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The Joys of Farm Toys

By Bernie Hunhoff

Ken Girard (above) and his brother, Mike, understand the human impulse to collect. Their office walls and warehouses are adorned with their own treasures.

Travis Hughes roused two of his sons early on a Saturday last spring, but instead of working on their Andover farm, as they might normally do, they drove south four hours to the little town of Wakonda for a toy tractor auction.

More than 100 farm toy aficionados were already in the Wakonda Legion Hall when the Hugheses arrived at mid-morning. The Legion ladies were serving coffee and homemade sweets from behind a long counter as the auction-goers — most of them wearing blue jeans and farm caps — admired and inspected hundreds of toys on several rows of tables. Some were in their original boxes. Sometimes there was only a box for sale.

Travis, 43, was among the youngest to register as a buyer that morning; his boys Scott, 14, and Orin, 11, were the only school-age youth in the metal folding chairs of the Legion Hall.

Rural South Dakotans are familiar with auctions and markets, but Wakonda’s toy tractor sales are quite unlike farm country’s somber sales of grain and livestock. Frowns are rare and nobody loses.

“Like one buyer told me, ‘It’s toys!'” laughs Ken Girard who, along with his brother Mike and a small team, has turned antique farm toys into the biggest attraction in Wakonda. The family business operates from 11 buildings within the city limits, including several large warehouses where a Clay County farmer may walk in the door with a single toy tractor while the Girards and their crew are unloading a semi-trailer load from Canada.

Walls in several of the buildings are adorned with the Girards’ personal collections. Ken’s office is a maze of marine memorabilia and plastic toys from the 1950s. Mike likes vintage root beer advertising signs. Parked throughout are antique tractors and trucks, outboard motors, hunting paraphernalia and other artifacts of America’s great outdoors.

Wakonda, a town of 300, lies northwest of Vermillion in Clay County. Its name comes from a Santee Sioux word that means wonderful. Wakonda’s most recent claim to fame is the 101-game winning streak by the high school girls basketball team from 1987 to 1991. The school has since merged with nearby Irene. The only restaurant in town, modestly called The Pit, operates from the basement of an old hotel. The big Legion Hall is the social center, home to everything from wedding receptions to fundraisers and funeral dinners.

Wakonda’s auctions attract collectors and spectators from throughout farm country, including brothers Scott and Orin Hughes of Andover.

Ken and Mike’s parents, Marvin and Pat, started the family auction business at Wakonda in 1970. For years, they kept busy with farm and household auctions, and the sons spent weekends lining up furniture and appliances on the lawns.

“Back then, I had no desire to be in the auction business,” admits Ken.”But I spent one year in college and I didn’t like that, so the next summer, in 1998, I started auctioneer school.”

Just as he and Mike joined the business as adults, farm auctions began to dwindle.”Once there was a family making a living on 80 acres or every quarter section,” Ken says,”but they are all gone. We had to find some other specialties.”

The Girards began to focus on real estate auctions, and they also investigated the Internet.”I took a class in online auctions from Kurt Aumann of Illinois,” says Ken.”Kurt also specialized in toy sales so I figured if he can do it, so can we.”

In 2001, the Girards invited consignments from friends and neighbors in southeast South Dakota. Local families brought a few tractors and trucks, and Harrisburg toy dealer Cam Lind brought a few hundred items.”I don’t remember the prices that day,” says Ken.”All I remember is that we had a lot of really happy sellers and a lot of smiling buyers. I thought, heck we are in farming country so maybe this can work.”

The Girard brothers have also gained a reputation for firearm auctions, but they can only schedule a few every year.”Guns take a lot of space and they require a lot of paperwork,” says Mike.”The ATF keeps track from the time we log in a consignment until the buyer takes it home.” Federal agents seem far less interested in toy tractors and the people who collect them.

The brothers hold toy tractor auctions nearly every Saturday at the Legion Hall. Sometimes, the sale spills over into Sunday. Many of their consignments are shipped from hundreds of miles away, sometimes by the truckful. When the bidding stops, the auction crew spends the next few days shipping hundreds of toys to buyers from all 50 states and foreign countries. Through the years, Wakonda has become the national hub of farm toy trading.

Marvin Girard died two years ago, but his wife Pat still helps to clerk the sales. Scott Moore, a Centerville auctioneer, takes a turn at the microphone along with Mike and Ken and they all perform as ring men, meaning they roam the auction floor, looking for bids and encouraging the buyers.

The live auction is a show, and most of the people in the seats are there to watch.”We get that,” says Ken.”You don’t have to buy anything and we don’t charge anything to attend.”

While online bidders are a major reason for the Girards’ success, in-person attendees like the Hugheses are still a big part of every sale. Travis Hughes and his boys farm with”green equipment,” meaning John Deere. They have a few antique Deere tractors in a farm shed, and they collect the company’s old toys, especially the early grain combines.

