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Making Dignity

By Paul Higbee

Dignity, a 50-foot-tall stainless-steel tribute to indigenous culture, stands on a Missouri River bluff near Chamberlain. Photo by Chad Coppess

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the September/October 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine in conjunction with the unveiling of Dale Lamphere’s grand sculpture Dignity of Earth and Sky along the Missouri River near Chamberlain.

For a year and a half, anticipation built across South Dakota and beyond about Dignity, Dale Lamphere’s 50-foot sculpture that overlooks the Missouri River from a dominant bluff. Millions see it every year as they drive past Chamberlain on Interstate 90.

The stainless-steel statue depicts a Native woman with a star quilt and is both traditional and boldly innovative in design. The traditional: the figure of the woman whose dress, leggings and moccasins are authentic to the mid-1800s, and whose face is an amalgamation of three Lakota women Lamphere used as models. The innovative: motion and changing light in the quilt, with more than 100 blue diamond shapes that move with the wind, fluttering”like an aspen leaf,” Lamphere explains.

Rapid City entrepreneurs Norm and Eunabel McKie put more than a million dollars into the project. They speak of Dignity as”alive” and, Norm says, carrying a burden of responsibility”to inspire all people to maximize their lives, and also to combat suicide,” sadly prevalent on nearby reservations.

South Dakota Artist Laureate Dale Lamphere’s Dignity took shape during the summer of 2016.

The McKies, owners of the McKie Ford/Lincoln car dealership in Rapid City, started talking in 2008 about giving something back to the state that’s been so good to them. Norm went to another Rapid City businessman, architect Pat Wyss, and over time they discussed possible projects. The day came, Norm remembers, when he realized”we could have this iconic sculpture, on the Missouri, in the heart of the state.” Wyss remained with the project from those conceptual discussions to placement at Chamberlain. He is landscape architect for the site, incorporating the hill’s natural slope toward the highway into the pedestal. The McKies and Wyss knew that in Lamphere, they were involving not only an artist of the highest caliber, but someone who shared their deep respect for South Dakota’s Native peoples.

Dignity also contributes to South Dakota tourism, an aspect of the project that excites supporters for reasons beyond revenue. The statue shines a light on the state’s center, too often overlooked by visitors, and makes a powerful statement about modern South Dakotans’ respect for the region’s original residents and cultures.

As South Dakotans know well, these art forms can take a long time to reach fruition. In this case, though, things moved swiftly after a lunch with Gov. Dennis Daugaard where the Dignity concept was explained in detail.”Let’s make this happen,” the governor said to staff who were present. State government quickly committed to having the statue stand on South Dakota-owned land, at the busy I-90 rest area just east of the river and south of Chamberlain, a place offering a sweeping view of the Missouri, bluffs and prairie.

Lamphere gave the project instant credibility. He’s been a professional sculptor for 50 years, with his main studio in the Black Hills foothills near Sturgis. Lamphere has more than 60 major commissions to his credit across the United States, from the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., to art at the Eisenhower Medical Center in southern California. Recent pieces have been installed in Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago and San Antonio. In his home state, Lamphere’s work is prominent at the state capitol building and public venues from Sioux Falls to Spearfish. Human subjects range from spiritual figures to strong and resilient residents of the Great Plains, many of them women.

Over his career, Lamphere has embraced big-scale sculpture (consider his 33-foot tall Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary, Queen of Peace works at Sioux City, Iowa). That quality draws inevitable comparisons to two historic South Dakota sculptors — Gutzon Borglum (Mount Rushmore) and Korczak Ziolkowski (Crazy Horse Memorial). Lamphere is quick to say he doesn’t consider himself in that league, a self-assessment over which others might squabble. In 2013, the day after he was presented the Governor’s Award in the Arts for his lifetime of distinctive creative achievement, Lamphere was greeted with a long ovation in the state legislature chambers — applause any high-ranking political leader would envy. In 2015 he was named South Dakota Artist Laureate.

More than 100 blue diamond shapes flutter with the wind “like an aspen leaf,” Lamphere says.

Lamphere began creating Dignity by first drawing the form, then sculpting a one eighth-scale model. He communicated regularly with the McKies, who, he notes,”let me pursue my highest vision.”

That vision — including incorporation of light, color and fluttering movement in the quilt — stemmed almost entirely from Lamphere’s imagination.”One of the advantages of living out here in relative isolation is how I have no idea what the rest of the world is doing,” the sculptor says.”So I play around in my imagination.”

The spot where the statue began taking form, where Lamphere multiplied precise measurements from the model and transferred them to steel, is truly isolated. It’s a worksite he’s used before, about 44 miles east of Rapid City on Highway 44, near the Cheyenne River. The location makes it easily accessible to Native people who live in rural southwestern South Dakota, and many stopped by to offer encouragement.”That means a lot,” Lamphere says.

For visitors, the site felt more like a ranch where workers would gather for branding rather than creating art. The Black Hills could be seen off in the distance, with miles of golden prairie in between. About 200 buffalo roam the ranch, and stacked hay bales and tractors decorated the homestead. Dozens of colorful and loud peacocks added flair.

Lamphere fit right in at the Spirited Winds Tatanka Ranch, with his western attire and manner. A shed served as the work base, crammed with tools and home to 30 or 40 kittens and an antler collection. But in front of that shed Dignity rose, surrounded by scaffolding for workers.”They have no idea,” Lamphere quipped,”how tiring it is for me to stand on the ground and yell instructions up to them.”

The ranch is in Tom Trople’s family. Trople has been Lamphere’s chief welder for three decades. Trople had a quip of his own.”These days Dale is pretty understanding that you can’t bend metal every direction — although sometimes he wants to.” Trople has worked on about 20 of Lamphere’s large-scale works, taller than 20 feet.”During that time, Dale’s become more like a brother than employer,” Trople says.

Lamphere transferred measurements from a scale model to the stainless steel sculpture, which took shape on a ranch east of Rapid City.

The involvement of highly regarded sculptors Jim Maher, Andy Roltgen and Grant Standard made the crew something of a dream team. Another important contribution came from Brook Loobey, an automotive paint expert who tackled the challenge of experimenting with colors for the quilt’s diamond-shaped pieces and implied beadwork. He and Lamphere studied color shades in the sun and imagined how those colors might change under different shades of natural light.

Workers dealt with windy conditions along the Cheyenne, which reminded them that the wind is a factor along the Missouri, too. Early on, Lamphere worked with Albertson Engineering of Rapid City to make certain Dignity withstands the most brutal prairie blasts South Dakota can produce. Openings through the quilt, where the diamond shapes hang, help with the wind load.

In considering Dignity‘s full impact, more is at work than the intentions of the artist, benefactors and state of South Dakota. The venue — this exact bluff — witnessed complex history that is intertwined with the art’s statement. Lewis and Clark’s party camped directly across the river in 1804, and traditionally their story has been interpreted as a grand American adventure, with a Native woman playing a key role. But as historians and activists hammered home during the expedition’s bicentennial, those who followed the Lewis and Clark route brought diseases that devastated Native peoples of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest. Below the bluffs are a rail bed and trestle, reminders of the great political power railroads wielded in opening West River country to immigrants, greatly reducing reservation lands the Lakota people believed would be theirs forever. And the water below the bluff is called Lake Francis Case as often as the Missouri River, because dams completely altered South Dakota’s stretch of the river in the 1950s and ’60s and further stole reservation acreage.

Despite those and other historical indignities, the sculpture boldly proclaims that South Dakota’s Native cultures are alive, standing with dignity.

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The Modern Storyteller

By John Andrews

Downtown Rapid City has been artist Donald Montileaux’s home base for more than 40 years.

A pencil begins to scratch across a blank white sheet of paper. The noise is barely audible, but it’s there. Donald Montileaux is drawing Mickey Mouse.”It’s a stress reliever,” Montileaux says.”My other drawings take a lot of thinking, but Mickey, he just flows out of me.” He pauses for a moment.”You probably better not put that,” he says.”Walt Disney is gone, but his corporation is still around, and I might get in trouble.”

It seems doubtful that the multi-billion-dollar Walt Disney Corporation would kick up a fuss over a guy in South Dakota scrawling out a few Mickey Mouses just to keep his hands busy, especially if they knew the impact that one tiny cartoon character had on Montileaux’s life, and, in turn, the wider world of Native American art.

In his 71 years, Montileaux never earned a dime off a bootlegged Mickey Mouse. They’re drawn simply for the delight of his children and grandchildren, or because, after several decades of making art, his hands simply want to make more, even during an interview. His true passions are Indian warriors, horses and buffalo — not brown buffalo, but painted bright red, yellow or blue. His ledger art is an extension of the tribal tradition of painting or drawing on buffalo hides. Even casual observers can see the influences of his two main mentors: Herman Red Elk and the great Yanktonai artist Oscar Howe.

His paintings hang in homes and galleries around the world — and beyond. Within the last decade, Montileaux brought his art to the pages of children’s books, first as an illustrator and more recently as a storyteller. It was a long journey that required time, patience and ultimately acceptance from tribal elders as he sought to bring a much revered and protected Lakota tradition to a new medium.

And it all started at a kitchen table on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, when a father took his son into his lap and began teaching him how to draw Mickey Mouse.

***

Montileaux spent the first five years of his life in a small house in Kyle, the only child of Floyd and Clara Montileaux.”My mother and father only had eighth grade educations, and they had a hard time with life,” he says.”But they knew that the only way to really achieve anything was through education, and they wanted to give me a good education.”

The family moved to Rapid City, where Montileaux’s father took a job in a sawmill and his mother went to work as a dietician at St. John’s Hospital. Montileaux attended Catholic school through eighth grade. The course offerings did not include art, which led him to consider other career paths.”When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a little autobiography and said I wanted to become a priest. My dad was Lutheran, and my mom was Catholic. Dad said, ‘Maybe we need to broaden our son’s horizons a little bit.'”

They enrolled their son in public school, and an artistic fire that had been kindled on the reservation was reignited. Entertainment had been scarce in those days, so after the evening meal, while Montileaux’s mother washed dishes, he and his father grabbed a few comic books and sat at their kitchen table.”‘Let’s draw,’ he would say to me, and he’d help me. Mom was the judge. I drew a lot of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. That’s how he entertained me, but he also instilled a desire to become an artist.”

That desire blossomed at Rapid City High School.”In ninth grade, I was signing up for classes and one was industrial arts,” he says.”I just saw ‘arts’ and said, ‘Oh, I love that. Art.’ So I signed up. I walked in the door and here are all these nails and hammers and saws. I thought, ‘This is not what I wanted.’ So, I headed to the counselor’s office, and he said, ‘You want fine arts.'”

“Confrontation” features Montileaux’s brightly colored horses that seem to fly off the pages of a century-old ledger book.

