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A Musical Bridge

By John Andrews

Bryan Akipa is a self-taught red cedar flute player who also makes the instruments in his home near Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Akipa has joined the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra for several performances in South Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Delta David Gier was among five finalists to be the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s next music director in 2003. When the search committee asked why he was interested in moving from New York to Sioux Falls, he said,”I’m looking for someplace to build something significant.” Gier won the job, and his innovations have elevated the orchestra to national prominence, elicited praise from the nation’s most respected music critic in the pages of The New Yorker and earned him the 2022 Ditson Conductor’s Award, presented by Columbia University to conductors who demonstrate an extraordinary passion for advancing American music.

But perhaps his most important contribution to the people of his new home state has been the Lakota Music Project, an endeavor that seeks to heal relationships between Natives and non-Natives through music. Since the idea germinated in early 2005, it has blossomed into multiple performances, recordings, workshops and, most importantly, relationships that might never have developed had music not served as the bridge between two cultures that have long been mired in mistrust.

‚ÄãGier arrived in Sioux Falls with a solid musical background. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, a Fulbright Scholarship allowed him to begin a career in professional conducting in Europe. He completed an apprenticeship with the Philadelphia Orchestra and then spent 15 years as an assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic, the last five years dovetailing with his appointment with the South Dakota Symphony.

‚ÄãAs Gier planned his inaugural 2004-2005 season, he also wanted to gain a sense of how the orchestra fit into the fabric of Sioux Falls and South Dakota. “The one thing that was an unknown for me was how the orchestra was really serving its community and what the potential was for that,” he says.”During my first year, I was assessing — other than just playing concerts in the Pavilion — what else the orchestra was doing and what else could be done.”

‚ÄãAt a reception one evening, Gier met a young African American woman who was involved in the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities.”I suggested to her that maybe we should do something together, because a lot of orchestras have MLK concerts and bring in Black composers and Black artists,” Gier recalls.”She smiled and nodded and said, ‘If you really want to talk about racial prejudice in South Dakota, you should be talking to the Native Americans.’ After 20 years of living in New York, my jaw hit the ground.”

‚ÄãThe seed was planted for what became the Lakota Music Project. The SDSO hosted a lunch for about a dozen Lakota and Dakota leaders at the Falls Overlook Cafe in the spring of 2005. Gier remembers the undercurrents of mistrust that seemed to waft through the room as he spoke.”I came in with all kinds of ideas on ways we could collaborate, and that was my first lesson in learning to shut up and listen,” he says.”They didn’t need yet another white man’s program coming in and trying to help. That wasn’t anything that would be helpful to anybody.”

The orchestra welcomed the Creekside Singers to the Lakota Music Project. Pictured are (back, from left) SDSO music director Delta David Gier, John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear and SDSO principal oboist Jeffrey Paul and (front, from left) Brent Spoonhunter, Hanna Gasdia and Ari Black Bear.

Fortunately, Barry LeBeau was intrigued. LeBeau was a veteran lobbyist in Pierre for United Sioux Tribes, but he also had a background in theater.”I think he had an understanding for what the arts could do in terms of helping to generate understanding across cultures,” Gier says of LeBeau, who died in 2020.

The two of them began traveling to reservations across the state. Their first stop was Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, where tribal elder Robert Moore — who is also a classically trained singer — brought them into a tribal council meeting.”He gave us a five-minute platform to talk about what we’d like to try to do. That was the first stamp of approval that we got.”

They also sought input from Ronnie Thiesz, a longtime professor of Native Studies and literature at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, author of several books on Lakota music and culture and a founding member of the Porcupine Singers. Moore and Thiesz began traveling with Gier and LeBeau.”In talking with Ronnie, we really fleshed out what kind of a program would be meaningful to people,” Gier says.”Those relationships became the most important thing and helped to shape our initial tour and program.”

In the meantime, other orchestra members were doing their own groundwork. Jeffrey Paul, who is entering his 20th season as the symphony’s principal oboist, had also been traveling to reservations with the Dakota Wind Quintet, a small group of orchestra instrumentalists that performs concerts in smaller settings around the state.”My first time out with that group was in Pine Ridge,” Paul says.”It was just so clear to me that we needed to be listening and communicating and developing lasting relationships. So, we started opening the doors to other conversations. ‘What’s important to you? What kind of music do you listen to and how does music play a role in your life?’

“On some of our tours, we’d have a discussion and a jam session where we might talk and learn about the function of music in each other’s traditions and play some of the music that fits these functions back and forth. As you might expect, there was a lot more commonality than difference. It was kind of serendipitous that David took an interest in that as well.”

Paul was uniquely situated to help develop the Lakota Music Project. A native of Thousand Oaks, California, he studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Southern California, earning two degrees in oboe performance while also playing and learning piano, saxophone, guitar, bagpipes and even Irish whistles. He also developed a strong interest in the folk music of other cultures, likely because of trips he took as a boy to visit his grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada.”Back in the old days they used to say that Scottish culture was more preserved in Nova Scotia than it was in Scotland because there was so little traffic in and out,” Paul says.”When I was in the throes of studying classical music really intensely at one of the conservatories, a Scottish musician came in. It was just his voice and a guitar, but it really struck a chord in me. It was just beautiful music, profound in its simplicity and tradition. For me, that kind of tore down those conservatory walls because it affected me so much.”

That new perspective helped as he visited with elders and musicians, exploring the nuances of indigenous music and how it might blend with traditional orchestral music. Paul had written a piece called Desert Wind for electric guitar before moving to South Dakota. Gier heard the piece and asked him to expand it for chamber orchestra and to explore how to incorporate it into the Lakota Music Project. He performed it for Melvin Young Bear, keeper of the drum for the Porcupine Singers.”It dealt with feelings of being alone in both positive and negative connotations, and he said it went really well with a song that he had written for his granddaughter,” Paul says.”He said he had these same feelings when he held his granddaughter on his knee, and then she went home.”

Organizers spent four years traveling and talking to tribal elders, musicians and cultural leaders before the first Lakota Music Project performance in 2009. Since then, the group has staged concerts around the state, launched workshops and recorded an album.

Paul and Young Bear began working on an adapted version of Desert Wind that included Young Bear’s Harmony’s Song. That collaboration became the hallmark of the Lakota Music Project.”We were learning as we were going, how to listen to people and how we might actually build this thing together by listening to elders and musicians and cultural leaders. That building together became the key, and still is the key, to the Lakota Music Project,” Gier says.

“Orchestras are good at programming and implementing. That’s what we do. We’re not good at being flexible, and this kind of cross-cultural stuff was totally new. There was plenty of Indianist music that could be played. These are white composers who were truly inspired by Native American culture and seeking to honor that, but this is not something that was going to accomplish any kind of cross-cultural understanding. This cultural appropriation discussion wasn’t as heated a topic 15 years ago as it is now, but it became really evident that this was something that we needed to avoid, so we’ve never implemented that music in any of our Lakota Music Project tours. It’s always been original music that was created together.”

Members of the orchestra, tribal elders, scholars and musicians met, talked and played for more than four years before the inaugural performance of the Lakota Music Project was staged in 2009. The two-hour concert, featuring the orchestra and the Creekside Singers, explored how each culture experiences love, war, grief and celebration.”We would go back and forth. The drum group and orchestra would play examples of music that expressed each of the four themes,” Gier says.”It demonstrated not just the musical but the interpersonal relationship that we were developing between our orchestra and these Lakota musicians.”

The Lakota Music Project then took the show on the road, performing on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Lake Traverse reservations, Sioux Falls, Rapid City and at Crazy Horse Memorial on Native American Day in 2010.

All the work culminating in that first performance and tour is now considered the first phase of the Lakota Music Project. The second phase, spanning 2012 through 2016, included a new partnership with the South Dakota Humanities Council and the world premiere of WaktÈgli OlÛwa≈ã (Victory Songs) by American Indian composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Its five movements each honor a Lakota warrior: Red Cloud, Gall, Crazy Horse, Two Strike and Sitting Bull.

There were performances at Crazy Horse Memorial, Pierre, Eagle Butte, Sisseton and Mobridge. A fourth commissioned work, Pentatonic Fantasy, combined the talents of Paul and Bryan Akipa, a cedar flute player from Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation.”We spent some time on Clear Lake near Sisseton getting to know each other and talking about the instruments,” Paul says.”He demonstrated a lot of cedar flute traditions, how he makes them, and the symbolism involved. It’s been a wonderful friendship with him for many years. I wrote him an entire concerto to play with the orchestra, but the second movement, ‘Wind on Clear Lake,’ seemed to grow legs and turned into its own piece.”

John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear (the Keeper of the Drum) and Ari Black Bear perform as the Creekside Singers.

Akipa is a self-taught musician and flute maker who began studying the instrument as a student of Oscar Howe at the University of South Dakota. He received the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work preserving the flute and its music. The lifetime honor is the country’s highest award in folk and traditional arts.

He is heartened by the diverse audiences that have seen Lakota Music Project performances.”For the traditional flute, it’s relaxing music, but it’s almost like you are talking to the people,” Akipa says.”You are communicating with them and you’re telling a story with the song. You’re playing a song that could be sung. That’s for one type of audience. The orchestra has a much different style, and you’re bringing those two audiences together.

“For me, it was good to get more exposure for the flute. The traditional red cedar flute is really important to the culture, but maybe to other people it’s like a new age thing, or just a fad or something. Playing with the symphony helped other people take the music and the flute more seriously. The flute, and what it can do and the sound it can produce, really gets their attention. Some people might even have a spiritual experience. It’s just the way they interpret or feel the music.”

The third phase, from 2017 to 2019, included a chamber music program series of concerts in Washington, D.C., featuring Akipa and Emmanuel Black Bear, a traditional singer and drummer from Pine Ridge and two-time winner of a Native American Music Award. Jerod Tate (the orchestra’s composer-in residence in 2017) also launched the Music Composition Academies, week-long workshops every July in Sisseton and Black Hills State University in Spearfish open to students of all musical skill levels. They work with three composer mentors — Jeffrey Paul, Michael Begay and Ted Wiprud (composer-in-residence in 2018 and 2019).”It’s maybe one of the most important things to me that I do musically in life,” Paul says.”We do maybe a little bit of teaching but that’s not the primary focus, which is to draw out pure musical ideas from students.”

In September, when members of the orchestra are back on contract, they return to Sisseton and Spearfish and perform the world premieres of the pieces written by the young musicians. Gier says the experience can be cathartic.”These kids are dealing with deep emotional issues. They’re writing pieces of music about suicide because they lost a friend in school, or about missing and murdered indigenous women because this young woman lost an auntie. They’re processing this through the music they’re writing.”

Unfortunately, while the student academies have continued operating in Sisseton and Spearfish, other aspects of the Lakota Music Project have temporarily fallen silent. Like many initiatives in the arts world, much of the symphony’s programming is reliant upon grant funding, and in 2022 there has been little to none. But Gier and the other musicians who have invested 17 years into the one-of-a-kind endeavor are hopeful for brighter days.

“I went into it maybe crazily but with the idea that this is something that the South Dakota symphony should be doing. There are nine Indian reservations here, there’s a history of racial tension to put it mildly, and so rather than ignore it we could embrace it. My hope was that it would become so much a part of the fabric of who we are as the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra that when I’m gone it would continue, that the relationships between us and the Native community across the state would be so rich and meaningful on both sides of the equation that there would just be no question that this would continue, that this is who we are.”

That would certainly be something significant.

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

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Following Black Elk’s Good Red Road

By Bernie Hunhoff

ONLY 11 AMERICANS have ever been canonized as Catholic saints. The 12th could be Nicholas Black Elk, a thoughtful and humble Lakota holy man who lived in the Pine Ridge country of southwest South Dakota in a tiny community called Manderson.

Black Elk is remembered as a tragic 19th century visionary who, in his old age, despaired the loss of his lands and culture. That much is true. However, Catholic leaders say he was also an exemplary Christian who preached and practiced hope and forgiveness. There are disagreements over which part of his life was most meaningful, but of course his latter years prompted the Catholic Church to consider him a saint.

His road to canonization, which began in 2017, could span decades. The same process took more than a century for Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk woman who was canonized in 2012. First, Black Elk must be declared venerable by the Vatican. Then religious leaders will look for miracles attributed to him. However, the very fact that he is a candidate for sainthood has already brought bishops, religious pilgrims and other visitors to Manderson and the Pine Ridge.