When the bids for toy tractors began to exceed $1,000 at the Wakonda auction, Scott Hughes leaned over to his dad and said,”We could buy the real equipment cheaper than we can buy the toys!”

Scott is correct, says Ken Girard.”That was hard to wrap your head around when it first started happening, but now I completely understand.” The toy is easier to maintain and store than a full-size tractor. Also, perhaps there’s more nostalgia for the toy than an exhaust-spouting, back-breaking, hard-to-start two-ton pile of bolts and metal.

The Girards’ own collections range from tractors to boat memorabilia.

Even stranger, the cardboard box that came with the toy from the factory can be worth more than the toy and the real tractor.”We’ve seen that the box can often double the value,” says Girard.”We’ve sold a toy tractor for a few hundred dollars and then turned around and sold a mint of the same toy in its original box for thousands of dollars.”

Ken says farm toys are like a lot of things in life, from bitcoins to pork bellies and baseball cards; it’s hard to decide what’s a fair value or a good investment.

Consequently, the young auctioneer — who now knows the values of farm toys as well as anyone in America — has simple advice for buyers who join him in the Wakonda Legion Hall or online:”Buy it if you like it. Don’t do it to invest. You have to be pretty savvy to invest in toys. Just buy what you like. Don’t buy if you’re worried about what it might sell for later.” He believes few of his bidders bank on the notion that their purchases will be good financial investments.

Still, the toys keep gaining value. The national record for a toy tractor is $74,000 for a rare”Coffin Block” John Deere Model A pedal tractor.”We haven’t had a chance to sell one of those — yet,” says Ken. The Girards’ highest bid was $9,000 for a gold-plated Farmall 560 1/8th scale.

“There’s been an ongoing argument among toy dealers that there’ll soon be no young guys in the hobby and then the stuff won’t be worth much of anything,” says Ken.”But the fact is there’s never been any young people in the hobby. Almost nobody collects until they have space in their home, maybe because the children have grown and gone, and that’s also when they have some disposable income.”

Bidders are generally males who were raised on a farm, or at least have good memories of summers on a relative’s farm. They begin by collecting the tractor their dad drove.”Then they want the tractor an uncle had. Then they say, ‘My neighbor had one of those so we should maybe have one of them.’ Before you know it, you want them all!”

Ken believes toy tractor enthusiasts are different from risk-takers who invest in cryptocurrencies, and even a breed apart from collectors who focus on comic books, sports memorabilia and rare coins.

The Wakonda auctioneers also organize several gun sales every year. Mike Girard (above) says the government is much more interested in firearms than farm toys.

Many of the Girards’ customers, both online and those who show up in person, come from states east of South Dakota.”Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania — that’s probably where the biggest portion come from,” Ken says.”But we’ve shipped tractors to Hawaii and Alaska.” Interest in farm toys seems to lessen in ranching country, which begins west of Wakonda, but Ken surmises that it’s only because there are fewer people living there.

Just as farmers enjoy the long-standing”color wars” of tractor companies, toy collectors also play favorites. John Deere has the most fans, partly because the company makes more tractors — real and toy — than their competitors. Deere’s famous red rival Farmall (which morphed into IH and today’s Case IH) also has many fans and there are buyers for every make and color, including lesser-known companies like Cockshutt, Oliver, Massey-Harris and Allis-Chalmers.

The Girards enjoy the nostalgia-fueled camaraderie and good-natured rivalry of toy collectors.”They’ll drive here together, sit together and then bid against each other,” Ken says. Some are such regular attendees that they have a favorite chair in the Legion Hall.”It’s just like church,” he laughs.”They always show up and sit in the same place, and if they miss a day then their friends want to know if they’re okay.”

Seeing an empty chair is the hardest part of the profession, Ken says.”We’ve come to develop quite a relationship with many of these guys. Some I see a lot more than I see my own relatives. But let’s face it, some are on the senior side of life and suddenly they are gone — gone to a nursing home or they leave this Earth. Then maybe you have to sell the toys you sold them over the last 15 years. While we’re proud to do it, it’s hard sometimes.”

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

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Pine Needle Basketry

By Bernie Hunhoff

Trisha Blair’s baskets continue a centuries-old practice that traces to the Anasazis of the Southwest.

Trisha Blair believes that anyone who appreciates the concept of making something from nothing — and who has a persistent nature — may want to try creating coil baskets from ponderosa pine needles.

Despite droughts, forest fires, pine beetle infestations and civilization, the ponderosa pine remains the dominant tree in the Black Hills. The mountain range’s very name was inspired centuries ago by its peaks and valleys forested with darkish green pine needles. The Lakota called it Paha Sapa, which translates to”dark hills.”

