Category: columns-history

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Pouring Pettigrew

By John Andrews

Over a year and a half ago I got an e-mail from Darwin Wolf. The Sioux Falls artist had a sculpture being placed in downtown Yankton as part of the city’s new RiverWalk project. He sent me a picture, then mentioned another piece on which he was toiling at his studio in southwest Sioux Falls: a life-size likeness of Richard Pettigrew, one of the fathers of Sioux Falls and South Dakota’s first full-term U.S. Senator.

The project turned into a feature for our September/October 2010 issue. As Wolf researched his subject, he came to sympathize with the embattled politician, who was shunned by every political party he ever joined. The project became as much about redemption as creating a monument to one of South Dakota’s early leaders who had nearly faded into oblivion.

I spent a morning at Wolf’s home studio, watching as he worked to perfect the Senator’s piercing eyes. And I met others around the city that have researched and written about Pettigrew. All agree he had a contentious personality, but has been treated unfairly.

The Pettigrew monument was tentatively scheduled for installation downtown last May, but uncertainties regarding funding pushed it back. Last week I received notice that bronze will finally be poured on October 7 at Bronzeage Art Casting in Sioux Falls. A launch party is being held in conjunction with the pouring at Cherapa Place, with music by Dan Maher, wine from Renner’s Strawbale Winery and hors d’oeuvres by Buffalo Berries, one of Sioux Falls’ unique downtown eateries.

Since writing the story and getting to know both Wolf and Pettigrew, I’ve tried to remain in touch with the artist. And I’ve followed the Woodlawn Cemetery Association’s quest to refurbish Pettigrew’s mausoleum, which is dire need of repairs. Pettigrew was interred there following his death in 1926. After 85 years, the marble ceiling is sagging and the interior shelves holding the remains of Pettigrew, his wife and his sister are in dire need of repair.

Regretfully we cannot attend the pour. The entire magazine staff is heading to the Black Hills that weekend to attend the South Dakota Festival of Books. But it feels good knowing that Pettigrew is that much closer to taking his place at the corner of Fifth and Phillips, where he can watch over the city he helped mold.

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State-U, Version 2: No Frozen Critters

By John Andrews

The newest addition to the Brookings landscape is a friendly jab from Vermillion.

Are you ready to renew the athletic rivalry between the state’s two largest universities? It appears one school is.

A friend recently sent me a photo that I think is the first salvo in the soon-to-be-resurrected SDSU-USD rivalry. A huge red billboard recently went up along Interstate 29 near Daktronics in Brookings. It shows a coyote streaking after a rabbit, and the tagline reads,”Have an old friend for dinner.” It’s creative. It’s boldly placed in the heart of Jackrabbit Country. It’s also a sign that the rivalry many of us grew up with will be renewed with zest after nine years of dormancy.

SDSU and USD were spirited in-state rivals since 1889, when the football teams first played to a 6-6 tie. Then in 2003, SDSU announced plans to reclassify from the NCAA’s Division II to Division I, ending contests between the schools. USD made the move a few years later, and now both schools are again in the same athletic conferences, ensuring games every year. The rivalry resumes this winter, when USD visits Frost Arena on Jan. 12 for a men’s basketball game. Football follows next fall, with a game in Brookings on Nov. 17, 2012, the date advertised on the billboard.

I was a student at SDSU from 1998 to 2002. There was excitement all day when the USD basketball team was scheduled to play in Frost Arena. We’d arrive a full hour before the doors opened. When staff finally let us in, we’d sprint through the halls, gunning for the front row, half court seats. Once the game began, we’d keep one eye on the court and another scanning both student sections, trying to find the student who would inevitably toss a frozen coyote or jackrabbit onto the court.

Seemingly every alumnus has a frozen animal story. There’s a chapter full of them in Amy Dunkle’s The College on the Hill. Harry Forsyth, SDSU’s longtime athletic director, remembered finding a frozen coyote hanging from the rafters of the Barn, the campus field house where basketball games were once played.”They were going to lower it and play ‘Taps’ after the game,” he recalled.”We put a couple of big football tackles on the pulley to make sure nothing happened.”

