Category: culture

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Flagging a Red Barn

Frank Bootz was an experienced Beadle County house mover in an era when such a man was considered a community asset, like having a courthouse or a good fishing lake.

Recycling then meant a return trip on a bicycle, but house movers like Bootz saved hundreds of tons of lumber and brick from being pushed into creeks or buried in primitive landfills. Using little more than hydraulic jacks and some cables, they loaded homes, barns and commercial structures onto their rugged flatbed trucks. Sometimes the move was a few yards and occasionally it was a hundred miles: the practicality of a long haul was decided by the number of REA and telephone lines that stood in the way.

Sadly, every year brought new trucking laws and insurance regulations that made house moving more difficult. The story is still told of the day when a young highway patrolman stopped Bootz while he was moving a big red barn down Highway 14 between Wolsey and Huron. The patrolman puled out his citation book and began to berate the old man for failing to display the necessary red signal flag at each corner of his wide load.

Bootz slowly began to lose his patience, and finally he spoke in his own defense:”If they can’t see a big red barn, then how in the hell are they going to see a little red flag?” he asked.

The lawman’s face turned as red as the barn — and then, to his credit, he closed his ticket book and sent Bootz on his way with the barn.

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the May/June 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.


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Fifty Years in South Dakota

Light streams in on South Dakota poet Badger Clark at his home, the Badger Hole, in 1937. Dakota Discovery Museum photo.

Editor’s Note: In honor of National Poetry Month, here are a few stanzas by Badger Clark, South Dakota’s first poet laureate, on life in our fair state.


Fifty Years in South Dakota

By Badger Clark

We lack sophistication; our lives are all frustration,
We South Dakotans, so some writers say
According to those novels we mostly live in hovels
And all our days are dun and gray.
We flounder in futility, punch-drunk to imbecility
From dust and debt and drought and dying kine,
Aridity, frigidity — yet I, in my stupidity
Have lived here fifty years and like it fine.

I nearly froze my gizzard in one riproaring blizzard,
But that was in the year of Eighty-eight.
Thought I was never wealthy I’ve been absurdly healthy
Like nearly all people in the state.
If skies went dry and coppery, if fields got all grasshoppery,
That made the good years better when ’twas done,
And though my weak humanity slipped sometimes to profanity
I’ve lived here fifty years and think it’s fun.

I wonder if the fellows who paint us all in yellows
Have heard the meadowlarks among the grass
Or seen the corn in tassel or climbed a granite castle
That stands on guard above a Black Hills pass.
We like a fat prosperity but there’s a tougher verity
That roots us to the prairies and the Hills.
It’s HOME to us, our motherland, dearer than any other land,
I’ve lived here fifty years, but yet that thrills.

It never is”verboten” for any South Dakotan
To laugh and talk as freely as he votes,
And if they haven’t riches to carry in their breeches
They always carry laughter in their throats.
Our maidens sweet and willowy, our matrons good and pillowy,
Our boys and men look you in the eye
Make up a grand fraternity to do me till eternity.
I’ve lived here fifty years, and here I’ll die.


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The Everlasting Bijou Hills

Story and Photography by Bernie Hunhoff

Midway between Chamberlain and Platte, the Bijou Hills rise 400 feet above the prairie.

Three square miles of hills make just another landscape in western South Dakota and in many locales around the United States, but the Bijou Hills are a geologic and social curiosity on the flatlands east of the Missouri River in Brule County.

Capped with quartzite and containing unique fossils and fauna, the hills have been explored by biologists, archaeologists and naturalists. Adventure and drama have also visited the Bijou Hills — specifically a kidnapping, murder, bank robbery (if retrieving your own money is a crime) and other craziness.

The hills jut 400 feet above surrounding corn and hay fields. Cattle keep the grass low, showing some of the quartzite exposed 10,000 years ago by melting snow from the last glacier.

Tens of centuries later, the towns of Granville, Eagle and Bijou Hills were started below the hills. Now, only the latter survives. Bijou Hills had just three residents when we visited in 2007 — Wayne and Pat Surat and Wayne’s mother, Ruth.”Somebody will drive by here in 40 years and it will be a cornfield,” said Wayne.”I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s just the way it is.”

He knows Bijou history well enough to understand that change is a surety. Two hundred years ago, the hills were on a route for migratory buffalo. Because of them, the Dakota Indians also became frequent visitors, building ceremonial pillars on the hilltops and fashioning arrows and other tools from the quartzite.

White explorers were naturally attracted to the prairie promontories, beginning with French traders and continuing with Lewis and Clark, John Fremont and artist George Catlin, who collected stone samples and was enthralled by the area’s antelope, buffalo and prairie dogs in 1832.

Catlin called the hills by their current name, which has been traced to French fur trader Louis Bissonet, known in his native St. Louis as”Mr. Bijou.” Bissonet operated a post by the river in 1812 and traded with the Dakota Indians and white trappers.