*****

MANDERSON HAS 400 residents and one store. That is one store more that it would have if not for Emma Clifford, who for 40 years has operated Pinky’s, a social spot for youth and adults. As Black Elk’s legacy grows with the prospect of sainthood, travelers from far away now occasionally share the counter.

Sunday Mass welcomes worshippers at St. Agnes Church, which has become a centerpoint of the effort to canonize Black Elk.

“We are seeing not only Catholics, but non-Catholics, people of all faiths,” Clifford says.”But that is the story of Black Elk. When we pray to him today, we pray for people of all other faiths, hoping they will respect us.”

The town’s only other private business is Bette’s Kitchen, run by Betty O’Rourke, a great-granddaughter of Black Elk. She and her extended family serve meals in their home to locals and out-of-towners. Some days, they host meetings or gatherings on the hilltop residence, with its expansive views of the chalk-white bluffs that give the Pine Ridge its name.

The family’s land, on the southern edge of town, is where Black Elk famously welcomed Nebraska writer John Neihardt, author of the book Black Elk Speaks that brought literary attention to both of them many years after it was published in 1933. A one-room log cabin where the holy man spent some of his final years stands beneath shade trees halfway up the hill.

The busiest place in Manderson is a tribal school, the smallest of nine on the Pine Ridge with 152 students. Every year on Oct. 8, as the faculty and staff observe Black Elk Day, they track how many of the students are direct descendants of the holy man. At last count, there were 28.

St. Agnes Catholic Church, where Black Elk preached and prayed for decades, stands on the north side of town. The white church is plain even by rural standards. Below eight simple stained-glass windows are two rows of rickety pews — the same wood pews, no doubt, where Black Elk once sat and kneeled.

A brown tipi with a cross has been painted behind the altar. Statues of Mary and Joseph and a picture of Jesus stand at the front, but they share this church with Black Elk: his picture hangs above the sacristy door; prayer cards with his image lie in the pews; another photo of the Lakota holy man rests on a table with a sage bowl and an eagle feather; and just below the picture of Christ is a wood chair, colorfully painted by local artist Mark Anderson with Black Elk’s name and likeness.

*****

ON A WARM SUNDAY last summer, we departed Rapid City, turned left at Hermosa and drove two hours southeast, skirting the southern edge of the hauntingly beautiful Badlands country, to learn more about Manderson.

Black Elk descendants are numerous in Pine Ridge country. Betty O’Rourke, a great-granddaughter, ran a restaurant in Manderson with help from her grandchildren, Austin and Maisena. Photos of the man who may one day be a saint decorated the dining room wall.

When we arrived at 9 a.m., Betty O’Rourke and her family were busily preparing to serve a group of college-age missionaries who were scheduled to arrive for lunch. With her black hair drawn tightly back, you can see a resemblance between Betty and her famous great-grandfather, whose photos hang in the dining room of the restaurant and home.

“I was born a Black Elk,” she said, between checking casseroles in the oven.”My mother, Grace, was a Black Elk. They called her Gracie. My Aunt Kate was the first Native American woman in the U.S. Army.”

Betty says she and her husband, Chuck, are old enough to retire, but they keep running the restaurant for two reasons: the community needs an eatery and,”it teaches our grandchildren how to be in the world and run a business.”

She does not advertise or promote her connections to Black Elk.”Everything Grandpa said was that you should never profit from your culture,” she says.”We have certain people who do but I don’t think it’s right.”

Betty said she wouldn’t join us at Mass. She had to watch the casseroles.”When I was at Holy Rosary School, we would go to church every day. Sometimes two or three times a day, but you can’t get me to church today because I believe God is with me all the time. I don’t have to go to that building to pray to Him.”

She likes the priests from Holy Rosary, who often visit the restaurant.”They know how I feel and when they come here to eat, they don’t talk to me about going to church,” she laughs, and then she returns to the oven.

*****

MASS STARTS AT 11 a.m. on most Sundays. A priest and four Catholic nuns from the Holy Rosary Mission arrived just minutes beforehand because Joyce Tibbitts, the parish catechist, had already prepared the altar. Tibbitts does many duties that Black Elk performed for decades.

The simple but sturdy wood-frame church at Manderson was built by Black Elk and his friends in 1911.

The service began with Ave Maria, led by the nuns who had come from India to work as missionaries. One strummed a guitar. The church could hold a hundred people, but only a few dozen sat in the pews.

Father Edmund Yainao Lunghar, a priest from the Himalayan Mountain country in India, welcomed everyone with a smile. In a short homily, he told a story of a single mother who struggled to raise a troubled teenager. He said the woman steadfastly maintained that,”At the end of the day, no matter how much he misbehaves, he is still my son.”

Father Edmund asked,”How much greater is God’s love? How much will your heavenly Father forgive you if you turn to Him? Let us pray that we have a listening ear. The calling of the Good Shepherd, the whispers of the Good Shepherd, invites us to pastures where life is abundant.”

Midway through Mass, Tibbitts went from pew to pew, waving smoke from a bowl of smoldering sage toward each parishioner. It is a Native American version of the Catholic Church’s use of incense as ceremonial purification.

Rather than ring a bell, Tibbitts beat a drum as Father Edmund consecrated the bread and wine. A service at St. Agnes has the repetitive traditions of the Catholic Mass that bore the youth and comfort their elders, yet it is also like no other religious service in the world. During the Prayers to the Faithful, an appeal was made for a teen who had just died in a hit-and-run accident on the highway; another was said for a boy who was killed in a drive-by shooting that week.

One of the worshippers, a slender woman in her 50s, appeared to be intoxicated. During the Eucharistic prayers while everyone else was kneeling, she approached the altar. She’s not the first troubled person to do so at a Sunday service. It happens in other churches. But never was such a woman treated kindlier. Father Edmund gently assured her they could talk later. She returned to a pew.

At the close of Mass, the congregation recited a special Prayer for the Canonization of Nicholas Black Elk, which includes these lines:

Faithfully he walked the Sacred Red Road

And generously witnessed the Good News

Of our Lord Jesus Christ

Among the Native American people.

Open our hearts also to recognize

The Risen Christ in other cultures and peoples.

The congregation then stepped outside the old church building to socialize in an adjacent hall over coffee and baked goods. An artist’s drawings, featuring Black Elk with a halo, hang in the hall. Tibbitts says the art is considered inappropriate by the Church because halos are reserved for saints, and Black Elk is yet to be canonized.

*****

MANY SAINTS WERE imperfect early in life. Many suffered great injustices. Black Elk fits both categories.

He was born between 1858 and 1866. His tombstone in the weedy cemetery across the road from St. Agnes Church lists the former. The Catholic Church seems to have settled on the latter, while other historians cite 1863.

Black Elk nearly died when he was about 9 years old. He recounted the incident in great detail to Neihardt, whose daughter Hilda took copious notes for days and days during the summer of 1931. Her notes were published in Raymond DeMallie’s 1985 book The Sixth Grandfather. It’s considered more accurate than Black Elk Speaks, which is accepted as a more liberal translation embellished by John Neihardt’s own poetry and spirituality.

Black Elk used the missionaries’ Two Roads Map to teach children and adults about Christ’s life.

Black Elk recalled that his legs, arms and face became swollen and then he drifted into a dream state. He remembered being visited by grandfathers who instructed him in the good that comes from the harmonious red road and the evil that comes from the black road, including war and death. He realized that the sixth grandfather, a very old man with white hair,”was myself Ö at first he was an old man but he got younger and younger until he was a little boy nine years old.”

He saw a village of men, women and children who were dying.”I was frightened at the sight and tried to get away,” he said.”I passed in front of the tipi and all the people got up. The spirit said, ëThat’s the way you shall save men.'”

His recounting of the 12-day dream state took 22 pages in The Sixth Grandfather. Toward the end he notes,”They had taken me all over the world and showed me all the powers. They took me to the center of the earth and to the top of the peak they took me to review it all. I was to see the bad and the good. I was to see what is good for humans and what is not good for humans.”

*****

THREE YEARS LATER, Black Elk and his family were at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry were annihilated by the Lakota. Black Elk, then 12, was kept away from the main battle but he had close encounters with soldiers. At one point he was urged by an adult warrior to scalp a dying soldier. The Neihardt notes record him remembering,”Probably it hurt him because he began to grind his teeth. After I did this I took my pistol and shot him in the forehead.”

As the fighting concluded, he and about six other boys returned to the battle scene.”When we got there some [soldiers] were still alive, kicking. Then many boys came. And we got our arrows out and put arrows into the men and pushed some of the arrows that were sticking out in further.”

He took another scalp and handed it to a younger boy.”Then I got tired of looking around,” he said.”I could smell nothing but blood and gunpowder, so I got sick of it pretty soon. I was a very happy boy. I wasn’t a bit sorry.”

However, in the winter of his 17th year he felt a calling. He told the Neihardts that he heard a voice saying,”Your grandfather told you to do these things. It is time for you to do them.” He developed a horse dance.”After this ceremony was completed it seemed that I was above the earth and I did not touch the earth. I felt very happy and I was also happy to see my people, as it looked like they were renewed and happy. They all greeted me and were very generous to me, telling me that their relatives here and there were sick and were cured in a mysterious way and congratulated me, giving me gifts. I was now recognized as a medicine man at the age of 17.”

“He prayed with a pipe and a rosary,” says Father Daoust of Holy Rosary.

In 1886 he learned that Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show wanted to employ Indians to journey”across the great water” to Europe. He and about 10 friends joined, traveling by train to New York City where they entertained at Madison Square Garden for months.

“As we left New York I could see nothing but water, water, water,” he told the Neihardts. He performed for Queen Victoria in England, and later quoted her as saying that it was wrong for white people”to take you around as beasts to show to the people.”

He and three others became separated from Buffalo Bill’s entourage and found themselves lost in a strange country. None could speak English. Fortunately, London authorities linked them with another traveling show run by a man called Mexican Joe. They toured Italy and France for another year before returning home.

Back at Pine Ridge, he found his relatives and friends confined within reservation borders. Some were ill with strange diseases introduced by settlers and soldiers. Many were hungry and starving due to the demise of the buffalo culture and broken promises. Federal rules titled”The Code of Indian Offences” outlawed traditional dances and religious ceremonies. The rules also limited the practices of medicine men like Black Elk.

A new spirituality called the Ghost Dance was gaining strength. Black Elk heard that friends were dancing it below Manderson at Wounded Knee so he went to observe.”They had a sacred pole in the center,” he told the Neihardts.”It was a circle in which they were dancing and I could clearly see that this was my sacred hoop and in the center they had an exact duplicate of my tree that never blooms and it came to my mind that perhaps with this power the tree would bloom and the people would get into the sacred hoop again.”

The Ghost Dance’s popularity scared U.S. military leaders, and that led to Sitting Bull’s violent death on Dec. 15, 1890. It also contributed to the tragic confrontation between cavalry soldiers and the Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek on the morning of December 29.

Black Elk had spent a sleepless night because he sensed something was about to happen. He was walking at daybreak when he heard gunfire. From afar, Black Elk and a friend saw the wasicus (white men) coming with wagon guns. They heard shooting and cries. They saw women and children running to hide in the gullies. He and about 20 others rode to help. A bullet grazed his leg. He told Neihardt that he felt bulletproof, and that he heard bullets whizzing by.

In Black Elk Speaks, the holy man is quoted as saying that something died in the blood and mud and was buried in the blizzard that followed.”A people’s dream died there,” Neihardt wrote.”It was a beautiful dream Ö the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

That tragic poetry is not found in the actual notes, as published in The Sixth Grandfather. In DeMallie’s text, Black Elk describes the massacre and the aftermath. He laments that perhaps he should have died with the many others, and he says he prayed to the spirits above, saying,”Grandfathers, behold me and send me a power for revenge.”

*****

THIS IS WHERE Black Elk’s life story gets even more complicated. After the Wounded Knee massacre, he continued to serve his people as a medicine man. On many occasions, he found himself at sickbeds with Christian missionaries who were also there to serve. He had friends who had converted to Christianity. In fact, his first wife, Katherine War Bonnet, was a Catholic. She died in 1903.

This photo of Black Elk introducing the rosary to a Lakota child was widely used in Holy Rosary’s promotional materials in the 1940s.

