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The Utopia That War Built

By Michael Zimny

The Black Hills Ordnance Depot rose among the plains of Fall River County in 1942.

There’s a lost city, out among the rolling hills of Fall River County, south of Red Canyon, where the last ponderosa stands give way to yucca-studded grasslands undulating outward like a rattlesnake glissade. For some — children of the Depression and World War II, real-life Rosie the Riveters, Lakota people looking for a better life off the reservations — the strange ruins faintly visible from Highway 471 were once their own little prairie heaven.

Watch carefully from the road, and you might not know what to make of what you see — when suddenly hundreds of earth-covered domes bulge from a sun-facing slope, all in tidy rows, concrete faces casting shadows.

This was Igloo. For 24 years, the U.S. Army’s Black Hills Ordnance Depot (BHOD) provided livelihoods for thousands of workers and their families here — as well as a sense of community and solidarity of purpose unlike anything that many Igloo alums feel they’ve ever seen since.

In 1941, as the U.S. prepared for its possible entry into World War II, the Army’s Ordnance Department sought to vastly increase its weapons and ammunition storage facilities. Western South Dakota and Nebraska were viewed favorably for munitions storage, as their altitudes and low humidity were conducive to longer shelf life. South Dakota Congressman Francis Case lobbied hard for the Southern Hills. Though there were concerns about where the help would come from in such a sparsely populated area, the presence of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad helped win the day for the future BHOD.

A 21,000-acre site was acquired in the treeless, coyote-wandered hills between Edgemont and Provo. The devastation wrought by the Dirty Thirties had already depopulated much of the land, making acquisition less painful. The Army Corps of Engineers set up at Union Station in Hot Springs, a town hard hit by the Depression. Construction began in the spring of 1942. By August, 6,000 workers were employed on the project, double the population of Hot Springs.

Nearly overnight, tiny Provo was transformed into a worker’s tent camp. Other workers commuted from Edgemont and Hot Springs. Private homes became makeshift cafeterias. Every available living space nearby was rented. Wooden sheds were converted into sleeping quarters.

Conditions may have been squalid during construction, but the region was still reeling from the Depression. Building the BHOD was a paying job, and permanent employment at the Depot would be a better gig than anybody could have known.

Robert Raymond, a kid from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, moved to the Provo workers colony with his sister and her husband in 1942.”We lived in a tarpaper shack and a tent,” he recalls. But the lean times paid off.”After a year, we were eligible to move into Igloo. It was the best place I ever lived in my life.”

Around 800 dome-shaped structures that resembled igloos were built on 21,000 acres between Edgement and Provo.

Construction of the BHOD was a tremendous feat of engineering, logistics and labor. In just a few months, 802 of the”igloo” structures that would give the installation its popular name were erected. Purpose-built for munitions storage, the reinforced concrete domes — called”igloos” because they were thought to resemble traditional Inuit ice dwellings — covered with earth, were designed to direct explosions upward, not outward. Housing units and communal spaces were also built, and a looped railroad spur accessible to the igloos for loading and unloading war materiel.

A movie theater was picked up and moved from Lusk, Wyoming. A grocery store was hauled over from Chadron, Nebraska. Stonemason Monte Nystrom — famous for his Black Hills stonework including the State Game Lodge at Custer State Park — built several sandstone guard posts. The first shipment of munitions came in the fall of the same year construction started.

These were heady times at the BHOD.”The sheer excitement, 24/7 hustle and bustle of war time — neighbors coming home from or going to war. Test explosions on the Prairie” — are some of famous resident Tom Brokaw’s memories of his years (1943-44) at Igloo.

The Ordnance Department was one of the largest employers of civilians during the war, and for a place hard-pressed for jobs, the BHOD was a Keynesian dynamo. Clarence Anderson moved to Igloo from Hot Springs as a young boy.”Our family was extremely poor. We moved from a house that had two rooms and a path out to the outhouse. We had running water from one spigot. We had one light bulb that had a socket set-up to where we could have extension cords. I remember my mother had gone out and bought a toaster and we were all so excited because before that our toast was always made on the wood stove. When we moved to Igloo, we were very similar to all the families coming there. They were families that were out of work looking for a place to get a new start. We moved into a house that had five rooms, two bedrooms and an interior bathroom with running water. We were really excited as kids over that.”

“The Depression was just over,” recalls Robert Raymond.”We basically had nothing back on the reservation. We moved there and we had everything — there were jobs, money, brand new houses, indoor plumbing, ice boxes, a brand new school.”

Despite the tough times, labor was still an issue since nearly all of the military-aged men were off fighting when Igloo came online. The Ordnance Department had to look outside of the traditional labor pool for workers. Recruiters worked hard to attract workers from the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations. By 1945, 160 Native Americans were employed at BHOD.

Native American recruitment overlapped with heavy recruitment of women. When the first shipment of munitions arrived at BHOD, Goldie Lovell, a pioneering female truck driver, was there to haul the cargo to storage. Women like Lovell were Woman Ordnance Workers (WOWs). Immortalized by campaign poster icon”Rosie the Riveter,” WOWs worked at many traditionally male occupations during the war effort. Like Rosie, they often wore a red bandana. But instead of the white polka dots Rosie wears, theirs were emblazoned with white bombs, fuses lit.

“At Igloo, many, many of the workers were females, including my sister,” Raymond says. In that, Igloo was in line with depots and armories throughout the nation. In 1946, WOWs constituted over 46 percent of the Ordnance Department workforce nationally.