The most serious incident happened during a game at Frost on Feb. 7, 1976, when an overzealous SDSU fan threw a 55-pound frozen coyote onto the court. It struck SDSU cheerleader Margie Fiedler in the head. Fiedler suffered a concussion, was hospitalized in Minneapolis and missed three weeks of school. She later said doctors told her the impact had shifted her brain inside her skull.

Hopefully nothing similar happens when the schools meet again. It’s simply time to move beyond chucking frozen wildlife at each other. We should embrace this renewed rivalry with civility and sportsmanship. And somebody at SDSU should get to work on a billboard near Exit 26.

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Trees and Us

By John Andrews

I once accidentally set fire to a tree stump in our yard. It had been cut, and dry, jagged spires of wood rose where the tree snapped as it fell. Naturally it became the perfect place for a boy to stuff firecrackers.

For the 10-year-old me, the remains of that tree were nothing more than an opportunity for Fourth of July fun. The older and wiser me knows there must have been a story behind that tree. It was part of a line of trees planted along our lot line. Maybe one of the town founders planted it?

It’s interesting how in South Dakota, we form connections to trees. Perhaps it’s because when our ancestors first arrived in Dakota 150 years ago they encountered a landscape largely devoid of trees. When we look at the tall cottonwoods around our farmyards and small towns, they are a tangible connection to the pioneers we never knew. They are also full of history.

We’ve written a lot about important trees. There’s the landmark cottonwood that wouldn’t die in Henry. Planted in 1882, it survived a 1971 tornado, a windstorm in 1984 and a fire that destroyed the town cafÈ and bar. Victims of this year’s historic Missouri River flood are dealing with damaged homes and other possessions. But Curt Mortenson told us about a 200-year-old cottonwood near his house that’s been surrounded by water all summer. He said a photo taken in the 1880s shows a steamboat tied to it. No one knows the toll the flood will take on trees in the river valley.

In our September/October 2007 issue, Melvin Marousek wrote about a grove of trees his father planted in Meade County.”For more years than I like to remember, I have made periodic pilgrimages to this lonely but, to me, hallowed homestead where so many memories lie waiting to be resurrected,” he wrote.”It is here that lost memories well into conscious thought and long sleeping ghosts drift by — ghosts of many descriptions, some light and airy and cheerful, others sad, tired and grim.”

I heard about another important family tree just today. A stately cedar stood on the John Hynes homestead west of Conde for 112 years until a wicked thunderstorm ravaged the top third of it in the spring of 1994. The loss prompted Earl Grandpre, owner of the Hynes farmstead, to pen a tribute recalling memories and tracing the tree’s grand history.

Hynes brought his son to Dakota Territory to find a homestead in 1882. They filed on a quarter of land a half mile west of Conde. That fall they returned to St. Paul, where the rest of the family had stayed. Hynes told his wife there were no trees on the homestead he had selected. So the next spring, before they all came to Dakota for good, she went to the banks of the Mississippi River and collected a small cedar sapling. She placed it in a suitcase full of dirt from the riverbank and tended to it during the long covered wagon ride west. They planted the tree just southwest of their original shanty.

“Jack and Ed Hynes told me many times the story of this tree,” Grandpre wrote.”They seemed to want to impress on me the importance that they placed on it. They knew that my wife and I would own and farm this land, and though they didn’t say so, I know they did not want me to destroy this tree. They did not have to worry. My wife would never have let me or anyone else hurt this tree.”

That’s because trees can be as important to us as they were to the men and women who brought them here.

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Rediscovering J.B. Irvine

By John Andrews

We were visiting my wife’s parents in Letcher last Christmas when my mother-in-law asked if I’d ever heard of J.B. Irvine. I know a few characters from state history, but Irvine didn’t ring any bells. Then she showed me a number of photocopied letters written from Fort Sully in the 1860s and 1870s.

The copies came from Ken Stach, a postal history collector who lives on a farm near Letcher. He’s interested in old postmarks, and tries to ascertain the routes pieces of mail took to reach their destination. He’s also the editor of two postal history journals: Western Express and the Dakota Collector.

In 1987 he bought a collection of cancelled envelopes that belonged to James Finley, a South Dakota native living in California. Included were a series of envelopes postmarked from Fort Sully in the 1860s and sent by J.B. Irvine, mostly to his wife and children living in St. Paul. Stach didn’t know it, but the letters once contained in the envelopes are in the state archives in Pierre, presumably donated by Finley. When Stach discovered their location, he made an agreement with archives staff: they would photocopy the Irvine letters in exchange for copies of Stach’s postal history collection. Stach received the copied letters in the early 1990s, and they’ve lain largely unused in his collection until last winter.