Montileaux explored ceramics, sculpture, drawing, painting — every artistic medium he could imagine. He was also drawn to the Sioux Indian Museum and Crafts Center in Halley Park, a facility administered by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the U.S. Department of the Interior.”I was too young to be in there alone so I would get kicked out. But I would continue to sneak in because they had this Native American wax figure called Oscar. I loved that guy.”

His precociousness aside, the museum curator, Ella Lebow, appreciated his persistence and, perhaps more importantly, recognized his artistic ability. In 1964, during his sophomore year, she recommended him for acceptance in a new summer art institute held at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion under the guidance of Oscar Howe.

The opportunity allowed Montileaux to learn from the two artists who became his lifelong friends and mentors — Howe and Herman Red Elk. Red Elk was a Yanktonai, born on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana in 1918. He became interested in art while recovering from tuberculosis at the Sioux Sanitarium in Rapid City. He enrolled in art courses at Black Hills State College in Spearfish and, through a program at the Sioux Indian Museum, studied traditional buffalo hide painting. Red Elk eventually joined the staff at the museum, where he remained until his death in 1986, and became one of the region’s most highly skilled hide painters.

Howe, born on the Crow Creek Reservation in 1915, is perhaps South Dakota’s most influential Native American artist. After studying at the Santa Fe Indian School, Howe abandoned the more traditional style he had learned there in favor of a more abstract method. His new paintings, marked by bright colors and pristine lines, helped push the boundaries of Native American art.

Howe taught at Pierre High School until 1957, when he was named artist in residence and professor of art at the University of South Dakota. He remained there until his retirement in 1980. In the early 1960s, he launched a summer art workshop designed to help students learn more about Native American art. Howe’s program lasted only a few years, but inspired the university’s current Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute, open to high school students in grades 10 through 12.

Red Elk and Montileaux traveled across the state together for Howe’s workshop in 1964 and again in 1965.”Oscar Howe was everything I wanted to be — an artist, a teacher and a family man,” Montileaux says.”He was a taskmaster and a professionalist. Before he even started drawing, he knew where those lines would go. He mentally had it in his head before he put it down on paper. So, for a 10th grader sitting in class — kind of wild and crazy and hard to stay attentive — he really had little time for me. But Herman was a mature adult, and he helped me get through that first two weeks with Oscar because Oscar was so regimented. But the second summer I went down there, I really became friends with Oscar because I had matured a little more and my drawings matured.”

Even though Montileaux had been a rough-around-the-edges sophomore in 1964, Howe could see that the young man had paid attention. Many of the techniques Howe had taught were becoming evident in Montileaux’s drawings. One night, Howe invited Montileaux and Red Elk to his home for dinner, where they met Howe’s wife, Heidi, and daughter, Inge Dawn.

“You don’t have a Lakota name,” Howe told him.”Montileaux is not a very Lakota name. So, Herman and I have been talking through the winter about a name for you. You’re like a little bird. You’re into everything. You fly all over, like a little yellow bird. So we’re going to give you the Lakota name Yellowbird. You’re going in a good direction, but you’re all over the place getting there.”

“I really feel proud of that,” Montileaux says.”Oscar and I developed a friendship. We became an extended family in the two weeks that I was there. After that, I could always call Oscar and talk to him. He was always available. After I became a successful artist and Oscar had passed away, Heidi would come to art shows and visit me. She would catch me up on the previous year. When she came into a show, everybody knew that for an hour don’t even come close to me, because that was Heidi’s and my time to talk.”

His stint in Vermillion helped Montileaux earn a full scholarship to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After three years there, he earned another full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. But he soon discovered that the friendly and relaxed lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed in South Dakota and the Southwest did not exist on the East Coast. He came home and enrolled at Black Hills State College in Spearfish.

In 1970, he moved to the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation to teach elementary and junior high art.”I had wanted to be an art teacher, but I realized a teacher has not only the six or seven hours in the classroom, they devote 24 hours, seven days a week,” he says.”I had no time for my art.”

After three years at Cheyenne River, Montileaux moved back to Rapid City, hoping to find that ever elusive time to paint and draw.

***

That combination proved difficult to find. Montileaux needed a steady income, so he went to work at the Sioux Indian Museum, where he met his wife, Paulette. They were married in 1974.

In 1977, work was just finishing on the new Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. Montileaux took a job as a building foreman and was immediately thrust into preparations to host one of the most influential entertainers of all time.”I got hired two weeks before the building opened, and in less than a month we had Elvis Presley. It was just a buzz. Since I was the building foreman I got to go backstage when Elvis arrived. I was probably 5 feet from him, and I was just thrilled.”

A buffalo hunt scene from “Tasunka: A Lakota Horse Legend.”

Montileaux eventually became the Civic Center’s event coordinator and finally its assistant manager. In the meantime, he’d created an art studio in his home. But the demands of a full-time job meant he still couldn’t give his art the time it needed.”What little time I had I would go down there and try to get inspired. I always thought the pieces I produced during that period were all unfinished. They just didn’t have that quality, that polish, that they could have had if I’d had more time.”

Still, a highlight of Montileaux’s career came in 1995 when one of his paintings was launched into space aboard the shuttle Endeavour. Montileaux was looking for ways to support a program called SKILL (Scientific Knowledge for Indian Learning and Leadership), offered through the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Richard Gowen, the school’s president, suggested Montileaux do a painting and sell prints, the proceeds from which would help fund the program.

Montileaux produced a Badlands scene with three young Native Americans gazing into the starry night sky.”I could not think of a title for this piece,” he says.”We were at the printer and he says, ‘I’m going to push the button, we need a title.’ Everyone was talking about what they saw in the painting. I said, ‘I don’t know Ö Looking Beyond One’s Self.’ He said, ‘Man, that’s great!’ and he hit the print button.”

An engineer working on the Endeavour’s upcoming mission offered to include the painting in the shuttle’s payload, in an effort to further publicize the fundraiser. It blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the morning of March 2, 1995. Montileaux was not there. Instead, he stepped out into his front yard in Rapid City before sunrise that morning and, at the very minute Endeavour was scheduled to launch, he looked up at the stars — just like the subjects in his painting — knowing that his work was on an unprecedented journey into the universe.

Montileaux’s painting completed 262 orbits aboard Endeavour. Upon its return to earth, it was given to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Montileaux and others from the School of Mines traveled to the nation’s capital and presented President Bill Clinton with the No. 1 print.

Montileaux remained a weekend and evening artist during his 22-year career with the Civic Center.”We’d go to art shows on the weekends, and I’d always come back so inspired. Then we’d have to go to work the next day. I wished that I could be a full-time artist, and just do this.”

Finally, in 1999, at age 51 and with his three children grown, Montileaux and his wife began to consider that very possibility.”If you can make the house payment and put some food on the table, that’s all we really need,” Paulette told him. So Montileaux retired and, for the first time in his professional life, focused solely on art.

***

“I tried it and it just blossomed,” Montileaux says of the transition. One reason for his immediate success was his ledger art, a form in which scenes are drawn or painted on authentic ledger paper used by Indian agents or merchants during the late 1800s and early 1900s.”It had been dormant for so long that everyone was totally excited about it,” he says.”It was just me and about 10 other people doing it, nationwide. It was a very limited number of us.”

“Lakota Horse Nation.”

Ledger art is an extension of the buffalo hide painting tradition at which Herman Red Elk excelled.”In the wintertime, Herman would tell me stories about his drawings and what they meant and their symbols. So I tried to be hide painter for a while, but he was a master. I researched and found that once the buffalo were annihilated from the plains, Indians had no way of holding on to their ceremonies and history because they didn’t have a written language. So they did ledger drawings.

“Hides were so hard to come by, and you had to have bone brushes and rabbit skin glue and earth pigments. It was dirty and hard to do. I picked up a colored pencil and laid it on a piece of ledger paper. All of my drawings that I used to do on those hides came alive on that piece of paper.”

While he collected awards for his ledger drawings, Montileaux’s paintings truly rounded into form, particularly the horses that have become his trademark. Once again, their origin lies with Herman Red Elk, and the stories he told while the two of them worked at the Sioux Indian Museum. Warriors used to survey the land for advantageous points from which to attack enemy tribes, Red Elk said, often a small rise or a hill. As they sprinted down the slope, warriors gave a small tug on their horses’ reins. A pouch of herbs slid into the mouths of their mounts, giving the animals a burst of energy.”He said the horses would just fly off the hill and into that enemy camp. As soon as he said the word ‘fly,’ my horses never galloped or loped again. My horses fly.”

The legs of a Montileaux horse are fully extended, sometimes inches and sometimes feet above the ground. Observers can almost hear them thundering across the prairie, just as Herman Red Elk said they did. It’s a technique that Montileaux has mastered.”Herman always told me that once you put that black paint onto a hide, you can’t make a mistake. You have to know where you are going with that line,” he says.”Herman used to close his eyes and draw his horses. And now today, I can close my eyes and I can draw my horses, too. It’s something that all artists have to do. We practice our craft so much that it becomes an extension of who we are.”

In Montileaux’s case, his art is very nearly an extension of the two great mentors who shaped his career.”The design that I put down is Herman. The brilliance of my color is probably Oscar showing through,” he says.”They’re not in any way close to Oscar’s presentation. But the training, how to mix colors, how to stretch my paper when I do a watercolor, he’s there. Every time I do something, Oscar’s there.”

***

In 2006, Montileaux’s art entered a new realm when he was asked to illustrate a children’s book. Tatanka and the Lakota People told the traditional Lakota story of how the holy man Tatanka turned himself into a buffalo to help the Pte Oyate (buffalo people) survive after their emergence from the underworld through Wind Cave in the Black Hills. The text was written and edited by a group of Lakota elders and scholars. Montileaux’s paintings were done in a two-dimensional style reminiscent of buffalo hide paintings.

Stories such as Tatanka were traditionally kept within the sacred realm of Lakota oral history. Montileaux recalls many evenings as a child on the Pine Ridge Reservation spent at his grandmother’s cabin, a tiny home with no electricity, listening to grandfathers and uncles tell stories. It was often the only form of available entertainment, and they commanded the room.”When my uncle Albert came, it was really kind of a gift,” Montileaux says.”We’d all gather around him and he’d just take us away, telling us about wild horses, and Indians and all these things that had happened. And we never once thought that he was keeping a tradition alive by being a storyteller. We just thought of him as Uncle Albert coming to tell us a story. I never thought of him as a traditional storyteller, but he was.”

Montileaux read stories to youth at the 2019 South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood.

In 2014, Montileaux sought to bridge the divide between oral history and written stories once again, this time as both illustrator and storyteller. The idea came while visiting Alex White Plume, a Lakota elder perhaps best known for his battles against the federal government over the legalization of industrial hemp.”One night, Alex told stories. He’s a terrific storyteller,” Montileaux recalls.”He sat down and told this story and I thought, ‘My God, I’ve heard that story from my grandpas, grandmas and uncles throughout my childhood.’ It just struck a chord that I would like to write that story. And I listened to it — really listened to it — for the first time, because Alex was such a great storyteller.”