A typical needle grows to 6 inches over three or four years before shedding. Sometimes the mat of needles on the forest floor becomes so thick that it represents a fire hazard in dry conditions. Property owners often rake up the needles, both for aesthetics and to eliminate them as tinder. Some “green thumbers” use them as mulch in their mountain gardens.

Blair has found a higher use. Like Native Americans of centuries past, she uses the needles to create beautiful baskets — not by weaving but by coiling. The former English teacher, an accomplished oil and acrylics painter, says her art career began as a child.”We had an outdoor toilet and the four rough walls were conducive to drawing and painting, which I did. I covered them with pictures of horses and naked ladies. It seems that I liked Lady Godiva with long, flowing hair, and that’s where my art started.”

In the 1970s, Blair was studying in New Hampshire and exploring the East Coast when she toured the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. A friend was working there, so she got to enter the backrooms and see collections not open to the public, including blankets and baskets made by the Anasazis hundreds of years ago.

She held the baskets, studied the coils and noticed both their perfection and the imperfections.”I remember thinking even then that it’s something I felt I could do.”

Upon returning to South Dakota, Blair worked as a teacher and began painting pictures. Through the years, she developed a problem:”I couldn’t bring myself to sell the paintings. They are too much a part of me. I have a treasure room full of them and every relative has them hanging on their walls.”

When she embarked on basket making, a friend wondered if the baskets would end up in the treasure room with the paintings.”You know what’s going to happen,” warned the friend.”When you die, your son is going to box them all up and sell them for a quarter.”

Thanks to her friend’s honesty, Blair pledged to enter her new art phase with less sentimentality. As soon as she was satisfied with the quality of her baskets, she offered them for sale at a Deadwood art gallery.

Several years ago, she joined the Chautauqua Artisans Market, a group of artists who share a gallery on River Street in Hot Springs. Her baskets are also exhibited at Art Expressions in Custer and ArtForms in Hill City. She has sold them to appreciative buyers throughout the United States, and as far away as Russia and the Middle East.

North American basket making likely began with the Anasazi, a people known as”the ancient ones” who lived in cliff dwellings and stone pueblos in today’s Utah and New Mexico. The Anasazi mysteriously departed the area about 700 years ago, but many of their crafts and traditions were embraced by other tribes.

Blair is entirely self-taught; her encounter with the Anasazi baskets at the Smithsonian was her only tutorial.”That’s where I was inspired, though I never thought then that I would be doing it today.

“Their baskets had no knots, which is a challenge,” she says.”I also noticed that they made tiny mistakes,” which freed her from the burden of trying to perfect each stitch.”Another thing, you couldn’t tell where the coiling ended so that’s always been a goal of mine.”

Blair says coil basket making is slow and tedious.”I can spend a couple of weeks on a basket,” she says.”My son says I make 5 cents an hour.” However, like the”ancient ones,” she doesn’t do it for money. There’s satisfaction in making something beautiful from nature’s bounty. She has developed her own techniques and tricks. She even copyrighted a unique method of using a tooled leather base.

Blair believes almost anyone can learn, though it’s akin to hitting a baseball or riding a bike: you could read about it forever, but you need to see and do.

Fortunately, numerous YouTube videos and tutorials can be found online for visual learning — and Blair generously offered to explain the process as it works for her.

Needle Selection

Never take healthy green needles from a branch unless the branch is already broken and dying, and, conversely, try not to take needles off the forest floor because they may have bark lice or fungi, especially if they appear black.

“The most beautiful needles come from trees that have been stressed out by a fire or from the bug infestation,” she says.”When there is a fire that’s the first place I look.”

It’s easiest to work with longer needles; hopefully you can find some that are 4 to 5 inches long. She says pines in the Northern Hills generally have longer needles than those in the Southern Hills. If you harvest green needles, it takes a year to dry them and even then they don’t have the beauty of a needle that dries on the branch.

Blair tried a shortcut that nearly ended in disaster.”My son found some wonderful green needles, and I thought I would try to dry them in the oven.” She quickly learned why pine needles are such a fire threat.”They caught fire and I could have burned the house down,” she says.”Don’t do what I did.”

Blair washes the needles with soap and water, boils them, lays them on newspapers to dry and then puts them away until she is ready to coil. She also decaps the needles while they are wet, though she notes that some basket makers leave the caps for a more rustic look. Decapping is a laborious job, so she says you can expect friends and relatives to avoid you at that stage.

Gathering the Tools

Basket making requires pine needles, waxed thread (Native Americans used sinew, and some basket makers still prefer it), a base material such as wood or plastic, a sharp scissors, a sharp sewing needle with a large eye and a gauge to hold the coil of needles as you sew them together.