“After 20 years I decided to get the letters transcribed so they’re a bit more usable,” Stach says. He turned to my mother-in-law, a recently retired schoolteacher at Sanborn Central, who has been typing away all winter. Stach plans to provide the archives with electronic versions of the letters. Researchers frequently access the Irvine collection because it’s one of the best sources of information available about that time and place in Dakota history.

Javan B. Irvine was born in New York in 1831 and moved to Minnesota in 1852 to work as a builder with his brother, John. He joined the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment when the Civil War broke out and fought at the Battle of Bull Run in 1861. He saw action throughout the war, then was stationed at various military outposts, including Fort Sully in Dakota Territory from 1867 to 1874.

Many of Irvine’s missives are routine accounts of fort life, but in a December 1872 letter to his wife he describes a near fatal encounter with an Indian. Irvine had gone hunting on horseback when he met the Indian, whom he had seen before and considered friendly. But as Irvine rode away, the Indian drew a pistol and shot four times. One of the bullets lodged in Irvine’s scalp. After a brief pursuit, he returned to Fort Sully and eventually persuaded the skeptical doctor to extract the bullet.

“Dr. Wright dressed the wound, and from the fact that a hole was found in the top of my cap, supposed the ball had glanced after striking the skull, and passed out of the top of the cap,” Irvine explained.”I called his attention to a lump on top of my head, but with his usual super abounding theories, he explained the cause of that to his apparent satisfaction, but not to mine! I went to bed and commenced feeling the top of my cranium, and becoming convinced that the bullet was there, sent for the Dr to come down and cut it out. This he succeeded in doing after some difficulty, and spattering blood all over your nice bedclothes. The ball had remained in the wound about eight hours and didn’t want to come out very bad.”

Irvine retired from 30 years of military service in 1891 and moved to California, where he died in 1904. Though he spent just seven years of his distinguished military career in South Dakota, his correspondence gives us a remarkable look at Dakota’s early history.

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Civil War Mystery Solved

By John Andrews

Jacob Franklin Kinna’s headstone will be placed at his gravesite in Yankton after years of lying hidden under a house in Warner, south of Aberdeen. Photo by Col. Michael Herman.

Civil War veteran Jacob Franklin Kinna has lain nearly forgotten in an unmarked grave in Yankton Cemetery for 118 years. As it turns out, his tombstone has also lain forgotten in a tiny town 225 miles away. Thanks to some dogged research by genealogists at the state historical society in Pierre, the stone will finally be placed at Kinna’s grave during a special ceremony at Yankton Cemetery on Saturday, Sept. 10.

The grave marker was undiscovered until 1979 when house movers found it under the front porch of Gerold Zumbaum’s home in Warner, south of Aberdeen. They raised the house to work on the foundation and saw the white marble, government issued tombstone lying in dirt. There were no cemeteries nearby, and no one came forward to claim the stone, so Zumbaum stored it in his basement.

Local veterans heard about the marker and felt compelled to place it on the soldier’s grave. But they couldn’t find it. They searched fruitlessly in Brown County and finally sought help from staff at the state archives. Researchers Virginia Hanson and Lori Carpenter, both specialists in genealogy, immersed themselves in old newspapers and census, Civil War and land records. Soon Kinna’s story emerged.

He was born in Virginia in 1840. By 1863, the third year of the Civil War, he was living in Ohio, where he enlisted in Company C, 12th Regiment of the Ohio Cavalry. After training, Kinna and his company saw action in battles at Mount Sterling, Ky., Bristol, Tenn., and Dallas, N.C. His time in the military ended in November 1865.

After the war, Kinna and his family lived in Indiana and Illinois. In 1887 he homesteaded near Ordway in Brown County and joined the Robert Anderson Post 19 Grand Army of the Republic for Civil War veterans in Aberdeen. A few years later, he moved again to Yankton, where he settled two miles west of town.

On Dec. 2, 1893, Kinna was shot in the shoulder while trying to scare a trespassing hunter off his property. The wound became infected and he died 18 days later. Veterans from Yankton’s Phil Kearney Post 7 chapter of the GAR buried Kinna in an unmarked grave in the city cemetery.