Ruth Surat, Bijou Hills’ historian.

In the 1880s, homesteaders moved in. Their farmsteads soon circled the base of the hills, but even so, all the towns but Bijou Hills quickly declined.”The heyday for Bijou Hills was in the 1920s before the bank closed,” remembered Ruth Surat, Wayne’s mother, who moved there at the age of three when her mother bought the store. Photographs in her family album show a town that looked like an Old West movie set with horses, wagons and humble wood storefronts. Well versed in local lore, she even recalled old-timers who talked of Custer and his Seventh Cavalry visiting the region in 1873.

Mrs. Surat had lived the town’s history.”On Wednesday and Saturday nights you could hardly park your car on Main Street. The barber had to hire another barber in the pool hall to keep up,” she said. Her brother, Floyd Houska, ran the city bar.”He had to break up fights every once in a while.”

Natural disasters included the usual grasshopper plagues, fires and tornadoes. A gravestone in the nearby Union Cemetery memorializes the destruction of May 27, 1899, when a twister struck the Peterson farmstead, killing the father and six of his eight children. Neighbors rushed to the scene and found Mrs. Peterson in a muddy field, dazed and badly injured. At first sight, they thought she was an animal of some sort. Eleven-year-old Earl was found a half-mile away, also alive but pinned in mud by a stick that had driven through his clothing. Another son, Alvah, had ducked in the storm cellar and survived the storm while crouched in the dark hole with a big bull snake.

A few days later, the editor of the Chamberlain Register wrote that the sight of two wagonloads of coffins parked by the undertaker’s establishment,”made even the most hardened persons contemplate the uncertainty of life, and the certainty of death.”

Tragedy has visited the hill country throughout white man’s recorded history. Dozens of families lost their life savings when the Bijou Hills bank closed in 1926. Mrs. Surat told us one man made a final withdrawal.”He took a gun and went to the bank and said ‘It’s either you or my money,'” she said.”He got his money but nobody else did.”

She also remembered the day her elderly grandmother became lost in a snowstorm in the Bijou Hills.”The whole town went out after dark looking for her. Everyone turned our lights on so she might see them. All she was wearing was a light sweater, and we thought she probably walked up into the hills. When you get in the hills in a storm you can’t see anything.” The searchers couldn’t find Grandma Novak, but later that evening she walked in the front door of her own house. She said the fuss over her absence was”greatly inflated.”

Another search had a sad ending. Harvey Burr disappeared from his farm near town in November of 1951. His bloodied body was found days later in a haystack. Burr’s murderer, a young man from Mitchell, was a distant relative who had kidnapped and raped a country schoolteacher, and then abducted and killed Burr and wrote checks on his bank account. Though it happened over 60 years ago, old timers in the hills remember every detail.

Bijou Hills residents Pat and Wayne Surat started their own vineyard.

Crimes, hard times and disasters hardly define the day-to-day history of the hills, however. As a kid growing up in the town of Bijou Hills, Wayne Surat remembers rabbit hunts, ball games, picnics and sledding. He moved to the West Coast and married Pat, a Californian, but they returned in 1969 to raise their family even though the town was rapidly losing its population. Unlike the slow decline suffered by most towns, Bijou Hills disappeared a house at a time because an eccentric farmer from Academy bought them and moved them to his farm.”He even bought the church parsonage,” Wayne said.”He put them up on blocks and they were all rotting out there and falling down the last I saw of them.”

When we visited in 2007, the town consisted of Ruth’s house, Wayne and Pat’s place and the long-closed Bijou Hills Congregational Church. West of the church is a tidy grape vineyard, planted by the Surats with assistance from the nearby Platte Hutterite Colony.

The farms and towns are changing, decaying and disappearing, but the hills look much the same as when Indians gathered on them for ceremonies, or when the 19th century explorers passed by on journeys along the Missouri. The town of Bijou Hills may follow Granville and Eagle into obscurity, but its people’s stories, whether remembered or forgotten, are as much a part of the place as the eternal stones and boulders.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2007 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.


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Hot Springs Santa

Kids in Hot Springs call Franz Brown”Santa” all year round, whether he’s dressed in red or not. His jolly smile and naturally white whiskers are distinctive in all four seasons.

Brown has modeled as Santa for Oregon artist Tom Browning for many years. They met through Brown’s work as a writer and photographer at Southwest Art magazine. His image appears on plates, shopping bags, cards, pillows, cookie tins and prints that end up around the world. Browning photographs Brown in various situations and then creates paintings from the images.

“It’s something positive,” he says.”The process is fun, it’s kind of a play thing. We have shot Santa golfing and swimming. It’s fun to see the reaction to people seeing Santa on the beach in summer.”

