Category: columns-culture

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Painting Hay Camp

By Michael Zimny

Sandstorm.

Artist Grace French migrated from New England to Rapid City when it was still a dusty cow town known as Hay Camp and became a fixture on the local art scene — as both painter and educator. We recently sat down with Donna Fisher, secretary of the Journey Museum’s board of directors in Rapid City, to talk about one of the Black Hills’ earliest artists.

What is the Grace French story?

The Grace French story is really two things. One is tracing the career of a woman who came to Rapid City early. Rapid City was founded in 1876 during the gold rush, but the real centers of activity were gold towns. Rapid City at that point was called Hay Camp. It was a little market town on the front range, not where all the action was.

She was formally trained at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. At the time that was a very progressive school and women were able to study alongside men. In terms of art education it would have been considered cutting edge.

Grace French.

There was also a Normal School movement in New England that was very progressive in terms of training children in art. So she came with that experience.

She taught at the first university in the Black Hills, in Hot Springs, called Black Hills College. She lived with her mother [until she passed away in the 1890s] and sister in Rapid City and worked as both a painter and as a teacher, with a studio in her house.

You sent your kids up to art classes at Grace French’s — you wanted your kids to have culture. Everybody had piano lessons. If you were affluent enough you sent your kids up there, and the French sisters gave lessons to kids from families who couldn’t afford to pay.

She died at age 84 in 1942. Her ledger in 1939 shows that she was still sending a painting out to an exhibit. So she had a very long career as both a painter and a teacher.

As a painter — in the days before color photography, we have lots of black-and-white pictures from that era, but we really don’t have a sense of what the landscape and the color looked like, except for Grace. She was the dominant figure in the local scene.

In 2007, we did a big exhibit at the Journey Museum. When we started researching, we discovered stories that indicated her father was fairly wealthy and that his money had enabled these two women — Grace and Abby French — to live as artists. That was the popular lore, that he had stock in Homestake. What we learned through work with genealogists and [researching] family history was that her father was not a wealthy man. He was a mill worker when he died [in 1875, before the Homestake deposit was discovered]. Her mom was widowed when Grace was 17.

In fact, the French sisters were sturdy pioneer stock who were entrepreneurs, teachers and cultural influencers in Rapid City on their own.

Canyon Lake.

How did Grace French end up in the Black Hills?

She came out with her mother in 1885 from Boston. And here was this very progressive, thriving New England city — a heart of culture — and she must have loved it.

Her brothers and her sister came out to the Black Hills in about 1882 or 1883. The hysteria of the gold rush was fading but things were settling in, in mining expansion in the Northern Hills and Rapid City was a little merchant town with dusty streets and stagecoaches and freight wagons and lots of wood frame buildings. One brother had a sawmill.

Grace and her mother came out in September of 1885, by train to Fort Pierre, where they would have gotten onto a stagecoach because there was no train across the Missouri River. I always think of this woman who had just been walking along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston stepping off of that stagecoach onto a dusty, gravel street.

The brothers left within a couple of years. The mom and two sisters stayed and they built a house in Quincy Street that was up on a hill overlooking this little prairie town. She painted a lot of pictures looking down across Rapid City. We have sketches of important buildings that are gone now. We have a display of smaller works at the Journey, and probably the ones that best illustrate Rapid City history — the Alfalfa Palace, the early church spires, historically significant places.

Cold Spring.

What other subjects did she feature?

She was a superb portrait painter. She and sister were both fine china painters, which was a typical art form that was acceptable for women to get involved in. For about 30 years they both did and taught china painting. She did landscapes. She did lots of watercolors and sketches. She did a wonderful drawing of Needles Highway.

There were two collections [of small works, paintings and drawings] given to the Journey Museum — one by David Strain, the godfather of Rapid City history who wrote Black Hills Hay Camp. He featured his own collections of her work in that book.

She also did big, impressive oil paintings. Abby painted with her. They would go out in their buggy and do plein air paintings by the creek or Canyon Lake. That buggy was still in a little shed in the back [of the house on Quincy] when Grace died in 1942.

When she died, her [large oil paintings] were crated and stored by her executor with the stipulation that if Rapid City ever had an art museum these paintings should be given to the museum that formed. When the Dahl opened in 1975, a truck pulled up in front and they started unloading these big crated paintings. And they’re now in the Dahl [permanent] collection.

Dark Canyon.

Do you think there’s a lot of her work out there in private collections around the region?

It drives me crazy. Yes, the bulk of her stuff. There’s a photograph of Grace as an elderly woman in her home and she had paintings from floor to ceiling.

The other thing that drives me crazy — she studied with probably the leading china painter/teacher in America, Franz B. Aulich, in Chicago. Those little pieces — it’s what you did, you had these pieces of china painted by the French sisters. But it was something that fell out of fashion. World War I came and the porcelain wasn’t imported from Europe any more.