But Hanson discovered a cemetery records book compiled by WPA workers in the 1930s that included detailed descriptions of every burial in certain South Dakota cemeteries. She found the entry for Kinna and was able to locate his exact burial plot.

She also located two of Kinna’s direct descendants: a man living in Cheboygan, Mich., and Kinna’s 80-year-old great-granddaughter in Washington state. Both have been invited to attend the Sept. 10 ceremony.

Researchers still don’t know why Kinna moved to Yankton, why his grave was never marked or how the tombstone ended up under a porch in Warner. But when his marker is finally set, with military rites by the South Dakota National Guard’s burial detail, we’ll know he was afforded the honor he should have received in 1893.

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Together One Last Time

By John Andrews

This weekend could be the last chance you’ll ever have to see the two biggest pieces of gold ever found in the Black Hills side by side.

The Adams Museum and House in Deadwood plans to display Potato Creek Johnny’s famous gold nugget alongside the Icebox Nugget, found just last summer, from 1 to 4 p.m., on Sunday.

The Adams Museum has housed Potato Creek Johnny’s nugget for 77 years, though it rarely makes public appearances. Johnny Perrett, a petite Welsh immigrant with long hair and a scraggly beard, pulled the nugget shaped like a hockey stick from the tumbling waters of Potato Creek in Spearfish Canyon on May 27, 1929. At 4 3/4 inches long and weighing 7 3/4 troy ounces, it was declared the largest nugget ever found in the Hills. But skeptics claimed it was actually a melted mass of gold that Perrett stole from other miners.

Perrett decided to sell his nugget in 1934. He entertained many offers, but the winning $250 bid came from W.E. Adams, a longtime Deadwood businessman and politician who had recently built a new museum. Adams immediately placed the nugget in a museum vault and had two replicas made, one of which is on permanent display.

The original stayed hidden until 1995, when it was displayed in honor of the Adams Museum’s 65th anniversary.”It was like the Shroud of Turin,” says Mary Kopco, the museum’s director.”I’ve never seen so many people come through the Adams Museum doors in such a short period of time. Since a replica has always been on display, a lot of people thought the actual nugget had disappeared entirely.”

It has appeared publicly only a handful of times since, including a four-hour display in 2010 at the Journey Museum with the newly discovered Icebox Nugget, the largest undisputed gold nugget to come out of the Black Hills in 120 years. Prospectors Charlie Ward and Byron Janis pulled it from a cool, Black Hills stream on July 6, 2010. The exact location of the find was never revealed, but they say it was within 20 miles of Rapid City. Chris Johnson, owner of the Clock Shop in Rapid City, bought the 5.27 troy ounce nugget last summer.

After Sunday, there are no plans to reunite these two important pieces of Black Hills history, so Kopco expects a busy three hours.”It’s so fun for people to see both of these nuggets, but of course I’m partial to Potato Creek Johnny’s,” Kopco says.”It’s an incredible piece of history. I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to hold it in my gloved hands. It’s the reason we go into the museum profession. Pieces like these have impacted our lives.”

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Hot Springs’ Square Thinker

By John Andrews

People believed for centuries that the earth was flat. Hot Springs businessman Orlando Ferguson thought it was”square and stationary,” and believed it so vociferously that he delivered a series of lectures on the topic and printed maps to visualize his idea.

Ferguson has been in the news lately because an original copy of his map, printed in 1893, turned up in the home of Don Homuth, a retired North Dakota lawmaker who now lives in Salem, Ore. The map resembles a bundt cake pan turned upside down. The continents and oceans lie around an indented ring, while the North Pole is raised in the center. The sun and moon are attached to an actual pole rising from that point. Homuth donated the map to the Library of Congress. Now the Internet is abuzz with stories about this relatively unknown West River character.

Ferguson was born in Illinois and moved to Miner County in the early 1880s. The family later relocated to the Black Hills and established themselves in Hot Springs in 1886. There he managed the Catholican bathhouse for several years before he built his own, called the Siloam, which he operated until his death in 1911.

Ferguson referred to himself as both”doctor” and”professor,” but Fall River County historians can’t find any evidence that he was either one.”There’s no indication that he was a professor in any academic sense of the word, other than he professed to know the truth,” says James Bingham, president of the Hot Springs Pioneer Museum’s Board of Directors.”And we’ve found nothing to indicate he went to medical school. He simply claimed to be a healer of some kind with his bathhouses.”