Brown is also an artist, and started painting seriously when he relocated to Hot Springs in 2003. He began painting Santa himself after someone asked why Browning never created a prairie Santa. Browning was more interested in East or West Coast themes, so Brown set up a camera and photographed himself to begin a series of his own paintings relating Santa to the prairie.”I think Santa has a special connection to the Lakota because generosity is a highly esteemed value of the Lakota,” Brown says.

Besides looking the part, Brown also revels in the Christmas spirit.”I’ve always enjoyed Christmas. It’s always a special time,” he says. One theme in his Santa paintings is that gift giving doesn’t have to be material.”Giving comfort, love or companionship can be gifts, too,” Brown says.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Gorillas, Honkers and Beetdiggers

A fierce fiberglass ape welcomes fans to Gregory’s football field.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2001 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.


Unless a small town is blessed with a tornado or some other natural disaster, its residents are pretty much resigned to the fact that they’ll never see their community on the evening news. That’s why high school sports are so important in South Dakota — they’re an opportunity for small towns to get statewide recognition without having to experience death and destruction.

Because towns identify with their teams, the powers who decide such things often look to graceful, powerful animals for mascots. Bears. Bobcats. Golden Eagles. But there are those who take the road less traveled, mascot-wise, and opt for…something else. Which is how the Gregory Gorillas, Turton Frogs, Claremont Honkers, Waverly Woodchucks, Bruce Bees and Provo Rattlers came to be.

Others forego the animal kingdom for dashing role models. Knights. Cavaliers. For those who want a little outlaw in their mascots, however, we have the Sioux Valley Cossacks, Ethan Rustlers and Bristol Pirates. Other communities choose to honor less romantic figures. The Keystone Dynamiters, Armour Packers and Newell Irrigators, for example. Two schools even found inspiration in the sugar beet fields, which yielded the Vale Beetdiggers and Nisland Beettoppers.

Then there are those officials who truly went where no man had gone before, like the ones who settled on the Irene Maroons. (No doubt to the team’s relief, they later became the Cardinals.) Lastly, we salute the too-clever-for-their-own-good group, which would certainly include whoever came up with the Quinn Tuplets.

One South Dakotan, Jerry Miller, has been collecting sports stories for a long time — he started cutting basketball pictures out of the newspaper when he was still in grade school. His list of state schools and their sports team nicknames grew out of that hobby.

One of the more unusual state names belongs to the Sturgis Scoopers, which most people assume has something to do with mining. Not so, according to Miller. Back when nearby Fort Meade was a frontier fort, the soldiers would make their way into town, where they were often relieved of their pay by dance hall girls and card sharks. The local term for those folks was “scoopers” — they scooped the money out of the soldiers’ pockets. Hence the name honoring these previously ignored citizens.

“My favorite is Monroe,” said Miller.”They were the Canaries to begin with. Then just after the turn of the century a lot of Dutch people moved into the area, so they became the Monroe Wooden-Shoed Canaries.”

When ESPN had a program on unusual sports team names, Miller submitted the Monroe mascot to its producer.”They thought I made it up,” laughed Miller.”They wanted to know what I’d been drinking!”

There will be no Wooden-Shoed Canaries in this year’s matches. Monroe’s school is long closed, and for reasons unclear, no other has taken up the name. Likewise, no Beetdiggers or Beettoppers will take the court. Such names will live on only in the memories of”guys as goofy as I am,” laughed Miller.

When longtime Yankton sportswriter Hod Nielsen wrote a column about Miller and the sports team names he’d collected, it prompted a tongue-in-cheek follow-up story about new and improved names.

How about an athletic team known as the Allen Wrenches? Who would want to meet the Blunt Instruments on a football field? Could any athlete hold his head high if he was a member of the Custer Puddings or Lemmon Aides? Imagine the time announcers would have if the Florence Nightingales, Garretson Keillors, Gregory Pecks and Clark Kents were thrown together for a tournament.

What about the Irene Good Knights? Marion Ettes? Wall Papers? Emery Boards? Faith Healers? Last but not least, can you imagine having to face the Webster Dictionaries on the field of athletic battle? Consternation would almost certainly ensue if they prevailed.

“We hasten to assure anyone who might take offence that there is none intended,” said Nielsen of his efforts.”It’s just that, in the middle of a cold winter, the mind wanders.”

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Strong Values, Strong Hearts

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 1995 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.


Writing and teaching has been the lifework of Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, a Brule Sioux who grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Her literary achievements have garnered more attention than her classroom pursuits, but in both roles she has labored to cast a positive light on the differences between Native Americans and other races.

Sitting Bull, the great Sioux chief, was quoted as saying, “I have advised my people when you find anything good in the white man’s road pick it up but when you find something bad or that turns out bad drop it. Leave it alone.”

