instructor Lynn Munns.

Since moving back to Spearfish, he’s experimented with different formulas for making it as a small town potter, often doing other work — construction gigs and managing the family business (Good Earth Natural Foods) — to get by.

He estimates that the work he does for local businesses comprises the majority of his output. “It’s about ninety percent of what I’m doing. To make it as a potter in the Black Hills, you’ve got to branch out and do some different things.”

Making it here has challenges, but it can also inspire.

“The natural world, aesthetically, is a huge influence on me. Some of my favorite pots — I see them as pieces of a whole, like that really interesting stone that you see on the side of a trail, or that interesting branch on a gnarly old tree. If I had no limitations and could just make what I want, I’d make pots that look as if they were left on the side of a trail. They’d just look like they belonged there.”

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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Wolf Country Even Today?

By Katie Hunhoff

A taxidermied wolf inside the Pine Ridge Visitors Center near Kyle was struck by a vehicle and killed on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 2012.

Was a gray wolf roaming the lakes country of Marshall County this winter? A coyote hunter from Britton thinks he may have shot one by mistake in January. Wildlife officials are investigating his report.

Several years ago, a gray wolf was shot near Custer. John Kanta of the state Game Fish and Parks Department thought it wandered from the Great Lakes region.

Another gray was hit and killed by a car on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 2012. He weighed 130 pounds. The remains were preserved by Pete’s Taxidermy of Gregory, and are now on exhibit at the Pine Ridge Visitors Center near Kyle. He was wearing a radio transmitter, so officials quickly surmised that he came from Yellowstone National Park.

Gray wolves are bigger and stronger than timber wolves. Grays were lording over the river breaks of western South Dakota when farmers and ranchers first settled there. The wolves preyed on livestock, so they were eventually hunted to extinction in South Dakota.

One of the last was a wolf named Three Toes. He achieved great notoriety in the hills and plains of northwest South Dakota. Archie Gilfillan, a sheepherder and writer, was intrigued by the local ranchers’ mixture of respect and hate for the wild and wily creature. In his book Sheep, Gilfillan noted that Three Toes, “for 13 years laughed at poison, traps and guns, lived in and off enemy country with the hand of every man against him, a cunning, bloodthirsty killer, a super wolf among wolves and the most destructive single animal of which there is any record anywhere.”

So named because he had lost a paw in a trap early in his life, Three Toes gained a reputation as a bloodthirsty killer by 1912. He left his unmistakable paw print at ranches throughout Harding County. Infuriated ranchers tracked his whereabouts and devastating destruction. They estimated that his lifetime of kills exceeded $50,000 in cattle and sheep.

Three Toes lived to an old age, and reached the peak of his destruction in the 1920s. Gilfillan wrote, “For first, last, and all the time, Three Toes was a killer. Other wolves might kill one cow or sheep and eat off that and be satisfied. But Three Toes killed for the sheer love of killing. He would kill on a full stomach as well as when hungry. On one occasion he visited three different ranches in one night, killed many sheep and lambs at each one, but ate only the liver of one lamb.”

Officials bumped the bounty for Three Toes to $500, but no hunter could catch the cunning old wolf. In July of 1925, federal wolf hunter Clyde F. Briggs settled on a ranch near the center of Three Toes’ hunting range. For weeks Briggs set his traps and Three Toes carefully eluded them. But he was tricked on July 23 by a hidden trap. The earth around him was scratched and plowed by his frantic efforts to escape from the trap’s grasp by the time Briggs arrived. The trapper muzzled and hog-tied the big wolf and put him in the backseat of his car, intending to deliver him to Rapid City alive. But soon a passenger cried, “I think he’s dying.”

“Briggs stopped the car, and looking around, found the wolf’s eyes fixed on him. But the eyes did not see him, for the wolf was dead,” wrote Gilfillan. “Call it a broken heart, or what you will — something of this sort is what killed the old wolf. He was resting easily when found, his wounds were superficial … but there was something in his grand old spirit that could not brook capture, and Nature, more merciful than he had ever been, granted him his release.”

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Pollock’s Stone Idols

By Michael Zimny

Three stones on the Campbell County prairie could be the source of a centuries-old Arikara legend.

Three seemingly ordinary stones sit on a hill above some cabins at the Oahe Sunset Lodge on Lake Pocasse, just west of Pollock. Some believe these stones are the subject of an Arikara legend — concerning a pair of star-crossed lovers and their dog — reported in the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

To find the stones, take Highway 1804 north and turn left at the sign for the Oahe Sunset. The stones are on a small hill to the right, just past the cabins. Though some have described them as “boulders,” they’re not all that imposing — small enough that a Strongman contestant or a Bobcat could lift them. Are these the stones of legend?

That may be impossible to know.

We do know that on October 10, 1804, the Corps of Discovery happened upon an Arikara village near the Missouri River. Three days later the journals relayed an ostensible Arikara legend about three stones near a creek they called Stone Idol Creek, now known as Spring Creek.