The gauge also maintains a uniformity in the coil size as you circle the basket. Some people use a 2-inch piece of 3/8-inch copper or plastic tubing; Blair simply uses a short piece of a large soda straw (again, about 3/4 of an inch wide and 2 inches long).

The base can be anything — round, square or rectangle. Nature-loving artists use a section of a black walnut shell; the natural holes in the cavity provide a way to sew it to the first coil of needles.

A round bit of plastic, wood or any other material is suitable. Drill or punch holes around the edge so it can be sewed to a coil. A 4-inch coil of needles can also serve as the base, and that’s the method described below by Blair.

Begin to Coil

Blair says the needles must be wet and flexible, so wash them and pull off the caps at the end, but don’t separate them if they don’t separate themselves (often there will be three needles to a nodule or cap).

Put about 3 feet of string on the sewing needle. Fill the tube or straw with pine needles (it will probably hold 4-6). Start wrapping the thread tightly around the needles for three inches or so, moving the tube as you go.

After you have 3 to 4 inches sewn, force the coil into a circle, bending the needles back on themselves; secure the circle by pushing the needle and thread through the circle.

Making the Bottom

Reload the tube and continue with your first coil. Each time you wrap thread around the coil, you also stitch it through the previous coil. For aesthetics, find a method to keep the threading even from coil to coil; Blair uses her thumb to measure the distance. Keep adding needles to the tube as you go, always keeping it full so the coils are an equal thickness.

Whenever you get down to about 4 or 5 inches of thread, filter the thread onto another 3-foot string. If you find it too difficult to weave one length of thread into another, you could tie a knot and then hide the knot between the coils, but remember that the Anasazi never used knots.

Once the bottom is as wide as you wish (and why not begin with a small basket?), start to slant the needle upwards so the basket will naturally go up.

Creating the Walls

You can choose to make a straight wall around the bottom or taper it by gradually sloping each coil outward. As you spiral out, the stitches should get farther apart; again, find a method to space them properly. Keep the coils tight. Once you’ve reached the desired height, stop adding needles to the tube and allow the needles to taper down. Trim the needles with a scissors if they don’t taper properly. In the Anasazi baskets, it is hard to see where the coil ends.

Don’t hurry. Blair says even experienced basket makers can spend an hour per coil.

Finishing the Basket

Blair says”the ancients” used pitch bark to seal and preserve their baskets, but today it’s probably easier to use beeswax or shellac.”I thought I would use pine sap. I burned a tank of gas, driving through the forest. Hours later I had this little wad of pitch, mostly from bark beetle trees. It was just about enough to do an eighth of a basket.” She recommends varnish, beeswax or nothing at all.

Start with a small project, perhaps even a coaster, to avoid frustration. Blair suggests that beginners do small baskets of perhaps 3-4 inches in diameter. Explore opportunities to learn online or in person at a class or workshop. Even inspecting a coil basket in your hands can inspire and educate.

Finally, Blair suggests from experience, don’t hide your pine needle crafts under a bushel basket or in a treasure room; show them off, offer them at a gallery or use them in your home.

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

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Our Goat Renaissance

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Humans and goats share a deep bond, one that’s rich with fun and laughter. Photo by Mark Smither

When I was growing up in eastern Yankton County, we only knew one person who raised goats — an eccentric bachelor named Ernie Stortvedt, who lived across the road from my grandparents and was famous for his lackadaisical approach to cleanliness. Even in our fun-loving neighborhood, Ernie didn’t set an example anyone was apt to emulate. Goats and Ernie remained linked in my mind for decades.

That changed five years ago, when my niece blew her birthday money on a goat. My family quickly learned that goats are kind of like potato chips — nobody has just one. Soon, my brother and sister-in-law started going to livestock sales in search of goat bargains. Friends offer them goats. Bucks and does regularly escape their sex-segregated pastures and five months later, baby goats arrive. It’s not unusual to find a diapered kid or two in their house, confined in a playpen as they await their next bottle feeding. Now my family describes themselves as goat hoarders. They even have a sweet brown Boer named Honey earmarked for my daughter to work with when she starts 4-H.

Goats will probably never supplant cattle in South Dakota, but ownership is rising. According to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, South Dakota’s goat population consisted of 17,868 animals in 2017, an increase of about 7,000 over the previous 10 years. That number will undoubtedly be higher when the next goat census is released in 2022. I asked Katie Freng Doty, Yankton County 4-H’s Youth Development Assistant, if she’d noticed the change. Doty, who raises 30 Boer goats with her husband, Tyler, and daughter, Avery, on their farm north of Mission Hill, said that she and her sister were among the first to show meat goats in our area in 2011.”In my younger years of 4-H I don’t recall there being a Market Meat Goat show at the state fair,” Doty says.”It is now just as big of a show as any of the other species.”