The story was about tasunka, the horse, and how these new creatures, once tamed, made the Lakota people rich and powerful. Montileaux worked on a few early drafts and shared them with White Plume, who remained unsure.”I really like what you’re doing here, but storytellers traditionally tell the story verbally,” White Plume told him.”We don’t write things down because we want people to listen to us when we tell stories. We want to make an impact on them.”

Montileaux understood White Plume’s concerns but explained that the Lakota people aren’t as centered as they once were. They live around the world and gathering for traditional storytelling sessions is much more difficult in the 21st century. They needed a new way to hear the stories that remain so important to their culture.

He went back to his Rapid City studio and finalized his text and ledger drawings. He asked Agnes Gay, the assistant archivist at Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, to provide the Lakota translation. After a rewrite that more sharply focused the story for children in second through fifth grade, Tasunka: A Lakota Horse Legend was published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press in 2014.

Montileaux brought the finished version to White Plume’s ranch near Manderson, unsure of what the elder would have to say.”His eyes lit up as he paged through it. He was pretty happy with everything. You could tell by his voice. He got done with the book and said, ‘Sit down. You got some time? I want to tell you a story about muskrat and skunk.’ So he told me the story, and then he said, ‘You know, I’ve thought about this and I think maybe you’re the one. Maybe you’re the person who does this for our tribe.’ And that was really an honor, because he accepted the fact that the book was good, and he gave me another story. But he also accepted the fact that we had to write things down to keep them alive.”

That began the latest chapter of Montileaux’s life, that of modern-day storyteller. The state historical society press published Muskrat and Skunk in 2017. This story explains the origins of the Lakota drum, once again with an accompanying translation from Agnes Gay.

Montileaux’s books reached a wider audience in 2019, when the press published all three stories in one volume called Tatanka and Other Legends of the Lakota People. As the South Dakota Humanities Council’s Young Readers One Book author, Montileaux spoke to students across the state leading up to his appearance at the South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. More than 10,000 copies of Tatanka were distributed to second graders statewide.

***

Montileaux has established an artistic routine in retirement. His home studio contains everything he needs to do ledger drawings. He’s always on the lookout for ledger paper, particularly books that date between 1870 and 1930. They’re more plentiful than a person might think. They usually turn up at auction sales, or friends let him know if they see one in an antique store or elsewhere.”Every day I wake up, get my slippers on and come to my room,” he says.”I either pull out a piece that I’ve been working on or I start something new and different. Oscar Howe used to tell me, ‘Do every piece like it’s going to end up in the New York Museum of Fine Art, or even in the Louvre. Always have that attitude when you’re doing a piece, that it’s going to go far and it’s going to be there forever.’ I’ve always had that attitude.”

He keeps his painting supplies at a studio inside Prairie Edge, a store and gallery specializing in Native American arts and crafts in downtown Rapid City. He’s currently at work on another children’s book and a series of murals that will be installed inside South Dakota State University’s new American Indian Student Center sometime in 2020. Still, he wants to push his own artistic boundaries.”I really like to look at nature now. I’m trying to be that type of artist, like Renoir and CÈzanne. You know how the colors of their fields look so bold and beautiful? I want to do that, but I want to incorporate some Lakota feeling into those pieces. Maybe a medicine wheel someplace.”

The pencil scratching begins to grow fainter.”He’s got some great ears, a little nose and his hand is coming up,” Montileaux says as he puts the finishing touches on Mickey Mouse. Donald Montileaux has received worldwide accolades and awards for his books and art, but for maybe just a moment, he’s back at that little kitchen table on the Pine Ridge Reservation where it all began.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Cowboy’s Artist

By John Andrews

Tony Chytka fired his sculpture of saddle bronc champion Clint Johnson in his Belle Fourche foundry.

A BLACK CAT PURRS beside a homemade kiln that would raise the eyebrow of any OSHA inspector, but Tony Chytka doesn’t seem worried.”They would probably have a fit with me, but I’m the only one out here,” he says.

“Out here” is Chytka’s 360-acre ranch, which lies in a zigzag of red dirt roads southeast of Belle Fourche along the Belle Fourche River, part of the historic Redwater Irrigation District. The peak of Bear Butte, some 20 miles away and still snowcapped on an early May morning, is just visible on the southeastern horizon. He bought the place 20 years ago. He keeps a few cows and horses and puts up some hay. Chykta also does some irrigating; piles of irrigation pipe lie near an old tin cattle shed that doubles as a foundry, where Chytka produces some of the best contemporary Western art in North America.

When we spoke, Chytka was laboring on a 3/4 life size sculpture of Spearfish native and four-time PRCA world saddle bronc riding champion Clint Johnson. When it was unveiled in August of 2019 at the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center in Fort Pierre, it became the third and final piece added to the center’s sculpture garden, which is a tribute to South Dakota’s amazing history of exceptional saddle bronc riders.

Chytka has been on a lifelong path to becoming one of the country’s premier Western artists. He grew up on a farm west of Yankton; his surname (pronounced KIT-ka) is typical of the Bohemian families who settled that country in the late 1860s and 1870s. Growing up, he developed two passions — art and rodeo. The Chytka property also included the local saddle club arena, where South Dakota rodeo greats like Casey Tibbs performed. Chytka became enamored with rodeo at a young age. He remembers that after school at the one-room Longfellow District 11, he held on for dear life to a barrel suspended by ropes while his older brothers tugged the lines, simulating a teeth-chattering bronc ride. That led to competition in Little Britches and the high school rodeo club.

Teachers at Longfellow and the high school also encouraged his artistic endeavors. He took art classes and was introduced to sculpture during his senior year through clay modeling. While the other students were fashioning clay pots, Chytka created some 300 individual fired one-of-a-kind ceramic pieces.

After the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center opened in 2009, Chytka donated sculptures of Casey Tibbs (left) and trick rider Mattie Goff-Newcombe.

After graduating in 1972, Chytka enrolled at the University of South Dakota in Springfield. He took as many art classes as he could and became a member of the rodeo team, competing in bull riding and bareback bronc riding. He transferred to Black Hills State University in Spearfish in 1974, where he continued studying art and rodeoing. Chytka became a contemporary of Clint Johnson, who was on the rodeo team at South Dakota State University in Brookings.”He was a very strong rider,” Chytka recalls.”Very positive and an easy-going guy. Always had a chuckle to him.”

Drive around Belle Fourche and you’ll see evidence of Chytka’s success in Western art. Sculptures honoring brothers Marvin and Mark Garrett, two of the nation’s best bareback bronc riders, stand at the corner of Sixth and State streets. Another Chytka creation called Legacy, placed along Highway 85, was completed for the South Dakota centennial in 1989. Chytka has also memorialized Jerry Olson, a former rodeo clown and bullfighter from nearby Fruitdale, and his tribute to 1920s trick rider Mattie Goff-Newcombe can be found in Sturgis.

Chytka’s pieces are part of private collections around the world. Several are on display at the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So when the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center was becoming a reality in the mid-2000s, and its directors sought art to place inside, they turned to Chytka, who donated two pieces that greet visitors as they enter: Casey Tibbs in the moments leading up to a bronc ride and Goff-Newcombe performing at the Faith Fair and Rodeo in 1928.

“He’s really a perfect fit,” says Cindy Bahe, longtime director of the center.”He’s a rodeo guy and rode broncs, so he knows exactly the stature of the cowboy and the animal. They are pretty true to life.”

The center sought Chytka’s expertise again when planning began for a sculpture garden overlooking the Missouri River. Johnny Smith, a former board member of the Casey Tibbs Foundation, was particularly proud of South Dakota’s saddle bronc riding champions and wanted to honor the very best. Plans called for three sculptures, all produced in Chytka’s Belle Fourche foundry. The first, placed in 2013, depicts Ree Heights native and five-time world saddle bronc riding champion Billy Etbauer scoring 89 atop Painted Valley at the 2009 Cheyenne Frontier Days. The second, added in 2018, is Casey Tibbs on The Old Gray Mare, honoring his performance at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1949, the year he won his first of six world saddle bronc riding championships. Clint Johnson, a four-time world champion, took his place in 2019.

Legacy, completed for the state centennial in 1989, was Chytka’s first large-scale piece. It stands along Highway 85 in Belle Fourche.

For Chytka, the creative process begins with a pose that perfectly encapsulates the subject and the context of the piece.”Then I’ll use other photographs to try to get a three-dimensional draw from it,” Chytka says.”It’s really hard to work off a flat surface when you’re working three dimensionally. That’s what’s unique about it. You can walk around to the other side and see the depth of it.”

Those drawings eventually become a table-size clay model on which Chytka does the brunt of the shaping and sculpting.”That’s where you do all the designing, work out all the detailing and that type of thing. There are certain guides you can use for the length of the horse’s head, the legs. A lot of it is just the view. I like to just stand back and see it all together.”

Over the next four to six months, the project goes through various stages. A rubber layer is applied on the outside of the clay, and then plaster of Paris on top of that. The process yields a wax version of the sculpture, and a ceramic shell is built around it. When the wax is melted, the shell is ready to receive molten bronze from Chytka’s homemade kiln.

Chytka brought his pieces to other foundries until 1984, when he learned the process himself at a foundry in Bozeman, Montana.”The casting process has always intrigued me,” he says.”When you use commercial foundries, pretty soon all the work from that foundry starts to look the same. There’s just as much art in the foundry process as the beginning sculpture.”

His kiln, fueled by propane and powered by a Kirby vacuum motor, heats the bronze to 2,200 degrees. It’s a two man pour, he says, meaning a man at each end of an 8-foot-long metal tong holds the piece as it’s dipped into the furnace (the 10-foot tong was too hard to handle, he explains).”After it cools you can hit the bottom of the shell with a hammer and you aren’t going to hurt it,” he says.”The permanence of it is something I always liked.”

Chytka sculpted Johnson atop Kicking Bear, the horse he rode to win his fourth championship in 1989 (his previous titles came in 1980, 1987 and 1988). Visitors who attended the unveiling surely appreciated its artistic merits, but when old cowboys — and even Chytka himself — glance into the horse’s eyes or see the way Johnson sits in the saddle, they might be transported to their old rodeo days. There will be features that only those who’ve landed on their backside in the arena will notice.

“There are little things. Positioning, the equipment, the action and that kind of thing,” Chykta says.”I’m not hung up too much on detail, just as long as it flows. But when somebody who does know rodeo says, ëHey, you did a good job on that,’ then that means just that much more, coming from people who have been there.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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400 Roses

By Bernie Hunhoff

Kristine Reiner’s art career bloomed with the gift of 400 unwanted roses.

