Category: culture

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Under the Capitol Dome

Story and photography by Thomas Dempster

The state Capitol in Pierre on a cold winter’s afternoon creates a quiet atmosphere contrary to the buzz of activity within its halls.

I had promised myself that if I won election to the state Senate, at least once every day during the legislative session, I would climb the grand staircase to the third floor of the state Capitol. Made of white Vermont marble, it glows and shimmers as if made of lead crystal. Almost as inspiring as the Milky Way, it is a staircase meant for governors, for kings, for democrats. One must breathe in and bow in such grandeur, in reverence to the grand experiment of democracy, in gratitude for the opportunity to be here.

Once up the staircase, take a right or a left, walk to the south, and you overlook the rotunda. It is 95 feet from the floor to the vaulted dome. I crane my neck, peering as deeply as I can into the arch above. Does it represent the curvature of the Earth, I wonder? Is it the heavens? Or is it the domed sky capturing the faint song of a Dakota brave to the eagle above?

The Capitol building is as much cathedral as capitol, a mountainous presence above the prairie. Early one Saturday morning in February, the moon floated across the sky like an inflated balloon, looking as if it might meld into the lighted dome of the Capitol. Then the moon, tethered to its mother Earth, sank behind the Missouri River hills, the sun rose and day began.

The capitols of Montana and South Dakota are twins. Montana and South Dakota were both admitted to the Union in 1889. Montana designed its capitol first. South Dakota Gov. Samuel Elrod, a noted skinflint, or perhaps a practical South Dakotan, didn’t want to waste good money on design. He paid the Montana governor $20 for their plans.

Walk into our Capitol during the legislative session, and you enter a dynamo. The building throbs with energy, a power plant with the hum of a turbine at your feet, the strength of a South Dakota thunderstorm. As a legislator, you walk within the storm, often through its eye. You brace yourself against its ferocity and look for the lightning bolt.

I love to stand on the balcony outside the Senate Chambers, near the marble railings overlooking the rotunda. It is sufficiently high to induce vertigo. People below scurry like New York taxicabs, up and down, in and out. Surely, I thought, someone has put this to music. A lobbyist told me she used to pose herself here, like a watchtower. From this perspective, she could see who was walking below and calculate her strategy.

Watching scurrying mortals from the third floor balcony is mesmerizing, but more inspiring is to gaze at the immortals above, Greek goddesses gazing down from murals in the dome — Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and victory, Venus at play with Cupid, Ceres, and Europa, grasping a bull by its horns.

Greek goddess Minerva keeps watch on legislators below. She is one of several mythic figures depicted on murals throughout the Capitol dome.

In Greek mythology, Minerva carries an owl on her shoulder. But she also breathed life into Pandora, who unleashed the Miseries of Scolding, Deceit, Despair, Accusation, Lies, Envy, Distrust, Scheming, Drudgery and Gossip. “Here?” I thought.

The beautiful mortal, Europa, is mounting Zeus, a god disguised as a bull. Seduced by his soft eyes, she will be kidnapped and carried across the seas.

Cupid swirls in the gown of Venus, the goddess of beauty. “Cupid slinging arrows in this building?” I wondered. Unseen is the spirit of Strife, who threw the apple of discord into a wedding party, declaring, “The fairest shall pick it up.” Three ravishing goddesses, Hera, Venus, and Minerva dove for the apple, and it was from this seed that the Trojan War was born.

Ceres stands alone by a cornstalk. It is she who lent her chariot to man and taught him to sow and reap. But ironically, Ceres’ daughter Persephone was carried off to Hades by a dark chariot drawn by black horses. With Persephone pulled into the darkness below, the Earth grieves, and Ceres becomes an old gray woman. Winter falls, and mortals await Persephone’s return in the spring, when the Earth again will bloom.

“Ah,” I thought, feeling intensely mortal and vulnerable, “which goddess will have this day?”

I took a drink from the marble fountain, and walked through the swinging doors into the Senate Chamber. Woven into the carpet is the state seal with its plowman, mines, cattle, commerce, the Black Hills, the Missouri River. I could almost feel my grandmother’s presence, a homesteader where the Cheyenne River meets the Missouri 40 miles up. I walk to my desk in a room of cherry wood, African mahogany and scagliola columns, where delicious paintings speak the dreams of our ancestors, where amber stained glass bathes the chambers in the light of early fall. It is regal, rich, somber, and important.

Students and other constituents from around the state travel to Pierre during the legislative session to watch and learn. They observe proceedings from balconies in the Senate and House.

My greatest surprise was a good surprise. Legislators, Republican and Democrat, are comrades. There are 35 of us in the Senate, twice that in the House. We share a responsibility, a sense of mission, a duty. Most of us are separated from home, from children and spouses. During the session, each camps in a motel or hotel room. Each is there to make a difference. For January, February and part of March, life barely exists outside the legislature.

We do battle, experience victory, suffer wounds. It is a boot camp of sorts. But through it all, as we gather in committee hearings, debate in our caucuses and argue on the floor, there is a touching of hands, an acknowledgement in the voice that says “Good morning, senator,” a shared deference, a respect for the person and the position. It is not perfect, and not shared equally by all. But I have not met one former legislator who does not consider having served in the legislature as fundamental to who they are. It is a mark, a fraternity.

A cynic told me the day I left for my first session, “Don’t forget, Tom. Ninety-nine percent of the people don’t know and don’t care what you do in Pierre.” Unnecessarily harsh, I felt, but I discovered that even if he was right, the 1 percent who do care, care a great deal.

Pages help the legislative process run smoothly. They are selected from high schools across South Dakota.

“I love the process,” is a common refrain among legislators. Bills start as ideas, but harden to steel, fired by the legislative process. Propose a bill, and if it is a good one, like a piece of clay it is molded and shaped by many hands. Even an argument or bill lost can move the ball, can in some way shape tomorrow’s bill. I look to the panels of bearded legislators before me, I look to lawmakers unlike me, I look to lobbyists around me for perspective, for understanding. And then, somehow, through this great sifting and contemplative process, I vote, we vote. It is a process that boils down all arguments, bulging notebooks and stuffed files into one of two words: Yea, or Nay.

Another surprise. I had expected, had been told that there would be someone in leadership, in the administration, among constituents who would tell me how they expected me to vote. Not true, I discovered. But what you are expected to do is to formulate opinions that are grounded and sound, that have depth, that are representative of who you are. They may be dramatically different than people want. But if you treat serious matters seriously and thoughtfully, if you know and tell the truth to the best of your ability, you are granted the opportunity to do what you feel you have to do. And it is not possible to hide.

I had not suspected what happened to a freshman senator on his first speech on the floor. Standing amidst the roll top desks under the amber and brown stained glass of the Senate floor is not only humbling. It is frightening. When I stood to present my first bill, I gasped, then grasped for my microphone. I felt as if I was falling down a flight of stairs. But somehow I heard myself still talking, my presentation lasting all of 60 seconds or so. I sat down and did my best not to let anyone see the blood escaping my ears, mouth or nose. The bill was a lay-up, and was given to me because it was. But to my astonishment, I heard the majority leader ask the president of the Senate for permission to ask Sen. Dempster a question about his bill. As is protocol, the presiding officer, the lieutenant governor, turned to me and said, “Senator Dempster, do you wish to respond to the senator’s question?”

“What?” I thought everybody knew this was my first bill. I rose again, grasped the microphone and did my best to answer the question. Then there was another, and another, the questions more direct, my answers weaker and paler. My legislative career was doomed. Mercifully, the vote was called, the roll call taken, and the bill passed. Only then did I hear Sen. Bogue welcome me to the Senate floor, followed by smiles and applause of every colleague. Sen. Sam Nachtigal walked over and slipped me a note. “Good job,” it said, “but your zipper was down.”

My first real bill was intensely instructive. The merits were so clear. I was surprised by the heated debate on the Senate floor, and a little offended when a member of my party rose to call it the “stupidest bill of this session.” But that didn’t bother me because it was just one vote. It was only when heavies in the back of the room stood and spoke against my bill that I realized I was dying. Debate ended and the votes were taken, each nay deepening my color and agony. When the dismal result was announced, Sen. Richard Kelly, seated in front of me, turned and told me to “move for a reconsideration.”

When the bill came up the next day, the battle was on again. But I had asked for help, and I got it. I will never forget the assistant majority leader running up to me. “Give the rebuttal, make it short,” he said. “I’ll call the question.” We passed the bill, and later in the session it passed the House and was signed into law.

The Capitol grounds includes several memorials, including this one to veterans.

Like all specialized work, the legislature has its own language and meaning. Bills get “hog housed,” and I learned that “no recommendation” from a committee is better than having a bill “sent to the 41st day.” Committee action can be gutted with a “smoke-out.” There is a certain window when you can submit legislation, and a specific number of bills one can sponsor as the window begins to close. Some insurance bills are filled with such complicated language that even if you hold them to a mirror and read them backwards, it doesn’t help. Knowledge is king in this world, but so too is a word of encouragement, a thank you and a handshake.