I turned to a few other goat-loving South Dakotans to find out what makes the animals so popular. Most people agreed that goats are livestock on a human scale, which makes sense — archeological evidence indicates that humans first tamed the goat around 10,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest species to become domesticated. Goats also require less space, feed and money than other, larger creatures. But the animals are also intelligent and full of personality, so it’s easy for human and goat to create a deep bond, one that’s often full of laughter. Doty remembers her sister’s first goat, a runt named Bambi.”Any time we would take our goats for walks, her goat would only make it so far and he would just flop over. My sister, who was only 9 at the time, would pick him up and carry him home,” she says.”He caught on to that pretty quick. It didn’t take long and we would only make it a couple steps before he was done walking.”

Four-Legged Hospitality

Visitors of all ages enjoy getting to know the livestock at Pleasant Valley Farm and Cabins of Custer. Photo by Ardent Photography.

In a quiet valley in the southern Black Hills, a guard llama named Batman watches over his herd of goats with a sharp eye and deadly feet, ever on the lookout for mountain lions, coyotes and other threats.”He is not a pet,” says Susan Barnes of Pleasant Valley Farm and Cabins.”We’ve seen him kill coyotes. He stomped them to death.”

Susan worked at the University of Wyoming for decades, while her husband, Tom, was an environmental engineer. But when they retired in 2004, they knew they wanted to return to the 120-acre farm near Custer that Susan’s family had called home for generations. They divided the land into 17 pastures, leaving 40 acres for growing winter feed, and began to raise Boer show goats, but their interests quickly morphed into creating a herd of crossbred Boer, Spanish and Savannah goats for meat purposes. In 2019, the couple opened three vacation cabins and started giving farm tours to Black Hills visitors curious about the goats, Batman, and the rest of the menagerie: two herd dogs, Lily and Monte, a flock of free-range chickens and a few pigs.”A lot of these people are from Chicago and places like that and have never really seen animals,” Susan says. And while the guests may giggle at a goat’s antics and get a kick out of feeding the livestock, Susan makes it clear that farm life is not all fun and games.”You have to be here all the time. It’s dirty. It’s heavy. It can be sad if you have a goat that gets hurt. This kind of work isn’t for everybody.”

Tom, who passed away in August 2020, was a driving force in the promotion of goats as livestock and as food animals in South Dakota — not always an easy task in cattle country. He served as vice president of the South Dakota Specialty Producers for two years, teamed with area chefs to introduce goat meat, also known as chevon, to local palates and was willing to talk goats any time he had a willing listener.”Tom was a good promoter. He really liked people and loved his goats,” Susan says.”He set a pretty good standard for me to keep up. Tom was crazy to get people to buy goats.”

Luckily, Susan has ample support from their two children, who have been heavily involved in business decisions from the beginning. Daughter Molly Schultz and her husband Clayton manage the farm’s social media, Airbnb listing and website, PleasantValleyFarmandCabins.com. Son Tony and his wife Heather live in Alaska, but they helped Tom build the cabins and come home to handle maintenance jobs.”It’s a real family deal,” Susan says.

Susan describes goat meat as healthy, lean and mild.”It’s just kind of unique and it’s not something that overpowers you. I use goat hamburger for everything that I would use regular hamburger for,” she says. The farm supplies meat to A&D Jamaican Restaurant in Rapid City, Wild Spruce Market, Skogen Kitchen and Black Hills Burger & Bun of Custer, which sometimes serves a goatburger special. But their best customers are a group of Pakistani doctors at Monument Health, who use the meat in dishes from their homeland.

Having a local market for meat ensures that the Barnes’ goats are all more or less friendly — a bad attitude is a death sentence at Pleasant Valley Farm.”If you’re mean, you turn into goatburger,” Susan says.

***

New Mexico-Style Green Chili

by Suzanne Stemme of The Goat Rancher

1 pound goat meat, cubed

1 sweet onion, chopped

1 tablespoon oil

1 can black beans

1 can cream-style corn

1/2 cup Hatch green chiles

2 tablespoons ground cumin

1 tablespoon chili powder

SautÈ goat and chopped onion in oil until onion is soft (about 5 to 7 minutes). Add black beans, corn, green chiles and spices. Cover pan and simmer on low heat for 1 1/2 hours, stirring frequently. Top with grated cheese and serve with tortilla chips or corn bread.

Soap Making in Smithwick

Connie Koski snuggles with Zoey, a small-eared Alpine-LaMancha cross from the High Prairie Dairy Goats herd near Smithwick.

Anita Mason and Connie Koski, Smithwick’s goat herding soap makers, came to South Dakota for the climate. Mason ran a raw milk cow share program and kept Alpine goats in her native Virginia for decades before she was diagnosed with lupus. Southern humidity exacerbated the inflammatory disease, so the pair moved someplace more arid.”We’re both getting older and we said, ëIf we’re going to do this farming thing, we need to be able to walk,'” Mason says. In 2019, Koski took a job teaching social science at Oglala Lakota College. The two settled in Fall River County and started High Prairie Dairy Goats and the Grubby Goat Soap Company.