Sneve’s philosophy mirrors that quote. But she encourages her people to also recognize what is good in their own heritage. Sneve realized years ago that the strong values of Indian life were seldom revealed in stories of their culture — especially those family strengths which came under siege during the last 100 years of cultural integration in America.

When her daughter, Shirley, was reading books by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the early 1970s, she asked if the Sneves had lived the same experiences as the Wilders. Before she answered, Virginia read the books herself and discovered that the only reference to Indians spoke of “naked wild men” with horrible smells and bold, fierce faces. She then read other children’s literature and found similar treatment of her ancestry. Some stories told of brave young warriors and beautiful princesses but there were few stories that revealed the real-life strengths of the Indian culture and no stories of modern Indian children.

Sneve, who had been trying to write for adult women’s magazines, decided to try her hand at children’s stories. Her first, Jimmy Yellow Hawk, was a book about a little Sioux boy who wants to change his name. She wrote of his concerns in the contemporary world and the cultural reasons for Indian names. The book won a national competition for minority children’s books in 1972. That started Sneve on a career as a children’s author.

“It has been emotionally rewarding,” said the soft-spoken Sneve when we spoke with her in 1995. “I get letters from children who have criticisms or suggestions. Sometimes they have ideas for better endings. And they can be very blunt.”

But obviously not so blunt as to discourage her. Since the success of Jimmy Yellow Hawk she has written more children’s books and numerous short stories that have appeared in Boy’s Life and other publications and collections.

She has gained a reputation, both in Indian country and the literary community, as a first-rate storyteller. “Virginia is a good example of an elder in the traditional sense of the word,” explained Chuck Woodard, a professor of English at South Dakota State University in Brookings and longtime friend. “She’s a careful observer of experiences, and she has learned, not only from her own experiences but also of her people, which is one and the same in a tribal sense.”

Woodard said Sneve’s ability to imagine is a key to her writing. He said her 1995 book, Completing the Circle, “is a culmination of her lifelong reflections of what it means to be tribal. She uses both recorded events and her own imagination — developed by decades of examination and reflection.”

Sneve’s daughter, Shirley, saw signs of mom’s imagination when she told bedtime stories to her and her brothers, Paul and Alan. “She made up this series of episodes to get us to take a nap. I remember a witch named Helen and some other characters. But back then she left the Indian stories to my grandparents.”

Grist for Sneve’s stories is gleaned from her experiences growing up on the Rosebud Reservation. She attended BIA day schools and graduated from St. Mary’s High School for Indian Girls in Springfield. She then studied at SDSU in Brookings, graduating with a B.S. in 1954 and a master’s in education in 1969. She taught at schools in White, Pierre and Flandreau. When she retired as a teacher and counselor at Rapid City Central High School in 1994, it freed more time for writing.

Sneve sees her writing as an extension of her work as a teacher and counselor — and as a means to give an accurate portrayal of her ancestors’ lives on the Northern Plains. But Sneve doesn’t lecture. It’s not her style. She weaves a lot of legends and true family stories together with facts.

Her explorations have taught her much of the strengths and weaknesses of Sioux culture from the female point of view. “I was amazed at the tenacity of the women and how they held the family together. They had so many trials in their lives, especially in the last 100 years, but they still managed to survive and rise above those trials and not give in.”

She has noted that most literature is written from a male perspective. That is especially true in the case of the American Indian. “Male historians used male sources (missionary, military men and fur traders) in narrating their Sioux histories and those sources reported few events involving the women of the tribes, rarely even noting their names. Yet Indian women really had more of a say of what went on in tribal affairs than anyone on the outside realized,” said Sneve.

The Sioux felt women had a near-mystical power because they could give life. “The tribes realized they bore the children and if there were no women the tribe could not survive.” She discovered a quote from Standing Bear in 1931 who said, “Women and children were the objects of care among the Lakotas and as far as their environment permitted they lived sheltered lives. Life was softened by a greater equality. All the tasks of women — cooking, caring for children, tanning and sewing — were considered dignified and worthwhile. No work was looked upon as menial, consequently there were no menial workers.”

Virtue, modesty, hospitality and devotion to family were highly valued and young girls were encouraged to act appropriately and not bring shame upon the family. Pride in appearance and skill in the womanly arts were also important.

When white men first arrived on the plains, women who cohabited with them brought honor to their families and tribes, according to Sneve. But such marriages often resulted in drudgery and isolation for the Indian woman and if her husband became abusive she did not have the family support she would have had within the tribe.

Mixed-race marriages later became even more difficult. The Driving Hawk and Sneve family trees include such marriages. While they have been successful, Sneve has obviously pondered the dilemmas faced at times by both whites and Indians.

