Category: culture

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Aberdeen’s Graveyard Girl

By Bernie Hunhoff

Tasha Tietz, like all nurses, has a caring soul. She believes people should be remembered even after they’re gone.

Walk through a cemetery with Tasha Westby Tietz and you soon learn that tombstones represent life.

The same happens when you visit Tietz’s Facebook page. Watch her YouTube channel. Catch one of her talks or peruse her research on websites like Find a Grave and Ancestry.com. Tietz considers herself”a loner,” but the vivacious Aberdeen nurse is quickly becoming recognized as an authority on cemeteries. She even has an online persona,”Graveyard Girl,” though she shares the moniker with a rap musician and a fashion and beauty YouTuber — interesting company for the introverted daughter of an Aberdeen bricklayer and a beautician.

“I couldn’t even speak at my own wedding,” she laughs,”but I just spoke at the genealogy society and at the Aberdeen library. I can’t believe all that is happening.”

Tietz’s interest in the deceased began when she was working as a nurse’s aide at Mother Joseph Manor, an Aberdeen nursing home. She soon grew to love the Presentation sisters, and she worried that they might be forgotten when they die because they don’t have children and spouses. Even to this day, one of her favorite cemetery walks is a section of Sacred Heart Cemetery in Aberdeen devoted to deceased Presentations.

But it wasn’t long before she took an interest in more grave sites: those of other patients at the nursing home, her own ancestors and eventually perfect strangers.

“There is a quote that says a person is truly forgotten when their name is spoken for the last time,” she says.”That makes me believe that every person should be remembered and one way to do that is to be sure they have a tombstone.”

And in today’s online world, every tombstone should be searchable. Seven years ago, she began to enter tombstone photos on Find a Grave; today she is among its busiest contributors. She has posted more than 2,400 memorials and obituaries and 5,000 photos.

Aberdeen’s four cemeteries are her favorite places. She has documented many of their markers on Find a Grave.

Her paternal ancestors are buried at Claire City and Sisseton, so she has also visited them for years.”I try to take a bouquet to all my direct grandparents on Memorial Day,” she says.”I like to go to Claire City in September and visit the graves at Sica Hollow.”

In 2021, she found three tombstones of the Roy family, some of the first white settlers, among the autumn foliage of Sica Hollow. Most of her explorations have been in northeast South Dakota, but she has also roamed cemeteries as far away as Washington, D.C., Canada, Arizona and Texas.

She includes”graving trips” on family vacations when her husband, John, and their three daughters — Chloe, Claire and Charlotte — are willing.”The girls are not super-impressed yet,” she says.”John is also not a fan, but he’ll take me. We went to the Black Hills last summer and we explored Mountain View Cemetery at Keystone. I picked it because some of the Mount Rushmore carvers are buried there, and the actor Bobby Buntrock died and was buried there. There is also a Native leader, a medicine man, an artist and some kind of a wild Old West guy. It’s the only cemetery with a view of Mount Rushmore.”

She recently visited the De Smet cemetery where Charles and Caroline Ingalls are buried, along with their daughters Mary, Grace and Carrie.

Her social media posts also include information she gathers from other sources, including a recent bit about the Jewish custom of placing stones rather than flowers on tombstones. She also spotlighted a report of an Iowa cemetery that features three pyramids, built by the local newspaper editor who planned to be buried in one of them.

Graveyard Girl’s Facebook page now has more than 6,000 followers. Her sites have grown so much that they earn her small amounts of money, some of which she has used to help pay for gravestones on unmarked graves. If the revenues continue to grow, she plans to also invest in camera equipment and research materials for the ever-growing avocation.

She finds genealogy research the most rewarding aspect of being Graveyard Girl. People from across the nation have sent her notes of appreciation for her assistance in finding the graves of their ancestors.

Still, her favorite part of being Graveyard Girl is the time spent in cemeteries.”I like to be out in nature, and I am pretty much a loner. I think I’m also an old soul. I’m happiest when I’m with my family, outdoors in a beautiful cemetery.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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From Ashes to Art

By Bernie Hunhoff

Randall Blaze lost his home and art studio to fire, but the Pine Ridge Reservation sculptor is rising from the ashes.

Pine Ridge artist Randall Blaze hurried home from a grocery trip to Rapid City on an April evening in 2020 because he was eager to watch a TV documentary on Ernest Hemingway. Blaze lit a candle and set it on the arm of an upholstered chair. The next thing he knew, the chair was a ball of fire and within minutes the entire house was burning.

Flames were surely visible for many miles around because Blaze’s property sits atop Cuny Table, a mesa on the southern edge of the Badlands. However, nobody was watching. Nobody came to his rescue. The nearest fire truck was an hour away in any direction, and within minutes the entire studio was afire.

In the morning, Blaze surveyed the smoldering rubble. Sculpture tools, brushes, bronze artworks, furniture and business records were all lost. Though the fire didn’t spread across the grassy prairie, it did blacken a cottonwood tree that provided shade to the west side of the house. It was the lone tree on his 100 acres.

Cuny Table was settled by the Cunys, who arrived from Wyoming in 1880. Several of the young men married Native women; 50 years later, more than 100 families called it home. Many were Charles Cuny’s descendants. They had a school, church, dance hall and a few stores.

However, most were forced to leave in 1942 when the U.S. Army appropriated 340,000 acres in the Badlands for a bombing range. Families were given two weeks to pack up and go. Many of the young men joined the military.

Cuny Table and the entire region continued to be a practice range for the U.S. Air Force until 1958, and then was used by the South Dakota Air National Guard until 1974 when tribal leaders began to negotiate with the government for a return of the confiscated property.

Though Blaze was born and raised in Montana, his mother was a Cuny.”It turned out that Mom owned 17-and-a-half acres of trust land,” he says.”She and her family were moved out for the bombing range, and nobody came back. Every time a relative died, the executor of the estate would urge us all to sell, but I always objected.”

Myriad art faces are embedded around Blaze’s land on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Blaze joined the Navy and served on a refrigerated cargo ship during the Vietnam War.”One of the nicest things that ever happened to me was the GI bill, which gave me a month of education for every month I served.” He studied art at the University of Montana and was fascinated to learn about a variety of materials from Rudy Autio, a renowned ceramics professor and artist whose work garnered international acclaim.

Early in his career, Blaze devoted his creative energies to making jewelry, but he grew disillusioned by his customers’ lack of appreciation for the art form.”All they saw was a product, and it became all about the money.” Like Autio, he began to experiment with various materials, including bronze, metal and ceramics.

He also began to explore his Lakota roots at Cuny Table and started to buy his relatives’ small holdings; over the course of several years, he acquired 100 acres. Inspired by the solitude and the natural environment, he dreamed of building a studio and home there in the early 1990s, though he didn’t have the resources. Then came a visitor.

“One day my friend Rich Red Owl stopped over and said, ‘I hear you need a studio.’ I told him that I wished I could build one, but I didn’t have the money,” Blaze said, recalling the conversation.

“Do you have $1,500?” Red Owl asked.

“I have about that much,” Blaze said.

“Then let’s get started,” said Red Owl.

Blaze got a lesson in Indian-genuity. Red Owl showed him how to salvage and scavenge for inexpensive building materials, and before long he was moving into a 3,000-square-foot home that became known as the Oglala Art Center.

His career began to grow. He won fellowships at the Smithsonian and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, and his bronzes were featured at exhibitions in Japan, Germany and Australia. He authored a book, Heartdreams and Legends, on the contributions of indigenous artists of the United States and Australia. Seven Council Fires, a nonprofit that exhibits Native arts and crafts, marketed his sculptures worldwide.

Though he traveled the world, Blaze found that he was happiest when creating art at his humble studio. He rented most of his land to neighboring farmers but maintained a buffer of wild grass between his home and the crops.”After seeing what Agent Orange did to some of my friends in Vietnam, I just wanted some space between me and the chemical sprays,” he explains.

When a neighbor’s cattle trampled his yard and damaged some tipis that he had created as mini studios, he started a fence of driftwood to keep out the cows. Soon he assimilated art into the fence. Often, his pieces show faces of figures, perhaps in a spiritual search. Maybe they represent relatives who were driven from Cuny Table generations ago, or ancestors who were killed at Wounded Knee, which is just 20 miles to the east.

Blaze has gained attention in his home state over the past 20 years as a popular participant in the state arts council’s Artists in the Schools program.”I love working with the kids,” he says.”I am always amazed at what they can do.” He often incorporates his trademark faces into his teaching, and sometimes he takes samples of the students’ works back to Cuny Table and finds a place for them in his fence and wild garden.

When the original studio burned in 2020, he wasn’t sure, at the age of 71, that he had the energy or resources to rebuild. His friend Red Owl is now too elderly to help. But other support has arrived. Someone gave him a camper trailer. He salvaged what he could from the old house and became a regular shopper at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in Rapid City.

Blaze built a driftwood fence around his Cuny Table home to keep cattle away from the studio. The fence has become part of the art.

“That place is wonderful. But I was paying whatever they asked for windows and doors until my grandson suggested to me that I could dicker with them,” he grinned.”Guess what I paid for this window? It had been there for months, and I told them it wasn’t selling very fast. I got it for $95.”

In 2023 he was awarded a $5,000 fellowship from the South Dakota Arts Council to help fund the next studio. His adult grandchildren came from Utah to help install windows and start a deck.