A china plate design by Grace French.

But also styles were changing. If you think about the 1920s, it was a very different era from the 1900s — ladies sitting around drinking tea ‡ la Downton Abbey kind of thing. All of a sudden instead of the elegant, quite proper world, we had flappers. Oddly, the sisters wore long skirts and 1900s-era blouses, and their long hair twisted up in a bun, long after everybody else didn’t.

What other social activities was she involved in?

[The French sisters] were founders of the Christian Science church here. They were also super active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union — which was not only an anti-alcohol thing. The Temperance organizations were very involved in the vote for women.

Women could vote in school board elections, but even that was considered very controversial. And early records show that five women voted in the first school board election [in which women were allowed to vote]. One of them was Alice Gossage, the editor of the Rapid City Journal, and two of the five were the French sisters. That’s strong evidence that they were pretty spunky ladies.

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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Plants with a Purpose

By Katie Hunhoff

Linda Black Elk and members of the Brave Heart Society from the Yankton Sioux Tribe hold a festival every spring to help young people learn the stories and traditional remedies of their ancestors.

When Linda Black Elk’s family members felt sick, her grandma would go outdoors and collect plants to make medicine.”She never went to school but knew everything about plants, their names, uses and what ate them,” Black Elk recalls. She also taught her grandchildren about nature’s gifts.

“Later I realized my grandma was a scientist,” says Black Elk, who followed in her grandma’s footsteps and today is an instructor at Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota.

Black Elk spoke about her grandmother’s plants at the Waterlily Storytelling Festival, held at the Andes Central School and Marty Indian School last March. This year marked the festival’s 13th anniversary. Faith Spotted Eagle of Lake Andes helps organize the festival, which is named after the book Waterlily by Ella Cara Deloria.

“Waterlily is a landmark book that describes the life of a Dakota girl growing up in the 1800s,” explains Spotted Eagle.”Ella’s oral histories recorded in her written stories were like many of those told to us older ones in our growing up years, as that is how we learned our values and ways of being. We became painfully aware that many of the younger folks had not heard the stories we grew up on, so they could not pass this crucial information on.”

To preserve the stories, the grandmothers and mothers of the Brave Heart Society (a traditional Dakota society that was revived in 1994) began hosting the four-day storytelling event each March, when there was still snow on the ground.”After that,” says Spotted Eagle,”we go out and learn from nature.”

At the festival, Black Elk taught groups of teenagers the importance of identifying and using native plants. Her talk was titled”How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse with Common South Dakota Plants.” The zombie hook was clearly designed to entertain, but Black Elk also explained a catastrophe is possible.”The United States government has a zombie action plan,” she began her lecture. (It’s true.)

Black Elk recommends that we balance modern life with traditional knowledge. Here is some of the plant knowledge passed down from her grandmother and other ancestors.

Be careful when beginning to identify plants. Several are poisonous, so don’t take chances. Ideally, you should find an experienced plant hunter to help you get started.

Bee Balm or Wild Bergamot

Bee balm’s beautiful purple flowers grow across the entire state. Black Elk notes it smells like Listerine. Bee balm, in the mint family, is a powerful anti-bacterial and effective at treating wounds. It is also a calming aromatherapy and can be used to soothe sore throats, congestion or fever (place in a piece of cheesecloth and hold under hot, running water). Bee balm tea also calms a variety of stomach ailments.

Yarrow

Black Elk recommends yarrow to stop bleeding.”Crush up leaves, put it on a cut and it will stop bleeding immediately,” she says. In Greek mythology, Achilles carried yarrow to treat his warriors. Yarrow is one of the easier plants to identify, with flat leaves, which also make good salad greens.

Plantain

Black Elk says all botanists have an amazing story about plantain’s success in treating burns. Her favorite occurred when she was at a sweat lodge. An 11- or 12-year-old girl slipped when she was leaving the lodge and her foot made contact with burning, hot rocks. Black Elk grabbed plantain leaves, scrunched them up and applied to the burn. Seconds later, a blister formed. The girl stopped screaming and crying.”Yarrow immediately cools off burns,” says Black Elk.”It took the pain away instantly.” Because the girl’s pain was gone, Black Elk and the others decided to finish the ceremony and then head to the clinic. But when they came out of the sweat lodge 45 minutes later, the girl was running around barefoot and playing.

Stinging Nettles

While stinging nettles can cause a smarting rash, it is also a pain reliever, due in part to its ability to reduce inflammatory chemicals in the body. Black Elk had a friend who suffered horrible arthritis in one shoulder, and could hardly lift her arm. Black Elk asked if she could do a stinging nettles treatment.”Every day I whipped her shoulder with the plant for 20 minutes, twice a day. At the end of the week she had full range of motion,” Black Elk recalls.