Somewhere there’s a young man who probably feels he wasted his money on 400 roses. His investment didn’t have the intended effect — which, of course, was to impress a particular young lady — but the roses have led to a lot of good in South Dakota.

It all began a half-dozen years ago when Kristine Reiner was studying art at the University of Sioux Falls and politely telling a boy that she wasn’t interested. With a final flourish of hope and desperation, he called a Sioux Falls florist and had 400 roses delivered to her. Four hundred divides into 33-and-a-half dozen; her tiny college apartment was red with flowers.

Reiner wasn’t raised to throw things away. She grew up in Canistota, the youngest of three daughters of a single mom. Even though her dad was in prison for drug use and her mom struggled to pay the bills, she remembers her small-town childhood with a smile.”As the youngest, I spent a lot of time alone,” she says. But that gave her time to think and dream and draw. In high school, art teacher William Cavill encouraged her.”He told me I could make a living by being creative. He was the first person to believe in my art.”

With that confidence, she enrolled at USF in 2012 and there she met Ceca Cooper, an art professor known for challenging students on the boundaries between man and nature.”I realized I was there to learn the rules of art so I could break them,” Kristine says. In her senior year in 2016, she was seeking inspiration for her final art project, while also trying to distance herself from that persistent suitor.

That’s when the roses arrived. They filled her little apartment, both in space and scent.

With her”waste not” mentality, she couldn’t bring herself to throw them in the garbage.”They wouldn’t have fit in the dumpster anyway,” she says. At first, she and a friend went to Wiley’s Bar in downtown Sioux Falls and sold them to guys who didn’t need to buy in bulk because they already had girls at their side. She netted $180, but she still had a lot of roses.

“I just couldn’t throw them away,” she says.”I always loved roses. That’s probably why he sent so many.” She sat at home, surrounded by the flowers while also trying to imagine her final art project. It’s probably not shocking that she eventually brushed a rose against the canvas. She began to experiment with the flowers, not just as brushes but as elements within her paintings. She squished them and squeezed them. She broke boundaries.

Reiner’s work is inspired by, and sometimes made from, roses.

Kristine Reiner is now a burgeoning Sioux Falls artist. She works as a graphic designer by day, teaches evening art classes and just finished a mural commissioned by the city at Eighth and Main. She’s also a community activist.”I love Sioux Falls. It’s my favorite city,” she says, because she feels support, just as she did while growing up in Canistota.”Artists have such an opportunity here because anyone can meet anyone anytime. You don’t have to be someone to have a chance.” The people of Canistota are still helping her as well; Sue Baxa, who runs a restaurant in the historic Ortman Hotel, exhibits Reiner’s paintings on her walls.

While Reiner continues to create — with clay, screen printing and often still painting with roses — she also practices her creativity on social issues. When she learned that some South Dakota school children were”lunch shamed” (refused food because they owed lunch money) she and her sister Brandie started a nonprofit called Cathy’s Place to help families pay school debts.”We didn’t always have enough money for lunches and activities when I was a kid, and there were always people who helped us,” she says, particularly a lady named Cathy Steinmetz. They’ve created a Facebook page, and a website is coming. The nonprofit also helps teachers buy school supplies.

When the pandemic of 2020 forced Reiner to cancel her art classes, she used the free time to sew designer face masks. They became a hit with friends, and now she sells them on her website, kristinereiner.com.

The coronavirus also interrupted the corporate food chain, and she lamented the dilemma of farmers without a market. The crisis crystallized when her boyfriend, Damon Brown, learned that his family in Minnesota had been approached by the federal government for land to bury livestock that couldn’t be marketed. Together, they founded Cash Cow Co-op, an online directory that links farmers with families who want to buy local foods. They’ve already made connections across the Dakotas, Iowa and Minnesota.

All who like happy endings are wondering if Brown is the same guy who gave Reiner the 400 roses. He is not, but he shares her passion for making South Dakota a better place through creativity. What could be happier than that?

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

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Retracing Roads to Our Round Barns

By Bernie Hunhoff

A barn-like pavilion is the centerpiece of the two-county fairgrounds near Nisland.

South Dakota Magazine staffers crisscrossed South Dakota 25 years ago in search of that rare architectural treasure — the round barn.

With help from the State Historical Society, we eventually found 29. They included livestock sales barns, the Butte-Lawrence county fairgrounds pavilion, two octagonal machine sheds and a charming, vertical-log barn near Sturgis. South Dakota never had many round barns, so forgive us for loosely interpreting the term.

We also learned that circular barn construction dates at least to the Bronze Age (hundreds of years B.C.), when boulders were used not just for castles in Britain but also for barns.

George Washington was among the first American farmers to build a barn in the round. A reconstruction of his original 16-sided barn, based on the first president’s own drawings, is a popular attraction at Mount Vernon.

The Shakers were the first Americans to experiment with round construction. A Shaker stone barn built at Hancock, Massachusetts, in 1824 is among the country’s oldest.

There’s just something about roundness. Eric Sloane, author of An Age of Barns, wrote,”Farmers made circular designs on their barns and their wives sewed circular patterns on quilts. They took delight in round hats, rugs and boxes, and they made round drawer pulls and hand rests for their severely-angled furniture.”

Anton Anfinson, a contractor from Wakonda, promoted the round barn concept in southeast South Dakota. Anfinson believed a round barn was the most efficient way to feed cattle. Many round barns featured a silo or a hole in the hay mow at the center. Livestock stood with their heads to the center at feeding or milking time, making it easier to feed the animals and clean their waste.

Most farmers who constructed round barns must have believed in Anfinson’s economic theory, but it’s likely that they were also intrigued by the thought of having something out of the ordinary.

They got what they bargained for. During our 1990s search, we found that if we got within 10 miles of a round barn and asked for help, somebody would soon have directions. Any well-kept old barn gets people’s attention, but a round barn becomes a neighborhood landmark.

“A man’s barn bespoke his worth as a man,” wrote Bob Lacy in a foreword to his book, Barn.”It expressed his earthly aspirations and symbolized the substance of his legacy to his children.”

Rural historians estimate that fewer than 3,000 round barns existed in North America, and most were built in Canada. South Dakota never had more than three or four dozen.

Twenty-five years ago, it was heartening to learn that someone cared about nearly every round barn we discovered. Over the past year, we retraced our travels and found that most of those barns still stand. Following are stories about the barns and the people who care for them in the 21st century.

Watertown

The Corson Emminger barn south of Watertown along Highway 81.

East River’s most visible round barn stands just south of Watertown along U.S. Highway 81. Corson Emminger came to South Dakota in 1905 from Wisconsin, where round barns were popular with dairy farmers, and built the 50-foot diameter barn with concrete blocks in 1910. He added an attractive cupola for good measure. The barn served as a milking parlor for decades. Today, the Emminger barn is missing a few shingles but it remains in good shape thanks to the Moeller family, its longtime owners.

1880 Town

West River’s most prominent round barn serves as a grand entry to the Hullinger family’s 1880 Town, a pioneer village located 22 miles west of Murdo along Interstate 90. Richard Hullinger remembers the day they moved the 14-sided barn from a ranch near Draper, about 45 miles away.”We came across the country on a ridge, and we had to do a little dirt work on the draws to make the crossings.” Built in 1919, before the invention of power tools, the barn’s symmetrical roof is high art to anyone who ever handled a handsaw or hammer.

Mission Hill

Norman Nelsen would be pleased to see the place he named New Hope Farm more than a century ago. Nelsen was a man who appreciated detail. He kept a journal of the materials and costs when he built an octagonal barn in 1913 as a machinery shed.”He recorded how many nails and how many boards he used, and he kept track of the costs,” says his great-grandson Chris Nelsen, who now lives on the farm, northwest of Mission Hill, with his wife Cindy and their children.”You can still see the hooks in the round barn where he hung the longest ears of corn to dry,” Nelsen says.”It was his method of doing natural seed selection.”

In 1914, Norman built a traditional rectangular barn just a stone’s throw to the west. Today, calves and sheep enjoy the big barn, and the smaller one is still used for storage. Chris and Cindy tend fastidiously to both barns — they plan to re-shingle the round barn and they recently sided and roofed the big barn, where letters atop the main door read NEW HOPE FARM.

Sioux Falls

The Shafer family has tended to a round barn on the northeast edge of Sioux Falls for many years. The barn was built of hollow block in 1919-20 by bankers Art Winters and Ray Stevens, who liked the round concept for cattle feeding. They installed a nearby scale and operated the farm like a stockyard.

However, the feeder cattle created too much moisture in the winter months, causing thick layers of ice to collect on the walls. The bankers eventually abandoned their operation and sold the barn to the Shafer family, which owns it today. For years, they operated a dairy in the barn; today it’s mostly used for storage.

Ron Hodne says Lawrence Welk and his band entertained in the round barn.

Winfred

Lawrence Welk and his band played a few songs at a dance in the Hodne family’s big round barn southwest of Madison near the little town of Winfred. Entertaining seems to fit the Hodne family, which now operates a big hunting lodge affectionately called Hodneville (officially the Bird’s Nest) within shotgun range of the barn.

The 80-foot diameter barn was built for beef cattle in 1918. Ron Hodne’s parents bought the place in 1946 and today he lives nearby with his wife, Ev. They and three sons — Brad, Brian and Brandon — run the lodge, which can accommodate 50 overnight guests.

A few years ago, Hodne asked his sons if they thought the barn was worth preserving because it needed a $40,000 roof.”They said, ‘Do it,'” he says.

The family has used the round barn for just about everything you can raise in South Dakota — cattle, hogs and chickens.”We even tried artichokes,” Hodne jokes. It’s empty today, except for a farm cat, but he and his family may eventually find a way to incorporate it into the lodge.

Draper

The Freier barn near Draper was built from a pre-cut mail order kit, possibly from the Gordon Van Tine Company of Davenport, Iowa. It was used as a sheep barn for decades.

Renner

Blocks for a round barn on the northern outskirts of Renner were made from sand and gravel collected at a nearby pit in 1917. The Sorum family has owned the barn for generations. They used it as a dairy for many years, but in recent decades it has served as a horse stable and a cat paradise.

Gettysburg

South Dakota’s largest round barn is on the Sloat farm north of Gettysburg. Measuring 100 feet in diameter, the wood-frame structure is used for swine, beef and dairy.

Sturgis

A barn of vertical pine logs stands in Bulldog Gulch near Sturgis.

South Dakota’s only round barn made of logs lies in Bulldog Gulch, just south of the Black Hills National Cemetery near Sturgis. It was built of pine logs, stood vertically on a circular concrete footing, in about 1941 by the Blairs, a prominent pioneer ranching family.

