Posted on September 30, 2026September 30, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

100 Years of “Giants”

Ole Rølvaag’s classic homesteading novel offers lessons for South Dakotans today.

By Lance Nixon

The young teacher wants to write a book about homesteading in Dakota Territory, and by 1925 he’s finished with the work that some readers and critics will eventually consider an outstanding example of The Great American Novel.

But there’s a catch: This great American novel is published in another country, written in a different language, and most Americans won’t be able to read it until the translation of 1927 arrives under its English title: Giants in the Earth.

Ole Rølvaag was writing for Norwegians on both sides of the ocean. He wanted to finish his novel by 1925 in part to honor the first Norwegian immigrants to America, who had arrived exactly 100 years earlier. (He was also trying to finish before the well-known Norwegian novelist Johan Bojer finished The Emigrants about homesteaders in what is now North Dakota.)

Ole Rølvaag used stories from the Berdahls – his wife’s family – as the basis for his novel *Giants in the Earth*. Photos courtesy of the Norwegian American Historical Association

This year, descendants of those first Norwegian immigrants are commemorating the bicentennial of the journey as well as the centennial of Rølvaag’s saga. Those are important anniversaries in a state where more than 110,000 people — one out of every eight South Dakotans — claim Norwegian ancestry. The Center for Western Studies at Augustana University, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and the South Dakota Historical Society Press all recognized the significance and worked to celebrate the milestone in different ways.

Shortly after Delta David Gier became the music director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra in 2004, he was given a copy of Giants in the Earth in order to better understand a portion of South Dakota’s cultural history. He later discovered that Douglas Moore, a great American composer of the mid-20th century, had written a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera based on the novel in 1951. When the orchestra performed the piece in April, it was the first time audiences had heard the music since 1973.

“We were happy to be able to rediscover it,” Gier says. “The opera world couldn’t wait to hear it, and there’s not a better musical entity than the South Dakota Symphony to take up the mantle.”

Gier says the music is evocative of the wide-open spaces and loneliness that Rølvaag’s characters experience on their claim in Dakota Territory. South Dakota Public Broadcasting recorded the performance and plans to make it available online.

Harry Thompson, executive director of the Center for Western Studies, says milestones like centennials often remind people of important events, and so Giants in the Earth was a topic of the university’s annual Dakota Conference, where the theme was “Settling and Resettling the Plains.” But Rølvaag’s masterful telling of 19th century European immigration and the westward movement isn’t the touchstone that it once was, he noted.

“Giants in the Earth used to be required reading in schools around the country,” Thompson says. “I was required to teach the novel at Greenwich (Connecticut) High School, when I was doing my teaching practicum in 1976. It is no longer required nationally, and I’d be surprised to learn that many schools in South Dakota or Minnesota require it.”

Andrew Berdahl was pictured atop a haystack in 1908.

Still, Dedra McDonald Birzer, the director of research and publishing for the South Dakota Historical Society Press, says many of the novel’s themes remain relevant today. The press published a 100th anniversary edition with a new introduction and annotations by scholar Allan C. Carlson, a historian of Nordic immigration and culture.

The new annotations help explain concepts from the book that may not be as well known today, such as Norwegian mythology, Lutheran understandings and scriptural references. But, Birzer says, it was important to retain the novel’s original integrity. “We kept the original introduction by Lincoln Colcord, who was also the translator and someone who Rølvaag worked closely with,” Birzer says. “We basically added bookends to each side. I’ve known Allen Carlson for a long time. Our ancestors are from the same part of Sweden, so we’ve talked a lot of Scandinavian history. I knew he was well versed in the things we hoped to bring out, such as its impact and the things that Rølvaag was trying to accomplish.”

Rølvaag’s novel was published in Norwegian in two volumes in 1924 and 1925 under the titles, I de dage (In those days) and Riket grundlegges (The Founding of the Kingdom). The English version of two years later takes its title from the same verse of scripture, Genesis 6:4: “There were giants in the earth in those days ….”

In English it was a Book of the Month Club selection and sold nearly 80,000 copies in its first year, with a publisher’s poster proclaiming it, “The fullest, finest and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America.”

Carlson sees Rølvaag’s novel as much more than an account of one ethnic group’s experience. Native Americans appear briefly. The Norwegian settlers are afraid, although the novel’s protagonist Per Hansa befriends them. Similarly, the Norwegians make friends with a competing group of Irish settlers, despite friction over competing land claims.