Rosehips

You can absorb more vitamin C and omega 3s by eating three rosehips (small reddish colored rose berries) than from any other plant, or even from eating a grapefruit. Remember to remove the seeds — they have hairs on them. The flowers can be ground into a tea, or eaten fresh or dried.

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Fields Of Gold

By Katie Hunhoff

Ideally we’d be driving past thriving fields of healthy, ripening corn as we explore South Dakota roads in August, but this year drought has descended on our farms.

Corn has been growing here for hundreds of years. Before Dakota Territory existed, before steel plows were invented. Before the Louisiana Purchase and before Columbus stepped foot in America.

Today our corn crop is impressive. More than 12,500 South Dakota farmers have once again planted about 5.1 million acres. Last year, their efforts yielded a collective 850 million bushels. That contributed $2.6 billion to the state’s economy — over 5 percent of our total gross domestic product.

Yields like that don’t happen by luck. My grandpa was a corn farmer but he probably never harvested more than 75 bushels per acre. In 2015 the state average was 159, according to the South Dakota Corn Growers Association, and the highest yield was 288.62, credited to 38-year-old Joey Waldner of Huron Colony.

“You know everything has to fall together just right to do that,” Waldner told one of our writers. The soft-spoken and modest farmer has been growing corn since he was a boy. He began by helping his father, the Hutterite colony’s farm manager. Joey says the key to a high yield is,”never let the corn have a bad day.” He and his men irrigate and fertilize and spray for bugs and weeds.

My grandpa Bernie Hunhoff and his contemporaries tended their fields with equal care. Some would walk through the corn in the summer, cut the tallest stalk and then carry it in the pickup bed as a conversation piece, or maybe they’d take it to town for a”tallest corn stalk” contest. Today, due to modern genetics, stalks are almost all the same height; you don’t see a stray giant like the good old days. Furthermore, farmers don’t want their corn to grow really tall. They prefer more ears and less stalk.

That may be why”tall stalk” competitions are a thing of the past. But make no mistake — drought or not, corn is still a cultural icon of South Dakota. The rains will fall again — hopefully in time to salvage this year’s crop — and records will be broken for yields per acre. We’ll discover new variations of how to enjoy corn on the cob at the county fairs and the Corn Palace Festival in Mitchell will celebrate farmers Aug. 23-27, rain or shine.

For folks who love nostalgia and athleticism all wrapped in a husk, don’t miss the annual hand corn picking contest set for Oct. 1 at the Jim Redder farm near Flandreau. Men, women, youth and senior citizens all compete for a chance to go to the national meet. The event is free and lunch is available. Call (605) 997-3509 for more info on the contest.

Rain or not, our fields are about to turn gold in South Dakota. Enjoy the celebration of our annual corn harvest.

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Four Stars and Two Shoes

By Roger Holtzmann

Carolyn and I are at the grandma and grandpa stage of life, which is a time of both joy and trepidation. Is there anything sweeter in heaven or Earth than a little girl whose face lights up when she sees you? On the other hand, I worry because she can look at wild animals and hear them roar on an iPad. Will she be content to read an animal book with grandpa and listen to his imperfect impersonation of an elephant? Such are the questions that keep me awake at night.

This is also a time of life when I sometimes read only the headlines in our daily newspaper; the stories seem to be on some sort of dreary loop in which the names change and little else. Something similar can be found on the comics page — Beetle Bailey is forever getting horribly mangled by Sergeant Snorkel, yet he always recovers by the next day, and Dagwood remains skinny as a fence post despite consuming heroic amounts of food — yet I never miss a day or a panel. This probably means something. Drop me a line if you know what it might be.

When I’m done with the comics I glance through the obituaries. Not to see if I’m dead, as the old joke goes, but because people close to my age, some of whom I have known for years, are occasionally showing up there.

Several years ago, my parents entered the downsizing stage of life. They moved out of their house and into an apartment, which necessitated getting rid of everything from snow blowers to boxes of photos and mementos they no longer had room to store. My dad, my brother and I were going through some of these land found countless treasures, along with the usual fare unearthed in such places. Lamentable wardrobe choices. Embarrassing haircuts. People nobody recognized. Then we came across a small, framed flag of four stars. Dad lifted it from the box and stared at it for a moment with faraway eyes.

“This was hanging in the window of Mom and Dad’s house when I got home after the war,” he said at last.”There was a star for each of us in the service.”

Uncle Ed, the eldest of Alphonse and Mary Holtzmann’s four boys, got drafted into the Army in 1941. He started out in the cavalry. It seems odd that the Army still had horses at that time, but in any event, the generals soon reassigned him to an artillery unit. Ed served in Europe.