In 1977 she wrote a short story called “Grandpa Was a Cowboy and an Indian.” Here is an excerpt:

First I thought I’d stay out of it but after fists started flying, I jumped in. The first guy that swung at me was a white man so I hit back and was helping the Indians. I thumped away at my white friends till in the confusion an Indian got me in the gut. Now that made me mad. Here I was on his side and he slugged me. I gave him a good one back and then I was fighting Indians. I ended up getting whopped good by both sides and never did make up my mind which bunch I belonged with.

All the conflicts of the Indian culture — both from within and from the outside — caused much disruption in the lives of the Dakota people, said Sneve. “The fact that any families held together is pretty amazing.”

She thinks her own family did well, “because of the values that were passed down from the generations, particularly among the women. Family was important. We took care of one another.”

Those values are still alive today. “Indian women have become more politically active,” Sneve said. “I don’t think Indian women are so much feminists. They are not as concerned about women’s issues as they are about tribal issues and the issues that affect all of their people.”

Woodard, the English professor, said Sneve’s 1995 book represented “a strong affirmation of the values of Dakota women. It shows what powerful models they have been of integrity, courage, humor, storytelling ability and resilience.”

Somewhere between the lines there may also be a call to action, woman to woman, It’s not a loud bugle call — just a gentle lesson of how life was and how we all might learn from the past.

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve Today

Sneve has continued to write since this article was published in 1995. Her most recent book, The Christmas Coat: Memories of my Sioux Childhood appeared in 2011. She has received many honors for her work, including the 1992 Native American Prose Award and the Spirit of Crazy Horse award in 1996. In 2000, Sneve was the first South Dakotan to receive the National Humanities Medal.

Watch for Sneve at the 2012 South Dakota Festival of Books in Sioux Falls. She will be presenting ìLakota Storytellingî and hosting a Q&A after the Lakota Berenstein Bears screening on Saturday.

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Why Poker Alice?

By Jerry Wilson

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2003 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Poker Alice had been dead for 19 years when Nick Schwebach was born. But when Schwebach and three friends were trolling for a name for their new band in the early 1980s, they resurrected her.

Why Poker Alice?”I’m sorry,” guitarist Schwebach said.”I don’t have a good answer for that. We knew about as much about Alice then as anybody who goes to Deadwood and looks at the postcards — that cigar and that squatty face.”

“The name was Newt’s idea,” Schwebach said.”We were throwing around names, some of them not printable, and not coming up with anything, when all of a sudden Newt said,”Poker Alice!” When Avon’s Brenda Fennema sang with the band in its early days, some people thought she was Alice.

Gary”Newt” Knutson died in the early 1990s, and a couple of other originals, drummer Tom Voss and bass player”Smilin’ Jack” Carlson moved on. Various other well-known musicians played with the band over the years, but in recent memory, the regulars have been Schwebach, fiddler Owen DeJong, bass player Larry Rohrer, drummer Al Remund and guitarist/organist Denny”Crazy Legs” Jensen.

In the beginning, the Clay County group played mostly country; two decades later, the band is known not only for virtuosity, but for its vast range of songs.”The band has been a revolutionary process,” Schwebach said.”It’s a great, eclectic mix. If people want a country band, we can be a country band. If they want blues or rockabilly, we can do that. I think I could safely say that over the years we’ve played more than 300 different songs. Our last gig we played three songs we’d never played together before. You get those songs in your reptilian brain, and every now and then they resurface. I can just look at the boys and say ‘it’s one-four-five with a two somewhere in there,’ and that’s about all it takes. Everybody kind of thinks on the same wave length.”

Poker Alice plays somewhere almost every weekend. Some people plan their weddings to be sure Alice can come. A favorite venue is for the hometown crowd at Carey’s in Vermillion. Owen, Nick and Larry also play classic folk and country as The Public Domain Tune Band.

“Poker Alice was an astute businesswoman, and she liked to have a good time,” Schwebach said.”I think she’d love the Poker Alice band.”

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Threshing on the South Dakota Prairie

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Threshing time meant hot, sweaty days of back-breaking labor with sun in your eyes and dust in your mouth and noise from the grinding gears of heavy machinery bouncing between your ears. Itchy, scratchy chaff clung to wherever your skin was bare. And work stretched out in front of you, bundles and bundles of work piled in shocks that meandered in crooked rows over the yellow-stubbled horizon.

Cowboys get lots of credit for working like fools for little pay all week and only getting into town on Saturday nights. Songs are sung of their riding and romancing. Some with good teeth even have a chance to make movies.

But no cowboy could match “woe was me” stories with a real thresherman. And even though the literary types who write the songs and books never did immortalize the threshing teams of the Great Plains states, their exploits are not forgotten. Their grey, steel-wheeled threshing machines (some call them separators) can be seen in all parts of South Dakota. Most were parked in tree groves, ready to be pulled from retirement when the new-fangled combine faltered.