He recognizes that his style of architecture and the isolation of living on Cuny Table are acquired tastes. He was married and he’s had several lady friends,”but not a lot of women want to live out here where a toilet is a luxury.” Winters are long, even for the solitary artist; he spent the last few at St. Petersburg, Florida, because he hasn’t yet restored electrical service or plumbing.

“You can get stuck out here for six weeks or more in winter,” he says.”The wind blows all the time, and when it snows it can be incredibly beautiful, like waves on the ocean. St. Petersburg has art galleries and studios and people everywhere, but I get lonely there and by spring I’m happy to get back here.”

He likes being visited by badgers, coyotes, bobcats and deer. A sense of quiet permeates the outdoors; he can hear Canada geese approaching in the sky long before he can see them.

While winterizing the studio in preparation for his trip south, he saw that the cottonwood tree that burned in the 2020 fire had sprouted leaves on its bottom branches.”I thought that was dead after the fire,” he said.

The same might have been said about his studio. Though its reincarnation is primitive by Florida standards ó by just about any standards ó it fits nicely on Cuny Table.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Modern Rewards of Quilting

Story by Keley Smith-Keller

Photos by Chad Coppess

Mary Kirschenman (left) and Sally Schroeder guide quilters at Sassy Cat Quilting, headquartered in a former horse barn north of Yankton.

April Flying Hawk began quilting after her son, Ethan, died at the age of 3.

“I wanted to do a giveaway when my son passed,” Flying Hawk says.”And, I wanted to do the quilts myself, not buy them from anyone.”

Flying Hawk, a Wagner native and a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, reached out to the women in her community who create star quilts. Each of those women quilted differently. She took what she could from each quilter and began sewing, developing a process that worked for her. Now, Flying Hawk hand-stitches all her quilts to finish them. She only uses a sewing machine for the initial work of piecing them together.

Quilting feels like second nature for Flying Hawk.”The intention and goal of starting this was to find healing. It’s now become my second job.”

Quilting is growing across South Dakota. Shops catering to the quilters are especially showing up on main streets in rural communities. The reasons for the resurgence are as many as the stitches in a square.

Sally Schroeder’s shop, Sassy Cat Quilting, is located in a spacious, remodeled horse barn north of Yankton. She believes quilting is rooted in joy and passion. She also learned that it seams friendships.

Sally Schroeder’s Sassy Cat Quilting north of Yankton is one of nearly three dozen shops that cater to quilters in the state.

When Schroeder’s husband, John, was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, she did not know how she would keep the business going.”My posse pitched in and helped me keep the doors open,” she says. The posse consists of family, friends and customers who share her love of quality. Fortunately, the fledgling business and her husband both survived the ordeal. Today, carloads of quilters make daytrips to Sassy Cat to learn the latest techniques or shop for fabrics.

When you hear the stories of quilting communities, the question of why people stitch and stitch and stitch is less mysterious. This is not a solitary craft.

Susan Sanders is the chair of marketing and advertising for the popular Hill City Quilt Show.”My sister has told me that quilting is like breadmaking,” Sanders says.”You take perfectly good ingredients and tear them up to make something new.”

Quilting is a thriving pastime in Hill City. The mountain town of less than 1,000 people has five stores dedicated to fabrics, notions and quilting. Hill City has also hosted an annual quilt show for the past 25 years.

“There’s definitely demand,” Sanders says.”If one business closes, another quickly opens up.”

Craft Industry Alliance data lends support to Sanders’ statement. This national community for craft professionals predicts that the nationwide quilting industry, which currently stands at $4.2 billion, will become a $5 billion industry by 2027. Though no one has an exact count, there are at least three dozen quilt shops in all regions of South Dakota.

Enthusiasm and love for quilting can span generations. Grandmothers and mothers pass down their knowledge and skills and foster important family relationships.

“I was born into quilting,” says Yvonne Hollenbeck, whose family ranches west of Winner in Tripp County.”I’m a fifth-generation quilter, starting with my great-great-grandmother.”

Hollenbeck is also a quilt historian. Traveling the Plains and Upper Midwest, she conducts educational programs on the history of quilting and teaches would-be quilters the basics. A writer and cowgirl poet, she has an entertaining style and a love for rural America’s arts and crafts.

Mariah Baumberger cuts fabric in her mother’s store, Always Your Design, an anchor of the business district in Dell Rapids.

“Amazon wasn’t available 150 years ago,” Hollenbeck says.”Quilts were made out of old clothing and scraps to keep the family warm. People lived in sod houses or shacks and houses were cold. Quilts were a necessity to everyone.”

Hollenbeck starts her education programs with a history of the Civil War and her own family’s roots in Franklin County, Iowa.

“Every soldier leaving Franklin County for the war had a quilt in their issue made by the local women’s guild,” Hollenbeck says.”Men were also issued a ‘housewife,’ which was a sewing kit, and the men learned to sew — uniforms and even wounds. Lint was used to repair wounds.”

While economic data suggests that quilting might be an expensive endeavor, Hollenbeck disagrees. She tells would-be quilters that the hobby doesn’t have to be spendy. Hollenbeck frequents second-hand stores to purchase goods that have quilting potential. She recycles worn-out clothing into quilts. And, she does not use a sewing machine. Every stitch is fingered.

“I find sewing by hand relaxing,” Hollenbeck says.”I keep a quilting kit in my purse. While I’m waiting at a doctor’s appointment or the airport, I take out the kit and piece. Once I get the quilt made, it becomes a member of the family.”

Lake Andes librarian Mary Jo Parker is working to broaden the appeal of quilting in her community. Parker launched a quilt-making project in the fall. It began with an inquiry to the library from the Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX), sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Our local school has no FACS [Family and Consumer Science]. The art teacher does a little bit with quilting, but it’s limited,” Parker says.”And, math is more than adding and subtracting.”

Parker believes that all youth — Native American, white and others — can benefit from understanding the symbolism of the Lakota star quilt, which has become a powerful cultural art piece in South Dakota.

Through the Lake Andes project, people of all ages will learn to construct star wall hangings or pillow tops. Community members will also be invited to work together to construct a 58-by-58-inch star quilt wall hanging for the library, using the colors of the Lakota Medicine Wheel (black, red, yellow and white).

Quilting has an emotional appeal, but it’s also good for rural main streets. Earleene Kellogg of Edgemont saw quilting as a way to go into business with family members. Kellogg, her husband Jerry and daughter Natalie, started Nuts and Bolts in Edgemont in 2005. Located in an old bank building, half of the business was devoted to quilting and the other half to motorcycle repair.

Earleene Kellogg and her husband Jerry started Nuts and Bolts as a quilt shop and motorcycle repair business in Edgemont, but the quilting half eventually took over.

“We started in the old bank building because it really lent itself to the quilting side of the business,” Kellogg says.”We’re on the edge of nowhere, so we draw people from Wyoming and Nebraska and southern South Dakota.”

The business has evolved in 19 years. Quilting is strong, but the motorcycle department never grew.

“We both rode motorcycles and we thought there would be a bigger market for that,” Kellogg says. When Jerry retired from the railroad, he began to do sewing machine cleaning and repair. He cleans and repairs long-arm quilting machines and treadle sewing machines. Business is booming without a Harley or a Honda in the shop.

Quilting can also be a lesson in mindfulness. Kathy Grovenburg, sales associate with Always Your Design Quilt Shop in Dell Rapids, says she quilts for mental clarity.”It’s my god time. I like the creativity, the art and challenge of making something work and come out right. It’s great for keeping your mind alert.”

Grovenburg has been quilting for 20 years.”I do one thing at a time and only focus on that step. When I’m squaring out my fabric, that’s what I focus on. When I’m cutting, I make sure everything is exact. I can’t think of anything else in those moments. People are hesitant to try quilting for a variety of reasons. If they tell me they’d like to but they’ve never tried it, I say just try it. If they say they don’t know how to quilt, I say we’ve got classes for that. If they say they’re not good at color, I tell them we have people who can help them with that. If they don’t have a sewing machine, we can fix that.”

Our ancestors sewed out of necessity. They wanted warm blankets. Today, quilting attracts people for myriad other reasons — passion, healing, mathematics, business and art. Grovenburg recommends that newcomers to the craft consider their goals.

Blankets are now a side benefit; the other rewards are just as heart-warming.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Joyful Noise

By Chad Coppess

Mike Pedersen treasures opportunities to entertain visitors at his vintage general store in tiny Nora. His annual Christmas season sing-alongs have become a tradition in southeastern South Dakota.

For 34 years, Mike Pedersen has opened the doors of the historic Nora Store and beautiful music has flowed out onto the cold and wintry prairie. His Christmas season singalongs have become a tradition for people of all ages who enjoy the melodies, fellowship and the sense of stepping into the past.

With a current population of two at the intersection of Union County Roads 25 and 15, Nora never was much of a town, but it did have a creamery and blacksmith shop at one time, along with the store. Pedersen describes it as”the Walmart of its era. It had a lot of things, but only one of each.” The store opened in 1907 and included gas pumps for a while but closed in 1962. Pedersen moved into the store in 1973 and lived there for 15 years before building a home next door.

Walking into the store is a bit like stepping into The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie; the store’s shelves and walls hold antiques, many with Christmas flair, and carolers gather around a vintage wood stove on chilly winter evenings. The centerpiece is the large, 1907 pipe organ, originally housed inside the Lake Preston Lutheran Church. Pedersen first saw the organ after it had been donated to the National Music Museum in Vermillion, but it was in pieces scattered in a storage room.

Seven years later the museum decided it didn’t need the organ and offered it to Pedersen if he would reassemble it and play it. Friends helped him complete the installation in the Nora Store; the first song played on it was a tearful version of”Jesus Loves Me.”