A stanza written by Igloo worker Clara Jackman captured WOW pride in verse:

Though we’re not Miss Americas
Nor shaped like ancient Venus
We’re doing a job for Uncle Sam,
You’ve got to hand it to us.

Women ordnance workers, or WOWs, were immortalized in posters featuring Rosie the Riveter.

For those who could find a job at Igloo, the post offered adequate — if not fancy — housing, a self-contained community with grocery store, bowling alley, roller rink, the Cactus Inn lounge, even a dance hall where acts like the Tex Beneke Orchestra would play. Anything Igloo didn’t have could be found in Edgemont. Many families didn’t own a car, but that was no problem.”There was a bus that went back and forth to Edgemont,” says Clarence Anderson.”At the time that Igloo was developed, very few people had cars. And for those who did, not long after they decided people had to have insurance, so if you didn’t have liability insurance you had to park your car right inside the gate.”

One unique aspect of Igloo life that there seems to be some consensus on — people got along, regardless of their ethnic background. For a hardscrabble, working class town built from nothing on a desolate stretch of sunbaked steppe, Igloo was a real deal melting pot by many accounts.

“We lived in a section of Igloo where the housing was mostly Indian,” Raymond says.”However, other Indian families were scattered throughout the housing area. There was no apparent racism to me. It was the best place I ever lived in my life.”

“In 1943, the American Indians were very much discriminated against and they moved there and joined in with all the other people and became part of that big family,” says Clarence Anderson.”Many didn’t stay long because it was an awfully new culture for them, but an awful lot of them stayed for the duration and went to school with us. As young kids we had no idea that there was a prejudice against Indians because they were our neighbors and friends.”

In addition to white, Native American and African American employees, there was also a contingent of Italian prisoners of war at Igloo. They served as part of a national experiment with”Italian Service Units,” in which Italian POWs who didn’t demonstrate overt fascist leanings were allowed some measure of freedom in exchange for work. It’s rumored that the Italians had a knack for drawings, and that some of their bawdier masterpieces can still be seen inside some of the igloos.

The Igloo years coincided with the baby boom, and unsurprisingly people who grew up there remember it as a paradise for kids.”There were lots of kids around,” remembers former resident Beverly McBride.”It was very family-oriented. The houses were small but nice. Every house had a sidewalk.”

“People were just coming off food stamps,” says Yvonne Grubbe.”We had the commissary and that food came through the military. So we had a lot of advantages out there. You know all of the new buildings and everything, the schools. We had a roller-skating rink that was fabulous. And there was a big wonderful swimming pool, a huge community center, two basketball courts. You could walk around anytime, day or night. We had a big theater, and I think the first price I ever paid to go to a movie was 15 cents. Mom would give me a quarter and I could get a cold drink and popcorn with the rest of the change. They had all the movies that were put out in the big cities. We never had a loss for things to do.”

Facilities for play were abundant. Basketball was the most popular sport. Jim Anderson, who’s compiled an extensive online filing cabinet of BHOD memorabilia, remembers how the students from the reservations brought their”run and gun, full court press” style of play — popularized by Leonard Quick Bear and the St. Francis Mission teams of the 1930s — to the gyms at Igloo. The Provo Rattlers took their high-energy game to three state tournaments, making it to the 1954 finals (where they lost to Hayti) behind Lakota stars, brothers Dan and Herb Goodman.

The federal government recognized in 1942 that the children of itinerant BHOD construction workers, and ultimately permanent employees, were going to need an on-site school. In a matter of weeks, enrollment at the Provo School had jumped from 15 to over 200. Long-time Buffalo Gap principal Adelaide Ward was brought in as district superintendent, along with her lifelong colleague and friend Christina Hajek. The two devised a temporary plan to expand the Provo School, and bus excess students to school in Edgemont until a permanent school for BHOD workers could be constructed at Igloo. In 1943, the new school was completed. Though situated on Igloo proper, the school was still administered by the Provo School District, hence the school retained the Provo name, and Igloo athletes wore the Provo Rattlers uniform.

Enrollment at the Provo School skyrocketed after families moved to Igloo.

Adelaide Ward was a towering figure in the minds of Igloo youth, and undoubtedly made an impact on a generation of kids from Dust Bowl beginnings.

“I’ve always felt that she was one of the people that put me on track to, what otherwise might not have been a very successful life,” says Clarence Anderson.”She was a pusher. When she walked down the hallways you could hear her for a long ways. She’d been in a car accident and had a pretty healthy limp and she was, not overly heavy but a big woman, and when she’d walk you could hear her coming. I think to this day, she did it purposely, because everybody kind of shaped up as she was coming down the hall.”

“I was like, ‘Man we can’t get away from her, what’s the deal here?'” says Yvonne Grubbe.”She was quite a disciplinarian and all she had to do was walk down the aisles and the hallways. And you never knew when she’d show up at the door at any classroom and just watch and be quiet. We’d behave. Because we didn’t want her to catch us doing anything bad. She never even had to raise her voice really. She had the power, and we knew she did. And, of course, that was a different time. We didn’t sass back. We did our homework. We didn’t really do anything out of line. Anything that we did went back to our parents.”

Ms. Ward served as principal of Provo High School until her retirement in 1961. Christina Hajek served as principal of Provo Elementary. The two moved away some time after retirement, but occasionally returned to take care of business at the house they owned together in Provo, and possibly to maintain a connection to the community.