Dad, next in line, enlisted in the Coast Guard. He trained as a radioman, and spent most of his time afloat on small weather ships in the North Atlantic. Convoys and aircraft on the way to Europe needed up to date weather information, so he and his shipmates bobbed among the U-boats to obtain it. Oliver, dad’s younger brother, was part of Patton’s fabled Third Army. Its combat arms earned that fame, but they did so with the support of men like Oliver. He was a cook.

Uncle George graduated from high school in May 1943, and was drafted a month later. He ended up in the Army Air Corps as a radioman/cryptographer, and took part in the invasion of Luzon and subsequent campaigns in the Philippines.

“Mom and Dad said the rosary every night for us,” said Dad, and their prayers were answered. All four of the stars on their flag were blue; families that lost a son in combat had gold stars instead of blue.

My dad’s story brought to mind something I heard from an acquaintance. Her son joined the Marines right out of high school, and he is now stationed in Afghanistan. After being in country for some months he came home on leave and got married. All too soon, I’m sure, he returned to the war zone and she settled into base housing in North Carolina. She leaves a pair of his shoes by the door, as if he has just stepped out and will be back soon.

“They also serve who only stand and wait,” wrote John Milton in a different context, but the sentiment applies. Most of us may never truly understand what it feels like to look at shoes by the door or count rosary beads like the days until loved ones return. That does not relieve us of the obligation to try.

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

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Happy 200th

By Katie Hunhoff

It’s birthday season for several South Dakota towns, but the biggest celebration this year will be for Fort Pierre, the state’s first community to turn 200. But take note, our oldest town is not resting on its historical laurels. The Missouri River city aims to start its third century with a bang.

Two hundred years ago, the site of today’s Fort Pierre became a community of sorts when Joseph LaFramboise opened a trading post at the junction of the Bad and Missouri rivers. It was just 74 years after the Verendrye brothers had buried a lead plate on a nearby bluff claiming the region for France.

Fort LaFramboise eventually fizzled but in 1832 it was rebuilt as Fort Pierre Chouteau, named for a principal owner of the famed American Fur Company. Chouteau’s post prospered for decades, and became the midway meeting place connecting St. Louis with a number of smaller posts to the north and west in today’s Montana and North Dakota.

Chouteau pioneered the use of steamboats on the long and treacherous Missouri. Though boat captains and crews were befuddled by high water, low water, strong currents and submerged stumps, their cargo of pelts and hides made Chouteau a rich man until the beaver and buffalo began to disappear. By 1855, he was losing money so he sold the site to the U.S. government for use as a frontier army post.

Mayor Gloria Hanson puts Fort Pierre’s early history in perspective like this:”Thirty three years before the Declaration of Independence was signed two French guys claimed it,” she says.”When the Fort was established, Napoleon was occupying Europe, The War of 1812 was raging, Lewis and Clark were making their trek, the Louisiana Purchase was being negotiated and then you have Fort Pierre being settled. The history just blows me away,” she says.

Local historian John Duffy says the bicentennial will help reinforce knowledge of Fort Pierre’s history along with new development by connecting people.”The anniversary draws people to become involved and is bringing the town together. We have a lot of young families, retired families, and professionals. Eighty-five percent of residents work in Pierre. This is the time to draw everyone together.”

Hanson agrees that the celebration is time to move Fort Pierre in a new direction. “We have never done a good job of capitalizing on our rich history. Last year, for example, for a history field trip, students went to Pierre. I want our kids to have a ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ attitude about their hometown. So if they see trash in the street it would make them mad. I want to develop a passion for this place with everyone understanding how unique and special Fort Pierre is.”

The town has big plans for the 200th celebration, being held September 15-17. But, in anticipation of the birthday, music is planned throughout the summer. The Silver Spur has been holding concerts near the patio that overlooks the river. Country act Diamond Rio is booked for August 4. Drifter’s, the new convention center, has local bands scheduled throughout the summer. And for the finale in September, the community will hold a weekend-long celebration with a wagon train, parade, steak feed, arts festival, Suzy Bogguss concert, helicopter rides and a rodeo.

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Brimming With Enthusiasm

By Michael Zimny

At Star of the West in Belle Fourche, Brad Montague makes cowboy hats for West River ranchers as well as sports and television stars.

Is the generational divide over cowboy hat brim width just another indicator of the deepening socio-aesthetic chasms in our nation? Probably not. In any case, wide or tight, Brad Montague at Star of the West can shape you up.

He’s been shaping hats since he was knee-high to a buckaroo in Fruitdale, just east of Belle Fourche.”As a kid growing up wearing hats all the time,” Montague recalls,”we had to learn to shape our own hats. We had a pan with a little knob on the top that you could take a screw out and pull the knob off, and when it started boiling it shot steam. So we’d stand over the pan and steam our own hats and shape them.”