Guests at the Nora Store sing-alongs are greeted at the door as friends and thanked as they leave.

From there Pedersen’s childhood love of Christmas songs took over and he ran an ad in a local newspaper asking people to join him for singalongs. Around 3,000 people attend each year over several weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas. He invites school and nursing home groups in mid-week. Guests are welcome to play the organ or piano, or ring sleigh bells passed throughout the crowd.

Pedersen has never missed an open house.”There’s never been a person that’s come that I haven’t greeted,” he said proudly. One 2023 evening saw visitors from South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Ohio. He has hinted for several years that the singalongs might be nearing an end, but he hasn’t stopped yet.”I don’t take any day for granted,” he says.”For the future, I don’t know. I live in the moment. The building is kind of like me. It’s starting to wear out.”

For now the event seems in good hands, with several longtime friends taking turns on the organ and piano. Free will offerings are accepted, but there isn’t much of a budget. Friends and neighbors bring cookies and other treats to hand out along with hot cider and coffee. In the last few years friends have organized fundraisers to help purchase new siding and roofing.

“Where else in America will you find an event like this?” Pedersen asks.”There’s no real good way to describe it other than something you don’t forget. It’s been called a living Norman Rockwell painting. If I can bring a smile to a face, it makes my day. I think an hour or two here cures a lot of lonely.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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What the Bones Say

By Lance Nixon

Centuries-old bison kill sites on Candice and Dean Lockner’s ranch near Ree Heights may help us learn more about the Indigenous people who lived and hunted here.

The bison are just where the scouts have said they would be, grazing the warm-season grasses near a natural spring at the west edge of the broken country.

This hunt has been planned for weeks. Once everyone is in place, people wave branches and robes, moving toward the animals, hazing them toward the bluff. The slope is steep enough that one or two animals injure themselves, but others scramble safely into a deep ravine with no outlet. The lower opening of the canyon is blocked with fallen timber.

The animals are confused. They plunge against each other wildly, with no place to go. Hunters move into place at the edge of the ravine above them.

Archaeologists believe a scene like this occurred almost 1,000 years ago in Dean and Candice Lockner’s pasture near Ree Heights in central South Dakota. Dean found a layer of bones covered by about a foot of native sod in 2011 while checking cattle. The Lockners suspected they had found a bison kill site, with good reason. Archaeologists carried out a dig in 1960 at a bison kill site along the ridge 2 1/2 miles east of the Lockners’ discovery, and there is a later find of bison bones and artifacts, though never professionally excavated, just a few hundred yards east.

The Ree Hills — a mesa that gives the town of Ree Heights its name — rises 391 feet and covers about 180 square miles in Hand County.”It’s kind of like an island in the prairie, raised up above everything,” says Augustana University archaeologist Aaron Mayer.”And it’s a vantage point. You could see the bison herds from dozens of miles away. They were definitely using that area for different kill events.”

Dean Lockner found bison bones, estimated to be nearly 1,000 years old, protruding from a ridge of soil in 2011. Each season of erosion and excavation reveals more at the site.

At that first Ree Heights excavation in 1960, archaeologists William Hurt and Robert Gant found a”kitchen” area for processing meat and stone piles on the bluff. Very likely it was a bison jump in the classic sense, where Native hunters drove the animals off a cliff or rim steep enough to kill or injure many of the animals.

When archaeologist Mike Fosha, then of the South Dakota State Historical Society’s Archaeological Research Center, visited the Lockners’ site at their request, he suggested the hunters probably used a different method there: an arroyo trap.

That’s possible because Ree Hills geology consists of shale capped by Ogallala sandstone and covered by glacial material. Because shale near the edges of the landform has slumped over time, there are irregular benches along the steep edge of the ridge where animals could be trapped — either by driving them down from the bluff above or up the slope.

At his initial visit in 2015, Fosha removed a mandible of a young bison for lab work. Zooarchaeologist Danny Walker, a specialist in Wyoming, estimated the age of the young animal at 1.1 years. That indicates that the hunters probably killed it in the month of June or July. Radiocarbon testing on a molar from the animal dated the collagen in the tooth to a time between A.D. 1180 and A.D. 1270.

After exploratory work in 2017 and another excavation in 2022, archaeologists have now found four stone projectile points — either from arrows or perhaps from shafts hurled with an atlatl — as well as a scraper that may have been used for processing hides. They have also found chips of stone that may indicate hunters were sharpening tools on site.

The age of the new site makes it too early to associate it with any of the Native American tribes known to history.”We cannot make any direct connections from Ree Heights to Mandan, Hidatsa, or Arikara, but it does not mean that those people could not have been their ancestors,” Mayer says.”It may be likely the Arikara and Mandan hunted there at some points in time.”

Gardner Deegan of the MHA Interpretive Center in New Town, North Dakota, — an organization that showcases the cultures of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara peoples, or the Three Affiliated Tribes, on the nearby Fort Berthold Reservation — believes the tribes lived in other regions during their history. And elders say the tribes definitely knew how to use landforms in hunting.”I do know that in the culture, they used to do buffalo jumps,” Deegan says.”They would lead the buffalo off a cliff and the buffalo would fall.”

Doyle Crume and Del Compaan, volunteers from Webster, help excavate a bed of bison bones near Ree Heights in 2022.

Candice Lockner said she’s heard other Native Americans talk about their traditional technique for leading bison into a trap, perhaps by having someone pretend to be a bison calf while others push the herd from behind. It’s the same”pushing and pulling” principle that some ranchers instinctively use to move grazing animals today. Lockner says the technique could have worked well in central South Dakota.”Located above the three Ree Hills kill sites are very large boulders, behind which the fake ‘calf’ could hide,” she says.

Whatever the method, there are clues that people living in earth lodges on the James River near present-day Mitchell, about 100 miles east, may have been involved. An arrowhead found at the Lockners’ site is similar to an arrowhead found at the James River villages, which were active between about A.D. 1050 and A.D. 1200.

Interestingly, archaeologists have unearthed a large clay-lined basin at the Mitchell site that they believe was used as a bone grease processing station. Bone grease was obtained by applying heat to crushed bone. The grease may have been used not only in feeding the village, but also as an ingredient in a dried meat product such as pemmican.

Now, with the newly discovered bison kill site at Ree Heights from the same time period, archaeologists are considering the possibility that hunters from the river villages were traveling to the Ree Hills to harvest bison. It’s known from historical records that the area remained a reliable source of bison well into the fur trade era.

Ranchers are confident there are other bison kill sites yet to be discovered in the area. In August 2022, when archaeologists were working on the Lockners’ ranch, Dean and Candice walked along that tumble of hills in their rangeland and found yet another bone bed exposed by weather. Mayer, the Augustana University archaeologist, said Dr. Kristen Carlson, a faunal and bison bone expert, was on location and confirmed the site contains bison bones. Archaeologist Alexander Anton, now in Rapid City at the Archaeological Research Center, found a stone flake that indicates hunters with stone tools were on site at that new location, as well. It’s far enough from the first site on the Lockners’ ranch to be considered a new, separate kill site. That makes four confirmed bison kill sites in the Ree Hills.

As of 2018, there are more than 30 possible bison kill sites recorded in the database of the South Dakota State Historical Society’s Archaeological Research Center, but Fosha notes that many of those have not been confirmed.

In September 2023, the Lockners learned that the bison kill site on their ranch has been approved for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Though the site won’t be open to the public, the couple says the recognition is an important step toward preserving what is hidden on their ranch and learning more about how early Native Americans hunted bison in the Ree Hills centuries ago.

ìYou may temporarily own land,” Candice Lockner says,”but you do not own the history.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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What’s in the Water at Wallace?

By John Andrews

Wallace artists Adam and Madison Grimm are both federal duck stamp champions. Adam has won the Federal Duck Stamp Contest three times. Madison has three wins in the junior contest.

THERE AREN’T MANY ducks in Elyria, Ohio. It’s only 6 miles south of Lake Erie, but the second smallest of the five Great Lakes is hardly a South Dakota prairie pothole.

When Adam Grimm began hunting waterfowl, he and his dad drove an hour from their home in that far-western suburb of Cleveland to a public hunting area where the birds were often few and far between. It was no place to live for an outdoorsman, hunter and burgeoning wildlife artist.

Several years later, when he was married and had a daughter named Madison, he suggested moving to South Dakota, a place he’d visited as a child and had never forgotten. He spoke so glowingly of the state that his wife Janet, who’d never stepped foot within its borders, agreed to come check it out. Though it rained for five days straight, the young family was smitten and made the move.

They are now a family of six and firmly settled in Wallace, a town of 91 people in northwestern Codington County famous for being the birthplace of Hubert H. Humphrey, Minneapolis mayor, U.S. Senator and the nation’s vice president from 1965 to 1969. But the town could also rightly claim both Grimm and 17-year-old Madison among its favorite sons and daughters. They are both federal duck stamp champions, achieving success that the national art competition has never seen.

*****

Drawing was Adam Grimm’s first passion. He drew his favorite cartoons and other things he saw on television until one day Bob Ross appeared on the screen. His long-running PBS show The Joy of Painting captivated artists and non-artists alike, and Grimm began imagining life as an artist.”That Christmas I asked for oil paints,” he says.”I ended up not painting the way Bob Ross does, with the putty knife and three-inch brush, but I started to develop my own way. I achieved the look I was trying to get, and it just started to snowball.”