Carlson views Rølvaag as rejecting both Anglo-American preeminence and the idea of the “melting pot” to affirm instead “a vision of the United States as a democracy of ethnicities, a unique place where Hispanics, Asians, Africans, and American Indians — along with Europeans — could and should preserve their languages and ethnicities.”

Birzer agrees. “We see this a lot with Beret (Per Hansa’s wife), the idea of hanging on to that Norwegian culture and language and not becoming so American that part of your identity is lost,” she says. “Rølvaag spoke and wrote a lot about that. He thought you should have a distinct culture that is very much part of your identity and then go from there.”

Much of Rølvaag’s research came from interviews with the Berdahl family, who made the trek to Dakota by wagon train. Rølvaag’s wife, Jennie, was a Berdahl.

“Rølvaag depended heavily on his father-in-law, Andrew Berdahl, and other relatives for the factual information that is in the novel,” says Solveig Zempel, Professor Emerita of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and Rølvaag’s granddaughter. “They were part of an 11-wagon train that went from Fillmore County in Minnesota to Minnehaha County in Dakota Territory in 1873.”

The Berdahls settled in Edison Township, just north of Sioux Falls and west of Garretson. Rølvaag placed the characters in his novel farther west, though Per Hansa files on a homestead in Dakota the same year that the Berdahls arrived.

Rølvaag wrote many letters to his in-laws seeking information as he was writing. “He wrote much of the novel in his cabin the forest in Itasca County, Minnesota, and wrote the rest when he was in Oslo, Norway,” Zempel says. “The land where the cabin was located on Big Island Lake is now part of the Chippewa National Forest, and the cabin itself has been relocated to Sioux Falls. It is currently on the campus at Augustana.”

Rølvaag wrote in this cabin on Big Island Lake in Minnesota. It now stands on the Augustana University campus in Sioux Falls.

What sets Giants in the Earth apart and makes it a truly great novel — some would argue the greatest novel ever written about Dakota — is the way Rølvaag deals with the psychology of his characters. That has made his work influential in odd and perhaps controversial ways. The first great historian of the Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb, used Rølvaag’s novel as one of his proof texts for his argument that the Great Plains in its early period was a man’s country where women didn’t feel at ease.

“This story brings out clearly the difference in the effect of the Plains on the men and on the women,” Webb writes. “Men have loved the Plains with a primitive simplicity; women have been repelled from them as from a mysterious and dangerous world. So it is with Per Hansa, the man, and Beret, his wife. To Per Hansa everything was possible … With Beret it was different. She resented the country by the time she entered it — the vastness, the solitude, the newness and strangeness of it all.”

Per Hansa can scarcely believe that as an immigrant — not yet an American citizen, not even able to speak English to any extent — he can still get 160 acres of free land by filing on a homestead and then proving up. “Isn’t it stranger than a fairy tale, that a man can have such things here, just for the taking?” he asks Beret.

Everything Per Hansa touches seems to succeed. Once a fisherman in the Lofoten Islands (as was Rølvaag before he came to America in 1896), he rigs nets to catch waterfowl on the Dakota marshes with his sons. He makes money by trading for furs with the Sioux Indians at Flandreau and then selling the furs for a profit in Minnesota. He plants his wheat at the wrong time, and it still germinates and produces a bumper crop despite a late snowstorm.

Carlson notes that in his extraordinary success, Per Hansa is like “the Ash Lad” of Norwegian folktales, Askeladden — the male Norwegian counterpart of Cinderella — who always seems to triumph.

But Beret’s fairy tale is darker. She misses her family and the familiar terrain of Norway. She wonders how people can even live in Dakota, a great desolation where there’s not a thing to hide behind. She feels more and more oppressed with the “monsterlike” plain of Dakota until finally she begins to see something like a troll face grimacing at her out of the prairie landscape.

“I think Per Hansa and Beret might be considered two sides of the psychology of immigration,” Zempel says.

Ironically, for one who’d written so brilliantly about Dakota, Rølvaag didn’t stay in the place where he set his best novels. He worked as a farmhand near Elk Point for two years before enrolling at Augustana Academy in Canton. After graduating in 1901, he attended St. Olaf College, where he eventually became the head of the Norwegian Department. He died in Northfield in 1931.

Though he spent just a few years in South Dakota, his great novel remains anchored here and still offers food for thought for modern readers. “A reminder of how much we consider what it means to be an American comes out of this immigrant experience,” Birzer says. “In a place like South Dakota, almost everybody has immigration stories, one generation or five generations back, and sometimes those stories have been lost. I still think that is such a shaping experience.”