In the autumn of 1904, he was tending to a sick boy who lived north of Holy Rosary when Father Joseph Lindebner arrived. The Jesuit priest, a native of Germany, was well-liked by many reservation residents, who called him”the Little Father.” Lindebner had baptized the lad earlier, and reportedly became upset that Black Elk was there with his tobacco offerings, drums, rattles and other items.

“Satan, get out!” Lindebner declared, tossing Black Elk’s belongings out of the tent. At least, that was the story told decades later by Black Elk’s daughter Lucy. She said her father did not return the anger. The priest obviously saw something special in the medicine man and invited him to accompany him back to Holy Rosary to learn more about Jesus Christ.

Black Elk, curious about the new religion, stayed two weeks at the mission. He found Catholic theology compatible with his traditional beliefs in the Great Spirit, wakan tanka, and on Dec. 6, 1904 he was baptized. It was the feast day of St. Nicholas, so he took the saint’s name.

The rest of Black Elk’s story is the era not covered in Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. He converted hundreds of people. He and his friends built the St. Agnes Church building that stands today. He traveled, sometimes long distances by horseback in stormy weather, to tend to the sick and dying. He served short assignments at St. Stephen’s Mission in Wyoming and Marty Mission on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, but most of his life was spent serving the Pine Ridge people.

Bill White, a descendant by marriage to Black Elk, is a member of the Sainthood Working Group. White is a permanent deacon of the Catholic Diocese, serving at Porcupine on the Pine Ridge. He believes Black Elk became comfortable with Christianity because it fit his childhood vision of unity among men.”He saw the same thing written in Revelation. We are all standing before the Lamb of God. He always was striving to unite people. He had many non-Native friends throughout his life.

“I am certain he fits the model of a man who lived a heroic life and a model life,” White says.”He remained fully Lakota, and he saw that as being compatible with Christianity.”

*****

“BLACK ELK IS MY hero,” Joyce Tibbitts told us, as her congregation departed the church social hall on that Sunday morning. Actually, there are two halls behind St. Agnes Church — a Tekakwitha Hall, where Native American women once met in prayer groups, and a Black Elk Hall for the men. Today, Tekakwitha Hall is Tibbitts’ parish office, and a repository of information for the sainthood effort.

Tibbitts says the process began when relatives of Black Elk, who had attended the canonization service for Tekakwitha in 2012, asked Robert Gruss, then the bishop of the West River Diocese, if their grandfather might also deserve consideration. The working group was created, and it has already submitted a request to the Vatican Congregation of Saints.

Joyce Tibbetts’ tattooed arms reflect both Christian and traditional Lakota spirituality. Her pastoral duties at St. Agnes Church are akin to those performed by Black Elk in the early decades of the 20th century.

Though there are 10,000 saints, none are quite like Black Elk.”He prayed with both a pipe and a rosary,” says Father Joe Daoust, the superior of Holy Rosary Mission and a member of the group.”Some say he walked the two roads between Lakota and Catholic spirituality,” Daoust says.”But he actually blended the two into one red road to God.”

Tibbitts says she and others now walk that same road.”We are a swirl of religions — traditionalists, Christians and combinations of the two. We go to church and we also go to the sweat lodge or the big sun dance in summer.”

She says priests from Holy Rosary once distributed Holy Communion at the sun dance, but the practice was stopped — not by Catholic clergy but by traditional Native American leaders.”If a priest does show up at the sun dance today, the people will be respectful, but they cannot participate anymore.”

Tibbitts believes the challenges of everyday life on the reservation demand that anyone who wants to help — Christian or traditional — must be welcomed.”We’ve once again had a string of suicides,” she said.”The youngest was just 11, the oldest 18. We had a boy hit by a car. This week we buried a 20-year-old who died from illegal booze.”

Because liquor and beer sales are prohibited on the Pine Ridge, bootleggers are making home brews known as skips.”They use everything from hand sanitizers to rubbing alcohol, anything with an alcohol content,” Tibbitts says.”The result is a toxic brew that is killing our people.”

Poverty and health crises further complicate life in Manderson and the surrounding communities. Premature deaths are so frequent that plans are being considered to expand the parish cemetery, which lies just across the highway from St. Agnes Church.

Cynics might surmise that neither Native or Christian spiritualities have done enough to change a sad trajectory that has persisted since the buffalo were nearly exterminated and reservation borders were drawn. Optimists, on the other hand, would find hope among the good people who run the restaurants, stores, schools and churches of Black Elk’s home territory.

When Black Elk and Neihardt climbed Harney Peak (now known as Black Elk Peak) in 1931, the holy man spoke of the troubled times that faced his people.”The good road and the road of difficulties you have made to cross,” he said that day,”and where they cross, the place is holy.”

Seven decades after Black Elk’s death, it’s still easy to encounter holiness in his hometown. Sainthood might someday bring greater attention to the holy man’s humble, forgiving legacy. Maybe it would even bring about miraculous change.

However, the people we met in Manderson are not waiting for miracles. Like their town’s famous native son, they face the intersecting roads of good and bad every day.”I could see that it was next to impossible,” Black Elk said of his vision for a great flowering tree of unity in 1931,”but there was nothing like trying.”

Perhaps the beautiful miracle is that the trying continues today.

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

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Stopping the Green Glacier

By John Andrews

Cedar tree encroachment is becoming a problem in the Missouri River valley, choking out native species and reducing available forage for cattle.

WE STOOD HIGH ATOP a ridge on Rich and Sara Grim’s ranch in Gregory County. The Missouri River below looked like a wide blue ribbon stretching from horizon to horizon. A gentle northwest breeze made the afternoon’s 91 degrees feel like 75. Cattle stood on a point along the river munching prairie grass, surrounded by the remnants of a thick grove of cedar trees.

“My nemesis,” Sara Grim said as she grabbed the soft branch of a cedar and began picking at its prickly needles.

She’s not the only rancher who’s grown to despise these hardy trees. Landowners along the Missouri River — especially in the four south central counties of Gregory, Charles Mix, Lyman and Brule — have slowly watched valuable pastureland succumb to eastern redcedars, which have fruitfully multiplied for decades, marching steadily north from Texas, through Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, and now South Dakota. Farmers and ranchers in those southern states have long fought a losing battle against cedars, but many experts see South Dakota as the cedar frontier, the place where maybe the encroachment can finally be stopped. But to do so, landowners are having to get out of their comfort zones and reclaim acres through a force we’ve all been taught to fear — fire.

*****

HOMESTEADERS WHO POPULATED the central Plains in the 1800s were awestruck by the lack of trees. But in ravines and other protected areas stood eastern redcedars. A member of the juniper family, eastern redcedars are native to much of the eastern United States. In poor soil, they may never grow larger than a bush, but under ideal conditions they can reach 30 or 40 feet.

Sara Grim has become a staunch supporter of prescribed burning to control cedar tree encroachment.

They are drought tolerant and among the most important windbreak species on the Plains, qualities that eventually made cedars ideal for planting in shelterbelts. They can also reproduce prolifically, thanks to the birds and other small animals that ingest the tiny blue berries that sprout from a cedar’s branches. Studies have shown that the seeds pass through a bird’s digestive tract in 30 minutes, leading trees to sprout near their parent trees or along fence lines where birds might perch. Years of unchecked reproduction have led to cedar groves with canopies so thick that no vegetation can grow beneath. That decrease in forage worries cattle ranchers.

Sean Kelly, a South Dakota State University Extension Range Management Field Specialist based in Winner, says that every 1 percent increase in tree cover leads to a 1 percent loss in forage production.”It’s just a slow green glacier moving north,” Kelly says.”You see one or two out there in your pasture, and then five years later it’s 15 or 20. Before you know it, you’re trying to catch up and stay ahead of the curve. It’s hard for a rancher to stay in business very long if all they have is cedar forest and no grazing opportunities. And it can really start to snowball. If you’re not adjusting your stocking rates accordingly, it starts to spiral.”

Landowners began to act in 2011 when Doug Feltman asked the Natural Resources Conservation Service to survey his ranch south of Chamberlain to determine the impact of cedar trees. Using a series of five photographs of a north facing slope taken between 1981 and 2011, researchers determined that an area that once supported 10 cows could now barely support three. Feltman’s productive potential had decreased 70 percent due to cedar encroachment.

The NRCS then looked at neighboring Gregory County. Through aerial photography, maps, GPS and field work, researchers confirmed that 30 percent of the county was covered with a heavy to medium encroachment of cedar trees, judging by average trunk diameters.

A survey of 109 Gregory County landowners revealed that 80 percent were concerned about cedar encroachment. It also indicated that they were interested in learning more about prescribed burning.”Fire is the most economical way of controlling cedars, especially if you don’t have thick encroachment yet,” Kelly says.”When it was Native Americans and buffalo out here, natural wildfires kept invasive species like this at bay. Without that element of fire, they’ve been able to take over and keep spreading. That’s why we’re trying to reintroduce prescribed fire.”

Members of the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association create a fire line to help keep a burn under control.

After a series of meetings that began in the spring of 2012, the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association (MMRPBA) was officially incorporated in 2016. The organization is landowner-driven and governed by a seven-member board, all of whom own land within its four-county coverage area. Integrating guidelines from several government agencies and university experts, the association established a lengthy and detailed protocol that dictates precisely when and how they will initiate a burn.

“It’s a 15-page burn plan,” says Kelly, who also serves as vice president of the MMRPBA.”On a new burn unit, it’s easily a yearlong process.”

Every burn begins with an initial meeting between one or two board members and the landowner, who also must join the association and attend a prescribed burn on another member’s property before receiving burn services on his or her ranch. The group conducts four or five field visits throughout the year to determine the severity of cedar encroachment and identify other factors that will affect a potential burn: Where can they create fire breaks? Is any shearing needed? Are there hazards, such as power lines? Can safe escape routes be planned?

Once those questions are answered, work begins on the ignition plan. They determine how large the crew should be and what equipment will be needed. If possible, they try to incorporate one or two other landowners to utilize natural fire breaks. If a burn is planned all the way to the river, they work with the Department of Game, Fish and Parks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Then it’s a matter of waiting for the right weather. Kelly says they generally follow the 80-20-20 rule, which calls for temperatures no hotter than 80 degrees, at least 20 percent humidity and wind under 20 miles an hour. Those parameters mean that March, April and May are prime burning months, followed by a few opportunities in the fall.

After years of preparing, perfect weather arrived in April of 2016. The association was ready for its first prescribed burn on the Grim ranch.

*****

SARA GRIM WAS A girl on horseback, helping her father move cattle through the river breaks of the family ranch. When they came to a grove of cedars, she got off and led the horse through. That’s when a cedar branch caught on the saddle horn and broke the latigo.

“Now that’s a memory,” she laughs.”I haven’t thought about that in years. I don’t remember how he dealt with that. We had bad cedar trees back then and the cattle would get in them. It was hard to get them out; we had to crawl or lead the horse through. My father was noticing a problem with cedar trees, but nobody knew what to do. We all hoped it would just go away on its own, but it didn’t.”

An aerial photograph shows the darkened patches of the Grim ranch treated by prescribed burn in May of 2023.

Grim’s grandfather, William Sutton, arrived on this patch of land in 1929. He was working for the Yeoman Mutual Life Insurance Company, which had ended up with the ranch after its original owners, the Jackson brothers (also owners of the vast Mulehead Ranch), went under. Sutton came from Iowa and within a couple years purchased the ranch from the insurance company. His ranch brand became the Y-S, for Yeoman and Sutton.

When Grim’s father Billie Sutton, a popular local politician, died in a farm accident in 1982, Grim and her brother came home to help their mother manage the ranch. Eventually they decided to split it in half. Grim and her husband work about 3,600 acres of rough river break country mostly dedicated to cattle that have slowly seen their grass get choked out by cedars.

About 10 years ago, the Grims began working with David Steffen, a retired NRCS employee living in Burke, on a Conservation Stewardship Program that focused on grassland management. The program included the idea of cedar control through burning.

Grim was still working in the county treasurer’s office, where she spent 27 years.”One day, Dave came into the courthouse and said, ëSara, what are we going to do about this green glacier?'” she recalls. He had brought an overlay showing the cedar encroachment in Gregory County. The Grims had helped develop the county landowner survey along with Steffen and were interested in prescribed burning, so they got involved.

They quickly learned that education is paramount.”I’ve talked to so many people who are just unaware. They look at those trees growing in the river hills, and they think it’s beautiful, but there’s nothing growing underneath. There’s no grass, no feed, and we’re losing ground.”