He sold his first drawing at age 11. His grandfather realized Grimm’s potential and Insisted on paying $20 for it.”He always had that confidence that I was going to be able to do this as a living. I remember him telling my sisters, ‘Your brother will probably never have to have a real job.’ He just had such belief in me, and I think that had a lot to do with my own thought process and thinking that I could actually do this. If I won something, he would call everyone he knew and tell them.”

Adam grew up in Ohio, where he worked at the dining room table on his early wildlife paintings.

The next year he was invited to exhibit his work at a local craft show. He sold every item he brought and went home with nearly 40 orders for drawings. He started following other artists and became encouraged that he could make a living drawing and painting.

At the same time, his passion for the outdoors blossomed after a trip to South Dakota. Grimm first became acquainted with the state through his grandfather, an avid collector of Native American artifacts. Then his father began making annual hunting trips, and when Grimm was old enough, he came along. The country was unlike anything he’d ever seen.”I didn’t know anywhere like this even existed. I think people in South Dakota take South Dakota for granted. They don’t realize that it’s not like this everywhere else. The people, the nature, it’s not this way.”

His Interests In wildlife and art finally married when he saw his first federal duck stamp, a pair of canvasbacks by Minnesota artist Bruce Miller that appeared on the 1993-94 stamp. Still a teenager, he began submitting artwork to the junior duck stamp contest, open to students in kindergarten through 12th grade. He never won, but he gained valuable experience.

Grimm enrolled at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, though he struggled to fit in. His professors urged him to experiment in a variety of art genres, but he had a plan.”I was doing realism and wildlife art, and I told them that I would like to win the federal duck stamp one day,” he says.”No one at the college had ever really heard of it. It was like, ‘Who cares if you get a painting on some stamp?’ I remember telling them, ‘Well, it’s kind of a big deal if you win.'”

He began entering the contest as soon as he was eligible. In his first year, he submitted a painting of a mottled duck that took 16th place. The next year, his green-winged teal won eighth place. In 1999, the two species eligible for submissions were the black scoter, an ocean bird typically found in Alaska and along the Atlantic coast, and the mottled duck. He chose the mottled duck and pushed his own creative limits.

He thought back to a scene on a marsh near Timber Lake.”I had snuck up on this little water area and there were blue-winged teal out there,” he says.”The hen is pretty drab in color, but so is a mottled duck. She raised up and flapped her wings on the water, and the sunlight was shining through her feathers. That was so beautiful. If I could paint that, but with this other duck, that could win, because it would be more about the lighting on the bird than the bird itself. But I needed the reference. I was painting this in Ohio.”

Adam’s painting of a mottled duck stretching its wings won the 1999 Federal Duck Stamp Contest. He was 21, making him the youngest winner in the contest’s history.

Grimm contacted a biologist in Texas who was doing a banding project on mottled ducks and requested photos. Then, a friend sent him a mottled duck that he had shot (again, there aren’t many ducks in northern Ohio).”I would thaw the bird out the night before because I wanted that early morning lighting,” he recalls.”First thing in the morning I would run outside with this dead duck and hold it up and stretch the wings out. Then I would run back in and try to capture the colors I had just seen.

“I wonder how many of my parents’ neighbors were watching this crazy kid with a dead duck,” he laughs.”You do what you have to do in life, and there was no other way to do what I was planning on doing.”

Say what you will about his methods, his painting of a mottled duck stretching its wings in the soft sunlight of early morning finished first. At 21, Grimm became the youngest person to ever win the federal duck stamp contest.

What followed were several months of travel and delivering speeches about his artwork, which now appeared on a stamp that would be in hunters’ wallets and collections worldwide.”It’s almost like if you won American Idol,” he says.”You can go from being a nobody to being launched into the limelight. Everyone knows who you are. It’s a crazy thing.”

*****

Such a life-changing competition had humble beginnings that can be traced to legislation that another South Dakotan shepherded through Congress nearly 100 years ago. Waterfowl depletion on the Upper Plains was beginning to be a serious issue in the early 20th century. The federal government issued numerous protections, but it became clear that sustained recovery hinged on habitat protection.

South Dakota Sen. Peter Norbeck, who had already worked to establish wildlife preserves in western South Dakota and was the major force behind creating Custer State Park, became a champion of the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, a piece of legislation that had advanced in fits and starts during the 1920s. By 1929, he had a version that successfully passed through Congress. It created the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, which approved the purchase or rental of wetlands upon the recommendation of the Secretary of the Interior. The only thing it lacked was a permanent funding source.

That came in 1934 with passage of the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, which required hunters to purchase a $1 stamp before hunting waterfowl. Ninety-eight percent of the proceeds from their sale go the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund for wetlands preservation.

President Franklin Roosevelt asked Jay”Ding” Darling to design the first stamp, which featured two mallards landing on a pond. Darling was an American cartoonist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was serving as director of the Bureau of Biological Survey, the forerunner to today’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He had grown up in Sioux City, Iowa, where he developed an appreciation for the outdoors. After a year at Yankton College, he transferred to Beloit College in Wisconsin and had a successful career as an editorial cartoonist. He also founded the National Wildlife Federation in 1936.

Other artists were invited to contribute until 1949, when a contest was opened to the public. Rules, including that year’s eligible species, are released in the spring. Entries are taken from June 1 through August 15 and the winner is announced in September. A panel of five art, waterfowl and stamp experts judge the entries based on their anatomical accuracy, artistic composition and ability to be reproduced on a stamp. The winning design is featured on stamps that are valid from the following July 1 through June 30. Winners receive no compensation, but can sell prints of their work, which are highly collectible.

Today, federal duck stamps sell for $25. They are required for waterfowl hunters, and philatelists around the world are always eager to add them to their collection. The program raises about $40 million annually to conserve waterfowl habitat and, since its inception in 1934, has raised more than $1.2 billion to purchase more than 6 million acres of wetlands.

*****

With the big win under his belt, Grimm left school and became a full-time artist. Other accolades and milestones followed. In 2005, his painting of a wood duck won the competition to illustrate the Ohio Wetland Habitat stamp. Later that year, he and Janet were married.

Not long after the nuptials, the conversation turned to South Dakota.”I didn’t know if she would even want to move someplace like South Dakota,” Grimm says.”For people who enjoy nature, hunting and fishing, this area is so great. And for raising a family, this area offers so much more of the kind of life I want my kids to have. The place where I grew up just isn’t the same as it once was.”

Madison was a little girl when Adam began bringing her into the field to gather reference photographs for future paintings.

The couple and their new daughter Madison found a farm near Burbank in southeastern South Dakota and moved in 2006. Grimm quickly began taking advantage of his new surroundings. Searching for reference material in Ohio had always been a burden, but now he was surrounded by waterfowl aplenty. Donning a full ghillie suit, he began sitting in marshes and sloughs with his camera, spending hours photographing ducks in the early morning light.

They also began to notice Madison’s interest in art. Grimm recalls a particularly realistic drawing she did on a chalkboard at 2 years old.”Is that normal for 2?” he wondered.”She was our first child, and we weren’t around other kids her age, so I didn’t know what was normal for a 2-year-old. My sister is a speech pathologist and works with kids on certain benchmarks, and she said kids don’t normally do what Madison had done until much later.”

When Madison was 5, she asked if she could try to do a painting like Daddy. She found a photo of a canvasback from Grimm’s collection and began working in his studio.”She could enter the junior duck stamp contest,” Grimm said.”It’s a great contest for kids and there are a lot of prizes. I thought that would be a fun thing for her to try.”

The junior duck stamp program was launched in 1989, and the first national contest was held in 1993. Students from kindergarten through 12th grade are divided into four groups. States choose a best of show each year, and the winner is then entered into the national contest.

As Madison spent hours working on the painting, her parents worried she might not make the submission deadline. She was not dawdling. After years of watching her father, she was struggling to achieve the same realism.”I remember her crying, not because we were making her do this painting, but she was striving to reach the level where I was, and she couldn’t get there because she didn’t have the experience. She knew she wasn’t getting there, and it was upsetting her.”

Madison remembers the struggle, too.”I remember being really frustrated that it wasn’t going faster. I wanted it to be done,” she says.”I remember working on it for hours and losing total track of time. I would just get totally absorbed in the painting. Mom would come get me for supper and I’d realize that I had been in the studio the whole day.”

Adam and Madison each painted canvasbacks for their national duck stamp wins in 2013.

With her father’s encouragement, Madison finished the painting. She entered the state contest and won Best in Show.”She’s only 6,” Grimm says, his voice still reflecting the astonishment he felt 11 years ago.”I thought she did a nice job, but she’s only 6. I kept trying to rationalize it in my mind.”

Figuring Madison’s chances were slim in the national contest, the family went about their farm work on the day of judging.”It was being livestreamed, but we weren’t even watching it. I was working out in the garden,” Grimm says.”Then I got a phone call from a friend of ours and she said, ‘Madison’s doing really well. She’s at least fourth place.” So I ran in, and we had dial-up internet, so it was slow. By the time we pulled it up, she said, ‘I think Madison won.'”

With her victory, Madison became the youngest person to ever win the junior duck stamp contest, echoing her father’s achievement 14 years earlier and making them the first parent/child duo to win their respective contests. 2013 got even better for the family when Adam’s painting of a pair of canvasbacks standing on a shoreline that he entitled King’s Realm, won the federal duck stamp contest, giving him his second national win.

Madison won the junior contest again in 2020 as a 13-year-old, with a painting of a wood duck. The rules require junior winners to sit out a year after a victory, so her next entry came in 2022. She won for the third time with a painting of a green-winged teal.