He didn’t know then that standing over that jerry-rigged steam kettle, he was shaping more than just his hat.

Much of what makes a hat unique is in the curvature of crown or brim. “In my opinion,” he says, “the harder part of making a hat is the shaping.”

A hat’s shape conveys subtle messages about the age, persona or social milieu of the wearer. The”taco” look — a high, narrow crease in the crown that looks ripe for a spoonful of carne asada — is popular on the horse show circuit. The “cattleman” crease is a little wider and tends to be favored by more mature cowboys.

Brim width tends to correspond with age.”For years, the standard brim width of a hat was 4 inches. You’re starting to see the factory hats go to 4 and a quarter. A quarter inch doesn’t sound like much, but when you add a half inch in diameter it makes a huge difference in the appearance of the hat.”

“When you start getting into the older generations — 70s and up — you’ll see them going to a 3 and a half inch brim as opposed to a 4.”

Montague understands the visual subtexts communicated by a hat. More importantly, he intuitively understands how to formalize that visual language with his hands. And he knows what every cowboy used to know — that while styles can fade, a hat made of the right materials will endure.

Like most makers of Western hats, Montague uses the”X” rating system (unrelated to the old MPAA rating) to grade his hats.”The higher the Xs, the more quality and durability you get.”

Montague begins with a raw hat body and shaves away any excess felt before shaping the crown over a hat block.

But he doesn’t necessarily recommend relying on the rating system.”For years, Xs meant a lot more than they do now.” A higher”X” rating on a hat will generally mean a higher ratio of wild fur, but there is no governing body to set exact requirements for any given rating.”Anybody can label whatever they want.”

“If you take a hat from the’60s or’70s and it’s labeled as a 3X, you’ll find that little 3x is probably better than most of the 10Xs nowadays.”

Montague uses rabbit and beaver fur exclusively. A higher”X” rating means a higher percentage of beaver fur. More fine, short beaver hairs make for a stronger, more compact hat.

Older cowboys and cowgirls know this, but,”It’s gotten to the point that somebody my age or a little younger can’t feel a hat. I’ve had people come in here and argue with me that the higher quality the hat, the thicker the material is. No, that’s a lesser quality felt.”

Somewhere along the way, a tactile kind of knowledge was lost. People lost touch with their hats and started relying on the labels.”Cowboys that have been wearing hats their whole life will tell you that the movie Urban Cowboy is what killed it.” Not because John Travolta wasn’t true West, but because the movie’s popularity triggered a wave of hat inflation. Xs became status symbols rather than a measure of dependability.

“Around here, most people buy a hat to wear for dress, but eventually they make a work hat out of it. They wear it on a daily basis where it’s going to shed the sun, rain, the snow — the durability becomes a big issue. You know, if you’re going to spend $400 on a hat, you want something that’s going to hold up.”

Like most custom hatters in the U.S., Montague gets his felt hat bodies from Winchester, Tennessee. The Winchester Hat Corporation processes beaver, rabbit and other furs and forms them, with liberal use of steam, into a basic hat body.

At this point the hat body is cone-shaped and looks something like the hat worn by your classic hillbilly caricature. Maybe real hillbillies saved moonshine money by buying unfinished hat bodies directly from Winchester.

Cowboys are more particular about their hats.

Ironing helps shape the brim, which typically finishes right around 4 inches wide.

Montague starts with the raw hat body, molds it into the crown height he needs by pulling it tight over a hat block, cuts the brim to the desired width, irons out the Dionysian hillbilly lilt and forms a forward-facing Apollonian ellipse — a brim built to unfurl the Plains beneath a gaze like a hot branding iron. Nature renounces chaos beneath the benevolent tyranny of the brim, huddling into ordered bands like branded beeves. Rattles cease abruptly as its power surges over the land like a spinning blade severing serpent heads. Voles hunker. Storm clouds dissipate. Raptors trace its lines with flight.

That this instrument, so crucial to the breaking and taming of nature, itself comes from nature … well, Mother Nature should have seen that one coming. What else could the beaver portend? The beaver — nature’s self-intervention, altering ecosystems with its chompers and can-do. The beaver, whose pelt-money would launch wars and help John Jacob Astor build Manhattan, whose tail would make Davy Crockett a living legend. Of course the hat that donned the heads that broke and platted the Plains would be prized above all for how much of it was beaver.

Montague moved to Rapid City in the 1990s. He’d been working construction in the summers and took a winter job at the since-closed Western Way Work Warehouse.”Once they figured out I knew how to shape a hat, they paid me enough to keep me on.”