Clark described a stone trio “resembling humane persons & one resembling a Dog … situated on the open Prairie,” to which the “Rickores pay Great Reverance [and] make offerings.”

The story — as retold by nearby Mound City native, historian, South Dakota state representative and gubernatorial candidate Alice Kundert — concerned a pair of young lovers forbidden to marry by the young woman’s father, a chief. “When the youth persisted in his attention, his weapons were taken from him and he was driven out onto the prairie to starve or freeze in the winter cold. The Indian maiden resolved to die with her lover and so slipped away unnoticed from her father’s lodge. Close behind the two lovers followed the young brave’s dog.”

Winter passed. The chief was out riding one spring morning when he “came upon a startling sight.”

“There side by side stood the two young lovers … Their faces and forms showed young and strong with neither signs of gaunt hunger or suffering upon them. Close beside them stood the faithful dog. The Great Spirit had pitied the plight of these young children and of the prairie and turned them into stone images. About them he had placed an abundance of food, and clusters of wild grapes hung in festoons from a tree above the stone images, with one purple cluster reaching down to touch the maiden’s outstretched hand.”

Was this a real Arikara story?

“It sounds very plausible,” says Jasper Young Bear, a co-founder of the Medicine Lodge Confederacy, an organization — concerned with preserving “the Arikara culture, language, health and sustainable lifestyle” on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

“That motif — that a person has been turned to stone because of heartache — is the same type of story that was told about the woman that Standing Rock was named after. Right out in front of the Standing Rock tribal headquarters in Fort Yates, there’s the actual rock — on a pedestal, moved from its original place — named after an Arikara woman that was turned to stone by the powers above because she was broken-hearted.

“Stones in Arikara culture are considered animated objects. A rock is the symbol of the will of God. Over and over — you will hear this, you will see this, you will dream this.

“The rocks are actually people anyway. You’re not turning into some inanimate object. The word we gave to the Mandan people is a high term of respect — the Arikara word for Mandan is “kunit,” which literally means “rocks.” The [Arikara] considered the Mandan a powerful, knowledgeable people that stood for the will of God.

“A big part of this [rock] motif that continually reoccurs within our stories is that they have power, and that this power is connected to the thunder and lightning. There’s a [longstanding] ideology regarding the thunder and lightning, and the wind and the rain as Gods that sit in the West, and that these powers, visible on earth, were born from the power of the rocks. In the beginning of our creation story, the Creator himself squeezed a rock and from it gave birth to these four Gods that sit and protect the Evening Star, which is the mother of our people.”

The Arikara people have a long history in present day South Dakota. Archaeologist William Strong suggested that pottery fragments found at the Arzberger archaeological site — a fortified village near Pierre, occupied in the 13th and 14th centuries — showed “a general resemblance to historic and protohistoric Arikara wares.” Surveys at the Vanderbilt site show that during that era indigenous earth lodge villages existed in the Missouri River Valley in what is now Campbell County.

Even before the Lewis and Clark expedition, European traders had brought a series of devastating smallpox epidemics to the Middle Missouri Valley and disrupted the Arikara role in the continental indigenous trade network.

“The Arikara’s hatred of Americans had several roots,” wrote historian William R. Nester in The Arikara War. “The most important was the succession of trading expeditions up the Missouri, which threatened the Arikara position as one of the region’s trade middlemen. The animosity was inflamed by the death by smallpox of one of their chiefs during a visit to Washington in 1806.”

Less than 20 years after the Corps of Discovery were regaled with the story behind the stones, the amity between the Arikara and the Euro-American newcomers had dissolved.

In 1823, Arikara warriors struck a fur-trading party. The U.S. Army responded by bombarding their villages with artillery. The conflict — which became known as the Arikara War — was the first between the U.S. military and the indigenous people of the Plains.

Though the roots of the conflict went back further, Arikara animus towards these particular trappers began in 1822, when a Rocky Mountain Fur Company expedition led by William Ashley and Andrew Henry set out to trap pelts in the Rockies and transport them east rather than trade with Indians for them. That fall the expedition stopped at the Arikara villages on the Missouri River to trade for horses, and promised to set up a trading post there the following spring. The company reneged on their promise, angering the Arikara.

When Ashley and a party of around 100 trappers returned the following year to trade horses again, tensions were already high. A couple months earlier an Arikara war party had traveled downriver to what later became known as American Island, near Chamberlain, and attacked Fort Cedar — a post where the Missouri Fur Company traded with the Dakota/Lakota. The raid was successful but Grey Eyes, an Arikara chief, lost his son in the battle.

When Ashley’s party disembarked at the village, Grey Eyes demanded reparations for the loss of his son. Ashley managed to defuse the situation by explaining that Fort Cedar belonged to another outfit, and the two parties agreed to trade horses the following morning. Ashley acquired 19 horses in exchange for muskets, ammunition and other goods, and resolved to leave the following day, but wasn’t able. Stranded by a storm, the party was forced to hold off for another day.