*****

The Grimm family ó which has grown to include Hannah, Jonas and James ó relocated to Wallace six years ago. Adam and Madison’s shared art studio occupies the top floor of a guest house across the street from their home. The first floor accommodates hunters who come from out of state. It’s decorated with Grimm originals, including a painting that appeared on the cover of Ducks Unlimited magazine (he has twice been named the Ducks Unlimited Artist of the Year).

Madison goes photographing with her father to the sloughs and marshes around Wallace, though many of her photos are taken in the aviary that they built after her second junior duck stamp win. It houses 17 species of ducks, some bobwhite quail and a red golden pheasant that spends most of its time trying to impress the hens. In fact, the drake pintail that both of them painted for their most recent duck stamp entries lives in the aviary. Adam and Madison both finished second nationally.”You know what this means,” Grimm joked.”We’re going to have to eat that bird. Clearly, he’s not a first-place bird.”

Grimm says the wonderful people of the tiny town on the Coteau des Prairie welcomed them with open arms. Not long after they arrived, he was helping coach youth baseball and had joined the volunteer fire department. The kids have friends in town that they can see daily. And they are surrounded by ducks.”I used to drive 45 minutes to an hour away just to get to a marsh where I could try to photograph birds,” Grimm says.”Now, I can walk down the street. Even our yard has wood ducks and hooded mergansers flying through and trying to nest in our trees. Sometimes I think maybe it would have been easier to just get a regular job. But I really love what I do, painting these beautiful creatures in their natural habitat and having the inspiration right out our back door. It’s everything I want.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Grandmother Power

By Bernie Hunhoff

Native American leaders from across the state, including (from left) Cecilia Fire Thunder, Arvol Looking Horse and Belinda Joe, attended a Women Take Back Honor event at the Dignity of Earth and Sky statue near Chamberlain.

FORT THOMPSON IS A complicated place with a tragic history, but the tribal community’s residents are finding hope in grandmothers like Belinda Rencountre Joe, a scholar and dancer with a vision for action.

Joe is among the organizers of Women Take Back Honor, a four-year initiative to restore the leadership role of the woman in Native American culture. The effort began a year ago with a day-long event at the Dignity of Earth and Sky statue near Chamberlain.

Grandmothers empowering girls is an intriguing concept, so we telephoned Joe to ask if we could come to Fort Thompson to learn more about her efforts.

“Can you hear me?” she answered.”I am standing outside on my porch looking at the full moon.”

Yes, we heard her loud and clear.

When told that the success of the Women Take Back Honor event prompted our call, she laughed and said it was a coincidence that she was looking at the moon.

“The full moon symbolizes the woman,” she explained.”It symbolizes the woman’s gift to meditate and pray and then get things done. The full moon is when we are at our strongest.”

She said her own activism took hold in 1999 when she and her aunt, the late Stella Pretty Sounding Flute, represented Crow Creek at World Peace Day in San Juan, Costa Rica.”A message was given to me there, a seed was planted, that the grandmothers — Native and non-Native — have a role that must be renewed. It felt like a message from our Creator, Him or Her? I don’t know.”

She says the participants prayed on a mountain for four days, and on the last day several Indigenous grandmothers called her over to them, gave her gifts, and then asked her to”keep the light going within our women in North America, and they would do the same in South America.”

She admitted that she felt unsure that a Dakota girl from Buffalo County could bring that Indigenous message to fruition.

*****

A FEW DAYS LATER, we drove to Fort Thompson on a hot summer day to meet Belinda Joe and learn more about her mission to empower women.

We exited Interstate 90, South Dakota’s principal east-west highway, at Chamberlain. The road from there to Fort Thompson parallels the Missouri River and winds past prairie foothills covered with wild grasses and occasional herds of cows and horses.

Belinda Joe walks along the Missouri River at a park known as The Old Fort with Hillary Hyde, a local youth.

Fort Thompson, with a population of more than 1,200, is the largest community in Buffalo County and the Crow Creek Reservation. The name Thompson is a constant reminder of its tragic history. Clark W. Thompson of Minnesota was serving as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Abraham Lincoln’s administration when bloody battles and skirmishes broke out that are now referred to as the U.S./Dakota War of 1862. The hostilities between the Dakota and pioneer families were sparked by broken treaties, poor administration of government programs and the brutal winter of 1861 that led to starvation and frustration.

More than 400 settlers and soldiers were killed in the war. Historians didn’t document how many Dakota died, but 303 Dakota warriors were sentenced to death by a military court. Episcopalian Bishop Henry Whipple asked Lincoln to intercede, arguing that they were prisoners of war. Even though the president was overwhelmed with the Civil War, he took time to review each case and cut the number to 38, who were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, on Dec. 26, 1862. It still stands as the largest mass execution in American history, and probably always will.

In the spring, Congress abolished the Dakotas’ Minnesota reservation, nullified the treaties, crowded 1,300 men, women and children onto steamboats and exiled them to live on the eastern shore of the Missouri River in Dakota Territory. A federal order mandated that the Dakota race,”be annihilated or forever pushed from the boundaries of Minnesota.” A $200 bounty was placed on every Dakota Indian, causing many of them to be hunted for years. Others died of disease, malnutrition and despair.

The story of the war and the infamous date of the hanging is well-known to all residents of Crow Creek today, many of whom are descended from the executed or of the hundreds of Dakota who were incarcerated as prisoners of war.

The descendants created communities in the forested bottomlands of the Missouri River by building homes, churches, stores and schools. And despite federal efforts of forced assimilation, some of their culture was preserved in the shade of the cottonwood trees.

Then in 1963 the federal government finished Big Bend Dam and flooded 56,000 acres, including many small communities of the Dakota. Families moved to higher ground, and that is when many came to live at Fort Thompson.

Ironically, the 3-mile earthen dam was completed exactly 100 years after the beleaguered Dakota arrived on the river. Hardships at Crow Creek remain today, but Belinda Joe and others like her promise that there is reason for hope, and their hopefulness lies in the cultural strengths that their Dakota ancestors brought with them on steamboats from Minnesota and somehow kept alive in that cottonwood forest.

*****

BELINDA JOE MET US at the Lode Star Casino, a windowless coliseum of glitz in an otherwise humble town that has few private businesses other than three convenience stores. There are four churches and myriad tribal government buildings. The casino has the town’s only restaurant, so it often hums with a lively mix of ranchers, local families and visiting gamblers, including many who come to fish for walleye on the nearby river.

Joe is 69 years old with striking white hair. She is tall, gracious and articulate, though she was easier to interview that moonlit night on the telephone because at the casino she had a 5-year-old grandson, Oaklynd, in tow. Altogether, she has three children, 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. While at the casino, she was also trying to arrange a trip to Chamberlain to gather some clothing and bedding for a family in need. In fact, everyone she met at the restaurant had a question or a request.

We ordered sandwiches, but she soon asked for a to-go box because she hardly took a bite between phone calls, table visits and telling her story to us. Life was simpler when she was Oaklynd’s age, she laughed.

“We lived off the land,” she recalled of her childhood in the 1960s.”We ate wild game, which our dad and male relatives brought home. We fished and picked wild fruits. We grew our own potatoes. In the summer we walked down to the river and swam all day and then walked home.”

She says the family home, on the east side of Fort Thompson, was a hub for young relatives.”They would help us bag potatoes, and we would play a neighborhood game of softball, tag and make-believe.”

Her father, Whitney Rencountre, was a paratrooper in the Korean War who later worked as a tribal policeman and road worker. He hunted and cured mink pelts to buy groceries.”We grew up poor, but we didn’t see it as poor because we had everything we needed and the mainstay of that was our family. We were very close.”

She remembers her father as a good man who was always present. He and other relatives sang around a drum during warm evenings, and it was there that Belinda learned the songs and dances of the Dakota. The drum group, the Hunkpati Singers, still performs today.

Her mother, Thelma Black Tongue Rencountre, was the backbone of the family.”She was a petite woman who could do whatever it took to survive. She grew up as a Lakota girl in Promise, South Dakota, and was sent to the Pierre Indian Learning Center and the Stephan Mission when it was a harsh boarding school.” She spoke Lakota, English and Dakota.

Her father ran away from boarding school as a sixth grader, and her mom’s education was hampered by cruelties and illnesses. However, Belinda found refuge in books and became a voracious reader of stories that took her around the world. When she was a sophomore at Gann Valley High School, an encouraging teacher told her she had the talent to go anywhere she wished, and she taught Belinda to speed read.

“But I was scared to leave the reservation,” she recalls. A few years later, a young man on leave from the Vietnam War went to her father and asked if he could marry her — without asking her.

Her father’s answer was,”No, she’s going to college.”

Belinda remembers feeling relieved that he said no, but also thinking that she didn’t want to go to college because she wanted to see the world and she believed the only options for women were to be a nurse or teacher. Instead, she went to Denver and studied to become a court reporter. After working for the Navajo Tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she eventually gravitated home to Crow Creek. There was no work for a court reporter so she went back to school and earned degrees in education, determined that she would not discourage her students from learning about their own heritage.

Combining her mother’s fortitude and her relatives’ cultural teachings, Joe soon became an instrument of change at Crow Creek. She incorporated Dakota and Lakota songs, stories, dances and identity into her elementary curriculum and encouraged the students to use their voices to empower other youth.