His astronomical principles were based on a very literal interpretation of the Bible, beginning with the reference to angels visiting the four corners of the earth. From there, he developed his”square and stationary” idea, which he detailed for audiences at Hot Springs’ Morris Opera House in 1891. From those lectures, he wrote a 60-page pamphlet, full of other theories. He claimed the sun was 30 miles in diameter and just 3,000 miles from earth. His reasoning? If you stand at the equator on March 21, when the sun is directly overhead, then the distance you can walk north or south without casting a shadow is equal to the diameter of the sun.

He also shunned the idea of gravity. Instead he thought atmospheric pressure held people down and pushed the oceans up the sides of his indented map.

Today people debate the merits of Ferguson’s beliefs. Many are surprised that anyone in the 19th century would contend the earth was anything but a globe. Some wonder if he had ulterior motives.”For a long time, when I looked at that map, I wondered if he was just throwing it out there for entertainment value,” Bingham says.”But now I think he was serious.”

The Pioneer Museum has an original map and a copy of Ferguson’s pamphlet. Visit and judge for yourself.

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The Capital Man

By John Andrews

John Sutherland helped Pierre become the capital of South Dakota. Then he did it again. And again.

Between 1889 and 1904, Sutherland served as president of his hometown’s capital committee, and waged three successful campaigns to locate the seat of government in the budding town along the Missouri River. On Saturday, July 9, the state historical society plans to recognize Sutherland’s contributions to South Dakota history by dedicating a marker at his former home on the corner of North Huron and West Capitol avenues.

Not much has been written about Sutherland and his capital crusade, but Marshall Damgaard covers the topic well in The South Dakota State Capitol: The First Century, his book on the history of our capitol that appeared just in time for its centennial.

In the first campaign in 1889, Sutherland boasted of Pierre’s central location (once the Great Sioux Reservation was opened) and its spot along the Missouri River, which still carried numerous boats from Yankton to Bismarck. Supporters of Huron for the capital countered:”Pierre says she is a geographical center. Well, so is the North Pole, but although it is nearly as accessible as Pierre, no one seems to think of calling any public gathering there.”

In October, Pierre won a six-way battle for temporary capital status. But after statehood came in November, voters had to select a permanent site. Damgaard writes that Sutherland placed 40 campaign coordinators around the state and kept them”well-stoked with funds to ply voters with drinks and theater tickets.”

Sutherland earned his living as a well-respected and successful lawyer, so it’s a bit ironic that he was a major player in a 15-year fight that involved so many under the table deals. After Pierre emerged victorious again in the 1890 fight, Sutherland was asked if he thought either side had committed voter fraud. He said no, but also said Pierre was ready. In one empty precinct,”the committee had ballots marked and voting registers filled with names copied from the society page of a Saint Paul newspaper ready to use if necessary.”

Measures to move the capital surfaced in every successive legislative session until 1904, when legislators decided to put the matter to a final vote of the people. This time, lawmakers chose Mitchell to challenge Pierre. Sutherland again sent operatives across the state, but told them only to buy votes unless it negated a similar action by the Mitchell men. Railroads issued thousands of passes for people to visit each town, but Sutherland’s Stand Pat for Pierre campaign emerged victorious for the third and final time.

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Bringing Life to Rushmore

By John Andrews

Every year, millions of people gaze upon the four faces at Mount Rushmore. Most visitors could tell you that Gutzon Borglum designed them. But almost nobody knows the Italian immigrant who gave them life.

Luigi Del Bianco was Mount Rushmore’s chief carver from 1933 to 1940, but his role in creating the monument was nearly forgotten. When his son Caesar read Rex Alan Smith’s 1994 book The Carving of Mount Rushmore, he was shocked that his father’s name was nowhere to be found.

“That frustrated my uncle and myself so much that we went to the Library of Congress to look through Gutzon Borglum’s papers,” says Lou Del Bianco, Luigi’s grandson and Caesar’s nephew.”We found correspondence from Borglum about my grandfather’s importance, and how he couldn’t find anyone else in America to do this work. Whenever he quit the monument because of problems with wages, all work would have to stop. That’s how important he was. He was really the artist who brought the faces to life. The workers did a wonderful job roughing them out, but you need an artist to bring out the emotion in the faces, and that’s what my grandfather did.”