Their South Dakota herd primarily consists of LaManchas, a breed with a sweet disposition, high-butterfat milk and nubby, barely-there”gopher ears.””Everybody always asks about the LaManchas: ëWhat happened to their ears?’ They think it’s like docking tails on dogs. You can make lots of jokes,” Koski says. There’s also a rescue Toggenburg who suffered ear loss due to frostbite, but the queen of the herd is a sassy Alpine doe named Lucy.”Lucy’s the boss around here. She’s the only goat with ears,” Koski says.

There are several ways to make soap, but the basic process involves milk, fat and lye, which creates a chemical reaction called saponification. Goggles and heavy-duty gloves are worn to avoid lye burns.”It’s pretty much a cross between a chemistry experiment and a math venture,” Mason says.”Everything has to work out in relation to how much lye you use or you’ll melt your house.” She is not exaggerating — she and her father once tried to wing their way through a batch of soap, with disastrous results.”It ate through an aluminum stockpot we were using, ate through the linoleum, burned through the floor and burned through a rug,” she says.

Mason and Koski make a cold-process soap. First, frozen milk is mixed with lye in an ice-cold bowl. Then coconut oil, safflower oil, shea butter or other fats are gently heated to about 110 to 125 degrees. The milk/lye mixture is slowly combined with the warm oil until it becomes thick. The mixture is then poured into bread loaf pans, allowed to rest for 48 hours, then sliced, wrapped and placed on a shelf. The soap blocks cure for five weeks, which allows excess water to evaporate and eliminates any residual harshness from the lye.

Some soap makers would stop there, but Mason and Koski take an additional step called remilling, in which the blocks of soap are melted in the microwave, along with a small amount of additional milk, fragrance and other additives as desired. The soap is then repoured into molds and allowed to dry for about 24 hours. The remilling creates a soft, smooth soap that is gentle enough for Mason’s sensitive skin.”I like the softer bar,” she says.”If I’m comfortable, then everybody else should be comfortable.”

The pandemic halted craft shows, so goat’s milk soap production has slowed accordingly. Instead, the pair focuses on raising milk-fed pork.”It really makes a difference in the meat. It’s a super moist pork,” Mason says.”It tends to be very flavorful, like somebody slow-cooked it for two days.”

Once the pandemic ends, Koski hopes to introduce South Dakotans to their docile LaManchas.”Our plan was to bring some of these awesome East Coast lines out this way. It’s hard to go meet the kids at 4-H because COVID put the kibosh on that. Maybe we aren’t super awesome yet, but we’d really like to start showing,” she says. Mason wants to educate people about the value of dairy goats as part of a self-sustaining lifestyle.”There’s just no better animal than a dairy goat for that. You can make your own dairy products. You can raise bum lambs and calves off of their milk. Most people could have one in their backyard.” But perhaps their greatest challenge is finding a trusted neighbor so they can take a vacation.”We’re trying to sucker somebody into looking after the goats so we can get away for a while. It’s not working out very well for us. As soon as we say ëdairy goats’ they run,” Mason says.

Raised by Goats in Groton

Tessa Erdmann of Groton had learned patience and adaptability through her work in the show ring. Photo by Jacee J Photography.

After his family sold off their herd of registered Angus cattle, third-generation farmer Darrin Erdmann of Groton vowed to stick to corn and soybeans. Then his daughter, Tessa, joined 4-H. Erdmann bought her three goats, two does and a wether, and it all went downhill from there.”You can’t keep a waterer open for just three, so I got about 15 more. Then you can’t pay for the water with just 15 so I got about 20 more. Then we bought some more. At one point we had about 150,” Darrin says.”A project like this is hard to run as a business. It turns into a hobby, so you’re not really watching your balance sheet on it.”

The Erdmann family, which includes wife Julie and son Jarrett, raises predominantly Boer-based show goats, supplying animals to 4-H kids and to the local population of Karen and Somali immigrants. Darrin also owns Texkota Panel and Gate, distributing durable American-made steel pens to livestock producers.

Darrin remembers the public’s puzzlement when his daughter first showed goats at the South Dakota State Fair.”These old farmers would walk through and they were just amazed. ëWhy do we have goats here? This is South Dakota.'” But as a member of the state’s 4-H meat goat committee, Darrin has seen firsthand the goat explosion, which he credits in part to the bond that children develop with their animals.”Every one of them has almost a pet quality. Other livestock do not get that bond with a kid,” he says.

