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What the Bones Say

By Lance Nixon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What’s in the Water at Wallace?

By John Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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Grandmother Power

By Bernie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, we heard her loud and clear.

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gator Shows

By Chad Coppess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not even a gator bite will change his mind.

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

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Night Walking South Dakota

By John Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Elevator

By Bernie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Goos designed classic crib elevators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.