The association identified a section of the Grim ranch and formulated a burn plan. The Grims participated in a few controlled burns with local fire departments to prepare.”They were small experimental burns, and we were scared out of our minds,” she says.”I didn’t sleep for a week. It was very scary. For years if anyone saw a fire you put it out.”

But when they dropped the match on that April day, the association was in complete control. Flames roared and smoke billowed high into the sky. When it was all over, 340 acres of thick cedar forest had burned. Just as importantly, the blaze sparked confidence in the volunteers who were learning to manage such a destructive force.”You have to respect it, but you don’t have to fear it like you used to,” Grim says.

*****

PETE BAUMAN HAS been helping people get comfortable with fire for nearly 25 years. When he began, the focus was on using fire to help manage land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. After he started working for SDSU in 2012, his efforts shifted to working with multiple organizations on creating classes where landowners could be introduced to fire.

Cedars produce thousands of berries that are dispersed by birds and other animals.

“There was just this general idea that South Dakotans had a fear of fire,” Bauman says.”But over the years, it became very clear that people didn’t have a fear of fire, they had a disconnect with fire. There was no innate fear. It was more like we forgot how to understand it.”

Bauman says the prairie evolved with three things: fire, grazing and climate. Indigenous people recognized the value of fires and ignited them to stimulate the regrowth of native grasses that would, in turn, attract the great bison herds.”It’s nature’s wonderful reset button,” Bauman says.”Healthy prairies really are not damaged by fire at any time of the year because native plants come back. Fire stimulates native plant growth, it recycles nutrients, it definitely stimulates total production, seed production and seed viability. Pollinator plants thrive post-fire, which then creates insect habitat. They utilize that smorgasbord of nectar that’s been created. When that all functions well, you’ve got the foraging animals. Those benefits just build up the line. It’s when we throw exotic species into the mix that makes the timing of fire so much more important.”

He says the goals of fire today are to control, reduce or eliminate exotic species like brome, bluegrass, Canada thistle and sweet clover.”Now we have to look at fire as a specific tool that has to do with timing, intensity and duration, very much like grazing. We have to apply fire not as a hammer but sometimes as a scalpel and understand what the objective is of each individual fire, and that’s different than it would have been 250 years ago.”

For the past three years, landowners have received hands-on training at fire schools that Bauman has supervised throughout eastern South Dakota. Bauman serves as the”burn boss” while attendees assume other leadership roles that a prescribed burn would require.”The coolest thing about prescribed fire is we’re in control,” he says.”We don’t ever have to drop the match. From the moment we start to the moment we stop, it’s about control, control, control, which makes the fire the tool. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. Our mantra is that we want you to be bored on your fire. If you’re bored, your fire is doing exactly what it should do. We don’t want the amped up, excited chaos associated with fire response. We want clear thinking, well planned, well executed, boring fires.”

However, Bauman says a boring fire isn’t enough for cedar infestations.”What those folks need to do to save their ranches requires a higher level of risk and coordination and fire intensity,” Bauman says.”The schools that we do help lay the foundation for those folks to build their skills, because it’s a different kind of fire. If you have a boring fire trying to kill cedar trees, you’re probably not going to kill many trees.”

*****

WE SPENT TWO HOURS traversing the vast Grim ranch by UTV. The gray skeletons of cedars burned in that first fire in 2016 are finally beginning to fall. Charred trunks and trees that sport splashes of brown amongst the green branches show evidence of the 530-acre burn they held on their West River pasture in May of 2023.

Native plants such as snow-on-the-mountain have begun to re-emerge on patches of land treated by prescribed fire.

“Oh, look at that switchgrass,” Sara Grim said, stopping the side-by-side so we could examine the new shoots already emerging, just three months after their most recent burn. Big bluestem waved in the breeze. The white flowers of snow-on-the-mountain contrasted against the blackened trunks of cedars that will eventually topple over.

That spring burn had been planned for seven years. In the meantime, the MMRPBA has kept busy with other fires. The group burned 688 acres in 2017, 271 acres in 2018 and 314 acres in 2020. Covid, drought and other hiccups put a hold on burning for a few years, but in 2023 they rebounded by burning roughly 6,000 acres. There are 10,940 acres on the books for prescribed burning in 2024.

Grim’s ranch is very near the heart of South Dakota’s cedar encroachment, but Kelly says the spread is evident, especially along the Little White River in Todd and Mellette counties and the Cheyenne and James River valleys. Its leading edge seems to be along Interstate 90, where groups are already experimenting with prescribed burns and working to form burn associations.

Sheldon Fletcher, with the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s Environmental Protection Office, has begun holding meetings and oversaw a 30-acre prescribed burn after traveling to watch the MMRPBA in action. Rod Voss, a Rangeland Management Specialist for NRCS based out of Mitchell, has helped with two prescribed burns along the James River.”We’re at a stage here where it would be fairly easy to stop if we can just get our people educated,” Voss says.”A lot of people are recognizing the production impacts, but it’s a hard thing to educate people that a tree can be a bad thing. Out here on the prairie, people like their trees, but a tree in the wrong place is simply a weed.”

That’s something the ranchers of south central South Dakota know all too well. Kelly hopes people in other parts of the state begin to see the benefits of fighting with fire.”It’s not an easy sell, especially in some of these areas where the encroachment is just starting and they’re not really sure if it’s a problem that’s worth spending any time on yet,” he says.”I can understand that, but if you don’t believe me come down and take a look at Gregory County, because this is what you might look like in 40 or 50 years. We’ve got a real opportunity to stop it.”

If they succeed, then South Dakota can be something that Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska could not: the cedar’s final frontier.

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

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Forging Youth

By Bernie Hunhoff

Faculty, students and working blacksmiths gather around forges at South Dakota Mines in Rapid City.

Methinks if the Knights of the Round Table sailed to America today, they’d soon be drawn to Rapid City, where young bladesmiths are gaining a reputation on the campus of South Dakota of Mines.

When classes end on Friday afternoons, the youth can be found at an old-style blacksmith shop on the edge of campus, hammering red-hot metal into knives, swords and less-practical items like jewelry, animal likenesses, ornate scrollwork and roses with a burnt aroma. They chatter and share insights as gleaming coals heat the steel to more than a thousand degrees. The pungent smell of melting metal and the clanging of hammers add to an already-unusual campus atmosphere.

Why is an ancient skill developed during the Iron Age such a rage 3,000 years later at a university touted for modern science and technology?”Bladesmithing is a microcosm of metallurgy and the engineering processes associated with modern manufacturing,” explains Dr. Jon Kellar, a veteran Mines professor partly responsible for students walking around campus today with knives and swords.

Fourteen years ago, Kellar was watching a public television show titled Secrets of the Samurai Sword when he noticed that his young son was captivated by the history and science. It dawned on him that youth who are interested in medieval and Renaissance culture might also be intrigued by metallurgical engineering. Soon there was a Blacksmithing Club on campus, and all the school’s faculty embraced the idea of welcoming and recruiting teens who like fire and danger.

School of Mines professors also became involved in blacksmithing organizations, and they urged The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) to create an international bladesmithing contest for engineering students.

Before long, students were making swords at Mines, some using iron ore from the Black Hills. Just as Kellar hoped, the school’s awakening to blacksmithing has attracted students.

“I am more of an artistic person,” says Tony Romero, a third-year engineering student,”but the more you get into it the more you realize the connection between art and science.”

Romero says his interest in the artistry of swords and knives has been life changing.”The gateway drug to blacksmithing is blade smithing,” he says.

The blending of art and science is also forging a bond between high school students, South Dakota blacksmiths and major Midwestern manufacturers.

Isaac Hammer (left) and Tony Romero typify Mines students who appreciate hands-on learning, especially when fire and metal are involved.

Companies like John Deere and Nucor Steel, who rely on metallurgical engineers, saw the connection and support the school’s efforts.”If you go to their facilities, you soon see that it’s just blacksmithing on a much higher scale with much bigger furnaces,” says Kellar. Consequently, playing with tongs and hammers in Rapid City has led to careers for students who might never have imagined themselves engineers.

Bladesmithing brought worldwide attention to the School of Mines when a team of students won the 2017 international collegiate blacksmithing competition by forging a 34-inch blade fashioned after a 10th century sword found in a burial mound in Norway. The spine of the intricate blade was made from Black Hills iron ore.

The winning sword — exquisitely etched with artistic spirals and swirls — is now exhibited along with the trophy plaque behind glass in the hallway of the Metallurgy Building. It is the school’s holy grail for students who hope to repeat the accomplishment.

The story of the sword is now campus legend. Isaac Hammer, a junior student who leads the Blacksmithing Club, knows the names of the seven students on the 2017 team and he’s hoping he and his friends can add to the trophy case. The biannual competition was cancelled last year due to COVID-19, but Mines students are practicing to defend the title.

The Blacksmithing Club has also taken on the task of helping younger people; they’ve assisted Boy Scouts with merit badge projects related to metallurgy, and they host an annual summer workshop for high school students called”The Science of Swords.”

Conversely, the collegians receive support from South Dakota’s blacksmiths — especially Jack Parks, who runs Fire Steel Forge at nearby Piedmont. Parks, 72, remembers what it’s like to get started.”I was a young guy who liked doing stuff with my hands and I wanted to work with metal, but all I had was a claw hammer, a hacksaw and an electrical drill and I couldn’t get anywhere. Then I started playing around with fire and heating metal, and I saw how easily it would bend.”

Parks wrangled an apprenticeship with Keystone blacksmith Harvey Brunner, a cowboy who pioneered metal art in South Dakota. Parks practiced it as a hobby for 10 years before becoming a full-time artisan who has gained a reputation for creating architectural accents. He crafted railings for the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park and recently restored historic fences at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood.

Parks sees his younger self in the students at the School of Mines.”Blacksmithing has something that has always attracted certain people because it has all the elements that kids like,” he laughs.”Fire, smoke, noise and danger.”

Tyler Reinarts says he likes the history behind bladesmithing.

The Piedmont blacksmith credits the Mines faculty for recognizing an unconventional learning opportunity.”They’ve got some pretty sophisticated scientists and engineers there, but the blacksmithing part was lacking and they knew it could be an important part of the program.

“You can lay on your back and think about stuff and it really doesn’t teach you as much as if you do something with your fingers, even if you make mistakes,” Parks says.”There’s a connection between the brain and the fingers. The fingers help the brain learn and I think sometimes that is getting lost.”

Other hands-on blacksmiths who help the youth include Nick Hix, Woody Hanson and Erich Orris of Rapid City, Steve Grosvenor of Beresford, and Clark Martinek, an iron artist in Mitchell.

K.J. Groven, a Sturgis woodworker and blacksmith, is another key volunteer. Groven was born in Skien, Norway and worked on a family farm until 1999 when he emigrated to study mechanical engineering at Rapid City. He’s made a career in South Dakota of creating Scandinavian style buildings, furniture and tools.

Dr. Mike West, a colleague of Kellar, says some of the school’s bladesmithing culture should also be credited to Kevin Gray, who visited campus as a high school student with his handmade 8-inch knife in a backpack. Gray wasn’t carrying the blade for self-defense; he just wanted to show it to someone who might share his interests. Gray did enroll at the School of Mines, but due to financial hardships he left before graduation to earn money in the coal fields of Wyoming.

Believing in Gray’s ability and skills, the faculty developed an independent study program for him that included a special project in the blacksmith shop. He exceeded their expectations, documenting the properties of the steel that he hammered. He graduated, landed a position with Nucor Steel in Norfolk, Neb., and now returns to campus to help younger bladesmiths.

Such is the community growing around metallurgy labs, classrooms and that old-time blacksmith shop below Smelter Hill. Legend says King Arthur created the concept of the Round Table because he wanted his swordsmen to have an equal place. A man like that would love the comradery being forged around steel and fire in the black forest of South Dakota.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Spirited Place

By Chad Coppess

Mysterious sights and sounds have long perplexed the people of the Badlands.

The Lakota people called the rugged landscape of southwestern South Dakota mako sica, or”bad lands,” because rocky terrain, lack of water and extreme temperatures made it difficult to traverse and nearly impossible to inhabit. But it has become fertile ground for ghost stories.

A new board game called Horrified: American Monsters includes a character named the Banshee of the Badlands, which made us wonder: Is there such a creature? And what exactly is it? Our quest to track down the legend and its origins led us to other mysterious stories and encounters from this rough country.