Whether farmer, lawyer, teacher, rancher, doctor or stockbroker, for all legislators the pilgrimage to Pierre can be long, sometimes treacherous. To get to the middle of the state we drive through cities, farmsteads, small towns, interstates, two-lane highways. There is ritual in traveling great distances, in traversing the state on Sunday and back again on Friday or Saturday. There is satisfaction in hearing the crack of the gavel and the call that “the Senate will come to order” on Monday, and sometimes even better is the crack and the order to adjourn on Friday.

Pierre is a place apart, and the journey to it an equalizer. When winter storms move in on Friday, they stir a sense of urgency. Time to bare yourself to an unfriendly onslaught of frigid air, winds that singe like glistening knives. The highways will be treacherous, and perhaps still on Sunday when it’s time to turn around and drive back. On Sunday night, stories of the road are shared. There is communion here, for all have supped the same wine. Other lawmakers become brethren, and seatmates like family.

When the legislature is not in session, the Senate and House chambers are silent, the calm of an ocean at rest. Lights are dimmed, the floor cordoned off. It is a melancholy, silenced stadium, an unlighted stage. I miss the sergeant at arms, look for the lights to fire, want to feel the blood coursing through the marble banisters. I can taste the best bagels in the world from the cafe downstairs, see the lobbyists in their huddles, wonder about the governor’s men scouting below.

I close my eyes and hear the roll call. “Abdullah, aye, Albers, aye, Apa, nay.” My family’s Rotary exchange student from Italy, Stefie Zanet, was a Senate page, and for months after the session, she sang the roll call vote, senator after senator, name after name. Some votes fall like an easy rain. Others are tough, filling the chamber as if each vote is rung by the somber tone of a cathedral’s bell, deep and final. I remember one such vote late in the session. My seatmate, Jay Duenwald, his eyes expressive as a poet’s, nodded. “This sucker’s gonna pass, Tom,” he said. “The sucker’s gonna pass.”

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Townskeeper

By Nancy Haigh

Photos by Chad Coppess

Capa once had a population of 300 and was known for its mineral baths.

The town of Capa has a population of one unless you count Philip O’Connor’s dog, Midnight, whose nickname is Buddy. Phil and Buddy seem a lot like the town they live in — quiet, restful and welcoming.

Capa was platted in 1904 by the Western Town Lot Company, a division of the Chicago North Western Railway Company. Railroad representatives wanted to name the town Russell in honor of J.C. Russell, an early settler to the west. But Mr. Russell did not want his name attached to a town. Doane Robinson of the South Dakota State Historical Society suggested that the town be called Capa, which is Lakota for beaver.

Philip O’Connor is the last man living in Capa, a once-bustling town in Jones County.

As the railroad reached Capa in 1906, people began to settle in the 70 acre town site. Soon the town had 75 residents and numerous businesses, including the Capa Hotel, which piped water from an artesian well into a public bathhouse. The town became known for its mineral baths which visitors sought out for treatments. Capa also had lumberyards, a bank, the Capa Hustler newspaper, two churches and several general merchandise stores. Capa grew to about 300 residents.

Phil’s roots run deep in Capa. His great-grandparents, Arthur and Kathryn McConnville, were some of the first people to settle there. His grandparents, Walter and Kathryn Poler, purchased the hotel, a house, and a pasture in 1916. Later his parents, Henry and Helen (Poler) O’Connell, took over the hotel and house. Henry worked on a railroad bridge crew. Phil lives in the house where his grandparents and later his parents resided. He taught for 20 years in rural schools in the surrounding counties.

Today the town stays alive in the stories remembered by Phil. A house next to his was moved back and forth along the one street. Katie Biwer was the first homesteader, he says. Nick Biwer lost a gold Luxemburg coin and years later he was telling a Capa merchant about losing the coin. As the story goes, the merchant happened to be rubbing his shoe in the dirt at the time and unearthed the coin.

O’Connor’s grandparents purchased the once grand Capa hotel in 1916, along with a pasture and house.

“The Scandal of Capa” came about when a resident by the last name of Young solicited funds to build a sanatorium. The man absconded with the money and was never seen again.

The town prospered for about 25 years, but the Great Depression took a toll. Capa also suffered when the new highway didn’t follow the valley along the Bad River by which Capa sits. Cars had a hard time making the steep grades in the valley. Then the railroad company pulled its section crew from Capa and the town dwindled further. Another blow landed in 1976 when the post office closed. Most of the remaining homes were moved away, one going as far as North Dakota.

Still, Capa made news when a British Broadcasting Corporation crew filmed the town site and interviewed Phil in February 2009 for a documentary about the Dirty Thirties. The BBC found a town with remnants of the hotel, a few homes, a barn, the school and a church. Capa Lake on the town’s eastern edge is still fed by the artesian well that once provided warm baths in the town’s heydays.

Some people see pictures of Capa or drive past on the road and think they’ve seen a ghost town, but it’s still alive with stories and with Phil O’Connor, the townskeeper.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Why The Bottums Belong In South Dakota

By Nathan Schock

When Joseph”Jody” Bottum awoke on Dec. 3, 2011, his wife greeted him with an early Christmas present. Lorena had been tracking the climb up the charts of his Kindle ebook, Dakota Christmas, and that morning it ranked third among non-fiction books on Amazon.com.

But that December morning was also significant to Bottum and his family for another reason: it was being spent in their Hot Springs home. Following many years as a magazine editor and writer on the East Coast — and frequent vacationer to Hot Springs — Bottum had packed up and moved back to his home state.

The grandnephew and namesake of the late U.S. Senator Joseph H. Bottum believes the homecoming reinvigorated his writing. Living in South Dakota”has given me a calmness to write and to think more deeply than I was able to in New York. For the last ten years, I’ve been working 60-70 hours a week, mostly as an editor of other people’s work.” In South Dakota, he found time to pursue ideas he had put on hold over the past decade.

Ironically, it was a reprise of something quite familiar that led to his Amazon success. For years, Bottum had been writing about politics and religion for publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard. He thinks he had the best job in Washington.”I got to write about politics but I didn’t have to do it myself,” he says.

Still, when an acquaintance at Amazon asked if he wanted to edit some personal essays he’d written about his childhood Christmases into a Kindle Single, Bottum welcomed the challenge. He says he took the collection”like a carpet and shook it out.”

The result was Dakota Christmas, a compilation of humorous and engaging childhood reminiscences from his childhood in Pierre, where he was raised in the 1960s and 1970s. His family roots include not only the Bottums, but also the Hydes, a prominent family in Hughes County for generations.

The stories are diverse — corralling escaped horses on the snowy plains, reading Christmas books, the peculiar language of Christmas, South Dakota’s Christmas cuisine — but the threads that bind them are the place and the holy season.

The combination struck a chord with Kindle readers, and elicited an advance from Random House to write another book called The Christmas Plains. While it tells some of the same stories, Bottum utilizes two themes from his first book — the language of Christmas and spiritual geography — to explore how the experiences shaped his life.

“When I was young — no, even today — all my life, Christmas has begun with the words.” That sentence opens the second chapter of The Christmas Plains, in which Bottum writes about the language at the heart of our lives and our understanding of Christmas. Much of it focuses on the”peculiar … grammar and syntax of Christmas carols.” Along the way, he employs stories to demonstrate how we use language to grasp the world, and especially to make sense of Christmas.

But Christmas Plains really shines as it explores spiritual geography. Early in the book, Bottum talks about his family’s decision to take up permanent residence in South Dakota:

About a decade ago, [my wife] Lorena and I began to worry that we were letting too much of our time slip away — living homeless, in a funny kind of way: chasing from east-coast city to east-coast city, one new job after another, and providing for our daughter no clear geography in which she could center herself as she grew. Giving her no sense of place like the one I was given as a child, for good and for ill, out on those western plains. We needed a foothold, we decided, and what we found, at last, was a sprawling old Victorian monstrosity going cheap in the town of Hot Springs, down in the southern Black Hills.

Bottum’s personal attempt to secure a concrete foothold for his family mirrors his literary attempt to awaken readers to their own spiritual geography.”We used to have a spiritual geography,” he says,”where landscapes provided ways of seeing the theological meaning of the world. We’ve let our landscapes become very bleak. What I want to do with my writing is reinvest the world with richness, with meaning. Every tree we see ought to be speaking to us from God. Everything is screaming at us about God.”

But Bottum, a conservative Catholic, isn’t preaching. He’s inviting people to follow the personal path of rediscovery that he recounts in The Christmas Plains.”I think I knew this [spiritual geography] when I was young and I let it slip away,” he says. At home in South Dakota, he’s finding it again.”I’m native to the soil, and that’s a feeling whose importance our culture has increasingly denied. When I wake up, I sense the omnipresence of God.”

Many readers may not share his connection to South Dakota, but nearly all can connect with the holiday. And in that way, Christmas serves as a compass, directing readers to rediscover the spiritual geography of their roots. In The Christmas Plains, Bottum writes,”There’s something geographical deep down at the greeny heart of the holiday.” Bottum wants to use those annual, year-end tugs at our heart strings to remind us of something we lost, but aren’t as predisposed to think about during less festive times.

