Category: columns-history

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A Tradition of Stewardship

By Michael Zimny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bob’s Last Story about Jack McCall

By John Andrews

Bob Hanson knew all about Yankton’s history. Fortunately, he was also a mason, so whenever he came to inspect the nearly 150-year-old bricks of the Pennington House — the home of Dakota Territory Gov. John Pennington and today the publishing headquarters for South Dakota Magazine — he always had a story.

Jack McCall, the man who murdered Wild Bill Hickok at Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood in August of 1876, was one of his favorite subjects. After being acquitted at a hastily assembled miners’ court in Deadwood, U.S. marshals arrested McCall and brought him to Yankton, where he stood trial again, was convicted and was hanged just north of town.

There’s a theory among historians that government officials set out to arrest McCall and retry him in order to establish Dakota Territory’s jurisdiction over the Black Hills, an area still on the fringes of the legal frontier in the 1870s. Bob believed in more sinister motives: that federal officials could have orchestrated Hickok’s killing to assert such authority. He became even more convinced when he discovered a mystery at the Mead Cultural Education Center, which houses the Yankton County Historical Society.

Among the society’s treasured pieces of local history is a ledger book from the U.S. marshal’s office. It’s mostly a record of correspondence between the marshal in Yankton and Washington officials. Entries begin in 1862 and conclude in May of 1877, just two months after McCall’s execution. Bob’s interest was piqued by two missing pages that would have contained entries between April 3 and 9, 1877. For someone who believed a much larger conspiracy existed, those two pages were the equivalent of the missing 18 minutes of Watergate tape from the Nixon scandal.

I visited the Mead building to examine the ledger book. It measures about 12 by 18 inches, contains more than 600 pages and weighs about as much as a cinder block. The pages are filled with the beautiful script handwriting common on documents from the 19th century, although much of the reading is mundane unless you’re captivated by expense reports, requests for 2-cent stamps, expense reports, applications for vacation time and expense reports.

Four pages are bookmarked with thin white strips of paper. A curator told me Bob requested the book so often — right up until his death in 2018 — and read those pages so religiously that they marked them for him. One strip with the word JAIL written across the top marked a passage that explained the origins of Yankton’s first jail on Linn Street. Other pages include correspondence between Marshal J.H. Burdick and Attorney General Alphonso Taft that clearly show the subject of jurisdiction over the Black Hills was an issue.

After several hours of reading, I concluded there was likely no smoking gun — either in the book or the missing pages. Local historian Jim Lane, who has also extensively researched McCall’s time in Yankton, agreed.”Bob loved a good story, and he had a lot of fun with it. He kind of pushed the conspiracy theory,” Lane says.”When they hauled McCall back to Yankton, the territorial capital established legal authority over the Black Hills. That’s when they say that if there’s going to be a trial out here, it’s going to be decided by Dakota Territory. Bob was a little bit right with the theory that they wanted this to happen. But I don’t think anyone assassinated Wild Bill Hickok for political means.”

Jack McCall spent just seven months in Yankton, and he’s been dead for 144 years, but he’s never far from the minds of people in Yankton, as we discovered for a story in our March/April 2021 issue. The courthouse in which he stood trial at Third and Capital still stands. A plaque on the side of the building notes the courtroom’s location”directly back of this marker.” It is to be taken literally given the sign’s placement well above eye level.

The jail where McCall was held is now an apartment building at Fifth and Douglas. Its owner told us that before renovations there were still bars in the basement. Another marker stands at the corner of 31st and Broadway where the gallows stood, and a memorial headstone was placed in Sacred Heart Cemetery in 2017, though it does not mark McCall’s actual grave, the location of which within the cemetery is another local mystery.

I bet Bob would have had a lot to say about that.

Bob Hanson repairing Custer graves at Bon Homme Cemetery
Bob Hanson repairing Custer graves at Bon Homme Cemetery
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Bridges to History

By John Andrews

John Timm as Governor Arthur Mellette.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Petrified Giant

By Michael Zimny

An ancient petrified tree in Perkins County may be one of the largest ever discovered and may eventually tell us more about what kind of landscape existed here in the past.

“My father and a friend of his discovered it while herding sheep back in the 1930s,” recalls retired local rancher Clyde Jesfjeld. “They decided that it had to be a tree because of the way it appeared.”

Contemporary newspaper articles confirm that it was George Jesfjeld and Charles Murphy who first discovered the tree northwest of Bison. “Word got around, and back in those days the WPA was in operation,” Jesfjeld says.”There was a small crew that came in and unearthed more of it than what my father and his friend had uncovered.”

Over the years, there have been several efforts to partially excavate and examine the tree. In 1949, the Rapid City Journal reported that University of South Dakota Museum Director W.H. Over visited the site. He estimated the tree’s age at 60 million years. The same article listed its measurements as 9 feet in diameter at the exposed base, with 84 feet uncovered, extending to as much as 200 feet total as it disappears beneath the sloping ground.

Fred Jennewein, a Bison-area rancher who ran a small range relics museum in town, was active in the effort to excavate the tree. “In the 75 feet of exposed log,” Jennewein wrote, “there is no break thru [sic] the trunk of the tree altho [sic] in recent years there has been some vandalism by shelling off considerable sized pieces of the petrified wood.”