The earliest written records of a Badlands Banshee come from Myths and Legends of Our Own Land published by Charles Skinner in 1896. Jason Offutt’s 2019 book Chasing American Monsters also includes the banshee along with other South Dakota tales like the Lake Kampeska Monster and the tiny devils of Spirit Mound.

Mateusz Wosik, a paleontologist at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania, spent two summers as a park ranger in Badlands National Park. He used the banshee as the basis of an evening program for visitors in 2012 and 2013.

“I’m sure I scared the bejeezus out of little kids,” Wosik says.”It was a very popular program with the amphitheater full most Friday nights. There was definitely a big interest.”

Wosik approached the myths, legends and ghost stories with an explanation of how such tales get started. He believes many legends are a misinterpretation of fossils. For instance, the first discoverers of an ancient mammoth skull could mistake the hole in its center, which accommodated its trunk, as an eye socket.”So that’s where the legend of the one-eyed cyclops began,” he says. It’s also within reason, he suggests, to discover fossil remains of a real dinosaur but exaggerate them into a dragon.

The Badlands contain one of the largest deposits of fossilized prehistoric mammals in the world. Dinosaurs there became extinct around 30 million to 65 million years ago, Wosik says. Around 40 million years ago, what he calls”version 2.0″ of mammals began, creating animals much closer to what we know now.”Before that they were very weird,” he says.

One of the early mammals was the titanothere, or brontothere, a large animal similar to a modern rhinoceros that lived in the Badlands and contributed to the region’s legends. South Dakota’s Native American tribes have different stories about”thunder beasts.” The combination of fossil brontotheres and modern bison most likely blended into these”thunder beings.”

Mateusz Wosik often incorporated the Badlands Banshee in talks while working as a ranger at the national park.

As Wosik interviewed Badlands-area inhabitants for origin stories, he found that the tales vary slightly from person to person, but there was a connection between”thunder beings” and”water monsters.” A basic story tells of a father warning his son not to wander off, which of course the son ignored. A storm blew in with rain and lightning, a great battle between”thunder beings” and”water monsters.” Fossil remains of pterodactyls are the thunder beings that threw lightning bolts to the earth, which we find as fossil baculites, long pointy-shelled creatures. The water monsters would be what we now know as mosasaurs, whose fossilized skeletons have been found throughout South Dakota. They defended the earth in these great battles by throwing large boulders into the sky. The battles still create the immense noise we hear during thunderstorms. At the end of the tale the father found the boy sitting on the bones of a prehistoric water beast, one of the mosasaurs.

The folklore story of the Banshee of the Badlands came after these legends but doesn’t seem to have roots in Native American mythology. Wosik hasn’t determined if the tale is just a product of Skinner’s imagination or is based on stories he heard while in the area.

Skinner portrayed the Badlands as”hell with the fires out,” inhabited by rattlesnakes and a very unfriendly sounding place. Near a butte called”Watch Dog,” which Wosik has been unable to identify, the banshee appears to unlucky travelers. The shrieking transparent figure of a woman is common in ghost tales.”Think of the first ghost in the library at the beginning of Ghostbusters,” Wosik says.”Or the character in the video game Mortal Combat.”

Skinner described a typical encounter with the Badlands Banshee.”If war parties, emigrants, cowboys, hunters, any who for good or ill are going through this country, pass the haunted butte at night, the rocks are lighted with phosphor flashes and the banshee sweeps upon them,” he wrote.”As if wishing to speak, or as if waiting a question that has occurred to none to ask, she stands beside them in an attitude of appeal, but if asked what she wants she flings her arms aloft and with a shriek that echoes through the blasted gulches for a mile she disappears and an instant later is seen wringing her hands on her hilltop.”

“It’s like she’s wanting something, but not knowing what she wants,” Wosik explains.”It feels like a haunting, but she’s only wanting to communicate.”

Adding to the creepiness, the banshee sometimes has a companion skeleton who seeks out music. Attracted to the melodies around cowboy campfires and settlers’ cabins, the skeleton seizes any violin left in his reach and plays throughout the night. His music at times leads people into”rocky pitfalls” and eventually steals the listener’s soul.

Wosik’s interviews with Native American people from the area concluded that the skeleton must be the banshee’s loved one.”The banshee and the skeleton seem to be stuck in curses where they can’t communicate,” he says.”Maybe he’s trying to steal a soul to give her.”

Wosik enjoys incorporating established fossil knowledge into folklore.”I suspect there is a basis in the banshee tale from something like the bison and titanothere connection to ‘thunder beings.’ With the banshee there is no fossil evidence, but if we apply the other stories, it makes sense. Most of these legends are based on something real, quite often fossils misinterpreted.”

The Badlands Banshee has appeared in books and games.

How did an obscure legend turn up in a board game? Mike Mulvihill of Seattle, Washington, is responsible for the design and development of Horrified: American Monsters.”We knew that we wanted to highlight the monsters of the entire country,” Mulvihill says.”For source material we chose the book Chasing American Monsters by Jason Offutt. In looking at our map we felt we needed something in the Great Plains. When we read about the banshee, its concept was so intriguing from both an image and gameplay aspect. As we discovered more about the banshee’s background, we found out about the skeleton that accompanies her. This image of a violin-playing skeleton and the banshee is what really sold us on including the character in the game.”

A children’s version of the Badlands Banshee story is featured at a podcast called”The Cryptid Catalog.”

Badlands rancher Joe Amiotte hasn’t seen the banshee, but he has plenty of unusual stories.”About 25 years ago me and my wife and my cousin were camping by the creek roughly 15 miles south of Interior,” he recalls.”We were sitting around the campfire having a few beers and we decided to make ‘bigfoot’ noises, or at least what we thought sounded like that. We did that for about half an hour and then quit. Not too much later we heard something that wasn’t a mountain lion, not a wolf. It was growling and branches were breaking. Well, it had taken us around 20 minutes or so to set up camp, but it took us exactly five seconds to break camp and get out of there. It was a growl, a deep bark that I’d never heard before. I’ve heard mountain lions scream, I’ve heard wolves howl, it wasn’t that.”

They returned the following day to retrieve camping equipment and saw no signs of anything.

“We’ve had a neighbor who saw something in a human form from the waist up standing about 500 yards from his porch,” Amiotte says.”By the time he drove up it was a mile away, so he didn’t go after it any farther. That was in the middle of the day.”

Aaron Kaye, who serves as Chief of Interpretation for the Badlands National Park, says the area has moods.”If you walk around in the Badlands at night, you’re going to see and hear things. I’ve heard blood-curdling screams. I’m sure they were big cats, but Ö.”

He’s heard stories of the”Badlands yeti.” A local rancher who is now deceased reported multiple sightings of a brown, bear-like creature and finding hair from it.”He was quite convincing,” Kaye says.”For me it was just a campfire story to tell kids. And the story may change a little every time I tell it.”

Kaye also says maintenance employees at the Badlands National Park visitor center once encountered a ghostly woman in a white dress in the building after hours. She hasn’t materialized since a remodel of the center a few years ago.

There appear to be no recent banshee sightings, but other ghosts do seem to inhabit the Badlands.”Every now and then when it’s really clear out by this old homestead place you can hear kids like they are playing in the creek nearby,” Amiotte says.”It’s never scared a horse, but we can never find anything when we ride over there. Sometime in the 1930s or ’40s there was a cholera epidemic. They lost some kids, and they were buried there, so we are pretty sure it is those kids’ spirits. They are friendly though, never doing anything to scare anyone.”

They leave that for the banshee, or the yeti, or any of the other mysterious creatures whose legends live in the Badlands.

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

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Summers Like Watermelons

By Stephanie Anderson

Illustration by Darya Tsaptsyna.

The summers were like watermelons: we split them open and dug our spoons into the red flesh, claiming no melon had ever tasted so good, the juice running down our chins. The summers were huge and round and bright green, too big to carry, containing everything.

We threw open the screen door and took off running. We ran everywhere. To the barn where wild momma cats curled around tight balls of kittens in the square straw bales. To the corral where the bum calves waited for their bottles. To the shelter belt of pine trees that stood like ladders to the sky. We climbed to the top, sap on our legs and hands, and surveyed the prairie like eagles.

In the summer we were best friends. We saw the town kids occasionally, the other farm kids even less. But we needed and missed no one. We had each other, and the land, and Mom and Dad, and animals: two dozen cats, a border collie, horses, cows, raccoons, rabbits, deer, antelope, badgers, songbirds, and coyotes howling at sunset.

We got up early and whisked powdered milk with hot water in a 1-gallon Schwan’s ice cream bucket and funneled the milk into white plastic bottles and stoppered them with red rubber nipples. We carried in hay and pellets and checked the water tank. We named the calves after Disney characters and rubbed their backs while they sucked milk.

In the evening we pitched hay and poured buckets of corn for the butcher steers in the corral. We scratched their necks and sang them songs, named our favorites and took their pictures with the FunSaver cameras Mom bought us. Someday the steers would be eaten, likely by us, but that felt far away. We didn’t feel anything about our role in fattening them for slaughter. The corral was across the gravel road from our house, at the bottom of a deep draw with a small marshy creek. The smell of sweet clover hay mixed with wet creek mud and the earthy scent of manure: that’s the aroma of summer evenings as a child.

We were 8, 5 and 3 years old. Then 10, 7, 5 and 1 (we got a baby sister that year). Then 12, 9, 7 and 3.

On Sunday afternoons we crammed into a’70s-era Ford pickup with Mom and Dad and set off to the pasture to”check cows.” We always hoped the cows were on the other side of a steep draw so we could gasp and cringe as Dad went off-roading. The cows gathered around the pickup as Dad filled the salt and mineral tubs, and by hand we fed the friendly ones cake, tasty pellets as round as cigars. When Dad parked the pickup truck by the stock dam, we leaped out and followed cow trails deep into the cottonwoods, tasted ruby red buffalo berries and wild purple plums, smelled sunflowers and sweet clover.

Most days we looked as wild as we felt. We wore slip-on shoes that were green inside from the grasshoppers we squashed under our heels while running in the grass. In the morning we put on whatever looked comfortable — our dad’s black T-shirts that fit like dresses, jeans cut into shorts, those free but too big XXL shirts from the annual Farm Safety Day Camp. We destroyed our clothes with dirt, cow manure, grass stains, popsicle drips and cat claws.

Some years we grew a big, shared garden of vegetables and flowers with our mom. Other years we divided it into personalized plots that reflected our individual tastes. Once we planted a corn maze. In the stalks we played hide and seek with kittens and munched on raw peas, pod and all, and dug our fingers and toes into the dirt. We were big on dirt.

On branding day, we watched our dad and uncles sort the calves from the cows and push them down the chute and onto the branding table. With a mix of curiosity and remorse we pressed our foreheads to the fence and watched Dad brand a calf, give it shots, notch its ears, and, if it was a male, castrate it. Blood and iodine, testicles and bits of ears, the smell of burning hair and skin. We got older and left the fence one by one to join the men. We filled the vaccine gun and angled the needle, pushed the calves down the alleyway while they kicked our shins and returned them to their mothers when the day ended.

The erratic prairie weather was our guiding force. On hot days we jumped into the little above-ground pool Mom set up for us. On cold days we fled to the barn. We wore knee-high black rubber boots when the corrals were muddy. We stayed up late watching lightning storms and huddled in the basement when the tornado warnings came. When hail destroyed the wheat, we stayed silent and serious like our parents. When it rained, we rejoiced with them.

We ate strange things: the chips that flaked off the tubs of Crystalyx, a sweet, crystallized blend of molasses, fat and minerals meant for cows; wheat kernels straight from the beard; starchy field corn before it ripened; the caramelized cracked corn and oat mixture we fed the bum calves. We opened our mouths wide and drank from the water hydrant.

But watermelon — that was the taste of summer. It seemed there was always one in the fridge. All summer we anticipated that perfect melon: sweet but not sugared, juicy but crisp, the kind that let out an audible”crack” when split open. And when we found it, we gorged.

Then we were 13, 10, 8 and 4, and everything changed.

That summer I went to the fields with Dad, and the season went from being a time of play to a time of work. I raked windrows of hay with a Farmall tractor and a twin rake, bouncing down the field, Dad following with the baler. Then I cut hay with a Hesston swather with no cab for a summer before graduating to a bigger machine that would be”mine” for the next four years. Dad and I would leave at 5 a.m. and take lunch to the field. I came home at night dusty and tired. Because I loved the farm, I loved the work.