That afternoon, according to Ashley’s journals, two upper village chiefs named Bear and Little Soldier warned him that some lower village chiefs were planning to attack. Then later that night, a trapper named Aaron Stephens slipped into the village, reportedly looking for “female companionship.” Whatever he did, he didn’t live through the night. A man named Edward Rose ran towards the keelboats, followed by an Arikara war party of several hundred, to tell Ashley that Stephens had been killed. Near dawn, the war party attacked the trapper camp on the shore, killing 12 men.

The surviving men fled to the keelboats and then to a nearby island, where they buried two of their dead. One of these boats features in South Dakota lore as the scene of a solemn prayer by famous frontiersman Jedediah Smith, the “gentleman trapper” who was said to pack a burner and a bible. According to Dale L. Morgan’s Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West, the trapper/ordained minister “stepped forward, and while the men stood silent around, with bowed head he prayed to that God in whose sternness all were prepared to believe, in whose compassion at this moment they much needed to believe.” This devotional moment is enshrined in the State Capitol in a mural — The Peace that Passes Understanding — by artist Charles Holloway.

That August, a combined force of Army soldiers led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Leavenworth — along with Ashley’s trappers, a Missouri Fur Company militia and Dakota/Lakota allies — marched on the Arikara villages, bombarding them with artillery. Grey Eyes and perhaps 50 others were killed. Then Leavenworth surprised everyone by agreeing to a ceasefire, which didn’t satisfy the fur traders. When the Arikara abandoned their villages for fear of reprisals, members of the Missouri Fur Company party burnt them to the ground. This began the long Arikara flight that ended at the Fort Berthold Reservation, established in 1870 for the three-affiliated tribes — the Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa. The legend has since lingered around the banks of Stone Idol Creek, but any certain knowledge as to the identity of the sacred stones left with them.

The stones at the Oahe Sunset Lodge were actually moved, from a place closer to the creek to their present spot, by previous lodge owner Denny Jensen.

Jensen may have sincerely believed he had found the same stones Lewis and Clark reported seeing. Assistant State Archaeologist Mike Fosha visited the site in 2000 and concluded that the owner was likely in the general vicinity of the site but that “Stone Idol Creek is several miles long and any location along this stretch has equal probability for the location.” Some local papers ran with that, presenting Fosha’s visit as a certificate of authenticity, prompting him to respond in the South Dakota Archaeological Society Newsletter that, “next time I will just nod my head and say nice rocks.”

In a 2004 SDAS Newsletter article, archaeologist Linea Sundstrom posited two possible locations for the stones — Spring Creek near Pollock, and Porcupine Creek near Fort Yates. “Lewis and Clark noted the stone idols … when the explorers were somewhere between the mouth of the Grand River (October 8) and the Cannonball River (October 18); thus, either of these locations could be correct,” though “the more likely of the two locations for the stone idols is present-day Spring Creek.”

Sundstrom contextualized the stones within a diverse Native American tradition of stone person stories among various tribes throughout the region. Native American scholar Vine Deloria Jr. wrote an entire chapter on “Sacred Stones and Places” in his last book, The World We Used to Live In. “One of the most prevalent entities in the traditional Indian spiritual universe,” wrote Deloria, “was the sacred stone.”

Sundstrom also noted that, “Most of the historical accounts describe offerings piled at the feet of the stone persons.”

“[Making offerings] is a relation to a natural, or in this case a semi-unnatural event, regarding power,” says Jasper Young Bear. ìThere’s an idea that there’s luck and power around that area. So what the Indians are doing is they’re creating a transference and counter-transference, to allow that sacredness to seep into their lives by acknowledging the Great Mystery.”

“This [giving of offerings] shows up archaeologically,” says Fosha, “at the base of stone features that are unique in the landscape.” Unsurprisingly, since the stones had been moved, no evidence of offerings was found where Denny Jensen placed the stones he found with a backhoe.

Maybe one day the SDAS will take a call from someone who’s found three unusual stones near Spring Creek, and find evidence of offerings at their feet. Or maybe an offering site will be found minus the stones, perhaps because they’ve been moved by water or a backhoe. Maybe there are people who know — but aren’t telling or haven’t been asked — exactly which stones are the story’s home. The story itself isn’t stoneless.

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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Men in Black Stripes

By Roger Holtzmann

“When you make a call and the whole place goes nuts booing you, that’s when you know you got it right,” one longtime referee said.

Ah! The sounds of basketball season! Pep bands blaring out rock songs. Gyms exploding when the home team drains a clutch three-pointer. Whistles piercing the din, then deafening silence as the crowd draws its collective breath and awaits the referee’s call.

Followed inevitably by an enraged chorus of boos from half the crowd, while an aggrieved,”It’s about @#$&% time! He’s been doing that all game!” rings out on the gym’s opposite side.