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

Posted on August 31, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Good on the Bad

Nemo painter Mark Zimmerman’s exploration of the anything-but-square Bad River valley

By Bernie Hunhoff

Wild landscapes inspire Black Hills artist Mark Zimmerman, so imagine his delight when he discovered the Bad River, which pigtails 161 miles from Fort Pierre to Philip in western South Dakota.

The river valley is a picturesque and sparsely populated stretch of ghost towns, grasslands and big ranches. Zimmerman researched, explored, photographed and sketched the region. Now he is creating art that he hopes will convey his love for a land most Americans consider flyover country.

Open spaces provide his greatest inspiration, but artist Mark Zimmerman’s home and studio are deep in the forest near Nemo.

“I want people to love it the way I do,” he says. “Of course, I know that doesn’t happen just from looking at a picture. I hope I can capture the feel of the space. If you are a child of the prairie, it’s in your soul, and if you are not then you might look at it and still see it as empty.”

Zimmerman is that child. He was born in Greeley, Colorado, east of the Rockies, and raised in Kansas and North Dakota. As a graduate student at Illinois State University, he discovered that he missed the wild prairie. He felt claustrophobic when surrounded by industrial landscapes. Even the Illinois farm fields were too square, too civilized — too straight.

A sculptor from Chicago once assessed Zimmerman’s paintings and told him that something was missing. Zimmerman remembers the critique: “He said, ‘That’s all great, but where is the other stuff? Where is the stuff you don’t like?’”

The painter never forgot the sculptor’s question. “I know what I don’t like about the land I love,” he says. “I don’t like the squares.” So, he began to insert squares in his paintings — jarring interlopers to otherwise natural shapes.

He returned to North Dakota and was working at The Arts Center in Jamestown when he met Mary Wipf, a visiting artist from the Black Hills. She told him that she lived on a small ranch in South Dakota. He imagined a windswept and treeless prairie homestead, which only added to her allure. They married and he moved to South Dakota in 1997.

As it turns out, the ranch is in the forested Black Hills, just a few miles from the tiny town of Nemo, but that hasn’t hindered their relationship or his art career; Mary looks for lichens and fungi in the lowlands, while he prefers to hike the ridgetops.

However, he still seeks opportunities to explore the open prairie. In autumn of 2001 he was awarded a state Arts Council grant to visit Harding County, which he once called “the last best corner” of South Dakota. He spent his days teaching art at the rural schools, and then he drove the backroads, shooting photographs of scenery that has inspired his art ever since.

Zimmerman seldom references his photos as he paints because the prairie is embedded in his imaginative mind. As he developed the Harding County series, his style changed from abstract to expressive landscapes that reflect his affinity for the land of barbed wire, native grasslands and dirt roads.

He also respects the ranching families. He remembers the fifth grader who drove herself to Painter School in a big truck, and the youngsters who spent recess catching garter snakes in a creek. “That was a long time ago and I’m still painting memories of that place.”

Twenty years after Harding County, Zimmerman became interested in the Bad River when he was invited to participate in a 2023 project called “Navigating Narratives: The Corps of Discovery in Titonwan Territory.” Craig Howe, the project’s curator, asked artists and writers to produce a work based on Lewis and Clark’s journal entries from late September of 1804.

Zimmerman chose September 25, a day when the explorers had a tense confrontation with the Lakota at the intersection of the Bad and Missouri rivers in today’s Fort Pierre. Even then, the waterway was known as the Bad River (wakpa sica) by Native Americans because of a major flood in 1738 that killed many people. Lewis and Clark called it the Teton River because of their confrontation with the Teton Sioux, but the original name has survived.

“I read and reread everything I could find from the journals about that day and then I forgot everything and just started to draw and paint landscapes,” Zimmerman says. “I drew circles for the sun and the moon and stars, and intrusive squares. While I was imagining the mouth of the Bad River, I got the idea to paint it like I did Harding County.”

He proposed another plan to the South Dakota Arts Council, and before long he was back in open country. “The first time I ever saw it, I was driving north of the little town of Midland on the Bad River Road,” he recalls. “My first impression was from high above the foothills, and it wasn’t what I had in mind. Then you drop into the valley, past Capa and Van Metre, and I said, ‘Yeah, this is what I like!’”