She brought her young dancers to the dedication of Dale Lamphere’s Dignity statue in 2016. Lamphere’s 50-foot stainless steel sculpture of a Native woman wrapped in a star quilt immediately became an inspiring symbol of feminine empowerment. Jane Murphy, the sculptor’s wife, says several dozen Native and non-Native people are working on a vision that fits the art and the times.

Dignity, by artist Dale Lamphere, honors the cultures of the Lakota and Dakota people.

“Belinda did a blessing of the ground at Dignity before the ground was broken,” Murphy says,”and she is so connected to the Native culture and the people of her community, so she needs to be a part of this.”

Joe says she wasn’t really looking for another role, but the opportunity to build an initiative around Dignity seemed like a path to the calling she felt in Costa Rica.

Three years after the Dignity dedication, Joe accompanied Native Korean War veterans to Seoul, South Korea, where she represented her father and other veterans. At a banquet, she sang the Lakota Brother Song to honor the warriors.

While in Seoul, she learned of the”Comfort Women” who were taken from their homes in Korea during World War II and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. Some of the victims are still alive, and they recently received apologies from Japanese grandmothers as well as the Japanese government after decades of official denials.

Joe says their story reinforced her commitment to honor the women of all nations.”Perhaps someday we Native and non-Native women will receive apologies for the harm we have endured and recovered from,” she says.”A legacy of love and honor is what I pray for in my lifetime, for we are the life-givers of our families, communities and nations.

“Our language and our culture are our lifelines to the past, to today and to the future,” she says.”Too many of our youth are struggling with addictions, drugs and alcohol. I believe we are targeted because we are vulnerable. We are targets because of our poverty, targeted by the dealers and even by some of our own people. It’s an easy way to make money. They groom you and pull you in because there aren’t many jobs here for young people.”

Along with her teaching career and community activism, Joe also serves as the prison liaison for the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, visiting young men and women in the state prisons at Pierre and Sioux Falls during their spiritual conferences. Some of the young inmates are former students. Some are relatives.

“Most of our young males and females are in there for crimes involving meth — ingesting, using, selling, transporting,” she says.”A young grandson went in two weeks ago. In our Indian ways, they are all our grandsons and granddaughters, and we have an obligation to guide them and correct them and help them.”

Prior to one of her first prison visits, inmates warned her that her life was in danger. A threat was made by an inmate who was enraged that she’d reported a case of child abuse. Because Joe is a teacher, she is a mandatory reporter.

“At this point in my life, I wasn’t going to stop the visits,” she says.”My legs were shaking but I went anyway.”

When she arrived, the grateful inmates welcomed her warmly and promised they would see to her safety.”Come in and light up the darkness,” said one man. They presented her with a star quilt and beaded medicine wheel crafted by an inmate who worked all night to have it ready.

*****

THE TRIBAL HEADQUARTERS at Fort Thompson, a modest, metal gymnasium-style building, is a beehive of activity. People are constantly coming and going, asking about utility problems, stray dogs, vandalism and all the things that are talked about at city halls across the United States. Meanwhile, a half-dozen youth are shooting baskets while others visit on the bleachers.

At the center of it all is Peter Lengkeek, the 48-year-old tribal chairman who stands as straight and tall as he did when he served in the Marine Corps despite some service-related back injuries that cause him to work today from a stand-up desk.

He lowered the desk to normal height and sat down to visit with us about Joe’s work to empower the women.

“I think it’s beautiful,” he said.”It has to happen. The woman thinks from the heart,” he said, holding his hand to his heart,”while us men, we are from here” (pointing to his head).”Our culture was traditionally more matriarchal, but we were forced into a patriarchal society. It is unnatural for us, and it is not working for us.”

Though Lengkeek says the Marines were his only”college,” he speaks like a studied philosopher and historian when he reflects on his Dakota culture. He maintains that the rightful place of the women of the Dakota and other Native American tribes was diminished in the 19th century because”the government would only recognize men as leaders.” Wars, diseases, poverty and forced assimilation further reduced the traditional role of the woman in Dakota society.

Lengkeek says restoration of women’s rightful role will strengthen the entire culture, both at Crow Creek and other tribes.”We need healthy relationships, healthy communications and healthy boundary settings. Our young people must learn how to regulate your emotions, how to control your anger. That is something our language and culture teaches us. It teaches us how we address the physical, the spiritual, the mental and the emotional on a daily basis. Today, too often, we seem to care only about the physical. Our patriarchal society teaches us to put the emotions down and to not show weakness, compassion, tenderness, and love.”

Lengkeek says young people must have a good concept of healthy masculinity and healthy femininity.”The work of Belinda and others like her give me hope. Our aunties have a special obligation to teach. I’ve seen our women teaching our culture and traditions, teaching us how to pray. They are giving us hope.”

The tribal chair says he experienced the lack of culture in his own childhood at Crow Creek.”Many of my generation were not raised with the language and the culture, but when we hear it, we connect with it, and we want to learn more. My mother was raised in a boarding school. She could talk Dakota, but she never spoke it around us.

“On her deathbed, she was talking in her native language, and I was listening to her without her knowing I was there. Then she realized I was holding her hand and she stopped.

“Mom,” I said,”why did you not teach us this beautiful language?”

Lengkeek says his mother began to cry, and then she said,”I didn’t want you to go through what I had to go through.” She’d been so traumatized at boarding school by assimilation-minded teachers that she couldn’t bring herself to speak Dakota to her children.

Yet, Lengkeek says the language still has a powerful impact on Dakota youth.”A lot of study has been done on cellular memory, and it is recognized today as something real. Our people suffered historic trauma, but they also have a cultural or cellular memory that goes back to the early days of time. They did their best to take our culture and our language from us, but it is still here. They did their best to dehumanize us, but we are still here. All it did was make us stronger, make us more resilient. Yes, we are one of the poorest counties in the United States — but we are also one of the richest because we still have our culture.”

As the tribal chairman talked to us, Belinda was mingling with youth in the gymnasium. She wanted us to meet them, beginning with Keith Heth III, a 16-year-old who loves to skateboard, play the guitar and learn his native Lakota language.”My people went through 100 years of depression,” he says.”I love staying true to the culture and tradition.”

Jayton Pease, 19, is studying business management at Presentation College in Aberdeen. He hopes to return to the reservation to start some businesses, perhaps a barber shop and an arcade.”The younger guys look up to us older guys. It’s pretty cool but it brings a responsibility to set a good example,” he says.”I have a cousin who ended up in a dark place, but his young daughter helped him come back in the light.”

Hillary Hyde, 20, was shooting baskets. She says she worries about many of her friends.”Whenever I see police cars on the road, lights flashing, I pray for them. I wish I could change the world. They just need help, somebody to talk to. A family member or a friend. I saved a little cousin from drowning in a pool in Rapid City. Now I want to save him from drugs the same way, protect them all.”

Perhaps Joe took us to the gymnasium to show us there are others like her working for change. Or maybe she just wanted to occupy us while she returned phone calls to arrange for the clothing assistance.

As we talked with Hillary, Joe dialed a number and said,”I was supposed to be there at 3 to pick up the clothes. Will you still be there if I get there at 3:30?”

She handed her uneaten sandwich to one of the youth who hadn’t had lunch, then she rushed for her car, which she calls her”white pony.”

“Call me later,” she said.”I’ve got to go.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Gator Shows

By Chad Coppess

Ryan Comer deals with an ornery gator in the show arena at Reptile Gardens.

Rapid City is a thousand miles from the natural habitats of giant lizards, but Matt Plank’s boyhood dream was to work with alligators and snakes. Fortunately, one of the world’s largest collections was right down the highway.

Reptiles were”always a passion,” Plank says.”I always watched Animal Planet, was always catching garter snakes, frogs and toads. It seems to be luck that I grew up next to this,” he said as he walked through the Sky Dome of Reptile Gardens.

Plank got a job in the cafe at the expansive attraction in 2002, worked there seasonally while earning a biology degree in 2010 from Arizona State University and joined the permanent staff in 2013. He is now assistant curator and show coordinator, overseeing the educational performances for summer visitors.

Now he works alongside Head Curator Terry Phillip, who found his way to Reptile Gardens after managing a pet store in Colorado and focusing on”reptiles, dinosaurs, girls and business, not necessarily in that order,” he says with a smile.”I was not so successful at most of them.”

Phillip moved to the Black Hills, where he had relatives, and started doing alligator shows at Reptile Gardens in 1997. Today he is among the country’s top authorities on crocs, venomous snakes and other reptiles.

American alligators are one of the great success stories of conservation. Once endangered, they could have easily been hunted to extinction when people moved into their habitats. But alligators adapted and responded to preservation efforts; today they are thriving in the southern United States. Most of the gators at Reptile Gardens are captured in places like eastern Texas and South Carolina where they have become a nuisance in populated areas.

Rapid City native Matt Plank found a calling among the large reptiles that live just outside his hometown.

“Gator wrestling” has been a staple at reptile zoos for decades, however the shows at Reptile Gardens do not actually include grappling. At Rapid City, the entertainers seek to demonstrate the agility and strength of their alligators and crocodiles.

The shows took a two-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic but returned in 2022. Phillip said the revived shows brought together an inexperienced staff and animals that weren’t used to the handling, a hazardous combination. Even though the staff and the animals grow accustomed to each other, there’s reason for caution around them.”We aim for the art of perfection,” Phillip says.”You can’t make mistakes. The biggest problem is complacency. You don’t want that with dangerous animals.”

“You get hit by one of these gators you’ll feel it,” he said. Right on cue, an alligator that was being moved to a different enclosure swung his head and smashed the taillight on a pickup.

