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Winyan

By Chuck Raasch

Elizabeth Winyan (standing) was long associated with the Riggs family, caring for young Thomas in Minnesota and later joining him at Oahe Mission.

On a spring day in 1830 a family, including a 3-year-old girl, was harvesting sweet syrup from maple trees along the banks of the Minnesota River near present-day Mankato. Suddenly and viciously, they were attacked by an unidentified rival tribe.

The girl’s father was one of several Dakota Sioux killed in that attack. The young girl’s mother realized she could not escape the deadly melee while running with two children, so she emptied a pot of boiling water and hid the girl underneath. She then picked up her son and ran to safety.

For two days and one night the little girl stayed silent under the kettle. Then, her mother crept back and retrieved her.

“Even in her old age,” wrote historian Thomas Hughes,”Winyan never forgot that terrible experience and how, when her mother lifted the kettle, the moonlight showed on the bloody faces of the outstretched dead, her father among them.”

Winyan, who would later be given the name Elizabeth while working with Dakota Territory missionary Stephen Return Riggs, spent the rest of her life serving others. In Dakota, Winyan means mother and protector. She lived the name. Winyan was a human bridge over the most difficult waters of Dakota Territory and early statehood, when the federal government sought to force rapid assimilation of Native people, in part by creating reservations. By the time she died six decades later, Winyan was a legend among Native people, white missionaries and settlers on the Dakota frontier of the 1870s and 1880s.

Oahe Mission Chapel, next to the Riggs family home, was built in 1877. When Lake Oahe flooded the site it was moved to the Oahe Dam Visitors Center, where it stands today.

She often traveled the preaching circuit with the Riggs missionaries, blending her mission work with knowledge and practices of her own Dakota people. The Sioux, with a rich oral history tradition, have tried to keep stories like Winyan’s alive, but in the written annals of Dakota Territory her works are sparsely mentioned.

“She was amazing in her time,” says Winyan’s great-great-great granddaughter, Lora Neilan, of Summit.”And it is sad that it got forgotten.” When Winyan died in 1890, the noted Dakota Territory missionary Mary Collins, a good friend, wrote,”She was one of the grandest women I ever knew.”

Even my introduction to Winyan was accidental, a result of research into an entirely different woman on the Dakota frontier. In 1989, I spent a year studying political migration during a journalism graduate fellowship at Stanford University. While there, I did considerable research on the American frontier, which included paging through countless editions of 19th century newspapers in the archives. One advertisement in an 1888 edition of Minnesota’s St. Paul Daily Globe caught my eye. In huge type, I read:”SHE LOVES A SAVAGE!” It was an advertisement for a dime museum appearance of Corabelle Fellows, a young white missionary, and her new husband, Sam Campbell, a mixed-race man of Dakota Sioux and white blood.

I suspected there was a good story behind this headline. I tucked away a copy of the ad and years later, decided to investigate. I have often been surprised by how few female and Native voices are used in the telling of the history of Dakota Territory. I thought Corabelle may have something to say. This hunch — and years of research — resulted in my book Life Painted Red: The True Story of Corabelle Fellows and How Her Life on the Dakota Frontier Became a National Scandal.

The book follows young Corabelle and Sam as they set out on the sideshow circuits and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to make ends meet after Corabelle’s family disowned her for marrying a man of mixed blood.

During my research I also discovered Winyan, who had played a role in Corabelle’s early missionary work. In the winter of 1885-1886, she was in her third year of teaching and serving in missions in Nebraska and Dakota Territory. That winter, one of the coldest and harshest on the Plains, she lived and served with Winyan from a rough-hewn cabin at the Oahenoua village on the Cheyenne River, northwest of present-day Pierre. It was one of the most isolated posts on the frontier, serving people who had recently returned from exile in Canada with Sitting Bull. By then, Winyan had gained a reputation as one of the physically strongest women in the territory. She built the log cabin she lived in, hauled water uphill from the river and traveled long distances through harsh conditions to nurse the sick or dying.

Thomas Riggs.

Living with Winyan that winter, Corabelle, whose mother immediately disowned her after the marriage to Campbell, began calling Winyan”Ina,” or mother. Winyan had initially gained notoriety when, as a young woman during the bloody Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862, she secretly swam food to an island in the Minnesota River where Riggs and a small band of fellow missionaries and Sioux friends had hidden with their families. After her father died, Winyan had been taken under the tutelage of Riggs and his fellow missionary Thomas Smith Williamson. When the Dakota people in Minnesota were pushed west to reservations, the missionaries went with them, so Elizabeth gave up her life among the lush fauna of the Minnesota River valley to the harsher, starker and more expansive high plains of western South Dakota.