In the span of years since James Naismith hung up a peach basket and invented the game of basketball, no one has ever left a gymnasium saying,”Those refs really did a good job tonight.” If it was a close game the losing team’s fans are convinced they were robbed, as a result of either malice or incompetence. Which doesn’t mean the winning side thinks the officials did them any favors. They think their team won in spite of the referees.

When I was a wee lad I’d sometimes go to the games of an adult men’s basketball league that met on Sunday afternoons in winter. It was a pretty relaxed operation, the sort of league where guys would sprawl on the bench and smoke cigarettes during timeouts. If a player got thirsty mid-action he would sometimes go to the water fountain while his teammates played four-on-five at the other end. No one ever complained because this occasionally worked out well, strategy-wise. When the opposing team made a basket or his compatriots got a rebound he was in the perfect position to grab a floor-length pass for an easy layup.

On one memorable occasion I was tasked with running the scoreboard and clock for a game. Things didn’t go well because the controller had a quirky feature: if you forgot to flip a certain switch the buzzer would sound whenever the seconds counter hit 00. This was no ordinary buzzer, either. If the sonic energy it generated hadn’t been contained by the gym walls it would have shattered windows and terrified livestock for miles around.

At the opening tip-off, naturally, the clock read 8:00. Up went the ball, on went the clock and BRAAAAAPPP! went the buzzer, causing consternation and heart palpitations all around. When it happened at the beginning of the second quarter there were rumbles of discontent; on the third occurrence I was universally denounced and relieved of my duties. I remember the last buzzer distinctly for it was the first time I ever used the grandaddy of all curse words.

Anyway … referees for these contests were sometimes recruited by a player standing in front of the bleachers with a whistle and a striped shirt in hand. “Wanna ref?” he’d call plaintively to some poor shlub. As game time approached the standard on what constituted an acceptable candidate went down.

If Jerome Bear was around he always got the job. He wore the striped shirt so often it had stretched to fit his heroic midsection, and so was comically large on almost anybody else. Beyond that, Jerome was simply an institution. After watching him in action, an objective observer might conclude that he was less than conscientious. He could work a game with fewer steps than almost any referee in history, I would guess. Sometimes he’d lean against the wall at midcourt, or sit on the stage at one end and call the game from there. He was mostly fair, but it was understood by both teams that, in a toss-up situation, calls would go to the home team. Even so, I never heard any player get mad at or even argue with Jerome. He was just there. One might as logically have argued with the tide for coming in or the wind for blowing.

I think about that Sunday afternoon league whenever I see an ad for sports drinks, especially those which feature a guy drenched in sweat, droplets hanging off his nose, etc. First of all, are these appealing images? Do they actually make people want to buy such products? I don’t get it.

Anyway … most of the guys in that league were working stiffs. They didn’t make a big production out of the fact that they were sweating; most of them, in fact, would have recoiled at the idea of exercise for exercise’s sake. They played for love of the game, and if they took time off to get a drink, well, it was only logical to expend as little energy as possible. I’d love to see a commercial with sensible guys like them chugging Ultra Fantastic Power Zoom Ade between drags on a Marlboro.

As for Jerome, nobody would be handing him a whistle these days. Games at every level are a serious, no-pain-no-gain proposition.

Marvin ‘Pal’ Christensen of Yankton, was an unappreciated referee for nearly 50 years.”I’ve been called everything in the book,” he once told me. He worked his first basketball game (at Scotland) in 1947, and wore stripes for the last time at a football game (at Scotland) in 1996. Between those two contests he worked roughly 6,000 games, everything from middle school to a couple games in the Big 12.

If you ever feel like booing the referee, think about this.”A guy told me a long time ago, when you referee you’re only going to be half right. No matter what you call one side isn’t going to like it,” Christensen said.”But when you make a call and the whole place goes nuts, booing you … that’s a referee’s applause. That’s when you know you got it right!”

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the March/April 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Truck Stop-Titanic Connection

By Paul Higbee

It’s recorded that as the Titanic began slipping beneath the Atlantic waves, a passenger confronted a crewman.

“I was assured,” said the passenger, “that this could not possibly happen.”

The crewman replied that, all human assurances aside, the ship indeed was going down and that the matter was entirely in God’s hands.

Flash forward 80 years to Kennebec, South Dakota, where an eerily parallel conversation played out at Moore’s truck stop during a fierce October blizzard a few years back.

“I was assured,” said a man from Atlanta who was delivering a friend’s car to Washington state, “that no way, no way, could this happen in October.”

“It’s happening,” said an elderly gentlemen whose demeanor suggested he’d lived through South Dakota blizzards beyond count. “It’s happening, and only God can stop it now.”