Dick and Lonna Morkert removed 2 feet of cattle manure when they bought the barn 30 years ago. Once cleaned, they found the barn was perfect for their four horses. Lonna, who then worked at a clinic in Sturgis, met the man who cut the logs.”He was an old-timer who was known for his mules,” she says.”The Blairs gave him the job of cutting the trees. He said he skidded them down from the mountain just to the west.”

Bulldog Gulch has a rich history. The 1874 Custer Expedition stopped there and watered horses at the same creek that the Morkert horses enjoy. Some think the gulch was named for Madame Bulldog, who ran a saloon there.

The Blairs arrived in 1907. They raised registered Hereford cattle and held bull sales at the log barn in the early 1940s. Dick Morkert says old-timers remembered that bidders sat on long benches.

Weddings are sometimes celebrated at the No Name City campground, which borders the Morkerts’ barn and corrals. On a few occasions, a bride with good taste in architecture will ask to have a picture taken by the very clean log barn.

A round barn is among the collection of 14 old agricultural buildings at the Little Village Farm near Trent.

Trent

When the Big Sioux River threatened a century-old round barn near Trent in the 1990s, the landowners called Jim Lacey and said,”You need that barn!”

Lacey agreed, but moving round barns is not easy because they lack the floor beams of rectangular structures. Still, the Beckers of Marion agreed to move it with Lacey’s help, and together they brought it out of the river valley and onto what’s now known as Little Village Farm, a collection of 14 old agricultural buildings.

The village’s only other round barn is a brooder house.”It was a prefab job, probably sold by Sears or Wards,” Lacey says.”You put it together just like the old redwood water tanks, with steel bands. Tenant farmers could buy one, and then take it with them if they moved from one farm to another.” If the chickens dirtied a spot, the farmer simply pulled the brooder house to an area with fresh grass.

Jim and Joan Lacey welcome guests to their Little Village Farm, located west of Trent in Moody County. The buildings are full of farm and ranch machinery, tools and collectibles, including more than 6,000 farm caps. There is a small admission fee.

Zell

Twin 12-sided round barns sit in a horse pasture on the northeast corner of Zell, a small village west of Redfield on Highway 212. Zell was named by Benedictine sisters who built a wood monastery there in 1886 which is also standing, though showing its age.

Unityville

A big tile barn once stood just west of a little town with the fine name of Unityville in McCook County. The town was christened as Stark when it was founded in 1907, but when officials learned that there was already a Stark in North Dakota they unified around the new name. The landmark round barn was built in 1921. Unfortunately, Unityville is all but gone, the farmstead is now a cornfield and only the barn’s silo is now standing. Life is stark in Unityville.

Potter County

A 20-sided hog house built by John Nold in 1903 may be the first round barn built in South Dakota, according to a 1995 study by the South Dakota State Historical Society.

Nisland

The entire Butte-Lawrence County Fairgrounds is on the National Registry of Historic Places. Its jewel is the round pavilion.

Buried in the cottonwood and oak forest of the Belle Fourche River valley lies one of America’s truly unique county fairgrounds, and its centerpiece is a century-old, octagon pavilion.

The forested 40-acre site is a mile west of Nisland in Butte County, which has shared a county fair with Lawrence County since 1980. And who wouldn’t want to share such fairgrounds?

The white-washed buildings include two long, rectangular barracks that housed German POWs during World War II. The prisoners helped farmers with the sugar beet harvest. Big-branched cottonwoods shade the buildings and grass. The entire fairgrounds are on the National Registry of Historic Places, but the pine jewel is the round pavilion. President Calvin Coolidge attended the fair and was pictured at the pavilion when he vacationed in the Black Hills in 1927.

The sturdy structure survived several calamities, including a 2012 windstorm that damaged the roof and windows. The two counties and their fair board invested nearly $300,000 in repairs and updates. Officials hope to find ways to use the pavilion throughout the year — maybe for weddings and family reunions — to garner income for future expenses.

The fair is held the first weekend of August, a week before the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Area 4-Hers exhibit crafts, garden produce and other projects on the main floor and a second story balcony of the pavilion. REA co-ops host a free barbecue. Boys and girls show their livestock and compete in catch-the-sheep and dress-a-rabbit contests. At sunset, animals sleep in the barns as country music wafts to the high ceiling of the pavilion.

Admission is free at the fair, perhaps because the atmosphere is priceless.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Jazz on the Prairie

By David Jensen

Rapid City jazz musician Gary Bloomberg teamed up with Flaunt, an old-style Black Hills burlesque show, for a New Year’s Eve performance.

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

While other teenagers were listening to Madonna, Duran Duran and Michael Jackson in the 1980s, Jim Speirs rushed home from middle school in Rapid City to hear Doc Severinson’s Tonight Show Band or Maynard Ferguson. And when his classmates dreamed of being rock stars, Speirs practiced diligently on his trumpet with visions of becoming another Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis.

Speirs loves jazz — and he’s not alone. Scattered throughout South Dakota are musicians who play this uniquely American sound. They may be the next-door neighbor, farmer down the road or your office mate. Most local jazz musicians have other jobs.

Take, for example, Eric Knutson. He flies a fighter jet for the Air National Guard and plays trumpet. Jim Szana, jazz pianist, is a Pierre dentist. Cade Calder managed a Best Buy store, and Scott Olson is a farmer near Yankton; both play the trumpet. Speirs is executive director of Arts South Dakota. For these musicians and others, jazz is an avocation, not a vocation.

The 17 members of the South Dakota Jazz Orchestra demonstrate this passion over practicality.”We’re all-volunteer,” says Corliss Johnson. He’s a saxophone player and musical director for the group, which plays three or four performances a year. Johnson was head of SDSU’s music department and is now semi-retired.”Once in awhile we get paid,” he adds. But it’s seldom about money.

It wasn’t always that way. Musicians in South Dakota could once link up with a band and play ballrooms and dance halls throughout the state and make a living. Gary Bloomberg, a 94-year-old sax player in Rapid City, remembers those days. He still plays”a lot of solo gigs,” but recalls performing decades ago with the Bob Calame band and Happy Bill and All the Gang in ballrooms and on Watertown’s KWAT Radio and Sioux Falls’ KSOO.

Bloomberg is a master pool player and trick-shot artist, but he also plays with the School of Mines Jazz Band, and he helped form the Black Hills Dixieland Jazz Band.

A dapper dresser who is popular with the nightclub crowd in the Black Hills, Bloomberg occasionally traveled east on Interstate 90 now and then to perform at venues in Sioux Falls. One New Year’s Eve he teamed up with Flaunt, a burlesque act, to entertain at the Alex Johnson Hotel in Rapid City.

He wishes there were more venues.”There are a lot of good musicians here, but not many places to play,” he concedes. Even the School of Mines band plays just two concerts a year.

Soon after jazz was born in New Orleans more than a century ago, the music migrated up the Mississippi and into the Great Plains. In the early days there were plenty of places to perform. Jazz in South Dakota has a surprisingly rich history. It started in the heyday of the big band era in the late 1920s, when orchestras based in Omaha and Minneapolis would add South Dakota ballrooms to their tour schedules. Farmers and merchants, with wives or girlfriends, drove for miles to waltz, foxtrot and jitterbug to swing music.

While bands in urban areas could find work within a city’s limits, musicians in the Great Plains formed”territory bands.” The band members tied their instrument cases atop a bus and traveled from town to town. One of the most popular territory band leaders in the 1930s was Alphonso Trent who performed in Wyoming and the Dakotas, and spent much of his free time in Deadwood. There was also the Monthly Meadowlark Band from Ramona and dance orchestras lead by John Cavacas, in Watertown; Don Fejfar, Vermillion; Johnnie Arthur, Menno; Harry Eisele, Aberdeen; Tommy Matthews, White River; and Fats Carlson and Sonny Bronson in Sioux Falls.

Jim Speirs performs with the Jazz Diversity Project, a program designed to introduce South Dakota students to the history of jazz while cultivating an appreciation for the music. Photo by Greg Latza

Ironically, while farmers and businessmen struggled to make a living during the depression era, musicians were making money. Nat Towles and his band from Omaha performed in South Dakota dance halls for $5 per band member per night. Playing six nights a week, they did well by 1930s standards, earning enough for food, shelter and new saxophone reeds. Of course, they had to play a steady array of dance tunes; most musicians preferred playing improvised jazz and considered the dance songs”Mickey music,” short for Mickey Mouse. But it paid the bills.

Big-name bands could avoid the Mickey music and perform in concert, often at Mitchell’s Corn Palace. The Jimmy Dorsey Band played there in 1938, and his brother, Tommy, performed nine years later. Other Corn Palace entertainers included Paul Whiteman (“King of Jazz”), Johnny”Scat” Davis, Harry James, Frankie Carle (“Wizard of the Keyboard”), Freddie Martin and Skitch Henderson. Lawrence Welk and his orchestra made multiple appearances at the Corn Palace, always to sell-out audiences.

Think of Welk and jazz may not come to mind. But he once considered himself a jazz musician; when he was a teenager he was a member of the Jazzy Junior Five. And in 1927 he planned to take his band, the Hotsy Totsy Boys, to the”mecca” for jazz, New Orleans. But he ran out of money in Yankton and got a job with WNAX Radio.

Welk blended the big band sound with pop, jazz and show tunes to create his unique”champagne music,” so named by a dancer in Pittsburgh who praised it as”light and bubbly.” Paul Schilf, executive director of the South Dakota Music Education Association and a former professor at Augustana University, says all serious musicians would like to blend sounds and establish a new sound, as Welk did.”He broke barriers and diversified,” says Schilf.

As the big band era ended in the 1950s, most South Dakotans turned to rock, pop and country. It was difficult to warm up to the new bebop and fusion jazz, which didn’t seem to have a melody. The so-called”club jazz” — at home in smoky night clubs and hotel lounges — is up-tempo, includes complex harmonies and improvisation, and was made popular by musicians like Gillespie, Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.

Still, some musicians and aficionados in South Dakota liked it. They lived an underground existence, jamming in their homes and scrounging what few recordings they could find in the back corners of music shops. Then on a warm day in 1988 a surprising number of fans and musicians — more than 250 — gathered at a backyard party in Sioux Falls. That day the seed was planted for the Sioux Falls Jazz and Blues Society and the city’s annual JazzFest, which was staged until 2019. Held the third weekend of July, the festival drew musicians and up to 100,000 fans from around the region to Sioux Falls’ Yankton Trail Park for live music on three stages.

JazzFest was one of the few successful, free (sponsored by local businesses and beer sales) music festivals in the country, and it became a major draw for the state.”We can’t compete with the [Sturgis motorcycle] rally or Mount Rushmore,” said Robert Joyce, the Jazz and Blues Society’s former executive director.”But we’re on a lot of people’s radar screen.” High school reunions were arranged around the fest, as well as an occasional wedding reception. Tourists made vacation plans around JazzFest.”People will call and ask about our gas prices and how far we are from Mount Rushmore or the [Terry] Redlin Center,” Joyce says.