When combines were first introduced in the middle years of the last century, no one trusted them to really work as promised. So a cautious farmer kept his thresher in the trees. He even kept it greased and oiled for safe-keeping. Once they felt comfortable with the combines, some worldly farmers pulled their threshers out by the road as a treat for tourists. There they sit today. City travelers still marvel at the contraptions. They mistake them for everything from primitive UFOs to tin-roofed covered wagons. Because the threshers were sitting by the road, somebody got the good idea of hanging signs on them. If nothing else, South Dakotans are a practical people. Nobody on Madison Avenue in New York City could have designed a more sturdy billboard.

Generally, the thresher signs point the way to the nearest museum. For many years, that’s as close to the museums as threshing machines were allowed. The cowboys’ saddles and boots and spurs were welcomed inside. But the threshing machine stayed out in the elements, left to rust and sink slowly in the sod.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that some South Dakotans realized a part of their agricultural heritage could be lost. Efforts were begun to restore their old machinery and put it on exhibit with the cowboy’s gear. The first organization to collect the machines on a grand scale was Prairie Village, which organized on the outskirts of Madison in 1961.

Farm history is fun for city and country folk alike at places like Menno’s Pioneer Power Show. Photo by Bernie Hunhoff.

Several years later, the Western Dakota Antique Club was formed at Sturgis to preserve old agricultural equipment from West River farms. “We’d been taking in some threshing shows in other areas and we were getting itchy to get something started ourselves,” said Ambrose Bachand, one of about 200 founders of the Sturgis club, when we spoke with him in 1996. Another founder, LeRoy Hardy, remembered when they hooked up to their first threshing machine and pulled it out of the tall grass. “It was in useable condition. It just had to be taken apart and cleaned and greased.”

Hardy, Bachand and most of the original members of the West River club were farmers or had grown up on farms. But they said the popularity of the old machinery isn’t limited to farm kids. “We’ve had lots of city people come to our shows,” said Bachand. “It’s a chance for them to see a little piece of history.”

“When they look at some of these big tractors the pioneers used to break up the sod 100 years ago, it’s plain you don’t have to be a farmer to enjoy that,” said Hayes.

Most threshing bees in the state have more than just a grain demonstration. Madison’s Prairie Village Steam Threshing Jamboree, the granddaddy of South Dakota’s harvest exhibitions, has over 50 turn-of-the-century buildings, including a sod house, country school, print shop, opera house and jail. Rides are available on steam locomotives. But old iron farm equipment still takes center stage. Farmers like to argue over whether the red (International Harvester) or green (John Deere) machines are most reliable; when if the truth were known, both colors and all other shades were cussed equally and repeatedly back in their real working days.

While there was little romance and adventure associated with the oats and wheat harvest 50 years ago, perhaps a certain nostalgia has settled in. All these celebrations seem to be a fitting remembrance to the threshing culture, which has a lot of catching-up to do to take its deserved place besides the cowboy mystique.

Grab a Pitchfork … Or Just Watch

Every threshing celebration has its own flavor, depending on the talents and collections of the local people. Visit one of South Dakota’s threshing demonstrations and volunteer to pitch a bundle or two to get a taste of our agricultural history.

Aug. 3-5: Southeast South Dakota Threshing Show, Lennox. 712-737-2671.
Aug. 10-12: Humboldt Threshing Show.
Aug. 11-12: Twin Brooks Threshing Show.
Aug. 17-19: Black Hills Steam and Gas Threshing Bee, Sturgis.
Aug. 18-19: Rosholt Area Threshing Bee.
Aug. 23-26: Prairie Village Steam Threshing Jamboree, Madison.
Sept. 7-9: James Valley Threshing Show, Andover.
Sept. 8-9: Kuchen & Old Time Harvest Festival, Delmont.
Sept. 22-23: Pioneer Power Show, Menno.
Sept. 28-30: Coal Springs Antique Show & Threshing Bee, Meadow. 788-2854.

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Polka Time in Tabor

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Leonard and Mildred Cimpl were Czech Days staples. The Tabor couple helped organize the summer bash for over 61 years. They only missed one. That was the year they married. “At our place we live Czech Days year round,” Mildred said when we talked to her in 2009.

It takes careful planning to piece together a three-day festival that brings over 5,000 people to the town of 400. There are polka bands to schedule, dances to rehearse and kolaches to bake. Fortunately plenty of bakers are available to prepare the Czech pastry. An assembly line of women roll dough, bake it and add apple, cherry, prune, poppy seed or cottage cheese filling. “Between selling and eating,” they go through about 2,100 dozen, Mildred said.

Polka music is everywhere, even in church. At the polka mass, traditional songs are re-written with religious lyrics and sung in English and Czech. And there’s always an accordion dance band at Beseda Hall.