Accidents and injuries do occur.”I made it my first year without getting bit,” Plank says, but admitted he has been injured several times.”Now I do everything I can not to get on a gator,” he chuckled.”When it’s exciting it means something’s not going well.”

Showing scars along his arm and fingers, Plank recalled a bite that required 17 stitches.”I remember his mouth right here,” he says, clamping one hand onto the scarred one. Reptile Gardens Public Relations Director Johnny Brockelsby — son of Earl Brockelsby, who founded the popular Black Hills attraction in 1937 — recalls hearing on the staff walkie-talkie that a manager was needed at the alligator arena immediately.

“‘Immediately’ means there is something serious,” Brockelsby says, pointing out that he’s not at his best in emergency situations.”When I got there, Matt was just sitting on the gator like normal and I asked what was wrong.”

“Johnny, my hand is in his mouth,” Plank replied.

Terry Phillip has trained numerous animal wranglers and emergency personnel on handling dangerous reptiles.

“Matt had sweat streaming down the side of his face, so I gave the gator a light tap on the nose, but nothing happened,” Brockelsby says. After another smack on the nose, with Plank pushing down as hard as he could, he got the animal to open his jaws.

“Then he says, ‘Johnny, should I finish the show?'” Brockelsby laughs.”I said, ‘No, I’m taking you to the emergency room.’ Luckily his fingers were between the teeth, or it could have been a lot worse.”

Phillip calls the incident the”most significant in my time here,” and Plank agrees.”It’s the close calls that scare you the most,” he adds.

Recognized as one of the largest collections of reptiles in the world, Reptile Gardens is also a place where other people seek advice.”We get questions from all over the planet,” Plank says. The staff also keep one of the largest and most diverse supplies of antivenom in the world.

Phillip is proud of the training he’s helped provide for area medical technicians, law enforcement officers, EMTs and first responders. He has offered staff training for other zoos and animal parks. He recognizes that his expertise is unique and helpful in certain situations.”Anytime, anywhere, for any reason for law enforcement and emergency personnel,” he says. He has also been part of several confiscations of illegal reptile collections around the country, some of which were added to the displays at Reptile Gardens.

Plank loves his job and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”Sometimes I’m jealous of the Florida parks because of the weather,” he says.”But there’s something about this place.”

Not even a gator bite will change his mind.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Night Walking South Dakota

By John Andrews

John Banasiak in his office at the University of South Dakota, where he has taught since 1980.

John Banasiak is a passionate experimenter. As we sit in his office at the University of South Dakota — filled with prints, cameras and other ephemera collected over nearly 50 years of teaching — he talks about something that’s been on his mind at least that long.”Over the summer I tried to tweak this process that I did years ago, and I stopped because I almost burned my house down doing it,” he says.”But I thought there had to be some way to do it.”

Back when he attended the School at The Art Institute of Chicago, a professor told him,”You know photography exists, but there are lots of ways to get to it. You invent photography.” That led to an interesting mash up of photography and biology in which he purloined several of his mother’s begonias and put them in the closet, hoping the darkness would manipulate the starches. Later, he taped negatives to the leaves and replaced them in sunlight. He expected the combination of light and starch would produce an image. It kind of worked, but more than 50 years later he thought he’d revisit it by boiling leaves in ethyl alcohol to remove the green caused by the plant’s chlorophyll.”But at a certain temperature it catches fire,” he says with a laugh.”So that was the problem. I threw the pan out the window and there were all these flames. It was crazy.”

Digital photography has captured the 21st century — even in Banasiak’s classes — but there’s still a bit of mad scientist in him that enjoys tinkering with solutions and creating photographs that bring him and his students to places they’ve never been.”There are so many things you can do in a darkroom. There are all these magic tricks you can do that help invent some language, and it’s shocking to people. Then they go on and do it for years. They’re looking for some language, and when they see it happen, they want to do it.”

Thousands of students have found inspiration in Banasiak’s methods, but a career in art was never something the people in his neighborhood on the south side of Chicago envisioned for him. His grandparents from Poland and Ukraine settled there during World War I, finding comfort in the steady work provided by the factories that had popped up along the southern shores of Lake Michigan. Banasiak, born in 1950, was destined to follow his father and uncles into a lifetime of factory work until a teacher at his Catholic grade school noted his artistic ability. In high school, his art teacher pushed him to apply to the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually landing him a full scholarship to attend classes there in the fall of 1968.

A television set peeks out of a repair shop window in Kadoka.

He was admitted based on his talents in drawing and painting, but then he took a class in photography.”The only time I would have ever taken any photos would be for family gatherings, birthdays, graduations,” he says.”Sometimes my mother would hand me the Kodak twin lens reflex and I’d take a shot. I was just nervous I would shake or jiggle the camera because film was expensive, so I didn’t really relate to it at all.”

He loved the poetry of photography, especially in late-night photos that he captured while much of Chicago slept. Banasiak worked as a night watchman at the Art Institute. When his shift was over at 2 a.m., sometimes he stayed.”I slept under Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. I’d wake up to that,” he says.”There was Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge down that way and The Old Guitarist by Picasso. There was a Rousseau jungle painting and van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles. It was my favorite gallery, and I’d just sleep there on one of the cots because I had to get up early for my art history class that was right downstairs.

“On occasion, I didn’t feel like going to sleep and I’d just walk around Chicago with my camera. I like walking around at night. It was like a stage set waiting for the actors to show up. During the day, the sun would move, there would be light and shadows and it would all change. At night, there would be streetlights and it would stay like that for six hours. I could move around and get what I wanted.”

The results included poignant images of alleys, storefronts and other urban settings seen in a different way. It was the beginning of his”Night Walks” series, a constantly growing collection of photographs that continued after he moved to Vermillion in 1980. Though he was 500 miles from urban Chicago, Banasiak found commonalities as he explored his new, more rural home at night.”The atmosphere of the environment is all you need to make up stories. I think they’re part of my wanderings in my memory bank. When I see something, I’m drawn to it because it’s a familiar place. It resembles something of an environment that I have in my mind. They’re kind of archetypal, in my own head. Maybe other people don’t see anything in them. But I see something because they just look so familiar, even though they’re taken in different places.”

A UFO merry-go-round at a playground near Lewis and Clark Lake.

After graduating from the School of the Art Institute, Banasiak received a grant to attend the University of Krakow in Poland. He returned to earn an M.F.A. at the Art Institute in 1975. He served as artist in residence at Light Work and Syracuse University and spent a year teaching at the State University of New York in Oswego. He’d always wanted to explore the South Pacific, so he moved to New Zealand in 1979 and spent a year conducting photo workshops and teaching.

He seriously considered staying, but his mother called to tell him he’d won a sizable grant from the Illinois Arts Council. When he got home, he discovered they’d awarded the grant to someone else because he had been so difficult to reach in New Zealand. He was organizing notes and photos from his travels when someone from the Art Institute told him the University of South Dakota needed a full-time photography teacher.

“It looks just like New Zealand out there,” they told him.”And it did kind of look like central New Zealand. There was the river. I looked it up. And they showed a picture in this encyclopedia of East Hall, and I thought it looked like the Harvard of the West.”

His brother drove him to South Dakota for an interview. When John Day, the longtime chair of the art department and dean of the College of Fine Arts, called to tell him he had the job, he figured he’d stay for a year or two.”But I met all these great people, and the faculty, we’d meet for dinner almost every other night. I loved it out here, and it was peaceful. I applied to a couple of other schools, but I just couldn’t see myself leaving Vermillion.”

One or two years has turned into 44. Sabbaticals took him to Morocco, Jordan, Ecuador, Poland, Spain, Turkey, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba and China. Back home, his teaching brought numerous faculty awards as well as the 2021 Governor’s Award in the Arts for Outstanding Service in Arts Education.

A collection of tree shadows on the outfield fence at Riverside Park in Yankton.

Those honors are wonderful, but it’s clear that Banasiak’s passion will always be the photographic process.”I bought some beet powder not long ago,” he says, and sure enough, a package of beet powder rests on a counter beside some turmeric and other chemicals. He’s exploring how emulsions made from different plant juices produce images.

“The past couple years I’ve been kind of exploring, tweaking and rearranging†possible processes,” he says.”When I do something, I like doing the whole process. When I get done, I’m done with it. I don’t care if I exhibit or sell them. It’s really in the meditative process of doing it. Whatever I learn doing my own art is what I end up teaching. Classes are always different. I’m coming up with new ideas. I’m excited by them, and when I share them with the students they go nuts.”

The idea of retirement is a non-starter. He’ll invent and teach as long as he’s able. He knows infirmities come to all who live long enough, but he’s thought about that.”Sometimes, now that my eyes are having some issues, I might experiment with photographic braille,” he says.”I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility. I might try printing some photos on wood or plastic with the laser cutter that we have in the graphics department. To see with the touch of fingertips can be something worth exploring photographically.†I don’t really believe people see†with†their eyes anyway, they see†through†their eyes, and it makes me think, ëWhat else might I be able to see with?'”

If there’s a way, John Banasiak the experimenter will find it.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Elevator

By Bernie Hunhoff

A skeleton of the Rauville Grain Company still attracts attention north of Watertown.

Dave Goos recalls walking into Lampert Lumber Company in Sioux Falls and buying 9,000 pounds of 20-penny coated sinker nails.

“We were building a new wood crib elevator in Cavour and that’s what we needed,” says Goos, who designed some of America’s last wood structures before concrete and steel grain facilities became the norm.