When England’s BBC television network covered JazzFest, a reporter asked Joyce,”How come it’s held in South Dakota?” He answered,”It’s America’s music, and we’re in the heart of America.”

The festival drew big names in jazz, including a hometown boy, guitarist Mike Miller, who has performed with pianist Chick Corea and toured with comedian/singer Bette Midler. Miller grew up in Sioux Falls, as did Bruce Arnold, another guitar artist who made good. They met in New York, where Arnold has a recording studio, and produced a jazz CD titled”Two Guys from South Dakota.”

Performers like Lynwood “Cookie” Cook helped make JazzFest one of America’s top musical performances. The festival has since been replaced by Jazz Week, which includes a series of concerts and workshops throughout Sioux Falls.

Sioux Falls has become the focal point for jazz in South Dakota. It’s near the center of the”I-29 corridor,” so called by musicians who see the stretch of four-lane between Brookings and Vermillion as a link for many who play and enjoy jazz. Places like the R Wine Bar and Severance Brewing host regular or pop-up performances throughout the year.

Pete Franklin, who opened Delmonico Grill in downtown Rapid City in 2007, hoped to bring jazz to West River’s biggest city. Shortly before the Christmas holiday he booked the Sugar Free Jazz Trio at his upscale Main Street restaurant.”The place was packed,” he said.”The atmosphere was like an Andy Warhol party.”

Musicians like Jim Szana are always looking for more opportunities to play. The keyboardist/dentist, along with bass player Lonnie Schumacher (a builder and handy man) and drummer Ron Woodburn (director of the Capital City Campus from 2004 to 2013 and now a member of its advisory board) perform as the Jim Szana Trio, largely in and around Pierre. Formerly called the Rochford Trio, the group is a garage band — literally.”Lonnie built a garage next to my house,” says Szana.”Now we have a place to practice, so we should be playing better.”

The trio cut a CD called”Good Evening Vietnam,” jazz renditions of patriotic songs. Imagine a jazz version of”Anchors Away” or”The Air Force Song.” Szana served in Vietnam and appreciated the state’s creation of the Vietnam Memorial in Pierre.”But I felt more had to be said,” he says, explaining the intent of the CD.

Szana’s trio performs about 30 times a year, mostly at weddings, fundraisers and legislative banquets in the capital city. They usually adhere to a song’s original melody.”Politicians like it because it’s music to talk to,” he says. Evening social events during legislative session in January and February provide the trio an added perk.”Politicians like to give ësmall speeches,'” he explains,”but their small speeches give us plenty of time to eat at the buffet table.”

The time may come when jazz musicians in South Dakota can be full-time entertainers, and when all types of jazz — Latin, fusion, bebop, big band — draw attentive crowds, just as they did eight decades ago. That’s what the Jazz and Blues Society hopes will result from its Jazz Diversity Project, an educational program in which a combo visits schools and plays music while also giving students an American history lesson.

“We talk about the civil rights movement and segregation in New Orleans, and how it relates to jazz,” says Speirs, a member of the combo. Since its creation in 2006, more than 60,000 students throughout the state have taken part in the program.

The Jazz and Blues Society also joins with Augustana University to sponsor the All-City Jazz Ensemble, featuring about 17 young musicians from Sioux Falls high schools in a jazz concert each autumn. In the spring the program works with middle school students.

Dennis McDermott, retired band director at Aberdeen Central High School and a member of a jazz quintet that plays on occasion at the Ward Plaza Bar and Grill, also wants young South Dakotans to appreciate jazz. He long coordinated All-State Jazz Band, an event comparable to the All-State Band competition. Students from around the state audition to play in a jazz orchestra or combo and have a chance to learn from an invited jazz artist.

Many of the students will no doubt play jazz the rest of their lives. Some may even make a living at it, maybe even here in the heart of America.

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Baseball at Four Corners

Story by John Andrews

Photography by Matt Gade

The Four Corners baseball field sits at the junction of three highways about 40 miles west of Pierre.

To say baseball is the only game in town at Four Corners would be misleading, mostly because there is no town. Four Corners is simply the junction of highways 14, 34 and 63 about 40 miles west of Pierre. But there is a baseball field, thanks to a handful of farmers and ranchers who nearly 70 years ago wanted a place to play the game at the end of a busy day tending cattle and fixing fence.

The modern day Four Corners baseball team, which plays in the Pony Hills League of South Dakota’s amateur baseball association, is actually the club’s second iteration. The first dates back to the 1950s, when the fathers and uncles of many current players launched a fundraising drive to create a baseball field. In true ranch country fashion, donations included hay, cattle, machinery and precious time. Roy Norman collected money, and in 1953 purchased 14 80-foot light poles from a company in Ohio for $1,400. The height was important; Four Corners’ rival town of Philip had just installed 70-foot lights. They also gave Four Corners the unique distinction as the only non-municipal lighted field in the country.

Four Corners pitcher Adam Kaus delivers the ball during a Sunday doubleheader. Batters have to contend with sunlight reflecting off grain bins across the road.

Four Corners hosted its first game in the summer of 1954. Crowds of 200 to 300 people came to watch their neighbors play. Despite its remote location, finding players was rarely a problem, thanks to baseball’s great popularity during the 1950s and 1960s. But when needs arose, the men sought creative solutions. One summer, Four Corners needed another pitcher, so Norman placed an ad in the Omaha World-Herald seeking a farm laborer. The final line on the job description said candidates”must be able to pitch for a competitive amateur baseball team.” He found his pitcher. The young man spent the summer sleeping in the concession stand.

Four Corners’ heyday lasted until 1986, when the team’s aging founders opted for softball in other places. The field, no longer used, fell into disrepair. Its chicken wire backstop slowly disintegrated. Grass and weeds overgrew the dirt infield, swallowing home plate and the pitching rubber. For years, cattle roamed where outfielders once glided after lazy fly balls.

About 15 years later, the baseball bug re-emerged.”My cousins and brothers and I talked about the possibilities of it,” says Mike Hand, whose father, Dave, played for Four Corners.”And we just ran from there.”

Volunteers showed up, just like they did 50 years earlier.”We found the dimensions and mowed it,” Hand says.”We sprayed the weeds and grass off the infield. It took us a while, but a baseball field took shape.”

Baseball returned to Four Corners in the summer of 2002, and the team has been going strong ever since, maybe because familial ties unite the players, literally and figuratively. Mike Hand, the manager, is one of six Hands on the team, which includes his brother, his son and three cousins. The roster is rounded out by players who have moved away but still travel home from places like Wessington Springs, Mitchell and Wagner — 215 miles away — just to wear the Four Corners uniform.

Their dedication is remarkable. Because there is no city crew to help with maintenance, the players do it all, a task made more challenging due to the field’s lack of running water. Hand knows the field isn’t perfect, but they do their best.”If you ask players what the problems are, the first thing they’ll mention is the outfield,” he says with a laugh.”It’s not smooth; it’s kind of like playing Plinko because it’s tufts of grass and gopher holes.”

Shade is rare at Four Corners, so the players built small shelters for fans who bring chairs.

The lights, once a point of pride, no longer work, so game times are regularly Sundays at 4 p.m. That leads to another Four Corners quirk. The field faces south, so when batters come to the plate on a sunny Sunday afternoon, trying to catch a glimpse of the pitcher’s grip before he hurls the ball in their direction, all they see is sunlight glaring off seven grain bins on Mike Hand’s farm, which lies on the other side of Highway 34.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is travel.”Because we’re rural and in the middle of nowhere, hardly anybody will travel to Four Corners,” Hand says.”There are a few teams that willingly come every year. But last year we played 26 games and had five home games. It is not uncommon for us to travel 3,000 miles in a summer for baseball games.”

The travel is a matter of perspective. Four Corners once drove to Armour — 195 miles — after work for a game that began at 9 p.m. It finished at midnight, and then the players embarked on the 3 1/2 hour drive home.”Baseball is the only vacation and release we get from our normal, everyday lives,” Hand says.”The love of baseball itself is the best part of it.”

The question now is how long the players can sustain such a schedule. This group is in its 17th season of playing together. Hand says they are most likely the oldest team in the state; two players are over 50, six are over 40, five more are over 36 — and finding good baseball playing farmhands through newspaper advertisements isn’t as easy as it used to be.

There is hope in Fort Pierre, 35 miles away, where a long dormant junior legion program is once again fielding a team of 16- and 17-year-old players. Hand hopes to draw a few of them to their crossroads ball field in western Stanley County. If he’s successful, then even though there’s no gas or groceries at Four Corners, there will still be baseball.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

4 Corners warms up before the start of the first game of a doubleheader against the Plankinton Bankers during Pony Hills League action on Saturday, July 1. 4 Corners field sits 22 miles from the nearest town and six miles west of un-incorporated Hayes just Northwest of the Highway 63 and Highway 14 intersection.
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Accidental Rancher

The view from the north pasture on Eliza Blue’s ranch west of Bison. Photo by Christian Begeman.

South Dakota was supposed to be just another stop on Eliza Blue’s journey through life. The singer/songwriter had lived in Minneapolis, New York City and Portland, Maine. Then, about 10 years ago, she found herself in Perkins County, a self-professed urbanite gaining a small taste of rural life. Where she might have gone next, we’ll never know. She met and married a local rancher, and proceeded to fall in love with the land, the sky and all the joys and sorrows of West River life.

These days, she’s busy raising two children and tending to a menagerie of chickens, goats, sheep, cows and cats on the ranch west of Bison. Still, she manages to find time to contemplate and write about life on the Plains — the devastation of drought, the sense of community, the closeness of death and the wonderment of nature.

South Dakota Magazine collected several of these stories in a book called Accidental Rancher, released one year ago. The glimpses into Blue’s world are poignant and written with the uniquely lyrical perspective of a folk singer turned modern-day homesteader. Readers find themselves with Blue in her laundry room feeding bum lambs, following the antics of a rooster named Fancy Pants or, as in this excerpt called”Pigeons,” teaching her young son, affectionately called the Bean, about the miracle of life.

Pigeons

In the midst of several of our old outbuildings stands a grain bin. Years ago, a spring storm ripped two of the roof panels loose, the rain soaking and spoiling the small amount of grain pellets left inside. Since we run a predominantly grass-fed operation, it wasn’t a great loss, and fixing the roof didn’t rank high on our perennially insurmountable to-do list. So the grain bin, and the few inches of grain inside, have been left untouched by human hands.

Blue with her husband, Max Loughlin, and children Wesley and Emmy Rose, aka “The Bean” and “Roo.”