The granddaughter of the legendary Dakota leader Sleepy Eyes, she had grown up with a strong connection to the natural world. Winyan helped raise several generations of Riggs children, nursed the ill with herbs and practices passed on to her from her ancestors and sat with the dying when others were too afraid of evil spirits.

Tales of her physical strength spiced Sioux oral histories. Stories of her quiet mercies were also abundantly shared.”Winyan was a woman of strong character, fine mind and a natural leader,” the historian Hughes wrote.”Her great desire was that her people should hear the Gospel, so as the years went by, her work widened, and she was sent to various fields. She held meetings, discussed the Bible, visited the sick, buried the dead, and occasionally addressed conferences of white people. Even the Indian men held her in the highest esteem.”

Collins, the missionary, was struck by Winyan’s loyalty, her knowledge of her people’s past and her understanding of the natural world, particularly the constellations in expansive prairie night skies.”She is a faithful friend, true to her character as a Dakota,” Collins recalled.”She enjoys camp life with us, and evenings, as we sit by the campfire, she will tell stories of her early life, or fables, or legends of the stars. She is quite an astronomer. She reads the sky like an open book.”

Together, during that rough winter of 1885-86, the broad-shouldered Winyan teased Corabelle — barely 5 feet tall — about being able to keep up with physical work. Hauling water from the river to the cabin, Winyan would balance two large buckets on her shoulders, often while plowing through new fallen snow. Corabelle would follow with one pail, struggling, but rejoicing in Winyan’s eventual approval.”She always looked me over skeptically when we reached the house” after hard work outdoors, Corabelle recalled.”Invariably, when she found me unbroken, she would put her hands on her hips and laugh so hard that I was obliged to join her.”

Thomas Riggs established Oahe Industrial School in the 1870s as a training school for girls.

One night in the middle of that winter, Winyan fell asleep while Corabelle was teaching a group of young Sioux men. One of the men later returned to kidnap the bewildered Corabelle, catching her as she came outside to do a chore before bed. Winyan, awakened by a rush of ice-cold air from an open door, plowed through snowbanks to catch up with the young man, who had wrapped Corabelle in a blanket and was carrying her to his home.

“What bad thing is this!” Winyan shouted, shooing the man away.”Now you stop!” Her unwelcome suitor dropped Corabelle in the snow. Winyan wrapped her in a blanket and escorted her back to the cabin, where she consoled and soothed her with an herbal bath. Winyan scolded Corabelle for carelessly ignoring her warning to never go outside alone.

Corabelle and Winyan talked long into that night, marveling at how this white missionary and the Native missionary ended up together after growing up in such different worlds of culture, customs and religion.”How we talked,” Corabelle remembered.”Really talked, there in that crude cabin, shut away from the rest of the world. She asked and answered, and I asked and answered until that day, with its closeness of spiritual touch, became a highlight of my whole life.”

Missionaries and newspaper reporters alike simply called her Winyan. Eventually, she had a son, Edward Phelps, a minister, who along with his wife, Ellen, became missionaries and served rural South Dakota churches.

In her 50s, Winyan began speaking more frequently to donors and churches, traveling as far as Chicago. Neilan, Winyan’s descendant, has collected photos and articles that highlight her impact. Winyan’s life spanned the great events of the 19th century frontier: the government’s many treaties with the Sioux; the 1862 uprising in Minnesota, in which hundreds of white settlers and Native people were killed, and which ended with the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men; the many battles and massacres between U.S. Army forces and Native people on the Northern Plains in the mid- and late-19th century; the last stand of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry on the rolling Montana hills in 1876; and the rapid settlement and statehood of South Dakota in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Louisa Riggs considered Elizabeth Winyan (standing) a colleague. She is pictured with Mary Collins (second from right), another missionary.

“She was a legend,” Neilan says.”What I found out, in the time frame that she lived, with the racism she faced and everything that had happened, I am most proud of how she rose above that, of how she left her mark and how many other ones did as well.”

Even while helping Native people adapt to relocation to the reservations, she often quietly longed for her childhood life along the Minnesota River.”She missed it so much,” Neilan says. Once, when sitting with fellow missionary Collins, Winyan told of something she had just seen that”well represents our present condition as a race.

“A man named Longfeather, dressed in Indian dress paint and feathers, was teaching some boys the Indian dance and song,” Winyan told Collins. There were three boys: One with long hair and painted face and Indian dress, one with shirt and leggings and a white boy’s shoes and stockings on, the third dressed well in entirely white men’s clothes.”One represents the past, the second the present, and the third the future,” Winyan said.”I know it has to be, but to me the one dressed all in the Indian child’s clothing looked the best, but I’m only an Indian.”