He took notes and photographs, and he soon wrote a poem of his travels that includes these lines:

Head out, up the Bad River Road,

A stranger in a rangeland,

Steer the gravelly ruts, dust billowing.

Step into wildly surging winds,

Rattling in dancing autumn cottonwoods,

Hissing in sparse, brassy grasses.

Wheel round wriggling rattlesnakes,

Squint into a blazing sun,

Taste gritty dirt

Sweeping the spaciousness.

He wrote of the Capa School (“gone are the laughing children … the forgotten dreams”) and of driving the Capa and Van Metre trails (“where gravel eventually tapers to wandering twin tire tracks, roads named for disappearing places”).

Zimmerman wandered the Bad River for four days. Cattle ranches dominate the valley. Cows and calves share grasslands with deer, pronghorns, eagles and a plethora of other wildlife. On the southern edge of the valley is Ted Turner’s 141,000-acre Bad River buffalo ranch.

In the evenings, Zimmerman retreated to the Farr House, a historic bed and breakfast in nearby Pierre that was once the residence of Governor Peter Norbeck. He sorted his digital photos and notes and did sketches that are now taking shape on canvasses at the studio he shares with Mary near their home, which is buried in the pine forest a few miles south of Nemo.

Nemo, he notes, is a Latin word for nobody, so it is a good place to contemplate his Bad River experience and convert it to art. The spacious studio, which they call Green Ink Gallery, is a remodeled horse barn. There are stalls for their two horses and hay mounds for a big tabby cat that shares the ranch with them, along with a German Shepherd they call Echo.

Most of the people who will see his paintings have never driven the Bad River Valley. He hopes to show them its natural shapes and curves, and its wild nature. “Sadly, there are subdivisions and cornfields and roads coming for it,” he says.

“We live on a sphere, and we’ve decided to cut it into squares. I view it as an imperiled landscape. Most of our prairie is already cut into squares, which seems like a crazy way of dealing with a landscape that’s anything but square.”

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

Posted on July 31, 2026July 31, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Singing the Blues in the Black Hills

Bobby Joe Holman has been to music’s proverbial mountaintop, and he believes he found its peak in South Dakota

By Bernie Hunhoff

BOBBY JOE HOLMAN’S face is weathered and whiskered. But it’s a fresh face to the Black Hills music scene and, as Muddy Waters would sing, Holman has his mojo working.

The country/blues artist has been entertaining audiences across the USA for most of his 76 years. He arrived in Rapid City in 2021 to be closer to his wife’s family. After playing in America’s bigger cities, some may wonder how he likes the small mountain towns of the Black Hills. Attend one of his gigs and you’ll hear the answer in every song.

“My heart and soul are happy,” says the Santa Claus look-alike who sometimes plays five or six nights a week in various venues throughout the Hills. “The body is giving out, but the mind is hanging together and I am at peace.”

Yes, that’s how Holman speaks — his sentences sound like verses to a Willie Nelson song, and these days the title could be “Lovin’ Life in South Dakota.”

Surrounded by military memorabilia, The Bobbys entertain at the VFW Club in downtown Rapid City.

Holman was born in the west Texas town of Seminole. He spent much of his childhood in southern California, where he strummed his first guitar. He was serving in the Navy, aboard a submarine during the Vietnam War, when he began a lifelong love affair with the harmonica.

“I love the harmonica because it never sounds the same,” he says. “It almost plays itself. I start a tone and one note leads to another, it’s not all that structured stuff.” He started out with the diatonic harmonica, but soon grew to also love the chromatic, which has a wide range of notes.

After his military service, he studied music in Mississippi and became a successful blues singer, playing in Nashville and on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. He signed with Monument Records and found work in both radio and television.

He co-hosted a show called Across the Pond that featured U.S. and European jazz. Holman also became a successful author of “how to play” texts for the harmonica and taught the instrument at public schools, colleges, music stores and prisons. But commercial pursuits often interrupted his original love for a simple song.

“I’ve had a little bit of success,” Holman says of his career. “But the business end can suck you up. They’re always saying, ‘you should do this’ or ‘you have to do that.’ Now I don’t have to do anything but play the songs I love for people who want to hear them.”

Holman and his wife, Janet, came to Rapid City to live near Janet’s daughter, Genae, and her family. Genae’s husband is Bobby Sundby, a well-known local realtor and businessman. The two Bobbys became good friends, and soon they teamed up as a duo known, naturally, as The Bobbys.

“I needed a name I could remember,” Holman says with a laugh.