By the summer of 1945, some 4,200 people lived at Igloo, more than in Hot Springs today. As Igloo grew, so did the surrounding towns. The war effort had elevated a sleepy, seen-better-days backwater — hammered by broken banks, ruined homesteads and the decline of Hot Springs as a well-heeled spa resort — to a thriving economy with a housing demand that was hard to satiate.

Post-war, over a period of several years, there was a dramatic decrease to about 700 BHOD employees and a return to something more like the pre-war gender balance in the workforce.

While female workers would always play a major role at Igloo, victory overseas ended the halcyon red bandana days.”When the war ended and the veterans came back, they had veterans’ preference and most of those females lost their jobs as veterans took over,” Raymond says. His sister was one of those that lost her job, so the family moved on.

The conflict deficit didn’t last long. In the summer of 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and America became involved in another war in Asia. The Korean War effort nearly doubled the number of workers to about 1,300.

After Korea, there was another slowdown and some workers were laid off, then life went on for the workers and families at Igloo. There was always the occasional rumor that the Depot would lay more people off or shut down for good, but it was the height of the Cold War. Keeping America’s military good and lethal was the lifeblood of the prairie melting pot. When Nikita Khruschev assaulted his desk with a loafer at the United Nations General Assembly, that was probably a net good for wage earners from Hot Springs and Pine Ridge who might land a gig at Igloo.

Igloo had all the amenities of a typical small South Dakota town, including stores and a movie theater.

In the absence of a major war, the installation made itself useful as a conveniently remote place to conduct bomb disposal and explosive ordnance parts salvage. In 1962, a relative peacetime, 575 civilian and military employees worked at Igloo, and about 1,800 people lived there.

Ironically, the decision to shut down Igloo was made during the ramp up to the Vietnam War (during which, by some estimates, up to 7 million pounds of ordnance were dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). In 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara launched an effort to reduce military expenditures, even as he recommended a bombing campaign against North Vietnam. The BHOD, and 95 other installations quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of the Department of Defense.

“A cry of anguish went up from coast to coast,” wrote South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, in an editorial for The Progressive entitled”Swords into Plowshares.” The statement wasn’t entirely hyperbolic. Workers — and their representatives — at installations from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to BHOD argued that the cuts would devastate economies and communities.

McGovern was empathic:”One readily sympathizes with the men and their families who lose their jobs as a result of defense shifts or cut-backs.” But he was also circumspect:”Do we want the Defense Department to meet the military needs of the nation in a business-like manner, or do we want it to function as a gigantic WPA responding to local and Congressional pressures all across the land?”

From a budgetary perspective, he had a point — one that dovetailed well with a larger point he was making (one that’s still argued today), that”many of the most vocal ëeconomizers’ are the biggest ëspenders’ when it comes to armaments. Place the label ëdefense’ on a project and it will zip through the Congress with little or no floor debate.”

Still, one could argue that if any Defense project in America warranted the WPA treatment at the time it was Igloo. The BHOD not only helped revive a severely depressed portion of the former Dust Bowl, it was probably one of the federal government’s most successful attempts at a long-term employment program for Native Americans from Plains reservations. For that reason, Sen. McGovern and Sen. Karl Mundt did plead with the Secretary of the Army that Igloo was an extraordinary case, that nearly 20 percent of workers employed were Native American, that the closure would ripple outward damaging communities throughout the area. Edgemont had just built a new hospital, which wouldn’t likely survive.

In April, McNamara announced the impending closure of Igloo, to be carried out in phases, completed by the summer of 1967. Less than six years before Pine Ridge would erupt into open insurrection at Wounded Knee, tribal members lost not only a rare source of employment, but something rarer still — a place where Lakota and other Native Americans had worked and lived in relative harmony with non-Indians for 25 years.

In its heyday near the end of World War II, nearly 4,200 people lived at Igloo. By 1967, the depot had been closed.

After the closure, Provo dwindled down to a few houses. Edgemont prepared for the worst:”It was devastating,” says Clarence Anderson, who lives in Edgemont.”I remember the day when the announcement came out. It was just like the town had a heart attack. When the base closed, that was just a tremendous impact on the community. I would say almost half the population of Edgemont was lost at that time. We had a very vibrant business community — three auto dealerships, three hardware stores, two grocery stores, clothing stores — and it just went down to virtually nothing.”

The Department of Defense attempted to move displaced employees to other bases. As workers moved on, the short-lived prairie utopia was systematically dissolved by the cool bureaucratic hand. Yvonne Grubbe, having grown up a child of Igloo, worked at the business of taking it apart.”As people were transferring to different installations, the Army and Air Force would see what was available on this great big sheet that went out from the government. If they needed this stuff, it would be shipped out to whoever asked for so many chairs, or so many beds, or whatever.”

“And they even came in and took out the individual houses. There’s housing that came from Igloo all throughout the state. Lots of it went down to the Indian reservations. A lot of it came to Edgemont. People bought the duplexes and remodeled them. We tried to get rid of everything we possibly could.”

The 801 igloos and some other structures remain. Through the years, several schemes were hatched — including frozen meat storage — to make good economic use of the igloos, but none panned out. The prairie utopia is now entirely situated on private ranch land — a strange, distant sight, like an apparition on a seldom traveled road.

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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Pheasant Tales from South Dakota

By Katie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Grottos of South Dakota

By Michael Zimny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Very Hard Traveling”

By Michael Zimny

The 25th Infantry U.S. Army Bicycle Corps in the badlands of Montana.