The Bottums originally purchased their Hot Springs home in 2007 to occupy during the summer months. The tall, green Victorian house was the childhood home of Leslie Jensen, who became governor of South Dakota in 1936. It sits high above the Fall River on the west side of the Hot Springs, which is famous for its sandstone architecture, warm springs water and the Veterans Administration Hospital.

The spacious house has ample room for Bottum’s massive collection of books and smaller compilations, such as his treasury of South Dakota political buttons (which includes his great-uncle’s button and several representing the man who beat him in 1962, George McGovern). Bottum worked and socialized with Fred Barnes, David Brooks, William Kristol and other high profile intellectuals in his East Coast career, but there’s little evidence of that life in the Hot Springs house.

Outdoors, three gnarled cedar trees — possibly as old as the house itself — greet guests at the front porch. A red and white striped hammock hangs from the porch ceiling. In the backyard, weeds are crowding out the family’s plucky attempt to establish a garden of native grasses and flowers.

The Bottums’ daughter, Faith, graduated from Hot Springs High School last spring. Lorena, a native of Brazil, says they feel very much at home in the city of 3,700.”If what South Dakota has allowed thus far continues and my prose continues to sell, then we’ll stay until the end,” he says. He has recently published essays that blend sports and religion — one on the Tim Tebow phenomenon and another on baseball pitcher R.A. Dickey’s redemption from the steroid era. His most recent books include a collection of poetry called The Second Spring and An Anxious Age, an examination of American culture through the lens of religion.

But writing is a tenuous profession in any rural state. Perhaps the choice to locate in Hot Springs carries an inadvertent geographical clue. Sitting at the very southern tip of the Black Hills, rather than nestled in the center, one could quietly slip out, almost unnoticed.

However, if the decision to stay hinges on continued success for his prose and Dakota Christmas is an indication, the Bottums could be in Hot Springs for many merry seasons.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Lake Legends

By John Andrews

Native American legends, passed to each generation through oral history, are behind the names of many of South Dakota’s glacial lakes. Painting by Ron Backer.

Punished Woman’s Lake and Enemy Swim Lake are just a few of the beautiful names assigned to the Glacial Lakes in northeast South Dakota.

Legends behind the names include tales of lost love, bountiful hunts and bloody battles. And the stories preserve an important part of Indian and South Dakota culture.

The last huge glacier, during the Wisconsin Period (between 75,000 and 10,000 years ago), created the Glacial Lakes that dot the Coteau des Prairies, a rise that covers much of South Dakota’s eastern quarter. In A New South Dakota History, geographer Ed Hogan explains that two glaciers sat on either side of the Big Sioux River, which drains and bisects the coteau. The glacier on the east side melted quickly, leaving valleys, while the western glacier melted more slowly, resulting in lakes and sloughs.

Many lake legends originated in prehistoric times, making them impossible to trace.”Most of what was thought to be reality in those days got changed, or became legends,” says Elden Lawrence, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe and former president of Sisseton Wahpeton College.”Legends are kind of a safe haven. They don’t have to be true or false, they’re just there. So a lot of them, we don’t know for sure what they’re based on. Some of them go into mythology, which was part of the old culture. It’s hard to track down what’s authentic.”

Lawrence says legends were an important part of oral history, an integral component of Native culture.”We didn’t have any written books. History was passed down from one generation to another. It’s just like any modern school system. You can tell people things and they’ll forget. But you always remember a story, or a legend. It was a way of preserving a record of certain events or places. To oral history, legends were like a library, and the more you could remember the more knowledge you had. It was their one way, maybe their only way, of preserving history.”

Legends are still revered by tribal elders, but Lawrence believes younger generations don’t have the same appreciation. For years elders and youth gathered on the shore of Enemy Swim Lake so the elders could tell the lake’s story, but that tradition ended.”An elder told me that young kids no longer sit at the feet of the elders, they sit at the feet of the TV,” Lawrence says.

If that’s the case, then perhaps we’re fortunate that history isn’t always oral today. Here are written versions of some favorite South Dakota lake legends.

Enemy Swim Lake

Warring bands of Sioux and Chippewas fought in 1812 at Enemy Swim Lake, northeast of Waubay. Today the battle makes a captivating campfire story for visitors to NeSoDak Bible Camp, which sits on the site where the battle began.

Sioux men danced and sang around a campfire built on a peninsula jutting from the lake’s southern shore. A group of Chippewas on a hunting trip saw the firelight and planned a surprise attack as the Sioux slept.

Sioux warriors guarded the peninsula, so the Chippewas made rafts and floated quietly to a nearby island, then waded in waist deep water. The Sioux heard their splashing and attacked, shouting”Toka nuapi” (the enemy swims) as the Chippewas swam north toward Shepherds Point. The Sioux chased them over land and eventually killed the entire party.

In 1918 Jack Rommel built Camp Dacotah, a hotel and fishing resort, on the peninsula and decorated it with Indian artifacts found around the lake. The site became NeSoDak Bible Camp in 1942, one of five camps operated by Lutherans Outdoors. Rommel’s hotel is NeSoDak’s main lodge and Rommel’s cabin houses campers. A stone fireplace in the lodge features grindstones and arrowheads, and the cabin boasts a large native stone chimney.

Punished Woman’s Lake

When homesteaders settled around Punished Woman’s Lake in Codington County, they found two huge stone effigies lying atop a grassy mound three miles south of the lake. Indians had used 104 boulders to create a 13-foot outline of a man lying on his back with outstretched arms. About 40 feet away was the slightly smaller figure of a woman, lying in the same position. They likely memorialized the sad tale of Wewake and Black Bear.

The two were in love, but Wewake’s father opposed the union. Four times Black Bear brought gifts to Wewake’s father, but he refused them. Instead he accepted offerings from White Tail Wolf, a 60-year-old chief, and gave his daughter to him. The young lovers eloped and fled to the knoll south of the lake, where warriors from the tribe captured them. White Tail Wolf killed Black Bear and tied Wewake to a tree. She declared her love for Black Bear until the old chief stabbed her in the heart. White Tail Wolf prayed that the two be buried dishonorably, and crafted the stone effigies as a reminder of his unfaithful wife. The Great Spirit heard him and sent a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky that killed him.

Archaeologist T.H. Lewis sketched the effigies in 1883, but they were almost completely destroyed by 1914. Today South Shore community members re-enact the legend at the Punished Woman’s Pageant. An Indian chief tells the story to children as local actors recreate the scenes. An exhibit is also displayed at the Overland Country School and Museum in South Shore.

Lake Kampeska

When the water is low around Stony Point, on the southeastern shore of Lake Kampeska near Watertown, you can see a rocky island surrounded by buoys to protect unsuspecting boaters. It is a popular resting spot for water birds and the place where centuries ago a young Indian maiden named Minnecotah was left to die.

Many warriors from her tribe wanted to marry Minnecotah, but she was in love with a Wahpeton hunter. To satisfy the locals, Minnecotah said she would marry the man who could throw a stone the farthest into the lake. The men spent days heaving tiny pebbles and huge rocks, but the waves tossed them until no one could tell who won. They threw so many stones an island formed. By then they realized the contest was a ruse, so they kidnapped Minnecotah and placed her on the rocky island with no food. She survived with help from a white pelican that brought fish and berries. Her lover returned to rescue her and they went to live near his home in Wahpeton country. The warriors, discovering that Minnecotah was gone, believed that the sun god had sent the white pelican to take her away.

Stony Point was once an Indian campsite; arrowheads are still found there. And the legend of Maiden’s Isle has become an important part of local culture. Florence Bruhn, a former high school art teacher, adapted it to establish Ki-Yi Days, Watertown’s homecoming celebration.

Lake Tetonkaha

Lake Tetonkaha is one of eight connected glacial lakes that surround Oakwood Lakes State Park, northwest of Brookings. The place was once a summer camp and popular gathering place for Indians. One summer a group of Sioux warriors stayed late into autumn because a large buffalo herd was there. They became trapped when an early blizzard caught them off guard. Wood was scarce, so the hunters built a huge community tent.

They stayed the entire winter. When spring arrived they removed the buffalo hides they used for shelter, but left the poles standing. Indians who saw the poles called the place Tetonkaha Bde (the standing of the big lodge house), and the lake became known as Lake Tetonkaha.

In 1869 settler Samuel Mortimer built a cabin nearby that still stands, and the park visitors center displays Indian artifacts found around the lakes.

Long Lake

There are several Long Lakes in South Dakota, but the one northeast of Lake City in Marshall County might hold treasure. A Santee Sioux named Gray Foot told his sons on his deathbed in 1910 that he buried a flour sack full of gold coins worth $56,000 between two willow trees on the lake’s east shore.