Bobby Sundby is well-versed in the Black Hills music scene. His brother, Johnny, is a notable photographer who plays music with a country-rock group called The Lonely Rangers. Their late father, John, was a popular Rapid City businessman and pilot who sang for decades with the Shrine of Democracy Chorus, a barbershop group.

“Our family has always been involved in music,” he says. “Our dad probably never said the word ‘gig,’ but he would love what we we’re doing and the way the music connects with people.”

Sundby says Holman is “one of the most upbeat, positive, encouraging and supportive human beings I’ve ever met. He’s opened up a new world to me, by encouraging me to play the guitar and sing. I started out playing drums at Augustana College. I love that I don’t have to haul the drums around anymore, but more importantly, it’s wonderful to grow as a musician.”

Sundby introduced Holman to the Black Hills. “When he married my mother-in-law, I heard about him playing in California. I didn’t know then how accomplished he was. The first time I heard him sing, we were hanging out as a family in the kitchen when someone asked him to play the guitar.

“I happened to be playing gigs with Wild Bill Days in Deadwood, so I invited him to join in and he was great. He has a comfort level and a gift for gab that the audience loves, and as a musician he has a rare quality. He likes to play a song a little different each time, and that makes it more fun and interesting for the musicians and the crowd. If he makes a mistake in front of people he’ll just laugh, and they like him all the more.”

Bobby Joe Holman is a fun-loving blend of Willie Nelson, Burl Ives and Ray Charles.

Sundby says Holman is a charming man, whether he’s having a private conversation or playing to a full house. “A friend of mine said he’s like a favorite grandpa that everyone loves.”

Holman laughs at such compliments. “Bobby likes to brag on me,” he says, “but the reward is all mine. And I couldn’t do this today without him.” He credits Sundby and South Dakotans as a whole for giving him a fresh start at his age, and he’s determined to learn all he can about the musical traditions of his new home.

He especially appreciates the band-friendly practices of the nightclubs that book The Bobbys. “Music-wise, there are a lot of events and venues, and they all try to pay you a fair wage here,” he says. “In Los Angeles, they treat you like a dog because they know that if you won’t do it there’s somebody else waiting in line.”

He also appreciates the cultural makeup of his new state. “I love that we have two cities, and all the rest are these little towns, and every town has its own soul, and the people have their own ways of seeing themselves. There is something beautiful about the way people get along here.”

Holman hopes to contribute the only way he knows — with his music. “I know I gotta stay healthy,” he says, “so I drink non-alcoholic beer. I love alcohol but it’s made me make a lot of really bad decisions. Now I practice every day and I learn new songs. I am blessed to have the dexterity and the voice to do what I love at this age.”

The Bobbys entertain at some of the Black Hills’ best-known venues and attractions, including the 1880 Train depot, Deadwood’s historic Landmark Casino, the Firehouse in downtown Rapid City and the Mount Rushmore KOA Resort, where they play outdoors on summer nights.

The Bobbys are still an unknown band to many in the Black Hills. They were booked to play at Terry Peak a few months ago when a typo in the advertisement listed them as The Boobys. “Every biker from a hundred miles around showed up,” Holman quips.

They also play at lesser-known places, including nursing homes where senior citizens in wheelchairs nod their heads to the blues. “The rest homes are such a rewarding experience,” Holman says. “Some of them are on their last roundup but you can see they are listening. The songs are touching them.”

He also likes to entertain at the VFW club on Main Street in Rapid City, where he banters with other veterans who mostly sit at the bar, far from the stage, but applaud every song. “I’m a proud lifetime member of the VFW, the Vietnam Veterans and the Sons of the American Revolution,” he says. “It’s a privilege to play there.”

Regardless of the venue or the demographics of his audience, Holman makes an impression. Sarah Smoke, who manages the 44 North Bar at the Baymont Inn in Sturgis, says The Bobbys have quickly become a crowd favorite. The blues music is amazing, she says, and Holman’s ability to connect with a roomful of strangers is rare. “He has a unique voice and he’s very skilled with the guitar and the harp, but it’s more than that,” Smoke says. “He is so comfortable with the music, and he creates an environment that is special and warm.”

Rural America never takes its musicians for granted because small town fans know a favorite singer or guitar player may be just one song away from leaving for the city. But Bobby Joe Holman came from the city. He’s been to the music world’s proverbial mountaintop, and now his only goal is to stay healthy and sing for the people of the Black Hills.