I was among those waiting out the squall, and I chatted briefly with the man from Atlanta — briefly, because he wasn’t exactly in a chatty mood. He had visions of the car, like the Titanic, disappearing entirely, retrievable in theory only by casting cables into the cold depths. As it happened, though, the storm broke up after a couple hours and the man sped off down Interstate 90. And I do mean sped.

It’s unlikely, but maybe someday he’ll realize what a fine slice of Americana he experienced in Kennebec: South Dakotans stranded in a truck stop analyzing blizzards, exaggerating about blizzards past and creating clever and often obscene blizzard metaphors. I’ve waited out winter storms not only in Kennebec, but also at Rapid City, Sturgis, Pierre and Murdo truck stops, sometimes for as long as 48 hours.

Mostly I’m quiet during truck stop blizzard conversations, because I admire these storms for their strength that transcends human affairs. Expressing that sentiment in a roomful of people blown hours or days off schedule by snow is never wise.

So I keep quiet, but once I almost spoke up to endorse an Oregon truck driver at Rapid City’s Windmill Truck Stop. Just an hour earlier he ‘d totaled his rig on fresh snow, and now he waxed reflective.

“Sometimes I don’t take South Dakota blizzards seriously, because they’re pretty,” he said.

“No such thing as a pretty blizzard,” growled another long distance hauler.

“The way snow starts out here as snow, not rain, and swirls across the dry highway is pretty,” insisted the first man. “An ugly blizzard would be in Texas, where it starts as freezing rain that turns into a foot of ice, with a little snow sprinkled on top.”

That raised a choral response. I’m not sure any of the driver’s fellow truckers agreed that South Dakota blizzards are pretty, but they were unanimous in their hatred of Texas storms. The gentlest word I heard used to describe a Texas blizzard was monster, and the adjectives attached to the word that afternoon made it far from gentle.

But back to South Dakota blizzards. I could have supported the Oregon driver by saying something like, “There are other ways South Dakota blizzards are pretty, apart from their swirling. How about the way the Black Hills are absolute black just as the first flakes fly, and how they turn grey as flakes fill the air? Then the Hills slowly fade away as the storm intensifies, like Brigadoon or something.”

I could have said that, but of course I didn’t. I might say it to the man from Atlanta if I ever see him again, which I won’t. I’m pretty sure he’s south of the Mason-Dixon line this winter, maybe recounting his South Dakota adventure like a Titanic survivor.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 1997 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Old Farmyard Barn

By Christian Begeman

Looking back at the thousands of photos I’ve taken while traveling countless miles across this great state, I’ve learned that there are five things that folks love to see in photos. The first is a prairie windmill, followed (in no particular order) by abandoned houses, country schools, country churches and arguably the most popular: a good, old-fashioned barn. I’ve had more than a few people tell me that my next photo project should be on barns. I don’t disagree. I’ve found myself stopping to shoot barns that I find interesting any time the mood and light seem right. A farmyard barn holds nostalgic place in most people’s hearts, even if they’ve never set foot on a farm. From famous childhood stories like Charlotte’s Web to an occasional trip to visit cousins who lived in the country, barns seem to be a common thread running through our rural state.

Our barn wasn’t anything special. It did have 15 minutes of fame during the winter of 1996-97 when the snow was so high and hard that a yearling steer walked all the way to the roof. The photo my mom took of that scene made Phil Schreck’s KSFY Weathercast. Otherwise it was a pretty typical barn, both a place of refuge and a dreaded place of sweaty, smelly work. In my lifetime, it started out as a place of bum lambs and then turned into a milking parlor with wood stanchions and four fancy electric milkers. Every morning and every night, some or all of the family would find themselves working in that barn. But we also found ways to amuse ourselves amidst the drudgery of chores. The scent of straw bales still reminds me of lollygagging with the week-old kittens in the haymow while my older brothers finished the milking chores below, occasionally yelling for me to climb down and help.

A Begeman calf climbs a snowdrift to the roof of the barn during the severe winter of 1996-97.

Our neighbors had horses, and occasionally I would be asked to help with chores when they went on trips or vacations. There is something about the smell of horse and leather that still makes me smile and think of our fine neighbors. Their grandkids would often visit, and being near in age to me and my brothers we’d play all sorts of games in the barns and outbuildings of both our places, including basketball on the wood upper wood floor of one of the barns and various crazy Laff-A-Lympics competitions made popular by the late’70s Hanna Barbara cartoon we’d all watch on Saturday mornings. Whoa, how’d I get to’70s cartoons?

It’s no mistake the writers of the award-winning war movie Saving Private Ryan centered one of the most poignant and humanizing scenes of the film in a barn. Just before the final battle, Ryan laments that he can’t remember the faces of his brothers. After mentioning it to the captain, he then recalls hijinks in the family barn, ending the story laughing about how the barn nearly burned down … then a pause. Then the realization of that memory being the last time they were all together washes over his face and out into the audience. Even for an,”I won’t cry while watching a war movie” guy like me, that put a big old lump in the throat.