The most colorful part of Czech Days is the Beseda dancers, who perform the 19th-century Czech balloroom dance in traditional costumes. “In Czechoslovakia, every little village had their own costume,” Mildred explained. “You could almost tell the village by the skirts, or the boleros.” In Tabor, women wear a red skirt, white blouse and black bolero, and men were black pants, a white shirt and red vest.

Tabor has a museum, a cafe and historic St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church. And even if you miss Czech Days you can still order fresh kolaches; local women take orders to make at home.

In 2013, Czech Days will be held June 20-22. For a look at past festivities in Tabor, visit our Czech Days photo gallery.

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Rockin’ the Spearfish Pavilion

By Paul Higbee

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2002 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Spearfish singer Larry Bell and the Continentals played the Pavilion before finding success in Denver.

Early rock ‘n’ roll”was a whole new thing,” said Gary Mule Deer.”It was about being defiant, and of course parents hated it.”

Growing up in Spearfish, Mule Deer experienced big-name recording stars up close and loud, and they changed him forever. From about 1957 until 1964, Friday night meant rock ‘n’ roll dances in the city park Pavilion, dances that drew prime acts: the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chubby Checker, Buddy Holly’s Crickets, the Ronettes, Seals and Croft and the Ventures.

When Waylon Jennings died, he was recalled almost exclusively as a country act. But there are those in Spearfish who remember him coming to town as part of the Crickets. Glen Campbell became a country icon, but first he rocked the Pavilion as part of the Champs, who hit number one in the national pop charts with”Tequila,” and who also claimed Seals and Croft as members.

“I never could dance, but I sat on the rail listening to some of the most remarkable performers of the time,” said Larry Bell.”And I talked with any of them who would take the time, because they were living the life I wanted. Conway Twitty had a big, big rock ‘n’ roll hit, ‘It’s Only Make Believe,’ and I asked him one night at the Pavilion about the pop music business. He was frank, told me it was full of people who’d screw you any way they could, so he was getting out and going country, which is exactly what he did.” Indeed, Twitty went on to record more than 50 number one country hits.

Spearfish’s Larry Bell in 2002, years after his musical debut at the Pavilion.

Bell never learned to dance, but he did form a rock ‘n’ roll act similar to that of his Pavilion idols, despite Twitty’s warning. Larry Bell and the Continentals played the Pavilion, and later went on to considerable success as a Denver band. Bell also worked on the road for the Everly Brothers, who told him they remembered their Spearfish gigs.

“It seemed like they all remembered Spearfish,” said Mule Deer, whose own Los Angeles-based music career often reunited him with Pavilion performers.”That’s because they’d try to get into town a day early to see Mount Rushmore, and the Black Hills made Spearfish memorable.”

Of course, the musicians themselves made Fridays memorable for their fans. Mule Deer has never forgotten Jerry Lee Lewis playing Spearfish as”Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” dominated the airwaves. Mule Deer and a friend sat outside the Pavilion listening to that song on the radio, then turned the radio off to listen to Lewis playing it live.

Spearfish fans stood respectfully still for the Ventures’ instrumental numbers, and Jerry Lee Lewis said he envied that. But Spearfish responded to Lewis’s music by dancing with all the energy it could muster.

Jerry Sternad of Spearfish booked the rock ‘n’ roll acts. The American Legion post, which was the responsible for the Pavilion and needed to make money there, contracted with him.”How did he do it? I don’t know,” marveled Bell.”But Sternad got people right at the peak of their careers.”

Performers arrived by car — typically”two Cadillacs and a U-Haul,” Mule Deer said. Fans drove in too, from all over the Black Hills and beyond, probably 1,000 to 1,500 on good nights, and maybe 2,000 for the biggest acts. Admission was a couple bucks, but not everyone tried to get in the wood-frame Pavilion. Big screened windows made the music audible for blocks, and lots of couples preferred staying in their parked cars and…well, listening.

It’s hard to beat the creekside city park’s summertime ambiance, with the piney scent of Spearfish Canyon on the wind; it’s those kinds of nights most often recalled decades later. But there were dances in the dead of winter, too.”It took a long time to heat that big building up,” Mule Deer said,”But eventually all the bodies would do it.”

Spearfish musician and teacher Lyle Berry played with a Black Hills group called Lyle, Doug and Paul.

Things sometimes heated up in other ways too, recalled Lyle Berry. He moved to Spearfish as a high school sophomore in 1956. While rock ‘n’ roll hits of years ago are often presented today as tame souvenirs of a more innocent time, in fact there was nothing intended to be tame or innocent about them.”Those dances were known as the place to go to get close to trouble,” Berry recalled.”They weren’t for young kids. Mostly it was a crowd already out of high school.”