Then came boyfriends and beer cans and rodeos. Sundays at the lake with friends and late-night cruises in my pickup truck. Strongly worded declarations about moving to the city. The many forms of teenage trouble I got into during the summer. I spent those long days and nights with friends instead, and my siblings did the same. And then I was gone to college across the state, then to a job across the country.

No family stays young forever. But there are kind ways to grow up, and not so kind ways. As a teenager I was independent and quick to anger. I thought I deserved my space. Now I see that I pushed my family away to create that space, to create myself.

We are 30, 27, 25, and 21. We live in four different states. Though one sibling occasionally travels to visit another, Christmas is the only time all four of us are together. We text and call, but our lives are more complicated than we thought possible. The time accumulates like snow between phone calls and suddenly it’s been two, three, four months since we talked.

Sometimes I find one — a perfect melon. I eat a forkful and I’m sitting at the kitchen table on the farm. We’re 12, 9, 7 and 3 again. It’s Sunday afternoon in late July and we just ate Mom’s fried chicken and gravy and Dad is sprinkling salt on a watermelon slice, his funny habit. Our hair is bleached white from the sun and we’re making plans to check cows. The wheat is ripening in the fields. We dig into the watermelon and declare it to be perfect, the best one of the summer. We’ll never find one this good again, we say.

Editor’s Note: Stephanie Anderson grew up on a ranch near Bison in Perkins County. She lives and writes in Boca Raton, Florida. This story is revised from the July/August 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Fast, Loud and Proud

Story and photos by Chad Coppess

Late model stock cars work the high banks of Wagner Speedway.

My love for photography and race cars came from the same place — my father. When I was around 13 years old, Dad took me to Thunder Valley Dragways near Marion and brought along a borrowed 35mm camera. I was fascinated with his ability to take photos that looked as good as those I saw in racing magazines. A few years later he purchased a camera for me, and my own photographic journey began. Every summer I attend as many races as I can, camera in hand, across South Dakota. If it’s fast, loud and brightly painted, from super-accelerating dragsters to wide-sliding sprint cars, I love the spectacle. Here are some of the state’s racers and places where you can see them.

A photo by my father, David Coppess, got me started in photography. Two”wheel standers” were flying down the quarter-mile track at Thunder Valley Dragways in Marion when we were there in 1976. The Rapp family had started the drag strip 10 years earlier, and it’s still a big attraction today in Turner County. Thunder Valley is one of just two drag strips in South Dakota. The other is Sturgis Dragway, east of Sturgis.

Drag racing seems easier to understand than many sports. Two cars line up for a straight shot of 1/8th or 1/4th mile. The first to cross the finish line wins. However, there are subtleties, like the tire-smoking”burnout” that prepares tires for a quick launch down the drag strip.

Dale Garber, a drag racer from Pierre, has had success, but he says it comes and goes.”One year I couldn’t lose and the next I never went further than the first round of eliminations, but I love the adrenaline rush.” At right, Joe Wolf of Pierre leaves a smoke trail as he does a burnout in his flame-painted dragster at Sturgis Dragway.

Friday nights have been rip-roaring fun in Aberdeen for a century, thanks in large part to the Brown County Speedway at the county fairgrounds. The one-third mile track is busy from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Racers come from the Dakotas, Minnesota and even Canada to compete. The family atmosphere allows kids to visit the pits after races and win matching trophies with their heroes.

Tori Wendell has been racing since age 13.

The South Dakota Mud Racers hold eight weekend events every summer at tracks in Mitchell, Canova, Tripp, Canistota, Platte, Woonsocket and Fulton. The variety of classes — ATV, Street, Sportsman, Super Stock, Pro and Pro Modified — is part of the fun for the mudders and fans. Kevin Hohn remembers his first race in 1999:”I drove my street-legal Jeep and placed second. I had a blast and won some money, so I decided to build for the sportsman class. That started a 22-year career in mud drags with my daughter racing with me in her Jeep for several years.”

John Otte of Ravinia led a pack of winged sprint cars out of Turn Two at Wagner Speedway in a race last summer. Sprint cars attain high speeds due to their low weight, high horsepower and large wings that keep them connected to the track.

Tori Wendell has been racing stock cars on dirt ovals since she was 13 and is only the second female to win at Wagner Speedway near her hometown of Fairfax. Wagner Speedway is a 3/8ths mile dirt oval that draws big crowds on Friday nights, thanks partly to a reputation for hosting community benefits and special events. Many South Dakota racetracks generously assist local groups with fundraisers.

Wendell also won at nearby Stuart, Nebraska, last summer, and then her boyfriend Kyle Moos proposed to her in victory lane.

“I had two wins and a marriage proposal in three days,” smiled the young manager of Wagner’s NAPA auto parts store.

However, auto racing hasn’t always been so kind. She had a bad crash in 2021, rolling her car and sustaining a concussion and broken nose. Why does she continue to race?

“The thrill,” she laughed.”Nothing compares to it.”

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

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The Trainer from Marcus

By Sentel Schreier

Bud Boudreau says every dog’s mind is different, “and it takes patience to understand each one.”

Bud Boudreau wakes at 3 a.m. on most mornings. He drinks a cup of black coffee, dresses and dons a cowboy hat and boots, strings a dog whistle around his neck and walks out to the barn to start another day of training border collie sheepdogs. He hasn’t missed a sunrise in 60 years.

One morning I rose early as well and drove down Highway 34, past Bear Butte and Union Center in Meade County, to learn more about a little-known man who is credited with changing the way we herd sheep on the Northern Plains. The daughter of a sheep rancher, I still remember the excitement of Boudreau arriving at our ranch with a mule named Lenore, a truck full of border collies and a lifetime of stories.

I spent the last 7 miles of my drive that morning on gravel roads. Admittedly, I had to call Boudreau to confirm I wasn’t lost. I arrived just in time to accompany him as he headed to the barn. A symphony of wagging tails, excited whines and barks greeted us. The old man fed the dogs and cleaned the kennels. Then he saddled his palomino horse, collected the dogs from their individual kennels and let them exercise for a while. He told them to sit and they sat. He called them by name back to the kennels. The dogs were quiet as they waited to see who would be the first to work. He called for Dot, and she waited triumphantly by the barn door.

Boudreau, who is now 84, rode his horse out to the pasture with Dot by his side. She watched him intently for a signal to bring in the herd of Targhee sheep. With one word,”Away,” he sent the dog counterclockwise in a graceful, wide arc around the herd. I squinted to see Dot’s dark silhouette against the sleepy horizon — about half a mile away.

With varying sounds from his whistle, Boudreau signaled Dot to go clockwise, counterclockwise, walk up, look, speed up, slow down, stand or sit. Dot interpreted the slightest change in tone of the dog whistle or pitch of Boudreau’s voice to mean a different command. Boudreau and his border collies have their own language.

“The dogs have such instincts bred into them,” he says.”It’s remarkable. It’s easy to teach them because a well-bred dog already has the instincts.” Watching Boudreau in the field with his dogs is like watching a music conductor. He makes the slightest sound and the dog bursts into obedient motion. The dogs are sensitive to his body language as well as the subtle movements of each animal in the herd.

“It was the strangest feeling for me,” Boudreau says of his move from Maryland to the open spaces of West River.

Border collies have been used for centuries to herd sheep. Today they are invaluable members of many sheep ranches in South Dakota and other states where herds are large, in part because Bud Boudreau came here 40 years ago.

It’s fitting that”collie” is Gaelic for”useful,” because a sheepdog can do more with sheep than several cowboys on horseback. The border collie breed can be traced back to the United Kingdom, to an era when wool was a big part of the economy.

Sheepdog trials also originated in Europe but soon became popular in the eastern United States. Trials are competitions that test a dog’s ability to herd sheep in cooperation with its handler. Dogs must successfully complete the”outrun” or initial gathering of the sheep and”drive” them through different patterns of panels. Typically dogs must then”shed” the sheep or separate a few from the rest of the herd, and then pen the sheep in a corral within a time limit.

According to Boudreau, Englanders literally wrote the book on how to train sheepdogs. He learned the basics by reading an English text when he was in his early 20s, but his fascination with border collies started long before that. When he was 10 years old, his aunt stole him away from the family dairy farm in Michigan to see a short film called Arizona Sheepdog. The black and white documentary kindled his lifetime fascination.

Several years later, a neighbor imported two dogs from Great Britain and brought them to the dairy. Boudreau was amazed by how they could round up cattle, just as he remembered seeing in Arizona Sheepdog. By then, Boudreau’s dad had converted the dairy farm into a racehorse training facility. He helped care for more than 40 racehorses and he broke thoroughbred colts. A fearless young horseman, Boudreau preferred to gallop the ornery young horses around the track in the early morning because they”weren’t so tough if they couldn’t see where they were going.”

Boudreau embraced his dad’s racehorse business and eventually took it over. But he also dreamed of training border collies. As a father of four — Dean, Jean, Jimmy and Susan — he marveled at the neighbor’s dogs’ habitual herding of his toddler children.”I got real excited one day when that dog was herding my kids around the yard,” he remembers.

Boudreau became well known in the horse racing world and ran the family business successfully for more than 20 years before his ambition led to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to train and shoe horses for Alfred Vanderbilt, owner of Sagamore Farm and Baltimore’s Pimlico Racetrack where the Preakness Stakes is held today. Alfred, a pillar in the horse racing community, was the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the world’s richest man in the late 19th century.

Sagamore Farm gave Boudreau the opportunity to work with famous trainers and fine horses like Kentucky Derby winner Native Dancer. However, Boudreau arrived in Maryland in a full body cast after a”brawl” with a young colt. Knowing Boudreau’s reputation, Vanderbilt waited a month for him to recover. He started his job caring for broodmares, shoeing horses and training 2-year-old colts.”I woke up at 4 a.m. and was done by mid-morning with nothing to do in a strange place. I was bored and had a lot of time to think,” he remembers of his Maryland days.”I thought a lot about sheepdogs.”

Bud Boudreau has trained dogs and horses. He prefers dogs, he says, because of their intelligence.

Life changed when a friend gave him a border collie as a gift. Boudreau took the dog to a sheepdog clinic in Virginia in 1982. Jack Knox, a famous Scottish dog trainer, led the program and was impressed with Boudreau’s self-taught knowledge and his ability to interpret a dog’s movement. Boudreau soon met Ralph Pulfer and Bruce Fogt, two of the most respected experts in the industry. He credits them with making him the trainer he is today.

He returned from Virginia determined to train sheepdogs. After working on the track each day, he spent time with his dogs and a small herd of Barbados black-bellied sheep he had purchased.”I would shoe horses for folks in exchange for time on racehorse farms to work my dogs. I would pull up with my trailer, unload my Barbados, then spend the afternoon training the dogs.”

However, he felt he had a foot in two quite different worlds — horse racing and sheepdogs. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, but the decision to train dogs full time would be costly. He had spent years in the horse racing world, achieving credentials, connections and financial security. In six years, Boudreau had become Sagamore’s resident farrier and even shoed horses for the historic Green Spring Valley Hounds and Hunt Club.”I had it made, but I felt like I wasn’t fully committed to the horses or the dogs. I had to choose. I chose border collies.”

When he revealed his plans, the head trainer at Sagamore Farm told him he was,”making a big mistake.” Boudreau chuckles at the memory.”Everyone thought I was plum crazy.” Boudreau left the stables in the hands of his son, Dean, who had been his apprentice.

Not long after deciding to train dogs full time, Boudreau saw an ad for affordable land in South Dakota near the tiny community of Marcus, about an hour’s drive east of the Black Hills. In 1986, he loaded all his belongings, including nine border collies and eight sheep, in a homemade trailer and Toyota truck and headed west.”I moved with my dogs to a cabin on White Owl Creek,” he remembers.”It was the strangest feeling for me; I went from a very crowded area in Maryland to not seeing another human being for weeks at a time.”

In 1988, Boudreau’s three sons traveled there and built a log home for their dad from scratch, incorporating materials from the original homestead 2 miles from the house. Boudreau had spent the winter collecting stones from the dilapidated homestead shack for his sons to repurpose into a hearth and chimney. The original homestead stove sits in Boudreau’s kitchen, a tribute to the pioneers that lived at Marcus before him.”I still make my famous waffles on it from time to time,” he says with a smile.