Tessa, a senior at Groton High School, has had the opportunity to bond with many goats since she first started showing in 2013 — some more successfully than others. Her first year, she wrangled a 100-pound hellion named Thunderbolt.”He had the worst personality. He was just absolutely wild. Holding that goat was never easy,” Tessa says. But she didn’t give up.”It drove me to try new things, different coolers, different feed, sit in their pen a little bit more. The next year, all the changes that I made paid off.”

That adaptability has served Tessa well, both when it comes to bonding with goats and when dealing with surprises in the show ring. One of her most harrowing experiences happened when her goat got diarrhea in front of a first-time judge in the middle of the 2018 Senior Showmanship competition.”I didn’t know what to do because obviously that’s not good looking for a show animal,” she says.”I wiped it off on my hand and wiped it on the side of my leg and kept going. That was probably the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done.” The judge never mentioned the mishap, and Tessa and her goat won the competition.

But whether Tessa won or lost, perhaps one of the greatest gifts Tessa has gotten from the goat world is friendship.”When I would go to these shows, all the kids there were just like me. They worked with their livestock day in and day out. They’ve become like a second family,” she says. Tessa is deciding whether to attend South Dakota State University or Oklahoma State University, but wherever she goes, she knows that friendly faces will make college feel like home.”4-H and FFA have given me the opportunity to branch out and meet so many different people,” she says.”My friends always joke if they meet a new person I probably know them first.”

Tessa gives 4-H a lot of credit in shaping her into the confident young woman she is today, but her father puts it more bluntly.”People always say, ëTessa’s such a good kid. Who raised her? It wasn’t you.’ It was the goats.”

From Finance to Fromage

Rapid City cheesemaker Spencer Crawford believes dairy goats are a good addition to a self-sufficient homestead.

Spencer Crawford went overseas to study finance and came home a goat farmer. After attending graduate school in Paris, he found himself drawn to socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneurship. During the course of his 10-year stay in France, he raised bees outside of Paris, dabbled in permaculture and was considering a move to West Africa to raise goats when a phone call from his mother changed everything.”My mom says, ëNo, no, no. I can visit you in Paris, but I don’t think I can make it to West Africa. Why don’t you come home? Why are you going to be a farmer in Africa? You can be a farmer in Pennington County,'” Crawford remembers.”Listen to Mom. Usually she’s right.”

Crawford returned to his native Rapid City three years ago, where he teaches French and Spanish at St. Thomas More Middle School and practices small-scale agriculture on his parents’ acreage north of town. His father, Tony, watches the farm during the day.”He helps out, but he and his friends are still scratching their heads. He never thought that his horse barn would be filled with a bunch of goats. I think the horses might be a little confused too,” Crawford says.

Some cowboys mock goats as”the poor man’s cow,” but Crawford appreciates the animal.”In terms of what they eat and what they produce, it’s just a lot more human scale,” he says.”You don’t need a ton of land, a ton of infrastructure. To milk the goats, you need a bucket with a lid, and the home kitchen is enough to have your family totally self-sufficient with milk and cheese and soap.”

With his herd of 10 Alpine dairy goats, plus chickens, honeybees and a number of cats, Crawford engages in permaculture, an interconnected style of farming in which all of the elements work together holistically.”Every plant that you plant, you can eat it or the goats can eat it,” he says.”No loafers. Everyone has a job.” One of the goats’ jobs is to provide rich milk, which Crawford uses to create tomme, an aged, washed-rind cheese.

The origins of cheesemaking are lost to time, but it is believed that the first cheeses were made when fresh milk was stored in pouches made from animal stomachs. Rennet, a mixture of enzymes found in the stomach’s lining, coagulated the milk and caused curds and whey to form. Crawford’s method is a bit more sophisticated. First, goat milk is heated in a sterilized pot. Next, bacteria is added to help the cheese develop flavor, followed by the curd-forming rennet. The curds are separated from the whey, placed in a mold or cheesecloth, weighted down and salted. This helps remove moisture from the cheese and encourages a crust to form.”It’s going to look a little spooky sometimes, but what’s inside is the good stuff,” Crawford says. His cheeses are left to age in a spare refrigerator in his basement. Cheese ages best in a humid environment at a temperature of about 50 degrees, so Crawford stores the cheeses in Tupperware containers with the lids cracked open and periodically washes each cheese with salt water. This helps kill bad bacteria or mold, develops the cheese’s protective crust and draws out additional moisture.

Unlike a commercial operation, there are many variables involved in Crawford’s cheese, so every wheel is a surprise.”The cheese is kind of a living, changing entity of its own,” he says.”You cut into a cheese that you’ve been saving for 10 months and then the wheel of cheese next to it that you made three days later and you think, ëWhat the heck? Why is this one so delicious?'”

Crawford would like to build a commercial kitchen, but due to government regulations, a health department-compliant cheesemaking facility is an expensive proposition. For now, he’s content to watch the comic interactions between his animals, share his best cheeses at potlucks and enjoy his after-school farm venture.”Some people go to the bar after work. I go milk some goats,” he says.