A couple years later, previous Star of the West owner Todd Christenson called him and offered him job. The plan was to take six months to apprentice Montague in hat making, then eventually sell him the store.”I’m one of those, if I can watch you do something, I can pick it up,” he says.”So I’d get ahead of what I was doing, and I’d watch [Christensen] finishing the hats. He was gone one Saturday, so I went to finishing hats. He came in that Monday and said, ‘Well, you got it figured out. Holler if you need anything.'” Montague was running the store within a month, and bought it out four years later.

Six days a week he takes felt hat bodies from Winchester — made up of more or less beaver depending on the X-quality the customer wants and is willing to pay for — shaves the excess felt down to an impervious surface, shapes the crown to the bespoke needs of the buyer, cuts, embosses and sews in the goat skin sweatband (“they cost a little bit more, but in the long run they’re more durable”), and makes hats out of them. He shoots for three per day on average.

A hat’s crease says a lot about its wearer. High and narrow creases are popular on the horse show circuit, while cattlemen often prefer a wider crease.

His shop is a like an enclosed fumarole. Most steps in the process involve plenty of steam. Steam, shape, steam, cut, steam some more. Gradually the union of heat, moisture and fur spawns something obdurate and supple.

“There are a lot of tools that take the hands-on thing out of it, but the more machines you get involved, the less custom-made it is.”

And a truly custom-made hat is getting harder to find. Since the 1990s, Western wear retail options have been steadily diminished, in Rapid City and the region. Even Pete’s Clothing in Belle Fourche — the local shop Montague grew up with — will close in the next few months. Consolidation means it’s harder to find something unique. And custom craftspersons with their own storefront are more rare than the shrinking number of Western wear outlets. He estimates there might be 50 makers of custom Western-style hats in the country. That’s why people come from far and wide to Star of the West.

“If you’re wanting anything different than what the shelf hats are,” says Montague,”you’ve got to come to me.”

Cowboys and cowgirls have noticed, including some noteworthy athletes.

“There was a year I think I had 10 of the top 15 bare back riders in the world wearing my hats.”

The walls of his store are lined with pictures of rodeo stars and country musicians wearing his hats. The most star struck he ever felt was when country artist Bobby Bare walked in. Outside of American ranch country, he ships hats to Japan, Australia, Russia and the UK. He’s even been commissioned to hat the casts of TV series like Fargo and Hell on Wheels.

Western styles are his bread and butter, but not a bridle on his powers of expression.

“I actually built a steampunk [fedora] here not too long ago.”

Still, the only trade show he does is the Black Hills Stock Show. Winter is his busiest time. Once calving season starts, some people might not make it to the shop for a while.”Hats will start to pile up on the floor.”

“A lot of my customers are people like me, people that I grew up with, that are interested in a lot of the same things. And the ones that aren’t cowboys, ranchers and all that — you get to learn.”

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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The Stars of Summer

By Katie Hunhoff

In 2009 Madison slugger Kevin Leighton hit his 500th home run for the Canova Gang. He broke the state record 169 homers before.

Leighton was just one of many memorable South Dakota baseball players — many of whom we’ve written about in South Dakota Magazine.

Like Leighton, Bill Prunty played amateur baseball for many years. But he’s best remembered for a single blast, known for years as the Home Run in the Dark. In a 1938 state championship game, Claremont and Aberdeen were tied 4-4 in the 10th inning. Umpire Tommy Collins announced that if there were no runs at the end of the 10th, the game would be replayed the next day. That was bad news for Claremont because their pitcher, Clayton Feser, had already beaten Watertown that day and all 10 innings against Aberdeen. It would have been impossible for him to pitch again in the morning.

Aberdeen didn’t score in the top of the 10th. Claremont had two outs in the bottom of the inning when Prunty came to the plate. He worked the count to 3-2, even though he could barely see the ball. The sports editor of the Aberdeen American News later wrote a poem about his next swing:

A sharp, clear crack and out through space

The leather pellet flew,

A blot against the darkening sky,

A speck against the blue.

Above the fence in deep right field,

In rapid, whirling flight,

The ball sailed on, the speck grew dim

And soon was out of sight.

No one needed to see where it landed — the resounding crack from the bat was enough. The ball was found in the morning and is now exhibited at the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

Red Loecker’s baseball career is most notable because no one expected it to happen. After being hit with sniper fire in Vietnam, he was told he might never walk again. But he was determined to get on his feet and play baseball back home in Yankton. He not only returned to the ball field, but won batting titles in 1969, 1970 and 1976, and was the state tourney MVP in 1969.

Women are also part of our state’s baseball history. Amanda Clement of Hudson was the first umpire inducted to the South Dakota Hall of Fame and the second female. Born in 1888, she grew up next to the Hudson ballpark and often played ball with her brother, Henry, and other kids in town. Because she was a girl, the boys often made her call the balls and strikes. She umpired her first real game at age 16 when Renville played Hawarden; it was the first game on record in which a girl earned money for umpiring.