If you happened to be working in southwestern South Dakota in July of 1897, you might have spotted an unusual sight: the first organized American mountain biking expedition. The soldiers of the 25th Infantry U.S. Army Bicycle Corps were on their way from Missoula to St. Louis, a 1,900-mile expedition designed to test the idea of bicycle-as-combat-vehicle.

On July 2, the Buffalo Soldiers — the colloquial name given to segregated, all African-American military units — covered 54 miles between Clifton, Wyoming and Rumford, South Dakota.

Blogger and Wyoming middle school social studies teacher Mike Higgins has compiled a day-by-day travelogue from contemporary newspaper stories and the journal of Second Lieutenant James Moss. E.H. Boos, The Daily Missoulian‘s embedded reporter wrote, “At S&G, the first station in Dakota, we filled our canteens with some of the worst water we had yet used. From the latter place to Edgemont the road, mostly sand, made very hard traveling. At Edgemont we stopped for lunch and departed soon after. Struggled against dust, heat and vast fields of prickly pear that morning, stopped in Edgemont for lunch, and departed soon after. Good roads, although hilly, were met, we were able to go at a good rate and were at Rumford, 16 miles from Edgemont before sundown.”

A map detailing the 1,900-mile journey.

The Corps crossed into Nebraska the following day, reaching Crawford as, “the Fourth of July celebration was at its height,” Boos wrote. “The town was full of people and the corps was given a hearty welcome.” After they were dined and entertained by revelers and soldiers from nearby Fort Robinson, the corps “left the town, passing through the big crowds on the main street amid loud cheers.” They camped that night in Belmont.

Their time in South Dakota had been strenuous and short. Just 48 of their 1,900 miles unwound across our state. Good drinking water was hard to find. Wheels sunk deep in dust on sun-parched ruts, and on reaching Rumford, “a section hand … advised us that the nearest camping place was at a ranch a mile and a half further on,” Boos wrote. “We started out and traveled five miles before reaching the ranch. A madder set of men never lived than the bicycle corps when we finally did get a camp.”

Cycling was already enormously popular in late-19th century America and Europe, but bicycles weren’t generally thought of as all-terrain vehicles. European militaries experimented with bicycle units with mixed results. The longest-lived was the Swiss Cycle Regiment, founded in 1891 and retired in 2001.

In the U.S., Gen. Nelson Miles was aware of European experiments and advocated for the metal mule. “The bicycle requires neither water, food nor rest,” he wrote. “The rider may push to the top notch of his own endurance without thought of his steed.”

When Second Lieutenant James Moss graduated at the bottom of his class at West Point in 1894, he was assigned to the 25th Infantry in Missoula. (Moss was white, like all officers placed in charge of otherwise all-black units). Moss quickly boarded the tactical cycling train and sought volunteers for a cycling corps. His first crew successfully completed several experimental forays, including an 800-mile round-trip trek from Fort Missoula to Yellowstone National Park.

Army leadership was divided on the utility of the military bicycle, so Moss devised an epic journey, hoping to silence the doubters. The 1,900-mile expedition from Missoula to St. Louis would cross terrains from, “the mountainous and stony roads of Montana; the hummock earth roads of South Dakota; the sandy roads of Nebraska and the clay roads of Missouri,” he wrote. For this mission, he assembled a team of 20 men and ordered custom-designed Spalding bicycles to carry their weapons and gear. The men trained for two weeks and embarked on June 14, 1897.

The soldiers encountered rough traveling during their brief time in South Dakota.

The roads they followed were anything from wagon trails to game trails to railroad track beds. They often had to dismount and walk for miles, their bicycles loaded with rations, rifles, ammunition, spare parts and gear. They averaged about 52 miles per day, facing their toughest test in the sandhills of Nebraska. They became experts at patching tires.

At journey’s end, Moss told the St. Louis Dispatch that, “The trip has proved beyond peradventure my contention that the bicycle has a place in modern warfare. In every kind of weather, over all sorts of roads, we averaged fifty miles a day. At the end of the journey we are all in good physical condition.”

The onset of the Spanish-American War brought an end to Moss’ experiments in military cycling. In the summer of 1898, the 25th Infantry — and all four of the Army’s all-black units — distinguished themselves in battle in Cuba. As with the other African-American units, their centrality in pivotal battlefield moments was often erased when mythologized versions of the War became popular lore.

There’s one accomplishment no one ever tried to strip from the 25th — the Missoula-to-St. Louis mission, perhaps because there was no competition. Nobody before or since has matched the Bicycle Corps’ journey.

Pferron Doss, author of a historical novel about the Bicycle Corps, led a commemorative journey that retraced their route in 1974. “We thought once we reached the Continental Divide, it would be downhill all the way,” Doss says, “but that wasn’t the case. But it’s a trip that every last one of us will never forget, because it was a time in our lives that we felt very proud to be doing this in their honor.

“It had not been done before, and these were black soldiers who formed a very unique first-time group. That in itself gives you a sense of, not only responsibility, but the freedom to feel very proud of what you’re doing.”

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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Some Things Never Change in S.D.

By Katie Hunhoff

South Dakotans have patiently awaited the joyful harbingers of spring: a tree beginning to bud, a flash of color from a tulip, grass slowly changing hue from brown to green. But the first sign of spring we received this year was not so welcome. March brought flooding to parts of East River, mixed with a statewide blizzard.

The mid-March storm was no surprise to most of us. We’ve endured our share of spring setbacks. In fact, our March/April issue — published just as the recent storms were gathering — includes a story on the awful historic winter and spring of 1952.