Editor’s Note: Readers can find upcoming gigs of Holman and Sundby on their Facebook page, which is titled The Bobbys: Two Guys, Two Guitars. 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.

Posted on July 17, 2026July 17, 2026 by Hannah Schaefer — Leave a comment

Weekend Roundup!

Three ways to spend your weekend in South Dakota:

1. Honey Bee Festival at the Laurel Ridge Barn – Wedding & Events Venue in Sioux Falls, July 19. Sweet treats, live music and activities.

2. Farley Fest at Lake Farley Park in Milbank, July 19-20. Music, parade, cornhole tournament, inflatables, Q-Fest barbecue competition, art and food vendors.

3. Brulé at Outlaw Square in Deadwood, July 20. Free concert kicks off Deadwood’s Days of ’76 and is part of the historic mountain town’s 150th celebration.

For more events, visit www.southdakotamagazine.com/calendar-of-events

Posted on May 29, 2026May 29, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Yes, We Pe-Can

Nut trees can flourish in a sliver of South Dakota, but will their growers ever be more than hobbyists?

Darrell and Martha Ausborn have experimented with nut trees on their 10-acre farm west of Yankton since 2008.

By John Andrews

Dan DeBuhr was 6 years old in the early 1960s when his grandmother returned from a vacation in Texas with two pecan trees. She planted them in the backyard of her Elk Point home — the same patch of land where DeBuhr lives today — not knowing what to expect. “They told her they couldn’t guarantee that they would make it in South Dakota,” DeBuhr says. “And they would never bear fruit.”

Today, motorists passing by on Interstate 29 can easily spot them because they are the tallest trees in town. In fact, measurements taken last June confirm that they are the two biggest pecan trees in South Dakota, both supplanting a 61-foot pecan in Rapid City.

A severe thunderstorm pelted Elk Point with baseball sized hail early last summer, greatly diminishing the year’s pecan crop. But near the end of most Septembers, DeBuhr wages a daily battle with squirrels to collect the prized nuts. The little critters clearly collect their share, evidenced by the tiny trees that spring up from pecans buried around his yard.

We think of more temperate places when we think of pecans, but they have a history in South Dakota. Pecans — as well as hickory, chestnuts, heartnuts, butternuts, English walnuts and maybe even pine nuts — can indeed grow in certain parts of South Dakota, and experimenters are working to create the best varieties for our environment.

*****

South Dakota is not a robust nut-producing state. Black walnuts are the only nut trees considered native, but John Ball, a professor at South Dakota State University in Brookings, says you can find butternut, American chestnut, English walnut, Manchurian walnut and even pecan, though the growing season is not always long enough to produce nuts. Far southeastern South Dakota, however, is another story.

“It is an unusual part of the state,” says Ball, who is also an SDSU Extension forestry specialist and South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources forest health specialist. “We should call it Western Iowa/Northern Nebraska, not South Dakota, and then it would fit. Growing pecans in those states would not be surprising, and southeastern South Dakota is kind of an extension of that. But it’s a rather abrupt line as we move out of there as to where something grows, where something’s a shrub and where something just never makes it at all.”

Our native black walnut provides a good example. “Black walnut is only native to eastern South Dakota, and really the southeast, though there is one population up in Codington County,” Ball says. “But it will even grow in Harding County. I’ve seen some trees out by Union Center and Bison. The difference is the ones down by Yankton and Vermillion can get a couple feet in diameter and 70 feet tall. The ones up in Bison get about 6 inches in diameter and maybe 20 feet tall. So while they can grow there, they grow very slowly. Down in the southeast, you can grow most of the nut trees that can grow out East, though not always as productively and not as quickly. And you have to really work at it. It doesn’t come easily.”

Any discussion of trees and plants and where they might succeed brings to mind the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, the reference that many gardeners consult before planting. The map is based on a region’s annual average extreme minimum temperatures, with lower zone numbers coinciding with colder temperatures. Much of the northern half of South Dakota lies in Zone 4b (-25 degrees Fahrenheit to -20), though some pockets, including Aberdeen, fall in 4a (-30 to -25). The southern half is largely 5a (-20 to -15), with some areas of 5b (-15 to -10) west of Yankton and around the Black Hills, including Rapid City.