Clement’s services were in high demand. She knew the game, plus coaches learned that they could sell more tickets with a pretty, young umpire behind the plate. She worked about 50 games each summer in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Her earnings paid her way through college. The Boston Post reported that she had turned down 60 proposals for marriage while umpiring, dubbing her the”heartless arbitrator.” Clement also broke a world record when she threw a baseball 279 feet.

Those are just three of our many heroes of summer. Every town has different memories and different stars. For a state with long winters and short baseball seasons, we have more than our share.

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The Scent of Colome

By Michael Zimny

Outhouse curator Richard Papousek’s contribution to humanity is more olfactory than”The Factory.” His Outhouse Museum in Colome is a small shrine to the historic design of private spaces.

The project began about 15 years ago and a few miles down the road in Gregory, where Papousek formerly ran an antique shop. The museum came into being as a tourist draw, but according to some grew into something much more than that, and according to others is still just a tourist draw.

“As a kid, I grew up with outhouses,” Papousek says.”We had them at our school and on our farm, and they’ve all kind of disappeared. And I thought this would be kind of neat to make a little collection, so I did that behind my store.”

He put an ad in the paper.”People thought I was crazy, but they did come across with some unique outhouses.” His collection includes a double-door, a doggy outhouse and a shack reputedly frequented by Calamity Jane.

The Gregory museum opened to some national media fanfare, and then settled into its existence as an outhouse collection in a small town on Highway 18. After Papousek closed the shop, the museum spent a few years in a temporary home, and then went away.

The museum is making a comeback in its new digs in an alley behind Main Street in Colome. Papousek has brought back some of the classics, along with some new, old outhouses, locally acquired. Each is accompanied by a summary of collected oral histories about its provenance and notable visitors received.”Each one has a unique story,” he says, though,”sometimes it might get embellished a little. It’s outhouses, what do you expect?”

Perhaps this installation will set down roots.”Gregory didn’t really want to be known as the dump of the world,” Papousek says.”I come to Colome and they welcomed it with open arms.” The city even laid some new gravel in the alley.

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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Writers on Wind

By Katie Hunhoff

Wind is an omnipresent force in South Dakota. We notice the rare absence of wind almost as much as strong gusts that ruin a summer picnic or dangerously carry snow during blizzards. Our state is consistently ranked as the fifth windiest by the National Weather Service.

Throughout South Dakota’s history writers have written about our wind, trying to capture the sound, the bite and relentlessness of prairie gales. There are rumors, which may be exaggerated, of pioneers going insane from the constant wind. More likely it was a mix of loneliness, poverty, harsh weather and extreme hardships that most settlers faced.

Kathleen Norris wrote a passage in her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography that gives a glimpse into how wind can affect the psyche:

“In open country, far from any trees, the wind beats against you, as insistent as an ocean current. You tire from walking against it just as you would from swimming against an undertow. Working outdoors on such a day leaves you dizzy, and your ears will still be ringing at night, long after you have drawn the shelter of four walls around you.

The wind can be a welcome companion on a hot day, but even die-hard Dakotans grow tired when the sky howls and roars at forty miles an hour for a day or more. The wind is so loud you have to shout at the person next to you, and you can’t hear yourself think at all. You begin to wonder if you have a self.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hamlin Garland was not a stranger to midwest winds. He was born in Wisconsin but the winds he experienced on the prairie stood out. “It was like all the roarings of all the lions of Africa, the hissing of a wilderness of serpents, the lashing of great trees. It benumbed his thinking, it appalled his heart, beyond every other force he had ever known.”

Sheepherder Archer Gilfillan touched on wind in a more lighthearted manner in his nationally acclaimed 1929 book Sheep (which was more about his Harding County neighbors than about sheep). Gilfillan wrote that the “force, not to say violence of the wind may be judged by the fact that when it is due east or west the transcontinental trains frequently blow through our towns as much as a day and a half ahead of schedule.”

South Dakota Magazine contributing editor Paul Higbee reflected on prairie wind for the May/June 2008 edition. In Lakota culture, he wrote, wind is a benevolent spirit Tate (tah-tae). “Tate is the father of the four directions and the epitome of what a good husband and father should be: strong and gentle, masculine yet unafraid of being nurturing and mother-like.”

And Black Elk, Oglala Lakota holy man, wrote that wind is part of the great circle. “Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”

Wind is as natural as our prairie grass, hills and flowing rivers. It is a part of the circle of life of which Black Elk speaks. Although we can’t see it, its force affects everything around us, our actions and even our thoughts.

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My Gardening Year

By Roger Holtzmann

Some years we get about a week of spring in South Dakota. Of course, there are also years when it doesn’t go on nearly that long.

Most years, summer is just all of a sudden here. Forget spring. One day you’re scraping frost off your windshield and the next you’re scraping a melted candy bar off the seat.