Neilan finds inspiration in her ancestor even today. She says she and her daughters (Lauren, Bailee and Falon) have also begun to study native plants, and to learn about the constellations that illuminate our prairie nights.

“She was a beacon,” she says,”a beacon of power in her own self.”

Chuck Raasch is a native of Castlewood and a graduate of South Dakota State University. He has written for the Huron Daily Plainsman, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and USA Today. Raasch has also authored two books, Imperfect Union: A Father’s Search for His Son in the Aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, published in 2016, and Life Painted Red: The True Story of Corabelle Fellows and How Her Life On the Dakota Frontier Became a National Scandal in 2023.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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What About Doc?

By Paul Higbee

Doc Middleton was a Nebraska outlaw who gravitated northward to run saloons in southwestern South Dakota. His exploits included running in the 1893 Chadron to Chicago horse race, where he was pictured at the finish line.

TO BE CLEAR, Doc Middleton never earned a doctorate. Sometimes it seems that’s the only thing we know for certain about the outlaw.

Middleton spent considerable time in western South Dakota, first arriving nearly 150 years ago and variously described as horse thief, cattle drover, saloon keeper, murderer, sheriff and wannabe showman. For what it’s worth, he possessed one of the Old West’s best beards. In early photos, his facial adornment — maybe a foot long — could have made him the front man in ZZ Top. After it grayed, Middleton trimmed it; he then bore a resemblance to Buffalo Bill Cody.

In the Black Hills, a place long fascinated by notorious men like Wild Bill Hickok, Lame Johnny, Fly Speck Billy and even George Armstrong Custer, it seems as if Doc Middleton has fallen through the cracks. Not that he’s been completely forgotten. Look up Ardmore, South Dakota, on Wikipedia and you’ll see two people noted as playing roles in local history: President Calvin Coolidge, who visited in 1927, and Doc Middleton,”a former resident who was an infamous outlaw.”

What made Middleton an outlaw? It’s hard to top murder. He was indicted on that charge after shooting an Army private in 1877 during a dance hall brawl in Sidney, Nebraska. The charge never went to trial, says Rapid City writer Scott Lockwood, whose new book Alias: Doc Middleton, attempts to bring the somewhat mysterious Middleton back into the public consciousness. Horse-stealing did put him behind bars on several occasions.

Middleton’s thieving began at age 14 in his native Texas. One theory about his nickname is that he developed skills for”doctoring” horse brands. Or it could have stemmed from a sloppy signature with the initials for David and Charles scribbled together and mistaken for Doc. David and Charles, by the way, were not his actual first and middle names. He stole them. And Middleton, at birth, was a middle name and not his surname. His last name was Riley. Records show Doc was born in the Texas Hill Country, though he sometimes claimed Mississippi as his birthplace.

Rapid City author Scott Lockwood was introduced to Doc Middleton through his fascination with the town of Ardmore. Lockwood’s new biography traces the outlaw’s life as well as his connection to the Fall River County ghost town.

Doc’s life was so full of contradictions and outright lies that writing a book-length biography would challenge any author. But Lockwood embraced the historical detective work. As he was researching, Lockwood was asked if he liked Middleton. No, Lockwood replied. He can’t condone murder and won’t minimize it. He suspects the Sidney incident wasn’t the only time someone died due to Middleton’s violence. On the other hand, there were certainly not dozens of killings, as some exaggerated newspaper stories of the era claimed.

“For a while I didn’t really understand how bad horse stealing was in the 1800s,” Lockwood says. It deprived a person of transportation, perhaps their livelihood, and sometimes their closest companion. Some of Middleton’s early thefts may have been particularly nasty, taking animals from Oklahoma’s Indian Territory because he believed authorities wouldn’t pursue or prosecute. It’s possible he followed the same line of thinking on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in Dakota.

Lockwood was born in Huron and graduated from Custer County High School. He wasn’t particularly curious about history classes in school but, he says,”I was always interested in the stories about the ‘old days’ my elderly relatives and neighbors told me.” He worked for railroads throughout the country’s midsection, making and supervising track repairs, and eventually managing sections of Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s maintenance from Montana to Texas, and from Alabama to Illinois. When Lockwood retired, he came home to South Dakota and its”rhubarb and lilacs.”

Ardmore interested him in ways similar to the stories his older relatives and neighbors had recounted decades earlier. Virtually a ghost town now on the South Dakota-Nebraska line, south of the Black Hills, Ardmore similarly attracted Middleton in 1900. He bought town lots, served as sheriff for a while and owned a saloon. He may have failed in the liquor business in another town, Lockwood thinks, but by the time he arrived in Ardmore he had learned not to drink his profits.