A group of Santees, including Gray Foot, raided the agency in Martin, Minn., on payday during the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Some soldiers were killed and the government payroll chest looted. When Gray Foot heard the War Department declare that anyone found with gold from the chest would be hanged, he buried it. His sons tried many times to find the hidden gold, but left Long Lake none the richer.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Cornstruction Nearly Complete

We stopped by Mitchell’s Main Street this week to see the progress on major renovations to the Corn Palace. Though the project is running a few months late, the end — or the cornstruction as some call it — is nearly complete.

We got a quick tour from Katie Knutson and Cherie Ramsdell. Katie is the director of Mitchell’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. Cherie is the artist who designs the murals — a task once done by the legendary Oscar Howe.

The changes are making the old palace seem warmer and more people-friendly. Old concrete pillars in the lobby have been redesigned as corn ears, and decorated with ceramic tile from Italy arranged in an abstract way like kernels on a cob. A second floor balcony now hangs above Main Street. Already, the community is using it for Thursday night concerts. A bright second floor area is now devoted to Howe, the Lakota artist. Huge windows have been reopened. The outdoor murals are larger than ever. And the new steel domes give an abstract look of corn husks, especially when lit at night. (They were still sitting on the street when we stopped.)

Congratulations to the Mitchell community. They’ve embraced our corn culture with the palace since 1892. John Philip Sousa performed there in 1904, and since then the big brick barn has been Mitchell’s invite to the world. Today’s Corn Palace leadership has done all of South Dakota a great favor by modernizing and reconfiguring the architectural treasure. Plan to stop and see the changes on your travels.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Love for the Game

By Mel Antonen

The Canova Gang plays under the lights at the ballpark in Canova. Photo by Christian Begeman.

As a kid in Hamlin County, Burt Tulson was marked for baseball success. He belted rocks with a bat, took batting practice at the granary and played night games under the only yard light on the family farm.

He chased foul balls for a nickel at Lake Norden Lakers games and in school he wrote an essay about how he wanted to be in the big leagues and build baseball fields.

Tulson wasn’t one of the handful of South Dakota-born big-leaguers, but in a state where town-team baseball is the closest thing to a common religion, Tulson has been a deacon of the diamond.

We are in South Dakota’s 82nd season of amateur baseball, and Tulson, 67, has been a manager almost half of those seasons. He’s in his 40th year of running the Lake Norden Lakers, and that makes him the dean of managers in the state.

Tulson has good company. Of approximately 75 managers, he is one of five with 30 years of experience leading an amateur baseball team.

The Canova Gang’s Dave Gassman and Kirk Sorensen of the Vermillion Red Sox are each in their 37th seasons. Paul Martin of the Akron (Iowa) Rebels and Fred Obermeier of Clark are each at 33. The Dell Rapids Mudcats’ Jim Wilber, who also managed Redfield and his hometown Miller, is at 31.

“Managers are the most important ingredient we have in keeping amateur baseball alive,” says Dale Weber of Salem, president of the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Association.”The average fan has no idea how much work a manager does outside the white lines.”

A manager does more than write lineups an hour before the game. They oversee the team finances, and sometimes foot the bill for expenses out of their own pocket. They buy equipment and uniforms, schedule games and organize ticket-takers, concession stand operators, umpires and announcers. Managers are groundskeepers — mowing, chopping weeds and preparing the field — and they fix everything from drinking fountains to bathroom light sockets.

“We have this notion that our ball fields should look like Yankee Stadium,” Wilber says.

The morning after a game there’s ballpark cleanup and calling newspapers and radio stations with game highlights.

Overall, town-team baseball is doing well, but there is a slow decline in teams, and that’s related, in part, to the difficulty in finding managers, says Herb Sundall of Kennebec, the association’s secretary-treasurer:”It’s not that there isn’t enough players or money. It’s that managers are hard to find.”

So, why do managers manage? Managers on the three-decades list don’t like attention and quickly credit spouses, children and townspeople for the success of a program. But managing gets in their blood, and they love it because of the competition, camaraderie and community. And, they don’t want to see baseball fade away.

Gassman says retirement isn’t an option.”Baseball is all we have left in Canova. I’m a die-hard. I’m not going to let baseball die as long as I am around.”

Except for Obermeier, who never played baseball, each manager followed a familiar path: They finished daily chores quickly so they could play baseball. They joined youth leagues, played American Legion and were drafted to play on the town team. After a couple of decades, they were handed keys to the equipment shed.

The Fireballing Manager

Dave Gassman’s dad, Bernard, was a manager in Epiphany. As a kid, Gassman tagged along and chased foul balls for a nickel and then spent his money on ice-cold pop at the concession stand, a taste that he’ll never forget.

Dave Gassman is interviewed after his team won the state championship in 2009.

Today Gassman, a farmer who owns the Canova Service Center, follows in his dad’s footsteps in Canova, his 37th season. He also managed one year in Scotland, the year he earned four state tournament wins as a pitcher and Scotland beat Renner 7-5 for the Class B title. Gassman has managed for so long, players might not remember that he was a pitcher, arguably the best in state history, with 376 wins and 5,595 strikeouts, both state records.

In 1966, as a Legion player, he pitched five innings of relief for Canova against Aberdeen in a state tournament semifinal game, allowing the Gang to use ace Lee Goldammer in the championship. Goldammer tossed a one-hitter in a 3-1 win against Woonsocket, giving Canova its first state title.

It was the first of four titles for Gassman. In addition to Scotland, the Gang won in 1979 and again in 2009 when Gassman got to share the experience with his son, Garrett, a left-handed batting catcher.

This year, in addition to Garrett, there are three other Gassmans on the team, including Dave’s nephews, Tucker and Gavin, all who either pitch or play infield.

Scout in Disguise

Burt Tulson and his sister, Pauline, had four places to play ball on the farm between Bryant and Lake Norden.

Burt Tulson.

They played with a plastic bat and ball on the front lawn. The second field had a granary as a backstop so they could hit balls toward the road. The third field was big enough for a game with the neighbors and the fourth was under the yard light, where players had to keep the ball inside the base paths or it was an out.

“That game taught us how to bunt,” Tulson says.”We had to play that game because there was only one yard light on the farm. I learned a level swing and bat control. It was like using a hammer. If you swing too hard, you miss the nail. It was important to be in control.”

His parents, Glenn and Fern, brought him to Lakers games in the late 1950s. He wore Lakers blue for the first time in 1966.

As a player, Tulson was a pitcher, but he injured his right shoulder in a motorcycle accident and moved to first base. He was a line-drive hitter with a lifetime average of .362 and 60 home runs. Tulson and business partner Frank Andrews, a longtime volunteer ticket-taker, were the contractors who built the amateur baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

He started managing the team in 1976 and earned his 700th career win in 2012. He’s managed the Lakers in 28 of their 39 state tournament appearances.

Tulson’s an accomplished manager, but one night, during the late 1990s, he used an off-the-wall scouting trip to see if he could break the Lakers’ late-season slump. A few days before a game in Huron, Tulson told his team he would be gone and that pitcher Paul Raasch would manage.

A smattering of fans attended, including one sitting alone at the top of the grandstand in Huron. The fan had enormous hair and wore a trench coat with big shades — a bit odd considering it was 90 degrees and muggy.

The Lakers’ players recognized the fan as Tulson, who was trying to watch his team from a different perspective.

During warm-ups at the Lakers’ next game, Tulson was asking about the Huron game, as if he wasn’t there. The players played along, but eventually they cracked and told him they knew where he was.

“It was hilarious,” Raasch said.”We played pretty good the rest of the year. We won the district and a couple games in the state tourney.”

Baseball and Healing

Kirk Sorensen, who farms west of Vermillion, has been a Red Sox fan his entire life. As a kid, he’d visit his grandma, Jessie Jensen, on summer Sundays and walk six blocks to see a game. He chased foul balls and hung numbers on the scoreboard.

Kirk Sorensen guided the Vermillion Red Sox to state championships in 2003, 2004 and 2006.

He was a catcher with speed, but an elbow injury moved him to first base. His resume includes a six-hit game and a season where he had 11 triples.

Sorensen, who also plays bass guitar in a country band, is the only manager to win state titles in Class A and B.

At times, baseball was therapeutic for Sorensen. When his first wife, Teresa, died in June of 1997, he thought about quitting as a manager. Then, a week after her funeral, he was at home as the Red Sox were playing. He decided to go to the game.

“It was a beautiful evening, so I put on my uniform and went to the game,” he says.”It allowed me to forget for a few minutes. The support of the baseball community meant everything to me. It got me through a tough time. It was so good. I’ll never forget it.”

The Bizarre Champs

Paul Martin grew up on a farm and played high school baseball in Westfield, Iowa. The year after his graduation, he formed a baseball team because he didn’t want to play fast-pitch softball.

Paul Martin.

He had a choice to play in a league in northwest Iowa or join South Dakota’s association. (Akron is just across the Big Sioux River, 18 miles east of Vermillion. Larchwood, Iowa, Wynot, Neb. and Crofton, Neb., are the three other out-of-state teams that play in South Dakota’s association.)

Starting a team from scratch isn’t easy. For several years, Martin, a former catcher, paid expenses himself and recruited players minutes before games.”There were times we had to pull dads out of the crowd to complete a lineup,” he says.”It took about 15 years to get going.”