But there are those around who don’t go by calendars, and they aren’t fooled by freak snowstorms. They know that spring begins when garden work begins. These folks, who look just like you and me, are really members of another species: Gardenus Maximus.

Gardening is a serious business to them. They’ve been wandering outdoors every day since Christmas saying to themselves,”I wonder if it’s too early to try a few ….”

Gardenus Maximus spend their winter months reading and rereading seed catalogs. You or I might look at two different packages of carrot seed, for instance, and see … two different packages of carrot seed. But a Gardenus Maximus sees one carrot that’s straight, one that tapers; one matures in 68 days and one in 73 days; one keeps well, while the other is very sweet.

Gardenus Maximus have names for all their earthworms. They produce more food than some countries and more flowers than the Tournament of Roses. They know their soil’s ph. Their rows are as straight as string and they own as much hose as the fire department.

Each fall, Gardenus Maximus generously share fruits of the harvest with friends and neighbors. Except for those times when they can be seen chasing someone down the street with a wheelbarrow full of zucchini, this trait is widely appreciated in their neighborhoods.

Through a process that scientists don’t really understand, Gardenus Maximus spend months digging and weeding and watering and picking without ever understanding how much work they’re doing. Black dirt may release some kind of mind-altering chemical that makes them forget, but nobody really knows.

About this time every year, a temporary madness comes over me and I believe that I too am a Gardenus Maximus. But it is somewhat like my wanting to be a rock and roll star without ever making it past two guitar lessons. It would be nice to enjoy the harvest — but I’m basically just too lazy.

Sorry, Mom and Dad. You did your best, but some things just didn’t stick. I look at a garden and see drudgery, blisters and lots of kneeling in the dirt. And for what? To insure myself an adequate supply of beets? Yum Yum. Can I have another helping of those fried beets, ma’am? Deep in my heart of hearts I know it’s just not to be. But some nice warm day, fueled by visions of plenty and several beers, I’ll go out and rent a tiller anyway.

After tilling at least seven times as much area as I could ever possibly plant, the remainder of the day is spent planting and planning. Huge red tomatoes will be springing up over here — sweet ears of corn over there — peas will climb along that fence. It looks just like the cover of Organic Gardening.

After that initial burst, my madness subsides and I don’t go out there for a couple weeks. By then, that wonderfully black, crumbly seedbed has solidified into something resembling a runway. Nothing has sprouted and my sets have mysteriously disappeared.

This discourages me, and I try not to think about gardening again until August. By then, a dense carpet of creeping jenny is everywhere. Gigantic pigweeds, with stems turning woody, tower over everything.

That’s my gardening year. As I look over summer’s sorry remnants each spring, I resolve to do better. But I can’t even fool myself anymore.

I did get something to grow once. As any gardener will tell you, growing tomatoes is only slightly more difficult than growing weeds. Anybody can grow tomatoes. But I always considered that harvest a genuine miracle.

Against all odds, my garden had produced actual fruit: Six tomatoes, to be exact. There may have been more than that. But with so many weeds around I didn’t realize they were even out there until it was almost too late.

They really jacked up my average yield: It went from zero to one and a half tomatoes per year. They were a real tough act to follow, and needless to say, I wasn’t up to it. But they did accomplish one thing.

You see, while I was busy setting ever-higher standards for incompetence in gardening, on the other side of the ranch (so to speak) my wife was causing all kinds of things to grow. Hedges, beds of perennials and trees were all flourishing on her half.

I told her different soils were responsible, but when she saw those tomatoes that myth was exploded. She is now in charge of the garden and I have been reduced to the status of a draft animal. Part of the reason for her success is her take-no-prisoners attitude toward weeds. Never mind all that organic stuff. She relies on 2,4-D in a base of used motor oil, topped off with a shot of nerve gas to take care of them. Weed conventions everywhere now open with a curse invoking her name.

She is also a big believer in mulching. Though this is a fine technique, it dies require massive amounts of grass clippings or leaves or something to use as mulch.

When we bought a lawnmower I was too cheap to buy a bagging attachment, as well as too lazy to empty bags. So during summer, I can often be seen cruising around town, searching out places where people bag up their grass clippings.

I’ve had many conversations like this:

“Do you mind if I take your grass clippings?”

Blank look.”Our … grass clippings?”

“Yeah, we use them as mulch.”

Same blank look.”You want … our grass clippings?”

Eventually I get around to loading them, but not before the homeowner has alerted all his neighbors. Misunderstanding what is going on, they offer bags of trash, busted chairs, old lamps, etc.

Perhaps our new domestic gardening arrangement will spare me this year’s attack of Gardenus Maximus disease. That will leave me one whole day that I used to spend on gardening to do something else.

Where’s that guitar, anyway?

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the May/June 1992 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.