Boudreau’s sons pooled their skills for the cabin construction. Local ranchers provided further assistance. For example, Boudreau traded help installing Sheetrock for dog training.”My boys had so much fun building the house and the neighbors got a kick out of it too. They would stop by to see the progress every now and then. It was a special time for me.” Boudreau also planted a tree grove behind his house that now provides protection from the strong prairie winds.

*****

With hill country, a river and expanses of land, the Marcus ranch proved ideal for training sheepdogs. Boudreau also fell in love with the resiliency of his neighbors. He believes South Dakotans are special.”People here understand hardship but are some of the most content people I’ve ever known. It’s because they’re doing what they want to do with their lives. Out here in the country, you have to love what you do to stay. I feel I have lived in the best generation that ever was in the U.S. and I couldn’t be luckier to end up in South Dakota.”

Bud Boudreau’s house includes a stone fireplace and a woodstove salvaged from a homesteader’s cabin.

Despite the rural location, sheepdogs have taken him on adventures he would have forfeited had he stayed at the racetrack. He has even competed at international competitions in Ireland.

One of his most memorable trips came in 1993 when he met his future wife, Sarah, at a sheepdog trial in Durango, Colorado. They have worked dogs together nearly every day since they got married in 2000 at nearby Sturgis. Sarah shares his love for sheepdogs and competes in trials. She also serves as a judge at competitions.

For eight years, the Boudreaus hosted a dog trial at their home near Marcus that attracted judges from Great Britain and competitors from all over the country. Bud and Sarah, along with help from Ross Lamphere and Jim Roth, also started the popular midwinter North American Sheepdog Trials at the Black Hills Stock Show. Apart from dogs, the Boudreaus also share a love for music. Sarah spent five years in Italy playing the French horn in Milan’s Pomeriggi Musicali Orchestra. Today, Bud’s old guitar hangs in their living room, and he says he knows he’s”doing okay” when Sarah recognizes a tune. He thinks playing the guitar has similarities to training dogs.”You never want to practice a mistake,” he explains.

The couple’s accomplishments also led to an adventure on a big ranch along the Rio Grande River, where Tommy Hayre raises more than 20,000 goats and sheep on 110,000 acres. Boudreau’s skill with dogs was an invaluable resource on the rough, West Texas terrain.”The goats were so smart, they’d hide in caves and you’d have to ride in with the dogs on horseback to gather them,” he recalls. During the drought year of 1998, Hayre sent Boudreau to his ranch in Argentina for two weeks to show Argentinian cowboys (gauchos) how to use sheepdogs.

Boudreau recorded the trip in a detailed journal that he shared:”We stood around the adobe kitchen, with a fire going in the fireplace. Later on I found out there was never an oven in a gaucho residence. There is always a fire in the fireplace, both summer and winter. On the table was a blackboard that had been purchased in town, with the commands — ëaway,’ ëcome,’ ësit,’ ëwalk up,’ and ëthat’ll do’ — written out in a way that they could pronounce.”

Boudreau drank mateÃÅ from a silver gourd and bombilla, ate mutton ribs from a 2-foot machete and rode countless miles in the pampas.”Living with the gauchos was an experience I’ll treasure forever,” he says. He left Argentina confident that his dogs had found worthy handlers in JoseÃÅ, Tabares and RamoÃÅn.

Sheep ranchers in South Dakota and around the world appreciate the talents of the man from Marcus. Boudreau was inducted into the American Border Collie Association Hall of Fame last September, an honor he considers a highlight of his life. He was”in shock” to hear the news, but western sheep ranchers believe the recognition was long overdue.

In a nomination letter, Montana rancher Kelly Bradley wrote,”This part of the country had big numbers of sheep running on it and yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, there were not many places using dogs and certainly not realizing the potential of a well-bred and trained border collie. Bud Boudreau almost single-handedly changed all that for us ranchers when he came to this country and went to work educating so many of us about border collies. For many, it was the first chance to see stock dogs that did more good than harm to their stock.”

My father, Gene Johnson, met Boudreau at a neighbor’s sheep shearing in Harding County. He’s become a reliable presence at our own sheep shearings ever since. Dad says the trainer brought better technique and finesse to our ranch.”I appreciate Bud’s knowledge of sheep and dogs,” Dad told me.”But I also appreciate him as a great friend and mentor to me. He has a way of making hard work more enjoyable because he’s there.”

Boudreau helps ranchers train their own dogs and he has sold dogs to others. Just as he did at our family’s ranch, he also taught sheep growers the benefits of dogs by just showing up to help. When he came to our place, we always offered him a room, but he preferred to sleep in the truck near the dogs, who had a strict bedtime of 7:30 p.m.

We loved his visits because the work always seemed to go more smoothly. Boudreau and a couple of his dogs could round up huge groups of sheep without help. Their movements were like magic to me and I wanted a dog of my own. Finally, Dad traded Boudreau some sheep for our border collie, Kate, after he took her to the National Sheepdog Finals in 2015. He also gifted me a dog whistle, and he came to the ranch to show us how to use the many commands.

He says every dog has its own peculiarities.”I won’t sell a dog I’m not confident in. Sometimes a dog will take years to get to the place where I feel confident in finding him a home. Every dog’s mind is different and it takes a great deal of patience to understand each one,” he says.

Because every dog needs hands-on attention, it’s an inexact and difficult business model.”I’ve been dead broke,” Boudreau admits.”Some people live paycheck to paycheck; I live border collie to border collie. Once a dog gets to be worth a certain amount, I can’t afford to keep him. If he gets hurt, there goes my paycheck.”

Still, he has never regretted leaving his better-paying career with East Coast horses.

“Training dogs has made training horses boring because of their intelligence. It’s a different kind of art form. It requires more finesse because the dogs get so fixated on the sheep, they have to rely on your voice only, and you have to hope they listen, and keep cool if they don’t.”

Boudreau’s philosophy on raising dogs sounds like parenting advice.”You have to be somebody that commits. A collie’s mind is like a growing child — you can’t miss a day. You have to be prepared to exercise their mind daily.”

He also emphasizes positive reinforcement.”I want them to stop doing wrong because they love the outcome of doing right. I want them to think of me as a safe place to look to. In order for that to happen, you have to keep calm. You can’t lose your cool. I want my dogs to look forward to training as much as I do.”

Spend a morning with Boudreau and his dogs and one thing becomes as clear as a Meade County sunrise: The dogs live to hear his gentle voice saying,”that’s a good boy.”

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

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Tongues in Granite Cheeks

By John Andrews

Mount Rushmore is a point of pride, a vacation destination and a vehicle for the nation’s humorists.

South Dakota Magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2010. For much of the previous year, we discussed how to celebrate such a significant milestone in the publishing world. Ideas for special stories in each of the year’s six issues took shape in editorial meetings and blossomed as we gathered the information and photos. But as we neared press time on the first issue of our anniversary year, one detail seemed to be missing: We needed an impactful way to kick everything off, something that combined the state culture that the magazine had explored for nearly a quarter century and the celebratory energy that we felt in our offices and hoped to convey to our readership.

Someone mentioned that Mount Rushmore, perhaps the most iconic and recognizable image associated with South Dakota, had never appeared on the magazine’s cover. What if we could find a way to make it look like those four, stoic granite heads were celebrating with us?

We located a beautiful photo by Chad Coppess, then a photographer with the South Dakota Department of Tourism and today this magazine’s photo editor. With his permission, we decided to have some fun. Or so we thought.

Our graphic designer skillfully added colorful, conical party hats to the top of each head, embellished with festive, silver tinsel where each hat met a rocky forehead. Directly below George Washington, we added a huge banner that appeared to be fixed to the mountain itself that read,”Happy Birthday SD Magazine,” and below that, the one-liner,”By George, we made the cover.”

We delighted in our mockup and sent the issue off to print around Thanksgiving. Our January/February issue is designed to arrive in mailboxes a few days before Christmas so that subscribers who receive it as a gift can enjoy a new issue during the holidays. Staffers received an unexpected gift, however, when readers saw the cover.

Cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba drew this image of a Roosevelt-less Mount Rushmore during a government shutdown. He says the national memorial is a good vehicle for editorial cartoons because it is widely recognizable.

It was far from the magazine’s most controversial cover image. That goes to a friendly rattlesnake that slithered his way to the top of the list in the fall of 2002 and never again made an appearance in such a prominent position. (Honestly, we had no idea how many people have snake phobias!) But a few readers were upset that we had taken such liberties with the Shrine to Democracy. Some even thought we’d desecrated the national memorial, as if we’d truly traveled across the state and spraypainted birthday wishes onto the billion-year-old granite. We feared what might happen if those readers ever saw the iconic”backside of Mount Rushmore” postcard.

All jokes aside, when it came to Mount Rushmore we began to wonder if people thought all jokes should be set aside. Since the last piece of granite was chiseled away in 1941, the images of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln — locked into their stony gazes across the Black Hills — have slowly seeped into American popular culture. Their likenesses help sell cars, beer, toothpaste, shirts and hats. They show up on music albums, at theme parks, in Hollywood movies and newspapers — both in the comics section for pure entertainment and the opinion page as the vehicle for cartoonists who have something to say.

It seems, though, that Mount Rushmore has always had one foot in pop culture. Even when the memorial was still an idea inside state historian Doane Robinson’s mind, the motivation behind it was to draw tourists into the Black Hills. As roads began to improve in the 1920s, the Hills were already becoming a vacation destination for people longing for the cool mountain air and beautiful topography. But Robinson worried that it wasn’t enough.”Tourists soon get fed up on scenery unless it has something of special interest connected with it to make it impressive,” he said.

About the same time, he began reading reports of sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s massive undertaking east of Atlanta, Georgia, where he was attempting to carve Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and other heroes of the Southern Confederacy into Stone Mountain. It served as inspiration for Robinson, who began dreaming of historical figures carved into the Needles.

In December of 1923 Robinson wrote to Lorado Taft, considered one of America’s pre-eminent sculptors, to gauge his interest in such a grand project. When Taft demurred, Robinson turned to Borglum in August 1924. Borglum’s relationship with the committee behind the Stone Mountain project had become strained and he was looking for a way out. Intrigued by Robinson’s proposal, he came to the Black Hills the fall of 1924 to see the lay of the land.

Borglum believed whole-heartedly in American exceptionalism, once saying that the records of the American people and their achievement should be”built into, cut into, the crust of this earth so that those records would have to melt or by wind be worn to dust before the record could, as Lincoln said, ‘perish from the earth.'” He also believed in big art.”Volume, great mass, has a greater emotional effect upon the observer than quality of form. Quality of form affects the mind; volume shocks the nerve or soul centers and is emotional in its effect.”

In the Black Hills, he discovered the perfect natural canvas to accomplish both of those aims. After abandoning the idea of full-bodied likenesses in the Needles, he began work at Mount Rushmore, a granite uplift that had been named years earlier for New York lawyer Charles Rushmore.

An air of patriotism and national pride surrounded the memorial from its start. President Calvin Coolidge attended a dedication ceremony during the summer he spent vacationing in the Black Hills in 1927. President Franklin Roosevelt visited in 1936 as Thomas Jefferson’s head was unveiled and was awed by the undertaking.”I had had no conception until about ten minutes ago not only of its magnitude but of its permanent beauty and of its permanent importance,” Roosevelt said in impromptu remarks.

Among the most iconic and irreverent riffs on Mount Rushmore is the view from the “backside” of the mountain. It has appeared on postcards, T-shirts and commemorative plates.

Work concluded on Mount Rushmore in October of 1941 under the leadership of Borglum’s son, Lincoln, who took over after his father’s death earlier that year. In 1933, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order placing the memorial under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. That organization still serves as the guardian of Mount Rushmore, helping more than 2 million visitors each year learn about its history and trying to ensure that its image is not sullied.

Perhaps the earliest and most visible challenge came in 1958 when director Alfred Hitchcock planned to use Mount Rushmore in his thriller North by Northwest. The movie’s climactic scene featured Communist agents chasing stars Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint across the faces.

The National Park Service was worried about such a depiction from the beginning. Officials signed an agreement with film studio Metro-Goldwin-Mayer in which producers promised that no violent scenes would be filmed”near the sculpture [or] on the talus slopes below the sculpture,” or on any simulation or mockup.

Hitchcock was upset with the situation and considered pulling the movie. But when he and film crews arrived to shoot scenes on Sept. 16, 1958, there were no problems. The Park Service even granted MGM permission to take several still images of the memorial before they headed back to California. That led to controversy when Hitchcock filmed the famous chase scene against a backdrop that was created using those images.