Today, the base of the tree — which is located on a School and Public Lands parcel, but not accessible by road — can still be seen, though much of tree has been re-interred with earth. We counted 37 paces walking along the depression where excavation once apparently occurred, before the earth above it slopes upward. Away from the exposed base, an occasional glimpse of petrified wood emerges from beneath the surface.

At one time, some locals hoped that the entire tree would be uncovered or excavated. “When the summer comes again we are going out with a bulldozer or some other kind of dozer and find out just how much farther that Oldest Old Timer goes back into that hill,” Jennewein wrote.

That does not appear to have happened. After the 1950s, newspaper articles about the tree are scarce. Though there had been some talk of removing the tree intact, that would have been difficult and expensive. In 1967, the state legislature allocated $1,200 to place a fence around the site, probably to prevent its gradual disappearance.

“I remember as a young boy taking a lot of different people down there so they could look at it,” Jesjfeld recalls. “A lot of people took a small piece.”

There is no fence in place, if one was ever built. Souvenir seekers may have forgotten about the tree and its remote location.

“There was discussion about getting the tree hauled out of there and placing it somewhere else where the public could view it,” says Mike Cornelison, Land Agent for School and Public Lands. However, any such effort would have to balance protecting the integrity of the native prairie against extracting the tree, a delicate task in its own right.

“If there was the right kind of supervision, it could be excavated,” Cornelison says.

So far, the funding has not come forward. Recently, several scientists at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology have expressed interest in visiting the site. Perhaps soon we will learn more about the tree’s history and potential future.

Is this the biggest intact petrified tree in the world, as some local enthusiasts claimed in the past? That probably depends on how bigness is measured. Maybe the tree can tell us more about the environment it thrived in, back in the days, to quote Fred Jennewein, “when the earth was young.”

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

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The Mysterious Custer Graves

By John Andrews

A stone in the Bon Homme Cemetery marks the graves of six unknown men believed to be members of the Seventh Cavalry. Legend says they died while marching through Dakota Territory in 1873.

There’s a mystery along the Apple Tree Road in Bon Homme County that has stumped local historians for decades: the identities of six soldiers buried in the Bon Homme Cemetery, said to be members of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry who died while passing through Dakota Territory in 1873.

Custer and his men arrived on the outskirts of Yankton in early April and set up camp west of town near the present-day stockyards. They were embarking on a 400-mile march from Sioux City to Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory. Fort Rice was to be the launching point for a summer expedition along the Yellowstone River.

The Seventh intended to stay no more than a few days, but even in 1873 the locals knew not to trust the weather in early spring. A severe blizzard that came to be known as the Custer Blizzard blew through town and delayed their departure until early May.

The unexpected layover in Yankton allowed the men to explore the young town and gave us stories that are still told today. One regards the local bandleader who assembled a group of musicians to play at a ball that town leaders hosted for the Seventh. Custer was so impressed with his musical abilities that he invited him to join the cavalry as its chief musician on the journey to Fort Rice. Felix Vinatieri accepted, and led a 16-member band as the cavalry paraded out of town on May 7. Fortunately, the band was left behind as Custer and his men trudged off to the ill-fated Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. If they’d gone along, the world may never have known Adam Vinatieri, Felix’s great-great-grandson and one of the greatest kickers the National Football League has ever seen.

Custer and his men didn’t march very far before they were delayed once again. Rapid snowmelt flooded both Emanuel and Chouteau creeks in western Bon Homme County. They encamped along Snatch Creek while a detachment went ahead to bridge the waterways.

The Seventh stayed four days, during which time Custer and several officers took meals at the nearby Cogan House, a hotel in the village of Bon Homme run by Bridget Cole Cogan, an Irish immigrant. It was during this short encampment that legend says six soldiers became ill, perhaps from typhoid fever, and died. Graves were quickly and quietly dug along the western bank of Snatch Creek. The men were buried there until 1893, when they were moved to the Bon Homme Cemetery. In 1922, a local stonemason crafted the large tombstone that marks the graves today.

Local historians have tried for decades with no luck to determine the names of the long-lost men. Regimental records indicate no deaths during May of 1873, and no mention is made of such an occurrence in the many memoirs written by participants in the journey or in contemporary newspaper accounts penned by journalists accompanying the Seventh.

We traveled to the old Bon Homme village site and met Greg McCann, who knows the legends better than most. He is Bridget Cole Cogan’s great-nephew and operates his modern-day Cogan House — a bed and breakfast along the banks of the Missouri River — not far from where the original once stood. He showed us depressions in the ground believed to mark the spot where Custer himself camped, chosen because of its ideal view of the river, the nearby military trail and Bon Homme.

McCann says he believes the widely held theory that the deaths were kept quiet because if word that such a contagious disease was spreading among the Seventh, the cooperation Custer so heavily needed from communities and Indian tribes along the route to Fort Rice would be jeopardized.

We published a story on the Custer graves in the fall of 2016 and made it available on our website several months later. Recently, a reader commented that an ancestor of hers fought with Custer, supposedly at the Little Bighorn, but never returned. She wondered if perhaps he died much earlier and lies in one of the graves.