But the map may be irrelevant. Ball says the more important factor for nut trees is the number of frost-free days. “I recommend throwing the zone map out when you get to South Dakota,” Ball says. “The zone maps were first developed in Boston. They started drawing the lines back in about 1927, and they did it without ever coming to South Dakota. The real difficulty is it is based upon only one climatic factor: the annual average extreme temperature, or, essentially, how cold it could get in January. That doesn’t do well here, because what really affects our nut production is our early frost in the fall, late frost in the spring, that cold snap that occurs in April after it’s already been warm or a nice mild fall and then suddenly the temperatures fall to freezing.”

The native range of pecan trees stretches from east Texas and Louisiana up through Oklahoma and Arkansas into portions of Missouri, southern Illinois and southern Indiana. They tend to follow river valleys, extending as far north as the Iowa/Illinois line along the Mississippi River. Those areas are most likely to give pecan trees the minimum 140 frost-free days needed for nut production. In South Dakota, those conditions are most likely to be replicated in the southeast.

Perhaps that’s why the DeBuhr pecan trees have flourished in Elk Point. Three more pecans purchased from Gurney’s Seed and Nursery in Yankton in the mid-1940s tower over Rick Gray’s home just north of Dakota Valley High School near McCook Lake. And Ball knows of a few pecan trees in Sioux Falls that produce nuts every few years. “While we do define areas and which trees will grow and perform well there, no tree has ever read a book,” Ball says. “We always get the outlier, the tree that’s growing where it shouldn’t, yet performing better than anyone would ever expect. And that’s the fun of South Dakota. It’s not like trees grow everywhere, and you really appreciate it when they make it.”

*****

John Goeden is an agronomist and self-described “collector of cultivars.” When he’s not consulting on corn and soybean hybrids for Channel Seed, he’s tinkering with trees on his 1.8 acres just west of McCook Lake. “My dad was a carpenter, and he loved hardwood trees, particularly walnut,” Goeden says. “That’s probably where it all started. I helped him take out a grove of about 100 walnut trees that were going to get ripped out of the ground and farmed in the late ‘90s. So in some ways, I’m paying for the sins of my father — and myself.”

John Goeden is a self-described “collector of cultivars.” His grove at McCook Lake includes at 25 pecan varieties.

He is particularly interested in pecan and hickory trees. He believes hickories were a prominent part of the river valley landscape until homesteaders began flooding the Plains in the 1860s. “We had a huge mass migration of people from east to west, and they came in wagon trains made of wood and iron,” he says. “When they were making and repairing things, they were all looking for the straightest, hardest, most durable wood they could find, and hickory was it. That’s probably a reason why we don’t have a lot of hickory remnants left. It’s also the best firewood.”

Historically, the Lakota were familiar with hickory from their time living in eastern Minnesota, before they were pushed west. Similarly, many Great Plains tribes had a word for pecan. “That means that they were either trading in pecan or making trips to where they were plentiful, which would be eastern Iowa, Illinois and Missouri,” he says. “They knew pecan.”

Those species command most of his attention. By the summer of 2024, Goeden’s experiments with tree grafting had resulted in at least 25 different pecan cultivars, along with 15 hickory and four English walnut.

Grafting is a tricky process by which two trees are fused together. Scion wood from a donor tree is cut and attached to rootstock so that their corresponding layers of cambium — the main growth tissue located just beneath the bark — align. The graft is then tightly wrapped and kept moist until the tissues begin to grow together.

“We’re probably not going to extend the harvest to Timber Lake,” Ball says. “But they’re trying to improve the quality of the nut. The rule of thumb I always use is the better the nut, the less chance it has of growing here. You’ve really got to work to develop those qualities, and grafting is how we do it. Thank goodness for the hobbyists that are doing that work to help push the limits and extend the higher quality nuts to our area.”

It was a failed graft that led Goeden to learn about the process. “I had planted some English walnuts,” he says. “I had them in the ground nearly 20 years and they produced nuts. Well, if you look at the leaflets you can tell the difference between an English walnut and black walnut. Somewhere along the line — either before I got those trees or perhaps after — the graft died back, and the black walnut took over. That’s what I actually had.”

His interest in grafting led him to the Nebraska Nut Growers Association, an organization that since the early 1970s has worked on grafting nut trees and placing them in the northern landscape. Grafting is particularly beneficial when working with nut trees, because it can dramatically reduce the time it takes to bear fruit. Self-pollinated pecan, oak and walnut trees might not produce nuts for 15 to 20 years. A hickory might take 40 years. “But if you take wood from a pecan tree and attach it to a two-year seedling and it takes, chances are in eight to 10 years you can have a pecan in your hand,” Goeden says. “It takes the memory of that tree it was on and puts it on top of a seedling. It basically cuts the time in half.”