Lou Del Bianco has been an actor and storyteller for 25 years. He created a one-man show and a website to tell his grandfather’s story, and will present it inside Borglum’s studio at Mount Rushmore on Sunday, July 3.

Lou learned about his grandfather’s work in second grade, when he found a tattered Mount Rushmore brochure.”From then on, it’s been a dream of mine to find out what he did and get him more recognition,” he says.”I feel like my entire career has led me up to this moment.”

Luigi Del Bianco studied stone carving in his native Italy. He settled in Port Chester, N.Y., after World War I, and began working in Borglum’s Connecticut studio. They worked together for the next 20 years, a remarkable stretch considering Borglum’s proclivity for firing people at the drop of a hat.”They argued quite a bit, but it was part of their relationship,” Lou says.”They had great mutual respect for one another, and in the end they loved each other.”

When Borglum made Del Bianco chief carver at Mount Rushmore, he said Luigi was”the only stone carver on the work who understands the language of the sculptor. He is worth any three men I could find in America.”

Del Bianco saved Jefferson’s face by almost seamlessly patching a crack one foot wide in his lip, and made Lincoln’s eyes come alive.”I could only see from this far what I was doing, but the eye of Lincoln had to look just right from many miles distant,” Luigi told an interviewer in 1966.”I know every line and ridge, each small bump and all the details of that head so well.”

After Mount Rushmore’s completion, Del Bianco returned to Port Chester, where he carved tombstones and set statues. He rarely discussed his work in South Dakota, but his craftsmanship on a Black Hills mountain will exist for generations.

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The Cowboy Governor

By Bernie Hunhoff

Charisma and money are the top qualifications for getting elected to high political office these days. Historians wonder whether some of our best leaders of yesteryear would have been able to serve in our YouTube world.

But South Dakota historians don’t question the electability of Tom Berry, the Belvidere rancher who was elected governor of South Dakota in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression.

And I was reminded of Berry’s popularity again today when Jan Rasmussen, a White River rancher and the niece of the governor, emailed a story about her”Uncle Tom.”

Mrs. Rasmussen wrote that her dad and her uncle ran the popular West River Frontier Days rodeo for a number of years. The Frontier Days rodeo ranked alongside the Cheyenne, Calgary and Belle Fourche rodeos in those days. The Berry brothers probably did everything from lining up the riders to ordering the beer and selling tickets.

For a few years, Uncle Tom even helped judge the bucking bronc riders. Of course, there’s always a wiseacre around to question whether a politician knows what he’s doing. One day, a spectator questioned whether Tom Berry knew anything about broncs.

The cowboy politician — then a state legislator, and never one to take much guff — immediately left his judging station in the arena, climbed aboard a wild, snorting bronc, and told the chute men to open the gate. The first bronc didn’t buck too much so Berry climbed on another and rode it as well. That seemed to satisfy anyone in the crowd who didn’t already know that Tom Berry could ride a horse.

We’ve collected a lot of good Tom Berry stories through the years, and published most of them in the magazine.

Anyone who wonders how a Democratic candidate won the governorship hasn’t heard of how he campaigned. He would stop wherever there was a crowd, and then proceed to regale the people with stories and good jokes. Some compared him to the great Western humorist Will Rogers.

Berry seldom drove by a threshing or haying bee during campaign season, because he knew there would be people and a good noon meal. He was invariably invited to sit down with the workers. On one occasion, he showed up at the Gene and Linnet Hutchinson ranch in Mellette County, where the family had gathered to put up the hay.

Mrs. Hutchinson was very pleased to have such a distinguished guest but she was also embarrassed by the men’s manners. And she wondered what would happen after dessert, when her husband, her sons and the hired man generally took a nap on the living room floor. Surely, she hoped, they wouldn’t do anything so rude with a would-be governor in the house.

The men and boys, of course, were not burdened with such a strong sense of propriety. Once the pie was eaten, they retired to the living room and soon were snoring. Berry, sensing Mrs. Hutchinson’s discomfort, assured her that there was no reason for apologies. Then he took off his cowboy hat and got down on the floor for a snooze of his own.