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

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A 66-County Tree

By Steve Riedel

Steve Riedel turned weathered wood gathered from across the state into ornate Christmas ornaments representing every county.

I was stranded at home during the bitter cold winter of 2020-2021 and the isolation that came with the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse. I desperately needed something to do. My thoughts turned to Christmas at the Capitol. My wife Marietta and I rarely missed the annual festival in which dozens of colorful and brightly illuminated Christmas trees fill the halls of the Capitol in Pierre. I thought,”I wish I could decorate one of those trees.”

My boredom collided with inspiration. What if I made a collection of wooden Christmas ornaments, crafted out of wood gathered from each county in South Dakota, in the hope of displaying them in Pierre? As soon as the weather allowed — and being mindful of social distancing — Marietta and I set out to visit the 66 counties in the state and ask South Dakotans if they would donate a piece or two of old wood.

Asking for our first donation was an anxious moment. I was so nervous that I planned the first stop at the home of acquaintances in Beadle County not far from our home in Huron. We drove into the farmyard and parked in front of the house. Nervously, Marietta asked,”You aren’t really going to walk up there and ask for wood, are you?”

Riedel’s Minnehaha County ornament.

I nodded and walked timidly to the home’s front door, where I found myself talking to both husband and wife.”That’s actually a good idea,” they said, and then gave me directions to two large piles of old wood.”If you don’t find enough wood this time, you can come back for more.” We scoured the piles and left with four posts and a sense of optimism.

I quickly learned that I needed to explain what I meant by”old wood.” While I was merely hoping to collect short pieces of wood that most people would think to be rotten and useless, folks seemed to think I was asking for more. I also learned that people almost universally liked my idea. While I sheepishly laughed at myself when explaining my project, others listened intently and took the idea to heart. Before we finished, people had donated weathered wood from broken fence posts, fallen barns and buildings, cattle corrals, rodeo grounds, original family homesteads, broken telephone poles, horse tack and collapsed bridges.

One rancher plucked several fence posts from a retired manure spreader. Another gave me a horse yoke complete with a double tree. We also came home with a few dozen fresh eggs, though we turned down some turkeys that were free if we butchered them ourselves.

As we traveled door to door, we marveled that people placed such trust in us. We were often sent off on our own, completely trusted on private property. At one farm, I knocked on the door and explained my purpose.”We’d love to help you,” said the gentleman who answered the door,”but I can’t right now. We need to go to town to have our picture taken.” He got in his car and, speaking through his car window, encouraged us to search through his old wood pile.”Take a look around and if you see something that will work, help yourself. If not, there’s more wood behind the barn,” he said as the family drove away.

The more people donated, the more meaningful my ornament project became. People proudly gave us pieces of South Dakota history. We were given the very wood that our ancestors used to build South Dakota. In some cases, I suspect the wood helped build South Dakotans. As a rancher handed me an old fence post, he said,”You can take this. It was hand-split by my grandfather when he was a young man.” His grandfather was former Governor Tom Berry.

Faulk County ornament.

Another elderly donor, while digging through a small collection of posts hiding under a rusty truck fender, came up with a unique piece.”Would this post work? I’ve been saving it forever but don’t know what I will ever do with it.” As it turns out, it was a post he had saved from the World War II era.”We couldn’t get round posts during the war,” he said. Remarkably, the ornament I made with it has two dark holes left behind by a staple driven into it sometime during the war years.

When cold weather did not permit traveling, I worked obsessively at making 66 ornaments. Creating one to represent Lake County was especially meaningful. My ancestors settled there in the 1890s, and I was raised on a homestead established by my grandfather in the early 1900s. I had searched his homestead nine years earlier to find a post to make an ornament that would be our only grandson’s first Christmas ornament. That was one of the first ornaments I ever made. The post I found was comprised of wood with a rich burgundy color. I made Lake County’s ornament from that same post. The wood was so brittle that during my first attempt, it imploded in my lathe. Fortunately, I learned a lighter touch, and I have since made an ornament to give to both my son and daughter from that same old post.

After thousands of miles on the road and as many hours in my workshop, the only question that remained was whether my Christmas at the Capitol wish would come true. Marietta and I summarized the project and our experiences on the road and sent it to the committee in Pierre. Their approval arrived shortly thereafter. I got misty-eyed when I read the news.

The abundance of wood I collected actually allowed me to make more than one ornament from some counties. By the time I was finished, I had crafted finial ornaments, candles, Christmas trees, snowmen, bells, candy canes, Christmas baskets, bird houses … all related to the spirit of Christmas. Some aren’t perfect, but each ornament — like the many South Dakotans we met — is unique.

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

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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.