Grafting and selected cross pollination have resulted in dozens of pecan cultivars, each with different nut sizes, bearing times, percentage of nut meat within the shell and cracking ability. Goeden is growing several of them in his backyard. “My goal is to see what we can effectively grow here and what we can’t,” he says. “Pecans and hickories can grow here, and we’ll find out which ones will survive. I’m trying to get the biggest, best nut possible, and the way to do that is to look at a number of cultivars in your own environment.”

Several of Goeden’s grafted cultivars are growing on Darrell and Martha Ausborn’s 10 acres of land west of Yankton overlooking Lewis and Clark Lake. Ausborn is a retired forester who began in private industry in Florida and Alabama. He later transferred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs where he worked as a forester until retirement.

He and Martha, an Alabama native, chose the Yankton County acreage because, Martha says, “he needed a place to play.”

To stay busy in retirement, the couple set their sights on nut trees. In 2008 they planted a batch of grafted seedlings that included English walnut, black walnut, pecan, Chinese chestnut, heartnut and butternut. As they’ve experimented, the Ausborns have added cultivars from various nurseries as well as grafted cultivars from Goeden.

“For pecans, we’re about as far north as you can get,” Darrell says. “The trees do okay, but some years there aren’t enough summer heat days for the nuts to mature. Last year they did mature, and this year they are growing. We’ll see how far they make it into the fall. If we get a cool September or an early frost, the pecans won’t be there. But the rest of the nuts do produce.”

A visit to the Ausborns’ grove in early August found healthy hazelnut trees, the nuts still tightly wrapped within flower-like green husks. “You have to hunt for the hazelnuts,” Martha said as she searched the branches. “I like to pick them because it’s like looking for Easter eggs. They lay up underneath the leaves. The husk has to dry and turn brown, and the nut will be loose. When you can touch it and it will spin, usually the last week in August, that’s when you can harvest.”

Dan DeBuhr enjoys pecan trees his grandmother brought to Elk Point from Texas in the 1960s.

The Ausborns also boasted healthy crops of heartnuts, butternuts, English walnuts and Chinese chestnuts. A Korean pine nut tree looked somewhat out of place but seems to enjoy the Yankton County environment. “That was something out of pure curiosity, just to see if it would grow,” Ausborn says. “In about 30 years you might be able to taste a pine nut, so remember it’s here.”

*****

Nut harvests are modest. The Ausborns spend fall days using homemade equipment to gather, wash and shell their assortment of nuts. Goeden shares his pecans and other nuts with friends and family. They gather every winter with the Nebraska Nut Growers Association for an annual nut evaluation that measures each nut’s size, cracking ability, flavor and quality and quantity of nutmeat. The results help them determine what cultivars are working.

They are also willing to help others. “Without the knowledge and expertise of the Nebraska Nut Growers Association, Darrell and I wouldn’t have had the success that we’ve had,” Goeden says. “Grafting nut trees is an fading art that needs to be passed from one generation to the next in order to push yield potential.”

People like Goeden and the Ausborns will never grow rich from nut production. Ball says a commercial operation in South Dakota is likely not viable. Still, with the right trees, bags of South Dakota-grown hazelnuts or pecans could show up at farmers’ markets and craft fairs. “It’s kind of like farming has gone,” Ball says. “When I was a kid, a family of five could live on a 140-acre mixed farm. Now that’s a hobby farm. Nut production is the same way. It’s hard to get the scale to where you’re actually able to make a living out of it as opposed to supplementing your income. But for a supplement, yes, you can have a hobby that actually pays.”

Dan DeBuhr’s grandmother likely never thought of her tiny pecan trees as a profitable side hustle, but she loved all trees and encouraged her grandson to care for them long after she was gone. “My grandma told me, ‘I’ll never be able to see the pecans, but if you stay here long enough, you probably will,’” DeBuhr recalls. “‘Do me a favor,’ she said. ‘When the trees get big, take a chair on the hottest day, when there’s no wind, and go sit under the trees, because they’ll talk to you.’

“One day in July I was out here working, and it was so hot, no air. So I got a chair and put it right between those trees. All of sudden the leaves were just shaking. That’s what she meant by talking.”

Perhaps they were saying they belong here after all.

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.

Posted on March 30, 2026April 8, 2026 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on February 23, 2026April 28, 2026 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on November 3, 2025April 8, 2026 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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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