Our longtime writer Paul Higbee began the article with a line that could have made a headline this month:”It was a demon of a blizzard that melted into a monster of a flood.” The January storm of’52 especially hit the Rosebud region of south-central South Dakota. Mission, White River, Winner, Philip, Murdo, Gregory and Pierre were hammered the hardest but the storm swept over the entire state, delivering severe winds and snow from Rapid City to Watertown.

Snowmelt in the spring brought more disaster. High water along the Missouri River valley and its tributaries drove 7,748 people in 17 counties from their homes. Miraculously, there were no fatalities. But 45 houses were destroyed and 584 damaged.

The Rosebud disaster wasn’t the most tragic storm in state history, but it’s one that captured the state’s imagination in part thanks to Laura Hellmann of Millboro, a tiny ranching community in Tripp County. After the storm, she asked 66 writers to quickly submit their survival stories before memories were dulled by time or forgotten. The stories collectively show the tragedy, despair and helplessness that weather can inflict.

Hellmann eventually published the memories in a small book, which she titled Blizzard Strikes the Rosebud. The stories are captivating. A Gregory cafe became home to 32 people for two days; they played cards, listened to the radio and slept in booths. Mildred Benson kept her students at Eden School entertained by organizing a folk dance that went on for two days.

Thor Fosheim, a 75-year-old rancher, rode off on horseback to save his cattle and never returned. Murdo rancher Noel”Pete” Judd went with his nephew to bring his daughters home from school. When their Jeep stalled, the four started walking. Funeral services for all four were held eight days later in Winner.

Most farmers and ranchers didn’t drive four-wheel-drive pickups in the early 1950s, and they didn’t have 100-horsepower tractors with heated cabs and snow blowers. Some of the rescue work was accomplished by foot and on horseback.

However, one thing has remained constant from 1952 to 2019. When times get tough, neighbors and even strangers band together to help one another. Much has changed in South Dakota since 1952. Roads and bridges are better. Dams and levees have been constructed to control flooding. Equipment is better and safer.

But good neighbors are still the greatest blessing when the snow is blowing and the water is rising. It was true in’52 and true in’19.

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The One That Got Away … Briefly

By Michael Zimny

A unique sculpture in Spearfish reminds us of a time when a national public art program was possible.

Fish Story — a tri-part set of sculptures — was created by artist Marion Overby for the old Spearfish post office. The New Deal’s rural post office murals brought art that dignified rural life to accessible settings.

An alumnus of the influential Cranbrook Academy of Art who later worked alongside designers Charles and Ray Eames, Overby received commissions from at least two small town post offices during the New Deal era. Her terra-cotta relief mural Early Postman is still on display at the post office in Mason, Michigan.

The old Spearfish Post Office was built in 1940, as part of an accelerated federal building program. The simple style and brick facade are typical of “Class C” post offices built in small towns during the era. The sculpture was commissioned in 1943. Overby wrote that she named the piece Fish Story because, “I am sure the country around Spearfish is full of tall tales of fishing and record-breaking catches.”

Carved from California walnut, the sculpture depicts a Native American fisherman with a spear and a non-Native fisherman in waders with rod-and-reel. Despite their differences in hairstyle and dress, both men look nearly identical. A fish trio swims between them.

“When this building was abandoned by the post office in 1996, the Smithsonian came and took it to D.C.,” says Kathy Standen, a personal banker at Great Western Bank, which occupies the old post office building today. “When the bank reopened in 1999, our bank president went to Senator Daschle and asked him if we could have that artwork back. Senator Daschle made it available for us and then they brought it back and put it back up on the wall.”

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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Yankton’s Civil Rights Champion

By John Andrews

Until the day Ted Blakey died in 2004, he possessed a newspaper clipping from February 1838. It advertised his grandfather, an 11-year-old boy at the time, for sale at a slave auction in Missouri. For Blakey, a Yankton businessman and tireless Civil Rights advocate, it served as a reminder of how far his family had come.

Blakey was born in Yankton in 1925, the youngest of 11 children. His family roots were in Missouri, but his father and uncle were encouraged to move to South Dakota after hearing Tom Douglas, an African-American who ran a successful business in Yankton. Douglas wanted to share the freedom he enjoyed so in 1904 he traveled through Missouri, telling everyone who would listen that if they came to Yankton they would find”freedom like you’ve never seen anywhere.”

Blakey’s father and uncle were in the crowd one day and were intrigued by the proposal. The final straw came the day his father was accused of assaulting a white woman after simply bumping into her in a dry goods store. The clerk threatened to lynch him if he ever returned. When he got home he told his wife they were leaving for South Dakota. They arrived in Yankton on Oct. 16, 1905.

In the Dakotas African-Americans did not find the same attitudes toward them that were prevalent in Southern states, but discriminatory language still found its way into early territorial laws. Gov. William Jayne, in his first message to the new territorial legislature in 1862, called for a ban on slavery. Despite his entreaty, a committee passed a bill preventing”persons of color” residing in Dakota Territory. Fortunately the full House rejected the measure. Still, the Organic Act that authorized a government for Dakota Territory declared that only”every free white male inhabitant of the United States…shall be entitled to vote at the first election.” Not until 1868 did the legislature delete the word”white.” Similarly, schools were”equally free and accessible to all white children,” until 1868.