These days, things are easier. There are plenty of players and Akron has a wonderful field.

The Rebels started in the early 1980s and have had their share of history-making moments.

In a 2008 game vs. Elk Point, they turned two around-the-horn triple plays — from third to second to first — meaning the Rebels had a feat that’s only been accomplished once in thousands of Major League games.

But the Rebels’ defining moment came in 2005, when they won a district title against Larchwood in bizarre fashion to make their first state tournament.

Larchwood was beating the Rebels 13-4 when rain stopped the game. The delay lasted two days because of wet grounds and other conflicts. When the game resumed, the Rebels rallied and won 17-16.

“It was an insane celebration because so many times, we were just one game away from going,” Martin says.”I’ll never forget it. We had a big dog pile of players on the mound.”

Rush of Memories

Fred Obermeier, who grew up raising Black Angus on a ranch near Clark, started a baseball team, too. He didn’t grow up playing baseball, but he loved the sport, and he was umpiring games as a sophomore in high school.

Clark’s Fred Obermeier (in blue) started a team from scratch.

In the spring of 1983, a group of players asked if he’d manage a baseball team, and the Clark Cubs were born.

Eventually, the team’s nickname became the Traders, in honor of Obermeier’s cousin, Chess, who trades corn options on the Chicago Board of Trade and supports the team with checks from the Windy City.”If we need uniforms or anything like that, he always helps,” Obermeier says.

As a manager, Obermeier played only when there weren’t enough players.”I didn’t have any talent,” he says.”I have been in two games and gotten one at-bat. I struck out. But, I love the game.”

There were good and bad times. In 1995, they went winless. In 1985, Claremont beat Clark 9-2 in the Class B title game. That game is stamped in Obermeier’s mind forever.

“I was nervous because I had not been to that level before and I was pretty new,” Obermeier says.”It was nerve-wracking.”

But while managers say the sting of losing big games never goes away, the hurt softens. The runner-up trophy stands on a shelf in Obermeier’s home, a snapshot of what amateur baseball is all about.

“Every time I look at that trophy, it brings back a lot of good memories,” Obermeier says.

Patience is the Key

Jim Wilber, who brokers farm land in Sioux Falls but grew up in Miller working in his dad’s feed and seed business, is in his 15th season as a manager for the Dell Rapids Mudcats, but his resume also includes 15 state tournaments for Miller and Redfield. He was a right-handed pitcher who also played all four infield positions.

Jim Wilber’s Dell Rapids Mudcats share the spotlight with Dell Rapids PBR, but the Mudcats finished on top in 2008.

Wilber’s state title was a long time coming.

The Mudcats beat Wynot for the championship in 2008, something they weren’t sure would ever come. After losing twice to cross-town rival Dell Rapids PBR in the state finals, the Mudcats blew an 11-6 lead in the eighth inning, only to come back and win 15-13.

“The lasting image was a strange combination of relief and euphoria,” Wilber says.”The Mudcats weren’t blessed with the best of luck during the final weekends of previous state tourneys. When Wynot rallied, the mood of our team was, ëHere we go again.”’

Wilber says the passion for baseball is unique:”It is the same in the Pony Hills, James Valley or Corn Belt League. Hometown pride has a lot to do with it. Attendance isn’t great at every home game, but the community keeps track of how their town team is doing. And playing in the state tournament is just plain fun.”

About the Author: Mel Antonen is a Lake Norden native. He is a pre-game co-host for MASN-TV, which covers the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles, does baseball analysis on Sirius XM radio and writes for SI.com. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Lisa, and son, Emmett.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Rusty Shovel

Editor’s Note: The indefatigable Frank Kloucek, a longtime Scotland farmer, state lawmaker and champion of rural life, reflects on the legacy of a simple farm tool that has passed through many hands.
By Frank Kloucek
Last fall a decision had to be made concerning an old rusty brown iron scoop shovel. Should a new handle be put on the shovel or should it go to the recyclers? As one pondered what to do, a reflection on the shovel’s history came to mind. The shovel was new sometime in the 1950s so Grandpa Frank used it. Bob and Clem Kloucek, Carol, Ann, Darla, Frank, Joanie, Richard and Allen all had the opportunity to enjoy its sturdy construction, strength and reliability that did not give, crack or wear out like modern aluminum shovels. And oh did it seem heavy for a shovel at the time! As cement feed bunks and hog barns, wooden feed bunks and chicken barns were cleaned out one by one it seemed to be the shovel chosen last to be used. The aluminum ones needed repair and seemed to wear out very fast compared to the old shovel. All shovels were usually washed after their use to prevent the strong acid in the manure from eating the metal and aluminum and to prevent contamination.
Notable people who also used the old brown shovel included Jarvis Winckler, Jim Ded, Allen Crane, LaVerne Dangel, Bob Green, Rick Van Winkle, Kevin and Mike Van Winkle, Larry Chester, Eugene Peska, Greg Faller, Roman Steffen, Ron Hamberger, Roger Berndt, Dan Haase and others. Saturday mornings were”clean the hog barns” mornings. After shoveling bunks for cattle we started on the hog barns. The old shovel stood the test, time and time again.
Often we had a mid-morning”coffee break” which consisted of poppy seed coffee cake, kolaches, kuchen, caramel rolls or another great pastry, served with coffee and hot chocolate in the winter and with ice tea and cold milk served in the summer. These were made by my mother Rose or Aunt Mary Ann and really hit the spot!
After the break it was back to the grind, shoveling the manure into the loader bucket of the F-11 Farmall loader mounted on an IHC 560 diesel tractor. We loaded it to the brim and once in a while snapped one of the bolts that held the loader to the rear axle. The replacement of the bolt would give us some down time to pile up more for”manure fertilizer” loading and take a short breather. A pitchfork was often used to tear the straw and manure apart and load into the old brown shovel and aluminum shovels for easier loading. We then bedded every building with fresh straw or corn cobs. The shovel did get a coating of waste oil after all shovels were washed at the end of the day. I remember that the handle was replaced at least three times from the 1970s to the 1990s. With the invention of strong air-powered wind guns, feed bunks are cleaned without the use of much manual labor. With the use of skid steer loaders such as the”Bobcat” the need for manual labor and the old brown shovel was less and less.
During the”free for all” to see who got what shovel, usually the person who got there first got the choice. Bob Green, the former fire chief from Scotland, was one of the few who chose the old iron shovel. He was in training for football and thought it improved his muscles. He was right, but for many others it usually meant a trip to the chiropractor sometime during the next week.
My daughters Jennifer, Michelle, Kimberlee and son Jared all got the opportunity to use the old iron scoop shovel. They did not use the shovel to the degree of previous generations, thanks to modern technology. Their father said”the use of the old iron shovel built character and muscles and was a family tradition.” This comment usually was not well received by the younger generation.
Now back to the decision on whether or not to put one more handle on the old iron shovel. It was an easy one. The new handle is on and it was used this winter to shovel snow and distillers dried grain from the grain wagon into the grinder. Maybe not as heavy a work load as it had the last 60 years, but still the old brown iron shovel is a productive piece of family farm history with a story that needed to be told.
Posted on by — Leave a comment

A Sun Dance and Maka Waconi: Circle of Life

Story and Photography by Michael Randall

A small village of tipis rises beyond the trees and boulders at the sacred Sun Dance site.

Early on a sunny June afternoon I turn from Highway 71 onto a gravel road and enter the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary south of Hot Springs. Within a mile, I see the hand-lettered”Sun Dance — Please Respect This Sacred Land.”

A dusty track leads higher into remote hills adorned with pine and cedar. Emerald green carpets the piedmont, and a warm breeze tugs at the brome, wild mustard and cheat grass. Patches of sweet clover bloom yellow and the air is thick with the piquant scent of sage.

In 1883, the U.S. government outlawed the Sun Dance, and Catholic and Episcopalian missionaries discouraged it. In his book The Lakota Way, Joseph M. Marshall III, wrote that the dance was characterized as”uncivilized and barbaric.”

They failed or chose not to see the ceremony for what it was: a symbolic act of sacrifice performed so that the people might live. Native Americans went underground with the Sun Dance until 1978, when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act legalized it.

Far back in the hills I pass a small herd of wild Sorraia Mustangs grazing beneath a stand of ponderosas on the sanctuary. Over another hill, the Cheyenne River runs high and muddy from recent rains. Along its bottom cottonwood leaves turn their silvery undersides to the breeze.

Passing through a livestock gate, I stop at another hand-lettered”Security” sign. Two Lakota men sit beneath a shade arbor next to a tipi. They welcome me, but also remind me that no recording devices or cameras are allowed.

It was one of many Sun Dances celebrated in summer on the Indian reservations of South Dakota, but the only one undertaken in the Black Hills. I was invited by Vic Glover, a former U.S. Army medic who flew helicopter medevac missions in Vietnam. A former journalist, he is author of the book Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge. A practitioner of traditional native spirituality, he is also a student of Buddhism and Christianity. Glover went to Asia several years ago as a volunteer after the huge Indian Ocean tsunami, and now lives much of the time in Thailand. He returns home each year to fulfill his pledge to take part in the Sun Dance.