So here’s a collection of barn photos from the last couple years. Many of these barns are old and may not last another year, while others are still bright red and being used daily. Maybe they will conjure a few memories of your own barn experiences to share. I hope you enjoy them.

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

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Our Water Stories

By Katie Hunhoff

The Muskegon was once hailed as the handsomest boat on Big Stone Lake. It capsized in 1917 with nine passengers aboard.

For a state once considered a desert, South Dakota has a lot of water, thousands of feet of shoreline and a veritable treasure chest of lake and river adventure stories — some dating back a century and more.

The Kampeska Monster is among the wackiest. Boat-builders at Lake Kampeska were building a steamer in 1886 when they reported seeing a”20-foot long snake-like creature.” They were not taken seriously until several days later when four prominent Watertown area businessmen claimed they also saw it.

The foursome said it swam for quite a distance before disappearing into the depths. Perhaps worried about their reputations, they admitted it might have been an unusually large lake sturgeon. Big-city journalists came to see for themselves. Some poked fun at the very idea of a Loch Ness on the prairie, but one writer concluded that,”sturdy, virile Dakotans were not given to superstitious fears.”

Some of our water stories are fun, but others end in tragedy. At Big Stone Lake on July 10, 1917, nine people stepped aboard an excursion boat called The Muskegon. They never reached the other shore. Heavy rain fell and then, said a survivor, it seemed that two storms met in the middle of the lake, capsizing the 60-foot boat.

A heart-wrenching struggle ensued, as passengers and crew tried to save themselves and one another. In the end, the captain and six passengers drowned, including two young sisters. A poet memorialized the dead with a long piece that included these lines:

Those were the ties severed

In those seven peoples’ lives

Lost on this boat Muskegon

Sinking to rise no more.

But the Muskegon did rise; it was pulled from the water and restored 10 years later by a wealthy businessman who renamed it the Golden Bantam. Today it is docked at a museum just across the South Dakota border in Ortonville, Minnesota, along with memorabilia and news clippings.

Not many South Dakotans have prospered as professional fishermen, but there was a time when you could make a living by clamming on the James, Big Sioux and Vermillion rivers. Button-makers wanted the shells in the early 20th century. Clams were so abundant in the James that a particular spot called Tuscan in Hutchinson County was dubbed the”Mother of Pearl Capital of the World.”

The clam industry dwindled in the 1940s due to over-harvesting, environmental changes in the rivers and, of course, the invention of plastic buttons.

Despite the placidity of today’s tamed Missouri, adventures still occur on its waters. In 1992 a young Yankton couple saw a small object with a yellow flag on top being pulled upstream by a nylon rope. The object kept disappearing and surfacing around their boat, until the rope got tangled in the propeller and killed the engine.

They began to be pulled upstream, backwards, and to the husband’s horror the boat was slowly being pulled down into the water. They traveled about 300 yards, with their transom only inches above the water’s surface before he was able to cut the rope.

Their experience was witnessed by other fishermen and was soon published in the Yankton paper. The city was abuzz with news of the river monster. Writer Marilyn Kratz concluded that a sturgeon, which can grow to 1,000 pounds, could have been the culprit.”Their slender body and long snout, covered with bony plates, would be a terrifying sight at that size,” she wrote.”They certainly would be large and powerful enough to pull a boat about their same size.”

Huge fish were also reported by dam-builders when the reservoirs were built along the Missouri. Some divers saw fish 15 feet long floating at the bottom of the muddy river. Mysteries are still unfolding on land and in the waters of South Dakota.

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Ready For Anything

By Roger Holtzmann

Winter driving in South Dakota can be hazardous if you aren’t properly prepared.

Kit-Kat bar, miniature (8)

Cup, styrofoam (2)

Kleenex, box, small (1)

If you had to guess, what would you say the above items have in common? Go ahead, guess. You’ll never guess. Not in a million years.

Okay, I’ll tell you. That’s the winter survival kit we carry in our car. You know. For emergencies. Out of all the things in this world, from shoes to ships to sealing wax, I’m not sure how we ended up with those three. But I do know this: We’re ready for anything.

Unlike most of my columns, where I write whatever pops into my head without regard for the facts or common decency, I actually did some research on what is supposed to be in an Approved Winter Survival Kit.

Flashlight. Extra batteries and bulbs. Spare alternator drive belt. Ice scraper. Jumper cables. Warning triangle. First aid kit. Warm blankets. Spare clothing. Food. Fire extinguisher. Tow rope. Maps.

Spare alternator drive belt?

What planet are those people from?

I doubt we’ll ever have an Approved Winter Survival Kit in our car. I don’t think we could even manage the flashlight. It’s not that we don’t have one. We have at least a dozen in the Put The Flashlight Away When You’re Done Using It So We Can Find It When We Need It I Swear To God You Kids Never Put Anything Away It Makes Me So Mad How Would It Be If I Made You Buy One With Your Own Money drawer. The problem is none of them work. Or you flip the switch and there’s a feeble little glow deep within the bowels of the bulb — which is less than useful when you’re trying to locate a remote control under the couch.