He has fond memories of the Cavour project and others like it.”They’d already shipped rail carloads of rough lumber to the job site. We would hire local guys — hopefully some young farm boys — and take our foreman and together we would build something that was a key to the economy and the culture of the area.”

What they built has stood the test of time. Grain elevators — some more than 100 feet high and a century old — continue to tower over Cavour and other towns in America’s grain belt. Many wood elevators are still used for grain storage. A few have been repurposed into lodges or homes. Others, though abandoned, are built so solidly that they’ve thwarted all attempts by nature or man to take them down. They represent farm country’s tallest icons of yesteryear, beloved by photographers and painters and every farmer’s son or daughter who ever unloaded a trailer or truck full of grain and then drove home while carefully clutching a handwritten check from the manager.

Some call them the skyscrapers of the prairie or cathedrals of the plains. To farmers, however, they are just The Elevator.

Dave Goos designed classic crib elevators.

D&W Construction, the company that Goos worked for in the 1980s, still exists on the western outskirts of Sioux Falls. He says he loved the chance to build something that was so vital to a town, and he still relishes the stories that developed from such an unusual and rugged occupation.

Like the day Pete Puterbaugh,”a tough as nails ranch boy from North Dakota,” fell off the elevator at Burke and landed on a lumber pile.”He got busted up pretty badly, but he walked away from the fall,” Goos says. On another occasion, Goos says Puterbaugh saw a badger digging a hole in a pasture.”As Pete told it, he got ahold of the scruff on each side of the badger’s belly and tried to pull it out of the hole, but he said it seemed like the badger ‘turned around inside his own skin’ and came at him, looking like it had two fistfuls of 16-penny nails for claws buzz sawing for his chest. All Pete could do was pick it up and throw it as far away from him as he could and run.”

Goos recalls an occasion when a few of the workers painted a picture of a scantily clad lady atop a new elevator.”It didn’t take long for the phone to ring in the office at D&W,” he says.

At yet another worksite, they were addressing a rat infestation, a common problem for grain facilities.”The manager had read about some powerful sonic device that would drive the rats crazy, so he bought one, wired it to a 2-by-6, plugged it in and shoved it up under the backside of the elevator on a Friday night. On Monday morning he was wondering if it made any difference when the guy who maintained the buses at the local school came and hurriedly asked for every shovel and broom they could spare.”

“My god, do we have rats!” said the bus man.

Goos says elevator projects always drew onlookers, but a job at Jefferson attracted an unexpected crowd.”A tornado had come through and taken down two 36-foot diameter bins. We made a mock foundation in the parking lot and built new bins to go on the old foundations. Then we dropped a cable through the bin top openings so we could hoist them with a crane onto the old foundations. But the day we moved them just happened to be homecoming day and they had a parade going on. People left the parade and brought their lawn chairs to sit along the railroad siding and watch us lift the bins into place. It was the last thing we wanted because we didn’t know if it was going to work.”

Goos studied mechanized agriculture at South Dakota State University and worked for GTA Feeds before joining D&W Construction as a project engineer. His job was to design the elevators.

“One of the first things you’d do is meet with the elevator’s board of directors, which was usually a group of farmers,” he says.”They always farmed and did chores until dark, so you’d be meeting late at night when everybody else was in bed. We would already have the place all measured out and we’d present a design. So often, they didn’t know exactly what they needed, but they trusted us — and we felt the weight of that responsibility because the elevator was such an important part of their community.”

The trust was well-placed. Most of the D&W-built wood elevators still stand. Many still hold grain.

“We still help to repair the old wood elevators,” says Jason Hiemstra, who started with D&W in 1987 when it was transitioning to steel construction.”We’ll still replace the siding or the cribbing. The wood elevators are actually the best way to store grain because the wood absorbs moisture while corrugated metal actually sweats and adds moisture.”

D&W Construction of Sioux Falls built wood crib elevators for decades. Jason Hiemstra, who has blueprints of the jobs and a carpenter’s cribbing hatchet, says crews still repair the sturdy structures.

Hiemstra, now one of the company’s owners, says insurance actuaries are the major threat to wood elevators.”They are starting to kibosh them because they see them as a fire hazard.” Grain dust is explosive; even a spark from an overheated bearing is sometimes enough to create an explosion.

He says old elevators also face problems with everything from mice to worn and frayed electrical wiring. Still, he appreciates Goos’ nostalgia for the elevators.”If I had built them, I’d probably feel the same way.”

An artist’s painting of an old elevator hangs in the entryway at D&W and Hiemstra keeps a cribbing hatchet — the main tool for carpenters who built wood elevators — in his office.

Dale Kelling joined the D&W crew in 1969 and retired as company president in 2011. He says D&W constructed its initial wood elevator in 1955, but the crib-style dates to the late 1800s when grain elevators were first built along the railroad tracks of the Dakotas and neighboring states.”Farmers didn’t want to haul the grain any further than they had to in those days,” he says.

Wood construction required skills that are rare today.”That cribbing hatchet was the weight of a heavy hammer,” Kelling says.”We tried air nailers back in the 1970s, but they wouldn’t pound the nail tight enough to cinch the wood together. That’s where the cribbing hatchet came in.”

He says the main purpose of the hatchet blade was to provide weight for the hammer head.”I don’t know if they actually used it to cut the lumber at one time, but we used hand saws. We bought saws by the dozens before we went to circular saws.”

Cribbed elevators were built by stacking 2-by-4, 2-by-6 and 2-by-8 boards horizontally, like logs in a cabin. The widest boards were used at the bottom, and the narrow 2-by-4s finished off the top. Steel rods were used as corner braces to reinforce the walls by resisting the pressure from the grain inside the bins.

Horses powered the grain-moving systems in the 19th century. Gas engines replaced the horses; electrical motors move the grain today.

In the heyday of small family farms, the grain elevator was the hub of most towns.”That was the gathering place,” Kelling recalls.”Some would come for coffee in the morning or to play cards in the afternoon, especially in the winter.”

Many elevators stocked livestock feeds and medicines, seeds, fertilizer, hardware and other farm supplies. They were also an entry to international grain markets. When farmers sold their grain to the local elevator, they drove away with checks that were hopefully big enough to keep a family on the land for another year.

Family farms are fewer in number, but many have survived even as other institutions deserted rural America. Railroads abandoned most of their tracks. Automobile and farm machinery manufacturers consolidated dealerships. Bishops closed churches. Politicians shuttered schools. Bureaucrats eliminated post offices. Consequently, much rural architecture — church spires, train depots and automotive garages — are disappearing on the Great Plains. Wood grain elevators are also fewer in number, but they are outlasting the other structures.

A few have even been repurposed. The Wik family converted a Faulk County elevator near Wecota into a private home. In the Gregory County town of Herrick, a 1907 elevator serves as a local bar and grill called Run of the Mill.

Jenna Carlson Dietmeier, interim director of South Dakota’s State Historic Preservation Office in Pierre, says grain elevators may not appear historically significant to people unaware of the heritage and unique construction.”They are not often seen as exemplary architecture. They are very utilitarian, and they don’t always stand out to the untrained eye. But they definitely tell the story of South Dakota’s agricultural history, and they are worthy of preservation.”

A wood crib elevator is one of the few remaining structures in Esmond, a Kingsbury County ghost town.

Carlson Dietmeier’s office is doing county-wide surveys of buildings that qualify for the National Register of Historic Places.”There are multiple grain elevators that are eligible,” she says. However, many exist in small towns where it’s difficult to find a new use. Some sit alone on the prairie because, thanks to their sturdy crib-style construction, they are the last structure standing.

Neighboring states’ historians are also eyeing elevators. The Montana Preservation Alliance has embarked on a major study of the issue, hoping to not only frame the problem nationally but to also develop models for repurposing vacant elevators.

Bruce Selyem started the Country Grain Elevator Historical Society in Bozeman, Montana, in 1995. He and his wife Barbara research and photograph old elevators; they hope to someday create a museum-quality interpretive site in an old grain facility.

Last year the Alliance for Historic Wyoming developed a tour of historic agricultural buildings that are typically off-limits to the public. On the outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming, entrepreneurs are converting a century-old wood elevator into a bar and entertainment center.

North of the U.S. and Canadian border, preservationists in Saskatchewan were alarmed to discover that 94 percent of their province’s historic grain elevators have disappeared. Government officials counted 2,878 elevators in a 1962 study; today they estimate there are less than 180, though efforts are now underway to save some.

Carlson Dietmeier, the preservation officer in Pierre, says 133 elevator properties have been identified in South Dakota’s recent Cultural Resource Geographic Research Information Display database. She believes there may be additional structures not yet surveyed or recorded. Fifty-five of the 133 were recorded as being eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

Six are already listed. They include the Herrick elevator which has been converted to a lodge; an elevator on the Barber farm near Lily; an elevator on the Lyons property in Lake County; two elevators at the Sexauer Seed Company in Brookings; and Central Dakota Flouring Mill in Arlington.

“The elevator and the local restaurant were the two hubs of activity in a small farm town,” says Dave Goos, the engineer who helped to build them in the 1980s.”If you wanted to know what was going on, that’s where you went.”

Farmers and ranchers often laud the importance of land by noting that”God isn’t making any more of it.” The same might be said of wood cribbed grain elevators.

While the grain elevators outlasted churches and other iconic rural buildings because of their ridiculously strong construction, even 9,000 pounds of nails isn’t enough to ward off fire worries, insurance actuaries and the vagaries of nature and time.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.