There was always a supply of liquor in the parked cars, and Spearfish boys thought of the events as prime opportunities for meeting out-of-town girls. Not infrequently those girls came to Spearfish with possessive boyfriends. Booze and jealousy combined to trigger some nasty fights, a few of which are remembered even now in details which elicit winces. Quick fights of passion usually happened in the Pavilion parking lot. Big ones involving pairs of expert fighters or long scores to settle were moved a couple miles out of town, away from police interruption, after the music.

Berry, who went on to teach high school 31 years in Spearfish and Lead, marveled at how different life was for Black Hills kids then.

“I didn’t have much money, and neither did anyone else I knew,” he said.”It cost just a few dollars to get into the Pavilion, but you’d have to watch your money during the week to make sure you had enough on Friday. Of course, it was the only place to see that kind of entertainment, so it was really something to look forward to.”

Berry was yet another Pavilion kid who grew up to perform both solo and duet acts in Black Hills bars and supper clubs of the 1970s, and as part of a group called Lyle, Doug and Paul. Seeing one of his peers, Larry Bell, succeed on the Pavilion stage made it seem possible Lyle could play, too.

“Those dances were known as the place to go to get close to trouble.”


Friday night dances at the Pavilion, built in the 1920s, were popular long before rock ‘n’ roll. Buddy Meredith and his KOTA Cowboys played there, as did nationally-known and local big bands. Wilber Tretheway from Lead, who later would be credited with saving the Pavilion, led a much-loved big band. Another Lead man, Henry Phillips, brought the Henry Phillips and the Ambassadors band to the Pavilion regularly for ten years in the 1940s and 1950s.

Bob Phillips sometimes carried his father’s drums in and out of the building.”Spearfish really turned out for dad’s dances,” Bob said, just as it did for rock ‘n’ roll. Cowboy and big band dances continued after rock ‘n’ roll continued to share the spotlight.

Just as Spearfish appreciated local country and big band groups, it got behind rock ‘n’ rollers with local or regional connections. Both Mule Deer and Bell said Myron Lee and the Caddies of Sioux Falls were hugely popular in Spearfish.”Myron Lee was a great saxophone man,” Bell said.”At least in our area, he really introduced the sax.”

Like Bell, Mule Deer eventually made it onto the Pavilion stage.”I mentioned how the musicians remembered Spearfish because of the Black Hills,” he said with a grin.”Well, maybe they also remembered because there was always a kid bugging them to sing with them. Me.”

After a Los Angeles music career, Gary Mule Deer once again lives in Spearfish, home of the hall of his youthful dreams.

The kid had talent. He learned guitar by picking his way through Johnny Cash and Crickets numbers. One night after Buddy Holly had died in an Iowa plane crash, the Crickets called Mule Deer up to perform”Summertime Blues” and”Mule Skinner Blues” with them. Mule Deer became friends with the Crickets and the Everly Brothers, both of whom played Spearfish often. He also formed a bond with the Ventures, partly because he ran Spearfish’s Vita movie theater.

“My dad bought the Vita and had me running it in 1963,” Mule Deer said.”The Ventures loved movies, so after their Pavilion shows I’d run a special showing of whatever we had playing, just for them. I’d pay the projectionist a little extra, and we’d even have concessions. It became a Spearfish ritual for them.”

Mule Deer’s rock ‘n’ roll friends encouraged him to polish his music, and before long, he had his own band, the Vaqueros, opening Pavilion shows. By 1965, Mule Deer’s career made Los Angeles his official residence, although more nights than not he was on the road. From time to time Mule Deer crossed paths with Pavilion alumni. When he and Jerry Lee Lewis played Lake Tahoe, Lewis began calling him”Spearfish” in honor of that association. The Ventures, never forgetting the movies and popcorn, set Mule Deer and his California band up with a line of guitars.

Back in Spearfish, the Pavilion turned quiet. After the Beatles toured America in 1964 and 1965, promoters saw the biggest rock ‘n’ roll acts had potential for filling not just dance halls, but arenas and stadiums. Spearfish dances got smaller and smaller, and more modern venues took shape in the area. Within a few years, the Pavilion was more likely to host a Boy Scout jamboree on a Friday night than big-name entertainment.

By the mid-1980s the building had fallen into disrepair, and might have been lost, except that former big band leader Wilbur Tretheway had moved to town and become mayor. He dubbed himself”the begging mayor” because he was prepared to plead for labor and materials to save the building. He succeeded, and today the Pavilion, more sturdy and comfortable than ever, bears the late Tretheway’s name.

No historical marker relates the fact that rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famers once strutted across the tiny stage. Gary Mule Deer, Larry Bell and Lyle Berry — the Spearfish kids who found rock ‘n’ roll life more than a fleeting fantasy — all live in Spearfish again, though Mule Deer is proof you need to be careful what you wish for. The guy who wanted to travel still spends many nights on the road performing.

But for a few weeks each year he’s home in the Hills, close to the big white building where so much began.