In that same drawer we have roughly 3,000 batteries. A, AA, AAA, C, D and those big honkers with springs on top. None are any good, but I can’t bring myself to admit that. I need a flashlight. I try one. It doesn’t work. Of course, I yell at the kids, which is my standard response to anything bad. Then I take out the batteries.

I put them back in the drawer. Maybe it’s a bad bulb, I think. Or this cheapo flashlight. I can’t risk throwing away good batteries.

I try different batteries. They don’t work. I put them back in the drawer. I get two more. From the drawer. The flashlight still doesn’t work.”Okay,” I tell the kids.”Two of you lift up the couch while the other one looks.”

Even after devoting considerable mental energy to the subject, I still can’t see any flaw in this process — nothing to explain why we never have a flashlight that works. If by some miracle we ever came to possess an Approved Winter Survival Kit, with an actual functioning flashlight, it would be borrowed quicker than a desperate child can wail,”Where’s the remote? I’m missing ‘Sponge Bob Square Pants!'”

Now that I think about it, we already have some of that other stuff in our car. Ice scrapers? At least four, crammed underneath the seat, all cracked, along with the pieces of a couple more. Jumper cables? A brand new set, guaranteed to be a foot shorter than necessary. Warning triangle? We’ll send the kids out with a red rag to wave. First aid kit? Seems like a waste of money. Blood congeals pretty quickly in the cold. Problem solved. Warm blankets? Got it covered. We have one that’s been in the trunk for years — it smells like dust, spare tire and gas. Spare clothing? This I don’t get. You’re stranded in a howling blizzard. Wind chill 800 below. You ran out of gas an hour ago. At that moment you decide you want to change clothes?

Food? Got it covered. Kit-Kat bars are what kept the Donner Party going. Fire extinguisher? The problem with having a fire extinguisher in your car is that, most of the time, your car is what’s on fire. It would be better if everybody else carried a fire extinguisher and you could borrow theirs. Tow rope? Sorry. Every rope we’ve ever had gets whittled away piece by piece. Put up a tire swing here. Drag your sister on roller blades behind the bike there. Pretty soon there’s not enough rope to hold up a pair of pants. Maps? Why? You’re in the ditch or stuck in a snowdrift or your engine’s going rrr-rrr-rrr-click. You’re not going anywhere, so you don’t need to know how to get there.

I guess we’re set, winter driving-wise. If you happen upon us by the side of the road — whether we’re stuck, on fire, rolled over or whatever — don’t bother stopping. We’ll be fine.

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the January/February 2003 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Autumn Mysteries

By Katie Hunhoff

Visitors have long reported strange occurrences at Sica Hollow in Roberts County. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

South Dakotans are no-nonsense folks, so we always struggle to find supernatural tales for our October issues, but we have heard a few through the years. One of my favorite spooky stories, published in our September/October 2014 issue, is about a mysterious bright, white light in Miner County that appears out of nowhere. Locals call it the spooklight. It can be seen along a particular stretch of dirt road between Carthage and Fedora. The story’s author, Donna Palmlund, talked to family and neighbors to get their spooklight accounts.

Palmlund’s father grew up on a farm west of Spooklight Road. His grandfather would say that sometimes the spooklight was so bright they could sit inside and read by it. After the Hass family moved off the farm, a man named Joe Spader lived there. “After I moved to that farm it wasn’t long before I was aware of this light that was very peculiar,” Spader said. He described the light as looking like a bright spotlight cresting a hill and then going down the hill, but a car would never materialize. Before he heard about the spooklight, he was worried someone was trying to steal something.

Another mysterious light has been seen in southeast South Dakota, looking over Nebraska’s Crazy Peak, which rises above the chalkstone bluffs on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. Sometimes the view gives South Dakotans an unexplainable light show. “I’ve seen all sorts of UFOs there in the past,” said Carvel Cooley, a longtime local historian. “It’s just lights. They don’t make any noise and they can stop, start, zap out of sight, disappear and reappear.” Although a lot of locals have seen the lights, most don’t talk about it. Some give credit for the lights to swamp gas. Others bring up the Santee Sioux legends of seeing “little people” in the neighborhood of Crazy Peak.

Another well-known eerie South Dakota spot is Sica Hollow in Roberts County. Reports of strange voices, lights flashing in creek bottoms and bubbling red bogs along the Trail of Spirits make Sica Hollow a spooky place to visit any time of year. Its first Indian inhabitants dubbed the forested area”sica,” meaning bad or evil.

We visited with Chris Hull several years ago. Six generations of Hull’s family have lived near Sica Hollow. He has spent countless hours hunting or camping in the forest and has seen the glowing lights. Once he also had a more mysterious experience while camping with friends. They realized they had forgotten supplies, so one friend drove home to get them.