I drive another half-mile to the dance site, where six poles fly American flags above MIA-POW flags. Just beyond, a forked cottonwood trunk stands 40 feet high in the center of a great circle. Colored cloth banners (red, green, blue, yellow) adorn its heights, flapping in the breeze. Other banners hang further down, as well as eagle feathers. Small”tobacco tie” prayer offerings to Tunkashila (God, the grandfather) wrap the entire trunk from top to bottom. Beyond, a fire pit heats rocks for sweat lodges bordering one side of the sacred dance site.

I park by other dusty cars and trucks and campers with license plates from Connecticut to California. Men and women nod or smile, though I am both a stranger walking into their most sacred ceremony and a wasicu (white guy). While some Sun Dances’ organizers do not allow non-native people to attend, others welcome people of different faiths and backgrounds. A third of the people at this Sun Dance appear to be non-native.

Several Sun Dances are celebrated on South Dakota’s Indian reservation every summer, but this was the only dance held in the Black Hills.

Father William Stolzman, a Jesuit priest, spent years on the Rosebud Reservation. For six years he convened bi-weekly meetings with other priests and Lakota medicine men to discuss Christianity and traditional Lakota spirituality. His meetings resulted in his 1986 book The Pipe and Christ, which describes similarities and differences between Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples’ traditional spiritual practices and Christian religious practices.

The book shows our shared humanity, but also the gulf between the ways two cultures see the world in general, and American popular culture in particular. At Stolzman’s meetings between priests and medicine men, the priests — curates of a religious culture full of complex doctrine and righteous certainty — spoke quickly and confidently and asked pointed questions of the medicine men.

The Lakotas were often upset by this bluntness of manners. Careful and slow to speak, they came to any topic indirectly, then spoke for longer periods. About some wakan (sacred) matters they were reluctant to speak at all, considering that disrespectful.

At the sun dance site, a huge circular dance area is marked off by a two-foot high fence of willow switches painted bright red around half of the circle, and bright blue around the other half. The base of each vertically arrayed willow switch has been buried and it forms one fragile stick of the fence that demarcates the sacred dance area. Near the top of each of the hundreds of willow switches that formed the circle, a small tobacco tie is knotted, alternating in the sacred colors of the four compass directions: red, yellow, black, white. They are offerings of tobacco to each of the 405 spirits that have something to do with humans.

Four openings in the great circle mark the four directions. Surrounding the entire circular site a vast brush arbor was constructed, consisting of forked pine tree trunks perhaps four inches in diameter. The base of each is now buried into the ground so that each trunk stands vertically. Lashed atop their forks, and crisscrossed in a rough lattice on top, tree limbs have been tied in place with cord or wire. Shaded beneath the arbor are some 50 spectators, plus three bands of drummers and singers who sit in circles around their drums.

Within the dance circle itself, perhaps 60 men and women in traditional Lakota garb dance in the day’s third of four dances. The men, naked from the waist up, are attired in ankle length wraps of red or blue cloth. Some carry eagle wing fans and their personal or family canupas (pipes made of traditional pipestone –“peace pipes” as we wasicus have called them).

Many men wear two standing eagle feathers attached within a thick cylinder of sage wrapped in spirals of red cloth and worn around their heads like a crown. Tufts of sage hang from the front over their brows. Sage cleanses a person’s body and spirit, and perhaps in wearing it this way the sage precedes the wearer on his path to cleanse him as he moves forward in the dance — just as in life.

Some male dancers bear healed scars in their chests and backs from past years’ piercings. Several others have fresh wounds from the morning’s dances, when some men were pierced with scalpels and lashed to the great tree by buffalo hide or plain manila ropes. One man has dabs of shredded tobacco stuck like a poultice to his still-raw wounds.

Beneath the brush arbor, I ask around and finally locate Vic Glover resting and talking with five other male dancers in one of the tipis. We’ve corresponded via e-mail for the last year, yet until today have never met face-to-face. He introduces me to each of the men and they greet me politely and bring me into their conversation.

After a time, I step outside as they prepare for the day’s fourth and last dance. The dance ensues, and at its conclusion all the young and old spectators, myself included, step outside the arbor’s shade. We stand side by side as the long line of dancers passes slowly. Each dancer looks into our eyes and acknowledges each of us, pausing to purify us with smoldering sage, or grace our shoulders and hands by a touch of their pipes, or stroke us all around with eagle wing fans.

Each dancer, whether pierced or un-pierced, is a person who pledged to dance long ago, then prepared a year or more for these four days of fasting and dancing. And now, after his or her exertions and personal sacrifice, each pointedly blesses each of us.

Then, one dancer looks at me as he touches his pipe and eagle wing to my shoulders, forehead and hips. He says firmly,”Take off your glasses. Don’t wear glasses while you’re being blessed.” I feel a rush of irritability, for no one in the long line of dancers that preceded him complained about my eyeglasses. In an instant, though, I make a decision to treat his words as education rather than insult; I remove my glasses and thank him. He nods and moves on to bless the next person. (Later, I learn that he serves as one of the Sun Dance’s overseers.)

The twisting Cheyenne River runs high and muddy, and the land beyond is a carpet of green from spring rains.

Afterward, Glover invites me to eat at the main camp with the other spectators, though he and other dancers will remain in the tipis at the dance site for four days, fasting and praying and resting between dances. I drive down to the camp beside the Cheyenne River. On a beach in the river bend a sweat lodge has been erected and above it on the meadowed bench of matted grass is a small village of tents and tipis.

The sinking sun lingers, its light falling yellow-green on the small camp and the nearby sandstone cliffs. I walk to the cliffs and examine a wide wall of petroglyphs that have been scored into the sandstone over millennia. Beside this ancient artwork, listening to the children’s laughter in the tipi camp, I place my palm on the glyph of what looks like a mammoth, extinct now for thousands of years.

People continue to pull up in cars and pickups and vans from the dusty gravel track that leads about a mile from the hilltop Sun Dance site. Some crank up their Coleman stoves or campfires, though many converge on the cook tent and brush arbor where a group of women have been preparing food. Kids yell and play and rush around while the adults, from vigorous young to frail elders, laugh and greet one another with smiles and hugs.

Watching such camaraderie with its warm and cheery flavor of a homecoming of relatives — and as welcome as these folks have helped me feel — I still feel strangely shy and a bit overwhelmed so I start my car and steal away.

The next day, I arrive at the dance site in early afternoon, just before the beginning of the third dance. One young man from Glover’s tipi has two new wounds in his chest — the marks of selflessness and sacrifice.

This day’s third dance begins. Men and women dancers move into the circle to the drummers’ and singers’ song. The dance lasts a long time, and though finally the dancers stop, the drummers and singers continue, and one of the ceremony’s overseers brings a tanned buffalo hide to the great tree and unfolds it on the ground.

Now, another young man will be pierced, a fulfillment of his vow to willingly suffer so that his people might be relieved of their afflictions. Sun Dance sponsors and dance leaders Tom and Loretta Cook of Chadron, Neb., lay the volunteer dancer down on the buffalo hide with the help of two other dancers. One of the assistants is the former Army medic, Vic Glover.

We watch from the shade beneath the brush arbor as Tom Cook pierces the man’s chest with a scalpel and inserts bone or hardwood skewers on left and right above his nipples, then ties buffalo hide ropes to the awls. Finally, Glover and Cook help the man to his feet and he begins to dance. The far end of the long rope is looped over a cross bar high on the tree, and two other male dancers take up that end of the rope.

The high cross bar becomes a rough pulley, so that when the men who hold the rope dance away from the tree the rope becomes taut and pulls the pierced dancer’s muscles so tight that they are drawn out from his chest, a great agony. Blood streams down his belly as, arms spread wide, he waves his two eagle wing fans and looks toward the sky and sun, beseeching Tunkashila and praying for his people.

The two dancers opposite the circle pull their rope harder and the man lifts into the air, spinning, hanging by the bone skewers hooked through his chest muscles until finally, from the weight of his suspended body, the two skewers rip through his chest muscles and come free. He spins to the ground where the assistants instantly provide support. For long seconds the man stands, resting shakily with their help.

Gathering himself, he raises his eagle wing fans, spreads his arms and dances around the circle. Cook and Glover go along to attend him, glancing repeatedly at his face as he progresses. As he arrives at each of the four openings in the circle, the pierced dancer turns and raises his arms toward God and the sun.

When the three men finally stop by the great tree, other dancers and members of the dancer’s family approach him, placing hands on him in gratitude and praying for him and for the community. His torn muscles still extend an inch or more through the two holes in his chest, though gradually they will withdraw back within his twin wounds.

In The Pipe and Christ Stotzman wrote,”Some people have great difficulty understanding and appreciating the tearing of flesh that takes place in the Sun Dance. Many cannot understand that there are higher values for which health is to be sacrificed. Modern Christians generally have little appreciation for the early Christian’s eagerness and joy in material penances, persecution, and martyrdom.”