Blakey became the owner of a successful janitorial service and pest control business in Yankton. He was also president of the school board and the PTA and active in the Jaycees and Kiwanis.”It was never really that bad,” Blakey recalled in a 2001 interview, though there were incidents of discrimination in the 1960s. South Dakota’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People surveyed the state and found certain restaurants in Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Huron, Mitchell and other larger towns refused to allow blacks to eat in. Another survey by the Black Hills Civil Rights Committee revealed that 90 percent of bars and barbershops and 30 percent of restaurants and motels in Rapid City refused service to blacks.

The NAACP and Gov. Archie Gubbrud recruited Blakey to remedy the situation.”That was when I really hit it,” he later recalled.”I went before Rotary, Kiwanis, the Sacred Heart PTA and a lot of clubs there. See up until then, a black person couldn’t get a haircut in Yankton until after 5 o’clock. He (the barber) pulled down the shade and cut your hair. There was not a barbershop in Yankton that would cut a black man’s hair in 1963.”

Blakey helped change all of that. In 1963 Gov. Gubbrud signed a Civil Rights Bill. Blakey also urged the state legislature to approve the 24th amendment to the constitution, eliminating the poll tax. South Dakota was the 38th and final state needed to approve the amendment in 1964.

In time Blakey came to be the unofficial spokesperson for South Dakota’s black population, a role he especially relished whenever outsiders had questions.”We hear about the Holocaust, and survivors of Pearl Harbor,” Blakey says.”I want them to know what black people did in South Dakota, and in Yankton.”

Thanks to Ted Blakey, many South Dakotans knew the story well.

Governor Archie Gubbrud and Ted Blakey of Yankton
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The Wisdom of the Fool Soldiers

By Michael Zimny

A mural inside Scherr-Howe Arena in Mobridge painted by Oscar Howe depicts the Fool Soldiers rescuing captives during the Dakota War.

In the winter of 1862, 10 Lakota warriors risked their lives and reputations for a novel concept: the rights of civilians during wartime. People called them “Fool Soldiers” because at a time when being indigenous made them targets, they staked a claim for militant humanism, even if it meant alienating some of their own. If they’d expected medals or accolades, the appellation may have proven apt. But the available evidence — the (mostly forgotten) stories told by descendants and historians — indicates another motive. They just wanted to “do good.”

The Fool Soldiers’ leader was a man named Charger, later Anglicized as Martin Charger, who was said to have proven himself in war, but who strove for peace, first in intertribal conflicts, then between Dakota/Lakota and the Euro-American arrivals.

According to Samuel Charger’s biography of his father, in 1860 a young man named Kills and Comes Back received a vision and approached Charger to discuss its meaning. The dream as related by Samuel Charger seems abbreviated, more like a postscript. He wrote that Kills and Comes Back, “had seen ten stags in his dream, all black and as he advanced toward them, one in the lead spoke to him. It said: ‘This vision is to be fulfilled by you and to be complied with by all who are members. You and every member is to be respected and feared and you must be united in your undertakings.’ As the dreamer looked closer he said he identified himself as the one who was speaking.”

What did the black stag, who was Kills and Comes Back, show him(self)? Charger held a council to divine its meaning. “Kills Game afterward interpreted it to mean that the membership should be ten in number and that to be respected by the tribe, they should be generous, not only with food but with their property. Charger agreed as did all the others.”

The following night, the young men shared the dream with Charging Dog, “a man of the same character as Kills Game, also a medicine man of fame throughout the tribe.” Charging Dog reaffirmed the others’ interpretation.

“As a medicine man I do not always get riches, but the good I do my fellow tribesmen is something to strive for. We may be brave in battle, but as everybody knows we do not live long and to do each other harm in our camp is very bad. I have seen a lot of it during my life. I believe the hardest thing for anybody to do is to do good to others, but it makes their hearts rejoice.”

Four Bear, a member of the Fool Soldiers band.

So they organized a Society based on those principles. In August of 1862, Dakota people at Upper and Lower Sioux Agencies of Minnesota were brought to the brink of starvation. They’d been hit by famine, and the annuities the government owed them were late, when agency storeowner Andrew Myrick was reputed to say, “If they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” Myrick was killed on the first day of the Dakota War.

You know how the lines blur if you’ve been there, and what happened next. Civilians killed. Reprisals that kill more innocents. That’s how it was going on August 20, when a band led by White Lodge attacked the tiny settlement of Lake Shetek, near present-day Currie, Minnesota, killing 15 settlers and taking eight captives — two women and six children.

When news traveled to Charger and the Fool Soldiers that White Lodge and his band were camped, with their captives, on the west side of the Missouri, they saw an opportunity to live their commitment to the vision.

They left their camp near Fort Pierre, traded horses and pelts for food they could offer as ransom, and set out for White Lodge’s camp. As they crossed the river, people were said to implore them not to go. “They thought the ‘boys’ as they called them, would not come back alive,” wrote Samuel Charger, “and the undertaking was foolish. But Charger told the crowd ‘there is only one life and that is short, hence we should do what we think is good.'”

According to South Dakota historian Doane Robinson, the band included: “Charger, Kills and Comes, Four Bear, Mad Bear, Pretty Bear, Sitting Bear, Swift Bird, One Rib, Strikes Fire, Red Dog and Charging Dog.” Along the way, they encountered a Yanktonais camp, where they were told that White Lodge’s Band was camped near present-day Mobridge.

As the stories tell it, White Lodge did not warmly welcome the Fool Soldiers. Negotiations were tense, and could easily have degenerated into shooting. In the end, White Lodge’s son, Black Hawk, agreed with the Fool Soldiers and helped them secure the hostages — the two women and five children, one child had died — but they weren’t victorious yet.