Park Service officials argued that Hitchcock had violated their agreement and that audiences would believe those scenes had been staged on the actual memorial. They demanded the removal of a credit line acknowledging the cooperation of the Interior Department and the National Park Service in filming at Mount Rushmore. The feds sought further help from South Dakota Sen. Karl Mundt, who in 1939 had successfully pulled from distribution a government-produced film called The Plow that Broke the Plains because of its inaccurate portrayal of the Midwest and his home state.

By then, however, little could be done. The credit line was removed, and the scene remained. In a 1991 article by Todd Epp for South Dakota History, Nicole Swigart, a seasonal interpreter at Mount Rushmore, wondered what Borglum would have thought.”It’s just my opinion,” she said,”but Borglum probably would’ve liked how the memorial was shown in North by Northwest. He liked publicity.”

Cecelia Tichi, author of Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places, says the Hitchcock episode likely began the era of satirical depictions of Mount Rushmore, however two years earlier, the cover of the February 1957 issue of MAD Magazine featured a smiling Alfred E. Neuman sculpted at the foot of Rushmore.

Once the Rushmore image was out, it became nearly impossible to police its every use. In 1970, the band Deep Purple released an album called Deep Purple in Rock, which included sleeve art depicting the five band members carved into the mountain in place of the presidents. A Colgate-Palmolive television commercial from 1995 used Theodore Roosevelt to sell toothpaste. Computer graphics showed Roosevelt breaking out in a toothy grin after his teeth had been power washed. That image transitioned to a man using Colgate toothpaste.

Marty Two Bulls rarely draws Mount Rushmore, but he turned to the four faces to help illustrate opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline in 2016. Two Bulls grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning in 2021.

An episode of the Fox animated series Family Guy parodied the North by Northwest chase scene in 2005. A huge Lego Mount Rushmore stands at California’s Legoland, complete with a crew cleaning Washington’s left ear with a giant Lego Q-tip. One online retailer offers a Mount Rushmore dartboard (you’ll hit the bull’s-eye by firing a dart at the left corner of Jefferson’s mouth). Small replicas are offered on several websites that feature other figures in place of the presidents — stars of classic and modern horror films, Disney characters and the Golden Girls.

Closer to home, a logo of Custer’s Mt. Rushmore Brewing Company and Pounding Fathers restaurant features the four faces, plus an arm added to Washington and Lincoln. Both men are gripping a pint.

The image of Mount Rushmore appears today in ways that Robinson and Borglum likely never imagined. So how much is too much? Is there a line? What makes people care?

ìPeople are fickle,” says James Popovich, who served as Mount Rushmore’s chief of interpretation for 20 years before retiring in 2004.”Some will say it’s just in fun and others will say it degrades the memorial. There are thoughts on both sides, and you have to respect them.”

In his two decades at the memorial, Popovich saw incredible demand for Mount Rushmore imagery in advertising. That usage sometimes rubbed people the wrong way.”People want to use any kind of logo from a national park, or Mount Rushmore especially, because it’s such an iconic symbol of America,” he says.”They want to use them in advertising or in any way to attract people to their business. So people do feel really particular about making sure the memorial is protected and safe for everybody to see and to see it the way they think it should be.

ìThe park service people, I think they feel a little unhappy about it when they first see it, but even me, as I saw it over time, I began to recognize why people do it. It sells literature, T-shirts, cups and hats, and that’s what they’re in business for, too.”

The memorial has also become a favorite for cartoonists, whose riffs on Rushmore have appeared in newspapers and magazines for decades. Jeffrey Koterba is a nationally syndicated cartoonist. He grew up in Omaha and spent 31 years with the Omaha World-Herald, where he drew more than 12,000 cartoons. Today his work is distributed through Cagle Cartoons and appears in 700 to 800 newspapers worldwide. He says Mount Rushmore is a natural fit for cartoonists because it’s recognizable — a trait that he thinks is becoming rarer.”When I was first starting out in cartooning, you could reference a film or a book, and even if you hadn’t seen the film or read the book, you at least had some understating of what it was, and I could use that for a cartoon,” Koterba says.”But today, there aren’t that many things that are so quickly identifiable in American culture. To me, Mount Rushmore stands pretty much at the top of the list. Everyone knows what that is.”

A notable Rushmore cartoon of his was born out of the federal government shutdown in late 2018 and early 2019. Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln gaze at a blank space on the mountain where Roosevelt should be.”Teddy’s been furloughed,” Jefferson quips.

As Mount Rushmore gradually solidified its place in modern popular culture, cartoons became much more widespread, appearing in national publications like The Saturday Evening Post.

Koterba put a lot of thought into that cartoon — the recognizable image, the implications that a government shutdown could have on the memorial itself and his audience’s potential reaction.”It’s my job to look for an image, or something using very few words, to get the idea across in a fast way,” he says.”They say the average reader spends 7 seconds with a cartoon. I thought, ‘What is something we all recognize as a symbol of our country and is somewhat related to the government?’ And I thought it was funny. I am going for a joke, not just for the sake of the joke, but ultimately to make a point.”

And then there’s the art itself.”I chose Teddy because visually, where it landed seemed like a good place. You wouldn’t want to do either president on the end. It made it more glaring. And it’s my job to take the reader by surprise. You don’t expect to see that image missing one of the faces.”

Koterba’s cartoons have featured the Statue of Liberty, George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War and the Mona Lisa. Locally, he’s drawn several cartoons featuring The Sower, a prominent sculpture atop the state capitol in Lincoln. He doesn’t recall any negative feedback in using those as vehicles. That could be because his audience is worldwide. Local readers may be more inclined to object with what they see as an unfit portrayal of a memorial or point of pride in their own backyard.

ìWhen I’m coming up with a cartoon idea, it’s coming from a good place with good intent, based in journalism, based in fact,” Koterba says.”Yes, it’s my opinion, but I’m basing my opinion on fact as I see it. If I’m setting out to make a point that I believe is a valid point, I have to make people think. How can I portray that in a cartoon and get you to think about something in a different way? I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, just add my voice to the conversation.

ìI have respect for monuments and paintings and symbols and the American flag. It’s never my intent to rile people up,” he says.”But if it’s a symbol that people recognize and I can use it as a vehicle to make a point, then I think it’s fair game. I don’t see it as such a sacred thing that it is above being able to be used for satire or cartoons.”

Maybe it’s true that Borglum — ever the publicity seeker — would delight in the universal access to his grand creation that the 21st century allows, and that millions of people around the world can see it in periodicals, on television, in movies and on the internet, portrayed both solemnly and respectfully and occasionally with tongue planted firmly in cheek. He might even think it’s worth celebrating.

Where are the party hats?

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

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The Respectful Shepherd

By Bernie Hunhoff

Sheep deserve our respect, says Belle Fourche writer and rancher Sentel Schreier.

Sentel Schreier learned the usual life lessons when she left her hometown of Belle Fourche to study economics at Augustana University in Sioux Falls — things like self-confidence and independent thinking — but she also had a dietary revelation.

“I just figured everyone enjoyed lamb once or twice a day,” she says. She was surprised to discover that most of her new friends didn’t know a lamb chop from a karate move.”They hadn’t grown up with it like I had,” she says. Lamb wasn’t served at the Augie dining hall and wasn’t to be found on the menus of restaurants in her home state’s largest city.

It was a culinary culture shock for a young girl who grew up on a fourth-generation family ranch believing that sheep are magical creatures that generously provide food and wool for mankind, all while maintaining an aura of dignity that she notes is even lauded in Bible passages.

On a college field trip to India, she was even more chagrined to discover that lamb was more popular there than it is in her home state, which ranks sixth in the nation in sheep production.”And most people are vegetarians in India,” she says.

Despite the change in diet, Schreier’s love for her West River roots never changed, and upon graduation in 2018 she returned home to teach Spanish at a secondary school. She married Nathan Schreier in July of 2021, and of course barbecued lamb was served at the wedding dinner.

Now she’s hoping to turn her husband into a sheepherder (he works in technology at the Belle Fourche schools). After two years, she left the classroom to join her father, Johnny Johnson, on the ranch. On a typical day, she rises long before the sun. She often”rounds up” a few ranch hands to help, and then makes the 50-mile trip north to the ranch where — depending on the season — they might rotate livestock to greener pastures, do some fencing, tend to newborn lambs or do the myriad other tasks related to raising cattle and sheep in western South Dakota.

South Dakota ranks sixth in the nation in sheep production.

Over the summer, she was also taming and breaking two wild mustangs that came from a Bureau of Land Management range, while keeping watch on a big ranch dog that was hiding a litter of pups in the high grass that surrounds the outbuildings.

Through it all, Schreier still accomplishes some teaching; she does it now through a website she created to share thoughts on rural living and lamb chops. Her online essays are not the mushy cliches and stereotypes penned by too many western writers who only glorify the blue skies, beautiful landscapes and resilient cowboys.”Rugged individualism isn’t all that great,” she suggested in a recent article.”People who make a life out of isolation tend to be bitter towards society — perhaps because interacting with others takes practice. Complete solitude makes one rusty and we typically don’t like things we’re not good at. But it’s also really easy to hate people; we’re all infected with normalized self-absorption, greed, slander, everything that’s always, always been a problem for our species ….”

She even dared to critique Archer Gilfillan, an early 20th century sheepherder who became regionally famous for his humorous books and entertaining speeches to livestock groups. While she enjoyed reading Gilfillan’s book Sheep, she adds,”I do remember how egotistical and bitter towards other people this guy was … plus he put random Latin in the book everywhere. I hate it when authors do this without any reason other than to say, ‘Hey, I know Latin.'”

In another essay, she admits that as a teenager she sometimes wanted more entertainment.”On the ranch, there isn’t a whole lot of recreation. Your options are limited to either reading, radio talk shows or roping buckets. We barely have cell service so social media is an option only if you want to walk out to a hill or stand on top of a truck.” She surmised, however, that”when you have no one to entertain you, you see what a good, amusing friend you can be to yourself.”

Schreier also writes about her workdays, her family and her faith, including highlights and doubts. Her thoughtful reflections on the complicated culture of consuming the creatures she coddles are a rare take on rural life.

“Last week my dad, husband and I butchered a sheep so we could have grass-fed meat in our freezer for the summer,” she writes.”In about five seconds it was over, and the sheep was dead. It struck me how remarkable it is that the sheep never made a sound. They are silent under stress. Even when docking, it’s very rare for a sheep to cry out in pain. The prophet Isaiah related Jesus’ dignity in the face of death like that of a sheep for a reason. ‘He was oppressed and afflicted yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.'”

Schreier believes there should always be”an air of respect” when eating meat.”Try to buy meat from someone who gave that animal a good life,” she suggests.”Perhaps before a dinner of delicious lamb chops, thank God for that creature’s life and ask Him to make you more generous like the critter whose life ended to preserve yours. Let’s make dinner sacred and special again.”

The hubbub of shearing season interrupts the solitude of life on a West River sheep ranch.

She and her father sell their lambs in the fall to feedlots but someday she hopes they might market meat directly to consumers.”Nathan and I even flirt with the idea of opening a restaurant that features lamb,” she says.

However, she says people need not wait for their grand opening to enjoy the flavor because there’s nothing very difficult about cooking lamb meat.”Lamb chops are comparable to a good beef steak,” she says.”Maybe marinate them with some olive oil and lemon, something acidic just as you would the steak. My dad and I will sometimes grill a lamb chop for breakfast. Lamb and eggs.”

She also recommends serving lamb with a Grecian sauce called tzatziki, which is made from sheep’s milk mixed with seasonings, herbs and cucumbers.”Nathan likes to go Mediterranean, and that’s always delicious,” she says.

She has learned that some people seem to avoid lamb because they think it is more complicated to cook than other red meats.”Or maybe they worry that they are going to mess it up,” she says.”But really there is no difference. You can go rare, medium or well done. You can make burger patties from ground lamb. And you can go traditional, just lamb and potatoes.”

She says her father remembers hearing that Americans soured on lamb after World War II, when the U.S. military supposedly served rations of poor-quality lamb to the troops. For many, it was their first taste of the meat, and they brought home a bad impression.

Give it another chance, suggests the young rancher who at age 25 is already developing a reputation as a rural spokeswoman who thinks for herself and respectfully encourages others to do the same.

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