Stolzman interviewed young men who had been pierced and tethered in the Sun Dance. Some told him that they identified”with Christ, asking Him for strengthÖ They gave themselves completely, body and soul, to God in ways they had never done before. They recognized their failings and their weaknesses Ö their limitations and their strengths. They discovered the love they had for their God and their people.”

The hilltop ceremony will last two more days, but in late afternoon I leave for home. At a rocky promontory nearby, I pull off the dusty track, shut off my car’s engine and step outside. My eyes drift down the bouldered scarp to the distant river bottom where, far below, seven huge white pelicans slowly flap along the winding Cheyenne, casting dark shadows on its muddy waters. Beyond, the rim rock mesas glow red and tan and the firmament above shimmers cobalt blue. Far to the north, evening thunderheads are blooming above the Black Hills.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Trygve Trooien: Country Philosopher

By Bernie Hunhoff

Trygve Trooien on the family farm south of Astoria.

Editor’s Note: Trygve Trooien passed away on Easter Sunday in 2015 on his farm in Brookings County at the age of 65. We met Trooien in the fall of 2002. We visited his peaceful farm on the shores of Oak Lake and he showed us his incredible collection of overalls. Here’s the story we wrote. It appeared in our November/December 2002 issue.

Trygve Trooien is a country philosopher. There is no better way to describe the 52-year-old bachelor who farms along the east shore of Oak Lake in Brookings County. He is a country philosopher in striped bib overalls who occasionally stages farm fashion shows.

Trooien is good-natured and has a ready smile. He is not talkative, although he’ll share his thoughts when prompted. His daily life is a philosophy and that makes him a truer philosopher than those who speak or write a certain way and act another.

Trooien is Thoreau with a Farmall tractor. He is what Thomas Jefferson wanted every man to become, at home and happy on the land.

The name Trooien is as Norwegian as Lutheranism or lutefisk, and Trygve is proud of the heritage. Most people around Hendricks, Minn., which is just a few miles from Oak Lake and the Trooien farm, claim the same ethnicity. Prior to visiting the town, we’d heard that it had only two churches and both were Lutheran. We asked if that was accurate.

“No,” replied Trooien. “Hendricks has four churches. Lutheran, Lutheran, Lutheran … and Methodist.” He attends the old Singsaas Lutheran Church near his farm on the South Dakota side of the border.

In this lake country, Minnesotans and South Dakotans socialize and intermarry and sometimes even move their residency from one side of the state line to the other. The Trooien family is well respected here. Trygve is known as a good farmer; he garners further attention from his overalls.

For several generations, bib overalls were the uniform of choice for hard-working farmers and city laborers alike all across America. “They were better suited for doing active, hard work than about anything else you could wear,” Trooien said. “I think they are cooler in the summer because they fit looser and you can always unbutton one of the buttons if you want more air circulating.”

He grew up wearing overalls and never switched to jeans. “I haven’t changed. I’m not going to change,” he said.

Trooien’s overall models included (from left) Nicole Fitzsimmons, Elizabeth Johnson, Kelly Moe, Katie Telgren, Katie Hunhoff and Sara Johnson.

Just as a man couldn’t be expected to farm without a tractor these days, Trooien said he wouldn’t farm without his overalls. “If we ever get to where we can’t buy them we’ll have to start our own factory. Yankton had its own overall factory once. So did Sioux City, Iowa.”

He hasn’t had to go to that extreme, but the scarcity of overall manufacturers does concern the friendly farmer. He orders Key overalls from Hendricks Hardware now that Lee only makes what might be called designer overalls. “Lewis Drug in Sioux Falls was the last place you could get the Lee work overalls,” he said. “I went to all three Lewis Stores and bought every pair that would fit me. I took good care of those last ones. I starched them and ironed them and tried to keep them going.”

He also favors Osh Kosh’s striped denim work jackets. He knew a mail order company that stocked them, but when the firm dropped them he thought he would have to switch. “A few years later we were sitting over coffee and a guy told me he saw some of those jackets at Country General in Brookings so I thought of an excuse to go to Brookings and by golly they had about 10 of those striped jackets my size on a sales rack for $7 each. I took them all. I was really happy about that deal.

“Then I thought I had heard that Country General in Watertown had the same deliveries as the Brookings store so I thought up an excuse to go to Watertown. Well, they had a rack of them and they were $9 each. I bought every one of them, too, so I’ve got a full closet of Osh Kosh jackets.”

Osh Kosh and Lee were two of many major manufacturers during the heyday of denim work clothes. Other well-known brands included Carhart, Carter’s, Key, Liberty, Paul Bunyan, Sears, Tuf Nut and Big Yank.

Three separate companies made overalls called Big Ben. There was Big Ben blue by Blue Bell, Big Ben striped by Wrangler, and Big Ben blue by the V.F. Company. Blues are solid denim. Striped are pinstripe blue on white.

Lee, which has always been Trooien’s favorite, sold four styles — stripe high back, stripe low back, blue high back and blue low back. “I grew up wearing blue and striped Key Imperials,” he said. “Lee’s were the Cadillac.” Every overall had a slightly different shape. Lee’s were generally considered a trimmer style, and they fit Trooien’s 170-pound frame.

Overall designers did try to change with the times, Trooien said. One manufacturer even renamed the plier’s pocket as a cell phone holder. But sales continued to lag until a few of the big-name companies like Lee decided to redesign the overall and market it to youth as a trendy casual wear.

Once he realized that work overalls were fading from the store shelves of rural America, Trooien stocked up on Lee’s. He also began to collect other styles. His wardrobe now includes 38 different styles representing 26 brand names. He never intended it to grow into a collection. “Whenever I saw an overall I didn’t have I bought it just to try it out,” he said.

Elizabeth Johnson models a pair of Keys with a handy pliers holder.

“Osh Kosh B’Gosh from Osh Kosh, Wisconsin may be the best known of all the overalls,” he said. “Big Smith was known as the big man’s overall. They were wide, very wide. If society keeps getting heavier, which is certainly the way we’re going, they could make a comeback.”

As happens with all collectors, Trooien has become an authority on the subject. He says the guarantees were always interesting. Big Yank promised, for example, that shrinkage would not exceed one percent. The H.D. Lee Company — a giant in the business with 11 factories across the nation — guaranteed that their overalls “must look better, fit better and wear longer or you may have a new pair free or your money back.”

Brand names aside, Trooien says there are four basic types of overalls. “You’ve got your church overalls, you’ve got your dress overalls, you’ve got your town overalls, and you’ve got your work overalls,” he explained. A dress overall is for socializing in town, but it would be better than what you might wear to town in the afternoon to get parts or groceries. A town overall doesn’t have to be as good as a church overall, but better than a work overall.

Generally, he explained, when overalls were in fashion a man would use his newest pair of overalls for church. When they were slightly worn and faded they could be used for “night business,” meaning they were worn to town or to visit the neighbors. When the overall was no longer fit for public use it was worn during the work day.

When the town of Astoria celebrated its centennial in 2000, Trooien produced an Overall Revue, a cross between a fashion show and a historical pageant. He recruited young ladies in the area to model the collection. His brother, Phil, was moderator. A few repeat performances have followed. Trooien said he’ll do more in the name of historic preservation of the overall culture if requests don’t interfere with farming.

Nothing stops Trooien from tending to his cows and fields. A few years ago, he had some chest pains and the local doctor put him in the hospital. He was a model patient until 6 a.m. the next morning, when he pulled on his Key overalls and went home to milk his 30 Holstein cows. He has never been back to the hospital.

He likes his country life and sees no reason for time away. “I don’t enjoy going on vacation. I’ve been around the world in the Army and I don’t care if I never go again. I wasn’t that impressed.”

The farm by the lake has been in the Trooien family since 1900. “My grandfather bought it after the previous owner was forced to sell it when he mortgaged it for a threshing machine.”

His grandfather’s big, square white house is still the main residence. Red barns stand to the west, between the road and the lake. More than a dozen tractors, mostly red Farmalls, are parked around the farmstead along with both modern and antique farm equipment.

Oak Lake in eastern Brookings County is a picturesque and peaceful place to live and farm, and an appropriate setting for preserving the overall, part of the fabric of rural America.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Will We Change?

By Paul Higbee

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

At first glance it may appear that South Dakota stock growers are divided into factions — producers of conventional, natural, organic and even organic kosher beef. But in talking to cattle producers around the state, you find they’re unfailingly respectful of one another.

Their uniform message seems to be: select any form of meat you like as long as it’s beef (preferably American grown, they add).

These producers are respectful, too, of people asking questions. Like, why is organic beef taking so long to establish itself, especially since we’ve began hearing about it in the 1980s?

“Compared to organic dairy and poultry, you don’t have a quick turnover,” says Charlie Johnson of rural Madison, an organic farmer in business with his brother, Allan.”Beef is a once-a-year product.”