Who wants an abundant supply of grain, housed in a predator-free location, accessible only from the air? Pigeons, we discovered one day this summer, when my curious son asked to see what was inside the bin. The sound of the creaking door frightened them, and the small flock that now calls the grain bin theirs came exploding through the holes in the roof in a flurry of squawks and beating wings, frightening us as well.

That did not dissuade us from peeking inside, however, where we found, in addition to feathers and poop, several tiny nests, each holding a rosette of gleaming white eggs.

The Bean is an avid bird watcher and also a big fan of hunting for chicken eggs, so for the rest of the summer, we couldn’t pass the grain bin without a request to check on the nests. From time to time I’d humor him, and we’d crack open the metal door for a quick peek. Thus, we got to watch several of the eggs hatch and then transform from nestlings into fledglings.

One day, however, when we peered in, I could tell something was awry. A mother pigeon, thinking herself quite clever, had laid her eggs inside the large plastic bucket used as a scoop when the bin was still in service. The high walls of the scoop had hidden the babies from our view, and now, half-grown and ready to meet the world, they were too big to spread their wings in the cramped circle of the scoop, and were permanently trapped.

I crept in as quietly as I could, and turned the bucket over gently. The birds tumbled out. Two righted themselves and wobbled limply away from me, their panic evident, but the third, its muscles too atrophied to carry its own weight, couldn’t walk at all, and lay fluttering weakly with fear.

“Babies,” said the Bean.”Big babies.”

“Yes,” I replied,”but we better leave them be. They are so scared.”

The next day, the Bean asked to see them again, and I had to admit, I wanted to see them, too. I feared the worst, however. Indeed, one of the babies was dead, never having moved from where we’d last seen it. The other two were huddled against the tin wall of the bin, pressed hard against each other. Their terror was plain, and the Bean made no protest as I closed the door, saying,”They are still too scared.”

This continued for a few days. Each day I grew more certain we would find the two remaining babies dead, but each day, they looked about the same; hunched and miserable, not moving much. I considered trying to borrow a birdcage and taking them out of the bin, but I worried it would be too much for the poor creatures. It seemed it wasn’t just their muscles, but their spirits that were stunted. They were living in pigeon heaven, but they were slowly dying because they didn’t know how to do anything else.

I also wasn’t sure if they had any source of hydration. Presumably their mother was in charge of that, but these two were nearly full-grown, and I wondered if the period of depending on the flock for sustenance had expired.

Just in case, the next time we visited, I brought them a little fresh water in a plastic dish. As I laid it inside, they scuttled away from me, the first movement we’d seen since I’d freed them. I closed the door, and thought,”Well, it’s progress.” And I finally had an idea of how to help them.

Wesley reads to his sister and an injured lam that is recovering indoors.

When we returned the following morning, I brought water and a large stick. The day after, more water and another stick. I didn’t really have a plan, but I figured seeing new things might wake up their brains a little. The Bean would wait at the door, guarding against barn cats and dogs, while I followed the babies around for a few minutes, forcing them to explore the new objects we’d brought. They grew stronger and more agile with every visit, until, four days in, one of the birds hopped, wings fluttering, onto the crook of a branch. She perched there for a moment, teetering slightly. I looked back at the Bean, who was peeking through the crack in the open door. He smiled wide, and neither of us made a sound while the pigeon wrapped her tiny toes around the branch, testing for the first time how it felt to leave the ground.

And then one day when I entered the bin, instead of simply hopping, both birds spread their wings, and slowly, so slowly they seemed to be defying physics, they both pulled themselves into the air. One landed a few seconds later with a bounce, but the other drifted for a moment, circling my head in slow motion, reaching and pulling, reaching and pulling, until she was at the hole in the roof, and then outside it.

I rushed out, picking up the Bean as I scurried past.”Did you see her? Did you see her?” I asked him.

“Baby bird flying!” He shouted in reply. We circled the grain bin, looking for the baby. I was scared she had fallen into the grass, easy prey for cats, but instead she was perched on the circular rim of the bin, head cocked, scanning the horizon.

She peered up for a few more seconds, the whole world a giant bowl over her head, before ducking down and diving back into the safety of the bin. The Bean, his eyes as blue as the sky, turned to me, and said,”Baby bird, not a baby anymore.”

I often fear I am a foolish woman. Sometimes I know that I am. Like when I am climbing into a stinky, old grain bin to chase sensory-deprived baby pigeons around. But every once in awhile my foolishness pays off. How else would I have gotten to see the look that appears on a small boy’s face when he sees a fledgling bird fly for the first time? The look of surprised delight as he falls a little more in love with the world and all its wonders.

For my part, I value the reminder that small kindnesses are rarely small and learning to fly comes in many forms.

Editor’s Note: Accidental Rancher is available for $14.95 plus shipping and handling. This excerpt is revised from the May/June 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Form First

By Ann Grauvogl

Ward Whitwam’s lodge pole tipis stand at several rest stops around South Dakota, including this one at Chamberlain. Whitwam, a longtime South Dakota architect, died January 25. Photo by John Mitchell.

Editor’s Note: Renowned South Dakota architect Ward Whitwam passed away on January 25 at age 97. South Dakota Magazine featured Whitwam, perhaps best known for his concrete tipis placed at rest stops across the state, in our September/October 2003 issue.

Ward Whitwam bustles, yes, bustles through his cluttered office on the second floor of the Security Building in downtown Sioux Falls. It’s Monday. He’s finished his design for the governor’s mansion competition. He’s training an 18-year-old to run the computer for the South Dakota chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which he serves as executive director. He’s a little late for an interview.”I’m busy,” Whitwam says with a grin.”Isn’t it wonderful?”

At nearly 80, Whitwam, whip thin in his white jeans, white shoes and red shirt, all topped by inquisitive blue eyes and a shock of white hair, has a hard time slowing down or even sitting still.

Retire?”I can’t foresee it,” he says. Not while his health holds. Not when the ideas still run strong. Anyone who’s traveled in South Dakota has seen the results of this active brain. Whitwam designed the towering concrete tipis — the largest of the concrete lodge poles are 56 feet long and weigh 6.5 tons — at seven of South Dakota’s Interstate rest stops. He also designed the Lewis & Clark Interpretative Center in Chamberlain with the longboat balcony overlooking the Missouri River, the arched office building on West Avenue in Sioux Falls, and the soaring, round balconies at the Good Samaritan nursing home on north Minnesota Avenue.

After 50 years in the business, Whitwam could be excused for slowing down. But the ideas keep coming.”His mind goes a mile a minute,” says architect Gene Murphy, who went to work for Whitwam in 1967, later bought the business, and continues to team with Whitwam for projects such as the Chamberlain rest stop, Sioux Falls Fire Station No. 6 and the governor’s residence competition.”I’m sure he stays awake at night thinking about these designs. He’s really fun to work with, and he works fast, and he expects other people to keep up with him.”

The bottom line is that her husband believes part of life is what you do, says Elissa Whitwam, who married Ward 44 years ago. Besides, he doesn’t have any hobbies. If Whitwam were to stay home, he’d have nothing to do but clean the garage.

In 2017, Whitwam received a Governor’s Award in the Arts for Distinction in Creative Achievement.

It’s in his genes, Elissa Whitwam says. It’s his way of thinking. Having an office outside the home is also the best thing for a marriage, says the woman who one quickly suspects has been and remains her husband’s biggest fan.

The challenge to design South Dakota rest stops came early in Whitwam’s career. It was the mid-1960s, when South Dakota was just building its Interstate highways. Lady Bird Johnson had launched her campaign to beautify America’s highway system. Congress approved a highway beautification law that came with funds attached to pay for approved projects.

The way Whitwam tells it, he and highway director John E. Olson went to the same Sioux Falls church. When Olson asked him if he wanted to design some rest stops, he said yes. Whitwam knew he wanted to say something about the past. The lodge pole design came to him during a meeting in Minneapolis. He remembers he was bored, and his mind wandered.”I sat there and I sketched,” he says. He kept wanting to show settlers, but he realized the American Indians had been here first. So the lodge poles — the poles the Lakota used to support tipis — emerged. When Whitwam took a model to the highway department, he says, they just stared.

The highway commission accepted Whitwam’s proposal in November 1965.”We think this design is far superior to park designs of other states because it is not only attractive but has historical appeal as well,” said highway commissioner J.W. Burns, according to an Argus Leader report. Burns found the design”South Dakota in concept,” reflecting the many cultural influences of the Sioux Indians of the state.

Whitwam, however, admits he did not know how he would connect the massive concrete poles that would form the tipi structure. That’s where Wilfred Schroeder, Marvin Heck (who worked for Gage Brothers Concrete), and Heck’s son, Richard, came in. Schroeder was in charge of structural design.”I guess the hardest thing was the fitting of them together,” Schroeder said, giving Richard Heck, now a Minneapolis architect, credit for doing most of the math. Marvin Heck knew the slots and positioning of the weld plates had to be precise to make the system work. Once they’d figured out where to connect the poles, where to place the metal flaps that would be used to weld them together and where the beams would settle against each other –“they just fit together like a glove,” Heck said.

Since the eight poles rest on each other for support, they wouldn’t stand until all were in place, Schroeder said. Each tipi was built around a temporary middle pole that was removed when the big beams were welded in place.

The first lodge poles were 40 feet long; later ones are 56 feet. The first rest stop tipi was finished in 1969 at Wasta. Six more tipis followed, at Chamberlain, at New Effington near the North Dakota border, at Salem, Spearfish, Valley Springs and Vermillion.”I know there were a lot of comments about them,” Schroeder remembers.

Even today, when South Dakotans and cross-country travelers take the Interstates for granted, people talk about the tipis. So many asked questions that the South Dakota tourism department printed a card giving the tipi dimensions.

The lodge pole rest stops are undoubtedly Whitwam’s most recognized work. They were, however, only one stop for a man who almost always knew he wanted to be an architect.

The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Chamberlain.

Whitwam was born Dec. 12, 1923, in Watertown. His father was president of Park-Grant Warehouse Groceries and started the Prairie Markets. Merle Whitwam had wanted to be an engineer, but took up the family business when his father died young. He told his two sons,”I want you boys to do what you want to do.”

By the time he was 14, Ward Whitwam was reading Architectural Record, and had discovered Frank Lloyd Wright’s just-completed Fallingwater — the Pennsylvania home built over a waterfall. Whitwam’s future was clinched.”A lot of young people want to be architects,” he says.”It doesn’t pay well, but it’s certainly fun.”

Whitwam followed his brother to the University of California at Berkeley.”I was 17 years old, a child,” he said.”I really was homesick and shouldn’t have left my mommy and daddy.” The South Dakota boy was also a good subject for ridicule until he won first prize on his first design job.”Suddenly, I had people talking to me,” he remembers.