They’d had to trade away all their horses and provisions, and had a 100-mile journey ahead, through blizzard conditions with a group of ragged, hungry children. As they started back, they received some help from Don’t Know How, a Yanktonais man who may have traveled with them to White Lodge’s camp, or met them coming and going. He furnished them with one horse and helped them fashion a travois to carry the children. (Don’t Know How was the paternal grandfather of the great Dakota artist Oscar Howe, who depicted the Fool Soldiers’ rescue of the Lake Shetek captives in one of his murals at the Scherr-Howe Arena in Mobridge.)

Don’t Know How’s kindness helped, but the Fool Soldiers still had to complete a journey akin to Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to make it home. Seeing that Laura Duley, one of the two adult female captives, was barefoot, Charger is said to have given her his moccasins, wrapping his own feet in old clothes.

The group camped only twice, walking through the third night, arriving the next morning at the river, where several traders helped them make a treacherous ford of the river, which wasn’t wholly covered with ice. From there, a trader named Charles Primeau housed the freed captives until the U.S. Army returned them to their relatives.

A monument recognizing the Fool Soldiers stands in Mobridge City Park.

Then the Fool Soldiers’ story faded into obscurity. They had set out to do good and succeeded. If they’d harbored any less selfless motives, they’d have failed.

Fool Soldier Joseph Four Bear didn’t benefit from his actions, says his great-granddaughter Marcella LeBeau.

“He signed the peace treaty [Treaty of Fort Laramie, 1868], and he had to live on the northeast corner of our reservation and not leave. If he left he’d have to have a signed permit to come and go, otherwise he would have been shot as a hostile. They gave him land allotments on the reservation. That was already our land. That was treaty land. What kind of sense is that, to give back his own land to him, and he had to live there?

“And he had to live by that peace treaty. So he didn’t dance Indian. He didn’t follow his own ways. He didn’t hunt for his people and provide for them like he did in the past. So my thought is: if you can’t be who you are then who are you? So he lived out his life like that.”

Were the Fool Soldiers misguided in helping the captives?

“I believe they did a good deed,” LeBeau says.

Joseph Four Bear did receive a token of posthumous gratitude.

“On his tombstone, a white marble tombstone, it said something about: He was a friend to the white man for over seventy some years,” LeBeau says. “And I know that his own people didn’t have the funds to do that.”

There is also a modest quartzite marker in Mobridge City Park that reads: SHETAK [sic] CAPTIVES RESCUED HERE NOVEMBER 1862 BY FOOL SOLDIER BAND.

In 1996, Paul Carpenter, a descendant of one of the rescued captives, brought gifts to the descendants of the Fool Soldiers and honored them in a ceremony. “There was standing room only in that building,” LeBeau says.

People lined Main Street and reenacted scenes from the rescue — Martin Charger giving Laura Duley his moccasins, wrapping his feet in rags, the children transported by travois, pulled by their single horse.

The tribute, 134 years after the event, raised some awareness momentarily.

“I think in school they should learn about it,” LeBeau says. “But I don’t think that’s happening. I know when I went to the boarding school we didn’t learn anything.”

The Fool Soldiers were revolutionaries. While their own people were steadily losing their land and way of life, they took a stand for people who looked like the enemy, 87 years before the Fourth Geneva Convention codified civilian wartime rights — including a prohibition on taking civilian hostages — into international law.

The reasons they haven’t been recognized probably range from the obvious (they were Native American) to the thornier issue of their acceptance within their own group. “Their own people — some of them — were against them,” LeBeau says.

The Fool Soldiers may be perceived, by some, as capitulators, and any recognition of them may, in kind, be seen as an exclusive endorsement of their response to the times in which they lived, like the epitaph on Four Bear’s tombstone. Their act, though, is not a negation of the survival strategies of warriors like Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull. Rather, it was the antithesis of Custer’s attack on civilian camps, or the massacre of disarmed noncombatants at Wounded Knee. The Fool Soldiers have been called pacifists, but Samuel Charger’s biography of his father depicts them not as pacifists but warriors turned militant humanists.

Martin Charger and his men are the moral forebears of Hugh Thompson and the American GIs who stopped the massacre at My Lai (and others like them). Decades later, Thompson and his men got their medals. On March 16, 1968, they didn’t know if they would make it out alive. That’s how it’s always going to be for a Fool Soldier. The conventioneers can call for Twister as a means of conflict resolution if they want. Wartime ethics live or die on the barrel side of White Lodge’s (or William Calley’s) guns. What the nations codified on Lac LÈman, the Fool Soldiers lived on the Mni Sose. There are greater monuments to lesser men.

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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Bullhead Remembers the Doughboy

By Michael Zimny

South Dakota’s only Spirit of the American Doughboy sculpture, in honor of America’s World War I infantrymen, is found in Bullhead on the Standing Rock Reservation.

Though they often go unnoticed, “doughboys” are a staple in America’s small town squares. Not the Pillsbury creation but the ubiquitous, if barely noticed, monuments to American soldiers who fought in the so-called, “war to end all wars.”

The term “doughboy” originated as in-group military slang, working its way out into popular culture. It’s a strangely jolly sounding word for the people to which it referred, given where they’d been, but it stuck.