What’s more, says Dakota Beef plant manager Larry Holtrop in Howard, it takes a while to get set up for raising organic livestock. Land has to be free of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides for three years.”Then you certify that every step of the animal’s progress has been free of chemical compounds,” Holtrop explains.”And you don’t just send the USDA an application and fifty bucks. They come out and check.”

There’s more. While South Dakota is known everywhere as great cattle country, and our stock growers are highly regarded for verification honesty, the state isn’t the best market for natural or organic meat. Organic products cost more.”The market levels are higher on both coasts,” says John Bruner, owner of Dakota Natural Beef north of Winfred.”These are products sought after by higher income groups.” And South Dakota wasn’t exactly first in line when it came to environmental, health-conscious thinking (stock growers often offer themselves as examples).

There are people everywhere (the coasts included) who categorize their steaks only as T-bones, ribeyes and sirloins, or currently trendy Angus versus everything else. So it’s good to look at definitions, still being written in some areas, as the USDA works to clarify the language and labeling.

To begin with, there’s”conventional” beef, which the world’s producers earnestly worked to improve during the 20th century. They put fertilizers and herbicides to use for lush grass and plentiful grains, and they employed antibiotics and hormones for animal health and growth. Then along came”natural” beef, which increasingly means verified to be antibiotic and hormone free over the animal’s lifetime — although in the past the term has meant anything from minimally processed to chemical free during the animal’s final weeks. The USDA is currently crafting tight defining language for”natural.” And there’s”organic” beef, taking the chemical-free concept several steps further, with verification strictly enforced by the USDA. Organic beef comes from livestock antibiotic and hormone free over its entire lifetime, born and raised on chemical-free lands, and fed only organic feeds.

“Organic regulations are so strict that inspectors will look into whether runoff from another pen could reach organic cattle,” Holtrop says.”Even what we use to clean our plant at Dakota Beef has to be organic.”

Not only cattle, but everything else that can be grown on a farm or ranch has been touched in some way by the organic movement. One of the first hints of that movement could be seen on the Bernie Johnson farm in the late 1960s. Charlie and Allan Johnson’s dad”was a hippie with a crew cut,” Charlie recalls.”His philosophy was he didn’t want anything on his farm that he couldn’t put on the tip of his tongue. Not many people were thinking like that then. But if 100 people came to a fork in the road, and 99 went one way, he’d go the other. It turned out he was prophetic.”

Charlie Johnson (above) and his brother, Allan, grew up on a chemical-free Lake County Farm, the sons of “a hippie with a crew cut” whose farming practices proved prophetic.

And willing to take action. By the mid-1970s, about the time Charlie graduated from high school, the few acres Bernie kept chemical free in the 1960s had expanded to encompass the entire farm.”So it’s all I’ve ever known, really,” Charlie says.”We’re pretty good stewards of the land here. Being organic keeps the soil qualities high. We rotate alfalfa, soybeans, corn, soybeans again, and the oats sown with alfalfa.”

Still, with some organic grains selling for human food products at twice the price of conventional grains,”I can’t afford to run them through my cows,” he says. Charlie and Allan run 180 head of Angus and Gelbvieh cross cattle, which consume roughage and provide organic fertilizer. But calves are mostly sold as feeder cattle, not finished off as certified organic beef.

It’s not only the high value of organic grain as human food that comes into play. Limited availability of those grains at times has kept some stock growers from thinking about finishing off organic beef. A few years ago, finished agricultural products were what state government said it hoped South Dakotans would produce;”value added” was the term. In that climate John Bruner established Dakota Natural Beef and found he could finish antibiotic-free and hormone-free beef that was consistently good.”We can get into a market because our product is natural, but we can stay in it only if we provide a high quality eating experience week after week,” Bruner says.”I can do that with natural beef, but I might not be as consistent if I were organic, because quality isn’t only taste but also tenderness.”

He explained that plenty of diners like grass fed beef. But August grass isn’t June grass. That’s where the tenderness Bruner demands in his beef becomes tricky.”Tenderness in beef comes about because of a rapid production of protein in the animal,” Bruner explains.”That happens when cattle eat green grass in early summer. But protein gains slow down by late summer if you don’t add supplements, when the grass is dry and hard.”

As talk about the lucrative markets for organic beef grew 10 years ago, observers looked at the challenges South Dakota stock growers faced and said it would take deep pockets to launch large-scale production here. Someone would have to devise a formula to cover the costs of those grains, develop feedlots, understand the emerging national market — plus find a community open to a new packing plant. Integrating an organic component into an existing conventional beef processing plant is extremely difficult because of possible contamination issues.

Then in 2004, Howard welcomed Scott Lively to the state as he was searching for a home for an organic beef company. Dave Clarke had a building, just off Highway 34, that could be modified and expanded to serve as a state of the art processing plant. Things came together so quickly that in 2005 the Wall Street Journal featured Howard and Lively’s fledgling Dakota Beef Company plus the town’s commitment to wind energy on page one. Dakota Beef could be found nationwide, from high-end restaurants pleased to offer customers organic steaks, to major league ballparks serving fans organic all-beef hot dogs.

In 2006 father and son David and Daniel Feinberg stepped in as Dakota Beef lending investors. After Lively left the company in March, the Feinbergs became exclusive owners. With investment and real estate backgrounds, and offices on the 32nd floor of a New York City office tower, now they’re getting to know rural South Dakota (not that much of a stretch, they stress, because of other business dealings in Colorado and a 150,000 acre working ranch David owns in Oregon). The Feinbergs have come to appreciate South Dakota’s”welcoming attitude and honesty,” said Daniel.

“South Dakota has some of the highest quality cattle anywhere.” David Feinberg says.”But it’s seldom organic.”

So Dakota Beef trucks organic cattle to Howard from all over. It processes close to 100 per week at the busiest times, and maybe 40 to 80 when demand dips. The owners see opportunities for growth long term, and for South Dakota stock growers immediately.”If there are South Dakotans we don’t know who are finishing organic beef, we’d like to work with them,” Daniel said.

A few years back, the Feinbergs guessed organic beef’s future would be bright.”But our interest initially was a health one,” David says.

By no means do all organic beef producers and processors say that. A good number admit to feeling more comfortable discussing their product in terms of supply and demand — if customers feel better about eating organic, those entrepreneurs are happy to supply it, no questions about buyer motivations asked.

South Dakota has a reputation for great beef thanks to cattlemen like John Bruner, but the best markets for organic products are far from his Winfred ranch.

The Feinbergs, though, have studied the work of Dr. Andrew Weil, suggesting that hormones passed from cows into dairy products can carry cancer risks, especially for women. If that’s the case, they feel, the same dangerous hormones might be found in conventional beef.”There’s also some thinking that antibiotics found in foods can limit the performance of antibiotics when they’re used for humans,” said Daniel. It surprises him that some consumers worry they might expose themselves to pesticides if they don’t carefully wash their apples, but don’t consider how cattle can carry pesticides if pastures aren’t chemical-free.

Health consciousness will always be a driving force behind organic sales, but there’s another emerging trend that has the Feinbergs projecting growth for their Howard plant. That’s the kosher market. Currently 10 to 15 percent of their product is doubly certified, as organic and as kosher. Kosher means the animal is downed with a precise neck cut in accordance with Old Testament law. While the Jewish market is key to kosher sales, Daniel said, the reason those sales are growing is because other people are committing to kosher”for spiritual and animal welfare reasons.” A solid argument can be made that a proper neck cut with a very sharp knife results in less animal distress than conventional slaughter. Glatt kosher means the animal was found to be in outstanding health prior to the kill, which is important to buyers seeking additional safety assurances.

The city of Howard is optimistic enough about Dakota Beef’s growth that it is studying municipal infrastructure improvements that may be required if a larger plant is necessary.

“Because of the process and costs, it’s expensive to run an operation like this on a small scale,” Holtrop says. With four decades of meat packing plant management on his resume, Holtrop was drawn to Dakota Beef in March”because this is a world-class challenge. There’s a big market out there for this product if we do things right.”

If the process and costs make organic beef a challenge for a packing plant, the same is true for stock growers. Dakota Beef’s Dr. Evan Whitley, who heads the company’s livestock division, can help producers get started.

So can Jim Krantz. An extension educator through South Dakota State University, Krantz has an office in the Miner County courthouse, just blocks from Dakota Beef. He first makes certain stock growers understand USDA requirements,”and we sort through any confusion about what natural is, and what organic is.”

A health program for both cow and calf is extremely important, Krantz stresses,”and producers considering this should know that even organic cattle can have vaccines. The other thing we always work on is nutrition, a way of regulating intake and the consistency of the intake. We develop a ration program.” Part of the program, Krantz adds, could include feeds that some stock growers haven’t previously considered, such as flax and barley.

So there’s no doubt some South Dakota cattle will experience altered diets in coming years. There’s no doubt that Americans coast to coast will enjoy new types of South Dakota beef, although in what quantity remains to be seen. Maybe these are the most important questions. Will South Dakotans feel inclined to spend a bit more to alter their diets? And will the rest of America follow our example?