At 18, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Louisiana, still a”soft city boy.” His job was to help build a”corduroy road,” but he would rather have told others how to build it instead of building it himself. He traveled with 19,000 other soldiers to England on the Queen Mary, landing Aug. 1, 1943, as a member of the 1172nd Engineer Combat Group.

By 1945, Whitwam was back at Berkeley, finishing his undergraduate degree in 1948. He took a year’s break in Aberdeen, where the architect he worked for fired him, telling him he was arrogant, conceited and egotistical. Whitwam returned to California to finish his master’s degree and a three-year apprenticeship and to pass his professional exam. He opened his office in Sioux Falls in November 1953.

The young architect soon had business. In coming years, he would design 22 nursing homes, mostly for the Good Samaritan Society, several Land-o-Lakes dairy buildings, office buildings, homes, rest stops, four churches in Luverne, Minnesota (Catholic, United Reformed, United Methodist and Baptist) and the Augustana University Chapel of Reconciliation in Sioux Falls. Churches are the most fun, Whitwam says.”It’s not a box, and you get a chance to express yourself a little more.”

Whitwam never strayed far from his early love of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and that of the Prairie School of Architecture.”Everything is a matter of proportions,” he says. Prairie architecture should be”slender architecture.” He still lists Wright’s Fallingwater and Taliesen East among his favorite buildings, along with the Lever Brothers Building in New York City and the Albert Dow home in Midland, Michigan.

ìThere’s too much fat around here,” he said. Not known for pulling his punches, Whitwam would never put stripes on a fat woman or on the downtown Sioux Falls Qwest building. He would never build the massive Dow Rummel addition on West Avenue, a street of one-story buildings.”Thickness is not good architecture,” Whitwam says.”You can’t have a big, fat house and have it look nice.”

The Good Samaritan Society’s Sioux Falls Center.

When he designed the Augustana chapel with its double roofline, Whitwam knew the school could not afford a campanile, so he designed height in the rooflines. He wanted to create grandeur without a box. He loves roofs anyway. When the period of roofs came in, he was in his glory, he says.

Whitwam never accepted some common architectural rules, such as the one laid down in 1896 by Louis Henri Sullivan:”Form ever follows function.”

ìI never bought it,” says the man who still believes in form first.”I want things to look nice, then I squeeze something into it.”

Whitwam likes to stay current and to experiment with materials. He likes adventurous architecture, said Sioux Falls artist Robert Aldern, who sees one of Whitwam’s greatest strengths as his ability to combine visual arts and architecture.”He’s one of the few architects who makes an issue out of that. It’s hard to have a client and talk about the money it takes to build a building these days, then talk them into adding architectural art forms to it.”

Aldern’s laser cut metal panels of South Dakota’s history are included in the Chamberlain rest stop. So are artist Carl Grupp’s decorative rolling gate and the massive nets Elissa Whitwam made using 800,000 beads. Whitwam added the 55-foot keelboat, which extends outside the building as a balcony where visitors gaze down at the Missouri River below the bluff.”It’s not a simple thing to involve art with architecture, but I think it’s a very wonderful thing that we have architects in the community that do,” Aldern said.

Pushing 80, Whitwam remains dedicated to architecture, says associate Gene Murphy. That’s why he continues to lead the state’s architect group. That’s why he continues to design. That’s why he was chosen as a member of the American Institute of Architect’s College of Fellows, becoming only the third South Dakotan selected for the honor in the last 20 years.

Being involved has meant more than architecture for Whitwam. He’s been a community activist, sometimes a gadfly. Before he married, he spent more than a decade as a Hi-Y leader, a position that left a legacy of trees lining West Avenue in Sioux Falls. Bruce Halverson, former president of Augustana University, was one of Whitwam’s Hi-Y members.

Halverson was a sophomore at Washington High School in 1959 when he joined the popular Hi-Y for social and athletic activities.”For three years, [Whitwam] was our mentor, our leader and a wonderfully supportive guide to this group of young men as we worked our way through high school,” Halverson said. The students were full of energy and enthusiasm, which Whitwam supported, providing good advice and guidance — and he wasn’t a parent.

When Halverson was a senior, Sioux Falls hosted its first State B basketball tournament, and Whitwam’s Hi-Y group planned social activities to go with it. They charged a dollar for admission to a dance, and made thousands.”One of the great images is of people standing around with money in every pocket of their trousers,” Halverson remembers.”Ward then said to us: ëWe need to put this to a good use.'” The group bought a trophy case for the YMCA, and Whitwam convinced them to spend the rest of the money on 63 trees for West Avenue.

The Chapel of Reconciliation at Augustana University in Sioux Falls.

What Whitwam forgot was that the Hi-Y members would graduate and go to college. So he took care of the trees for the next decade, teaching his sons to drive the water truck until he convinced the city to take over maintenance.”I’m reminded of it every time I go to an Augustana football game,” Halverson said. Whitwam has a tremendous spark for life.”He genuinely cares about people of all ages. He’s got a curiosity about life.”

Elissa Whitwam met that spark when she came home from Washington, D.C., because her father was ill. A friend invited her to help with a Thanksgiving brunch at the First Congregational Church, and that’s where she met Ward. She returned from Washington again when her father died the following February, expecting to stay at least a year with her mother.”In May, he finally asked me out,” she said.”I was busy.”

He protests but adds with a grin,”I had to check her out to see if she had any money.”

Elissa married Ward Whitwam because he knew what he wanted in life.”A lot of guys you meet don’t need a wife, they need a mother,” she said.”This guy didn’t need a mother.”

The Whitwams were married in October 1959. They had two boys, Wayne and Bryce, and a daughter, Elise. Whitwam designed a modified A-frame home for the family on the edge of a ravine in 1965. To visit the home is to leave Sioux Falls behind for the woods outside their front door.

Whitwam wanted the house spaces to be simple, the feeling open. The sloping roof peaks at 14 feet above the first floor; he painted the ceiling black, then lined it with walnut planks finished with Danish oil. The wood — he bought it for $200 from a family in Mission Hill — is put together like a puzzle, with black showing between the planks. The sloping ceiling sets the tone for the living room, kitchen and master bedroom. Windows fill the end wall of the living room, reaching to the peak.

The balcony outside is surrounded by trees. Whitwam also designed the dining room lamp, then had it made of blue and green Mexican glass cylinders, long filaments and wrought iron. In the bathroom, he designed a mirror that rolls to hide the medicine cabinet.

From this refuge, Whitwam goes forth to work and travel.”Slow down” has never been part of the picture.”Ward had this cancer and the heart thing,” Elissa says.”To him, it’s all a mistake.”

Retire? The question is obviously silly to this octogenarian.”I can’t foresee it,” says the man who still has much to do.

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Lakota Games on Ice

By Steve Kinsella

The Rosebud’s Mike Marshall is an expert in Lakota winter games.

From the frozen shore it looks like a game of hockey on Lake Mitchell. Youth and adults are bundled in coats, gloves and scarves. But is that a rib bone flying across the ice?

Actually, it’s the Lakota Games on Ice, a project of the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village to explore the region’s earliest Native cultures.”Sliding the buffalo rib” is a contest to see who can shove a winged bison rib the farthest. In pte heste (buffalo cow horn sliding game), kids slide an arrow-like gaming piece across the ice with a focus on distance and accuracy. Napeoglece kutepi teaches throwing a willow spear, and pasloghanpi tests accuracy while sliding a stick on ice.

Mike Marshall, an artist, cultural entrepreneur and enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, oversees the games and even makes the gaming pieces. Marshall became interested in the project several years ago when he worked at the Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum in St. Francis, where he helped to digitize a collection of Native American objects that included historic gaming pieces.

Marshall creates the equipment for the Lakota Games on Ice out of bison bones and other objects of nature. Centuries ago, such games were often held in winter because that’s when Native Americans would set up camp. Girls tended to play games that taught how to pack, move and raise camp. Boys played games that taught hunting or fighting skills.

Lakota author and teacher Delphine Red Shirt wrote stories about the games that were passed on to her orally. In her book Turtle Lung Woman’s Daughter, she recalls her grandmother’s words.”She had her group of girl friends who played together. They stayed in small groups and took short walks around the camp or went swimming together in the summer. They played and imitated the women, doing everything they did,” she wrote.”They gave mock feasts and tended to dolls carried in cradle boards, singing songs to them and braiding their hair in neat braids.” They did not play with boys.”We ignored them,” she said. The boys had their own games.”Theirs was a male world, filled with play on horses and games of aggression.”

During the treaty period, many games were banned along with long hair and braids, traditional dress and language — part of a process to force Native Americans to assimilate with the predominantly European cultures that had settled in the United States. But visitors to the reservations recorded the existence of the games a century or more ago, and many of the gaming objects were housed in private collections.

Cindy Gregg, executive director of the Prehistoric Indian Village, says her organization strives to promote an understanding of the first people to inhabit the region. Lakota Games on Ice fits the mission, as do exhibits within the Boehnen Memorial Museum, which includes a reconstructed earth lodge and bison skeleton. More than 1,500 students and teachers from South Dakota, and as far away as North Dakota and the Twin Cities, tour the village and displays each year, including many Native American youth.

The village hosts other events throughout the year to help preserve and celebrate all facets of Native American culture.”The village provides visitors with an in-depth view of pre-white culture on the Great Plains,” Gregg says.”In doing that, it also helps foster a deeper appreciation for the current Native cultures on the reservations and elsewhere.”

Visitors also learn more about prehistoric agriculture and lifestyles. Occupied more than a thousand years ago by hunters and farmers who migrated out of the Mississippi River Valley, the village is believed to have been built by ancestors of the Mandan. More than 70 earth lodges are buried beneath the village, on the banks of Lake Mitchell. On the nearby golf course is a series of burial mounds, one of which covertly underlies a gently sloping green.

Archaeology Awareness Days, held in conjunction with an annual excavation by Augustana University and the University of Exeter in England, takes place under the village’s state-of-the-art Thomsen Center Archeodome. The ongoing excavations have unearthed bone, pottery and tools, as well as hundreds of 1,000-year-old small, charred corncobs and sunflower seeds. Those and other discoveries are evidence that the original village is directly linked to today’s common food products, as well as the corn that adorns the nearby Corn Palace.

“The occupants of this site played a significant role in the continuum of agricultural development that originally started in Mexico and moved up the Mississippi River Valley,” says Jerry Garry, a longtime Mitchell resident and one of the early organizers of the effort to preserve and develop the village as a living educational tool.”Today, because of these people, we enjoy many of the cereals that are consumed worldwide.”

Too often, today’s media focuses only on the historic crises of Indian country rather than the contributions and accomplishments of its ancient cultures — including their playful spirit.”What’s really cool about Lakota Games on Ice is that it makes us more than just a romantic notion,” says Marshall.”We had our games and leisure activities.”

Editor’s Note: The 2021 Lakota Games on Ice is scheduled for Jan. 23. This story is revised from the January/February 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.