For decades, paper trails have gone cold. Someday one is bound to warm up.

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A Bridge for the Black Hills

By Michael Zimny

The landmark Keystone Wye and (inset) the arch made from discarded spans.

“Just as plants and wildlife complement the environment, so must the structures which we adapt complement the environment with pleasing aesthetic designs.” That’s how a promotional film produced by the South Dakota Department of Transportation described the goal of the Keystone Wye interchange.

If you’re traveling from Rapid City into the Black Hills, most likely you’ll cross the landmark bridge. Built in 1967, designers Clyde Jundt and Kenneth Wilson chose a laminated timber arch structure to harmonize with the natural surroundings.

Jundt and Wilson traveled to Oregon where the fir (probably Douglas) for the project was harvested, then processed in Portland. Individual boards were joined through a technique called scarfing to create 91-foot-long planks that were then glued together to create the arches. Cross-laminated timber buildings are currently trading in Portland. As usual, South Dakotans were decades ahead.

Charles Williamson was a longtime engineer for the South Dakota Department of Transportation and remembers being slightly nervous the day the arches were set in place. “If I didn’t have those two bolt fixtures exactly right when they put the big crane up, if those two didn’t come together at the top, what are you going to do?”

The two parallel arches were made of two spans. First, they were attached via steel hinges to the footings, then lifted and joined at the top of the arch. There wasn’t much room for error.

Fortunately, the measurements were correct, and the arches came together. There was a mishap during the building process. A truck carrying three of the arches from the Hill City rail station turned over, and though they appeared undamaged, DOT replaced them to play it safe.

“There could have been nothing wrong,” recalls Williamson. “But you can’t take that chance. If they’re damaged inside and you put them together, they’ll probably stand, but if you take a semi over them, they might collapse. We only had one option. You had to reject the whole load.”

The three rejected arches became a landmark of their own. First, they were placed inside town at the site of a planned Rushmore Memorial Arch park. That park was never completed. Years later the arches were moved to their present locale, just off Highway 16, at the turn-off for the now-closed Sitting Bull Crystal Caverns.

Williamson worked on many highway projects in western South Dakota, including the pigtail bridges on Iron Mountain Road, but when asked where the Keystone Wye rates among them all he doesn’t hesitate to answer: “Number one. Everything else was simple. I worried a lot that the arches come out, we rejected them, I had to wait again. I worried that if they dropped those in there and they don’t fit, what are we going to do then?”

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

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Remembering a Small-Town Boy

By John Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Our Suffrage Heroes

By Katie Hunhoff

A new exhibit at the Old Courthouse Museum invites visitors to relive the fight for women’s suffrage.

Mamie Shields Pyle was walking by a polling place on Election Day in Huron — a place where women were not welcome in the early 1900s — when she overheard a conversation that changed not only her life, but the course of South Dakota history. A man was holding up a ballot and showing a group of workers (some of whom were illiterate) how to vote.”He was threatening their jobs if they didn’t vote the right way,” says Rachel Farrell, executive director of Huron’s Dakotaland Museum.”Mamie got upset and that’s really what got her started in the suffrage movement.”

After a 1910 suffrage referendum failed, she committed herself to changing the minds of male voters. Her dedication included many sleepless nights when she felt work was more important than rest. She served as the South Dakota Universal Franchise League (SDUFL) president until the state’s ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1919. Then she enjoyed the fruits of their labor through the actions of her daughter, Gladys, who became the first woman to serve in the state legislature, the first female Secretary of State and South Dakota’s first woman to win election to the U.S. Senate.

Today Mamie and John Pyle’s Queen Anne home (which is part of the Dakotaland Museum) can be visited by appointment. It is one of several historic places that were integral to the suffrage battle in South Dakota.

John Pickler, a founder of Faulkton, and his wife Alice became suffragists after John was elected as one of South Dakota’s first congressmen. Colleagues called him names, such as”Petticoats Pickler” and”Susan B. Pickler,” because of his support for women.

“He was the only congressman who actually spoke for suffrage,” says Jodi Moritz, a tour guide at the Pickler Mansion in Faulkton.

Alice was one of South Dakota’s most passionate suffragists, serving as president of the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association and vice president of the SDUFL.

You can visit the Pickler Mansion from Memorial Day to Labor Day, open daily from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Known as the Pink Castle because of its unique exterior paint color, the home contains several items that belonged to the Picklers, including a copy of the book History of Woman Suffrage, signed by their friend and houseguest Susan B. Anthony.

Other historic sites related to the suffrage movement include our state capitol in Pierre, the Evans Hotel in Hot Springs, the Hipple House in Pierre and the Homestake Opera House in Lead. The March/April issue of South Dakota Magazine has an extensive feature article on the places and heroes of the women’s suffrage movement, which finally succeeded in 1920.

To help celebrate and commemorate the 100th anniversary, Gov. Kristi Noem assembled the Women’s Vote Centennial Celebration. Visit the group’s website to see events across the state.

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Our Favorite Trees

By John Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Somber Anniversary

By John Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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