“We were hiking and heard him yell from down in the hollow,” Hull told us. “He must have yelled five or six times. We wondered if his truck had gotten stuck and he had started walking. So we walked for a mile and got down to the bottom, but there was nothing there. We climbed a hill to search for lights and found nothing. Finally we went back to the campsite and he pulled in at the same time. He said he was at home and he had all the sleeping bags and things he’d gone to get. But all five of us heard him yelling that night.”

When the leaves fall and Halloween is close at hand, we all like a good South Dakota ghost story. If you have one to share, let us know in the comments below or email editor@southdakotamagazine.com.

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Steinbeck and Charley

By Paul Higbee

For John Steinbeck, the Missouri River divided East from West.

In the fall of 1960, John Steinbeck, soon to win a Nobel Prize for a lifetime of literary contributions, encountered the Missouri River. He wrote:”I came upon it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west.”

Steinbeck had loaded his dog, Charley, into a truck and set off across 34 states. He logged 10,000 miles searching for the nation’s essence. The trip yielded a great nonfiction book, Travels With Charley, and if you haven’t read it please find a copy.

Over the past several years I’ve retraced sections of Steinbeck’s trip. Like him I’ve sensed the intimidating enormity of the continent, struggled with bad directions from well-meaning folks, and jumped into conversations with strangers in diners. Although Steinbeck authored classic novels, no one recognized him — much to his satisfaction.

Half a century to the week after Steinbeck passed through the heartland, it felt like he sat in my passenger’s seat as I followed his route. I shared his”rich with butter-colored sunlight” view of Wisconsin, and got swept into the same”great surf of traffic” into St. Paul on old U.S. Highway 10. Later, there was the Missouri dividing east from west so that”the two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.” I should note that Steinbeck crossed the river at Bismarck, not in South Dakota. But his feel for the entire heartland is one of the best parts of the book. He was a native Californian living in New York and everything about our part of the country felt fresh. He encountered colorful characters on the prairie (we’ve always produced plenty), with the best being a friendly yet very reticent Badlander who feels like an uncle to most of us with Great Plains roots. I actually found myself looking for the old guy, leaning against a barbed wire fence as he did in 1960, a little more stooped with age. Not that he would have volunteered to say anything to me.

Fortunately for Steinbeck most of the people he met were more talkative, especially in the heartland. They spoke about worries related to”job uncertainty” and national security in a time of international strife. Americans I met still talk about those matters. One thing that disappointed Steinbeck was how no one wanted to discuss politics.”It seemed to me partly caution and partly a lack of interest, but strong opinions were just not stated,” he wrote. What’s surprising about that is he made his drive during the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign. We tend to think of that as a political season that got lots of Americans engaged, but that’s not what Steinbeck observed. I can report that times have changed. Everyone, it seems now, has a political point of view, everything can be politicized, and opinions are stated strongly. Steinbeck might appreciate the noisy political discussions he’d hear in today’s early morning coffee joints, but he’d quickly note that there’s very little debate. Like-minded coffee drinkers tend to gather and preach to the choir.

Long before Facebook and Twitter made it possible to share life in detail with legions worldwide, Steinbeck observed a value people placed in maintaining respectful distance.”A direct or personal question is out of bounds … he did not ask my name nor I his,” he wrote of a farmer he talked to for a long while. So there’s mystery behind many of the people he described, and they haunted me as I passed their way. What was with the flighty waitress (with an aunt in Sioux Falls) who Steinbeck said could pass for either a young, troubled girl or spry old woman? And what drew a roving Shakespearian actor to a camping spot along the Maple River at Alice, North Dakota?

By no means is the book all about cautious conversation, Wisconsin sunlight, and vistas from Missouri River bluffs. Racial tensions had heated to a boiling point in 1960. In New Orleans, Steinbeck felt nauseated after witnessing a cruel, calculated protest against school integration. Obscenities were hurled at children. He painted the scene vividly but it’s easy to see that Steinbeck was naive in one respect. He saw racial injustice as a southern problem. As the rest of the 1960s revealed, there was racial injustice in northern cities, too, and in Indian Country.

Unlike the very first readers who picked up Travels With Charley a couple years after the trip, we know what waited in the wings — assassinations, Vietnam, riots that took lives and burned cities. Throughout the book there’s an uneasiness that Steinbeck sensed, as if Americans were bracing themselves for something without being able to guess exactly what.”My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty’s beard,” one man told the author.”I don’t even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow … we’ve got nothing to go on — got no way to think about things.”

Maybe thinking is best done in retrospect, which makes Travels With Charley more valuable now. And for all our thinking, there are eternal things Steinbeck found that exist beyond our influence: the power of autumn winds on the prairies, and how starlight alone can make the Badlands glow on moonless nights. They’re part of the nation’s essence, too.

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the November/December 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.