After the war, as millions of veterans returned to their communities, there was a drive to memorialize the doughboys. Doughboy statues popped up in hundreds of towns. Artists competed to capitalize on the trend. Many were made of cast bronze. Then an artist named Ernest Viquesney, of Spencer, Indiana, developed a mass-produceable number he titled The Spirit of the American Doughboy that became the most widely proliferated.

“The original model was made out of pressed copper, so it was cheaper than ordinary bronze,” says Les Kopel, who has compiled decades worth of Viquesney doughboy research on his Doughboy Searcher website. “A lot of towns that couldn’t afford a monument could afford one from Viquesney.”

Viquesney’s doughboy is no Michelangelo’s David. For a work that’s supposed to portray a soldier stepping into the hellfire of No Man’s Land, his visage is more like that of a man about to walk the dog. His pose is rigid, a grenade held aloft in an unnaturally stiff right arm.

“If you view the statue from the side and you view the Statue of Liberty from the side, the pose is exactly the same,” says Kopel. “I’m not sure he got his idea from that, but that’s my idea anyway.”

For all the doughboy’s lack of realism though, like his name, he radiates a sense of calm in the face of adversity. The art establishment panned Viquesney, but people didn’t seem to care. There are still 140 of Viquesney’s Doughboys around the country, not including copies.

The only one in South Dakota is in the tiny town of Bullhead, on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

Wilma Tiger was born and raised in Bullhead and says the town’s annual Doughboy pow wow has long held an important place on the local cultural calendar. “It started with a pow wow by one lady that had it every year, Agnes Long Elk,” Tiger says. “She kept it going and of course I had grandmothers that were also on that. Now, it stopped for a while but then it was picked back up. And it’s been happening ever since.”

Among the names of Word War I veterans listed on the base of the memorial are Tiger’s grandfathers.

“A lot of the veterans in this community started way back in World War I,” says local American Legion post commander Joe Montana. “A lot them volunteered to go. It kind of went down the line from then, from families. Like my father was in Korea, and I kind of wanted to serve too because he served.”

Why such a strong tradition of service in Bullhead?

“I think it’s because a lot of them consider themselves warriors and braves,” says Montana. “They want to defend the country and they know they’re defending their people. Their people also live in this country. This country was established way back, way back before anybody came here. There was Native Americans, millions and millions of Native Americans that used to live here and everything else. So, just to defend the country and keep that mentality of being a warrior or brave that carried down from generation to generation.”

Though Bullhead was smaller, perhaps poorer, than most of the towns in the market for a doughboy, Montana says people pooled their money to get one. “They were like five hundred dollars short for the doughboy,” he says, “so a [rancher] out of McIntosh donated the last five hundred.”

As the Legion post commander, Montana is the doughboy’s caretaker. He recently painted the memorial to match the colors of uniforms in old photos.

Though the real doughboys of Bullhead are all long gone, the annual pow wow is still a draw. “We do turnip soup,” Montana says, “papa soup, tripe soup buffalo, beef, fry bread. A lot of the people living in Standing Rock too, they kind of know when the Doughboy is going to happen, because they start calling right away, start calling the district office here and asking about the pow wow.”

Veteran’s Day of 2018 marked 100 years since the armistice that ended the “war to end all wars.” But war is still with us. Maybe it always will be. After World War I, people wondered what it all was for. Now as then, people still remember their doughboys. Or at least they do in Bullhead.

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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Manganese Memories

By Michael Zimny

Frequent cross-state travelers may sometimes wonder: What the heck are those brick and concrete ruins just north of Interstate 90 a few miles west of the Missouri River? All alone on the swollen grass seas west of Oacoma, their mystique recalls Caspar Friedrich’s depictions of pastoral ruins.

So what are they?

The vestiges of what was a sizable manganese mining operation. According to a local, the open-ended concrete structure was a mineshaft and the brick building housed an auger.

Manganese — which is instrumental in steel production — was discovered in the black soil strata of the river bluffs in the 1920s. In 1929, the Deadwood Pioneer Times announced the formation of the General Manganese Corporation, dedicated to mining the metal from what it described as, “undoubtedly the largest deposit in America.”

State attorney general and future governor Merrell Sharpe, who farmed and practiced law in Oacoma, was involved in the project from the outset, acquiring much of the land.

The operation picked up steam as the build up to U.S. entry into World War II called for more steel, and consequently more domestic manganese production. Prior to the war, America was dependent on Russian imports. In 1941, the Argus Leader claimed that, “Up to 95 percent of our steel needs … have come from Russia, where it was mined practically with slave labor producing a very economical ore.” Most likely, the short-lived Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and Russia impressed upon U.S. planners the need for manganese-independence.

In 1941, the increased demand led the federal government to build a pilot plant to experiment with cost-effective methods for separating manganese from the surrounding shale. After the war, local papers reported that Merrell Sharpe, who had leased the land to the government, announced plans to utilize processes developed by the Bureau of Mines to expand private mining operations. Those methods must not have proven cost-effective enough to compete with imports in the post-war economy. A 1954 Rapid City Journal article on the flooding (for Lake Oahe) of Oacoma gave it a, “last chance for survival as an important town if supplies of manganese are cut off from Brazil and Russia.”

To date, the Oacoma manganese deposits are still considered too low-grade to compete with those in say, South Africa. One day, a new technology may unleash their potential. Then condominiums will kiss the skies on either side of the Oacoma/Chamberlain divide. For now, they’re moldering reminders of that time we tried to simultaneously stick it to the Third Reich and the damned Russkies.

Note: The old mining site is on private property. We were granted permission to access. Please enjoy respectfully from the road.

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.