Lockwood first learned of Middleton by reading the Wikipedia post linking President Coolidge and the horse thief. “I guess I was intrigued with him because he chose to make tiny Ardmore his home,” Lockwood says. And”he was able to steal hundreds of horses and escape vigilante justice.” Vigilantes operated outside the law, often lynching horse thieves and cattle rustlers in the Old West, including Middleton’s Nebraska partner-in-crime, Kid Wade. Middleton may have considered vigilantism more criminal than anything he perpetuated.

“He was such a restless man,” Lockwood says.”He liked to see his name in the newspapers and became a folk hero to many. He was great at promoting things he believed in.”

This is the earliest known photograph of James Middleton Riley, later known as Doc Middleton, taken around 1871 when he was 20.

Middleton obviously believed in Ardmore. But what he really wanted to promote was his own Wild West Show. There are stories claiming he performed briefly in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but Lockwood thinks Buffalo Bill Cody didn’t care for Doc Middleton. In Middleton’s mind, his own show, actually incorporated in 1904 in Rapid City, would be no less an extravaganza than Buffalo Bill’s. But it never happened. If it had, Middleton could have woven in plenty of his own real-life adventures: rounding up wild cattle roaming Texas after the Civil War, then becoming one of America’s original cowboys who drove herds north for public domain grass and less bovine disease. He rode through Kansas and Nebraska (the state that’s done the most to document Middleton’s outlaw history) and in 1877 he made it to the Black Hills, according to Lockwood. Middleton spent time in early Custer and Deadwood and was particular about whom he claimed as a friend or associate. Calamity Jane?”She ain’t my kind of people,” he reportedly said.

There’s an adventure the public would no doubt have demanded be recreated in abbreviated form as part of a Doc Middleton Wild West Show. That was a thousand-mile horse race from western Nebraska to Chicago in 1893. A Chadron, Nebraska, man promoted the idea as a hoax in an era of elaborate hoaxes nationally — ones that newspapers often reported, winning national attention for a community. In part, the news of a super-sized horse race spread because the idea appalled humane societies, and they took action to stop it. Middleton announced he would compete, and the Deadwood Pioneer Times entered into jokey reporting by remarking he should be ineligible because he would surely end up stealing other racers’ mounts.

Then remarkably, driven by the publicity, the race began to be taken seriously. In fact, humane organizations inadvertently boosted the competition when they said they would supply representatives to monitor animal health along the route. Middleton did, indeed, ride the distance on a gelding called Jim Fisk. Some observers predicted a win for Middleton. Strangely, Lockwood says (or maybe not so strangely when you consider the strong-willed contestants), the race didn’t begin until 6:15 one evening because of an argument over eligibility. The date was June 13, 1893. John Berry, riding a horse from Sturgis called Poison, first reached Buffalo Bill’s Wild West grounds near the Chicago World’s Fair on June 27. Berry wasn’t declared the winner, though, because in Chicago the eligibility issue flared again, and Berry had played a role in selecting the route, giving him an unfair advantage. Middleton finished about 27 hours behind Berry. Of eight riders who completed the long course, Middleton came in sixth.

Newspaper accounts of Middleton’s participation in the thousand-mile competition likely surprised some people. Reports of his death had circulated numerous times over the years, usually owing to gunshot wounds but once due to smallpox in Ardmore. It was as if the press was certain that Middleton would meet death at an early age and was ever ready to pounce on the news. While Middleton liked newspaper stories, even those maudlin and false reports, he had no use for anyone proposing a book about his life. He wanted that writing assignment reserved for himself, although he never got around to it.

“He even threatened to come after anyone attempting to write a book,” Lockwood says.

The Middleton family in 1899 included (from left) Doc; children Joseph William, Ruth Irene and David Wesley; and his wife, Irene.

Middleton married three times. In 1911 his third wife, Irene, died at Hot Springs after gallbladder surgery. Funeral services were conducted in Ardmore and then her body was interred about 30 miles south in Crawford, Nebraska. Certainly that’s where Middleton believed he would someday be buried, in prime horse country. Crawford sits a short canter from Fort Robinson, a major base of operations for the U.S. Cavalry during Middleton’s time.

But Middleton never made it to Crawford. He was occasionally involved in unauthorized alcohol sales and that landed him in jail in Wyoming in December of 1913. He died on December 27 at age 62 from a bacterial infection complicated by pneumonia. A burial plot at Douglas, Wyoming, was supposed to be temporary, but it’s where Middleton lies 112 years later. In 1968 a group of Nebraskans petitioned to move the body but didn’t gather many signatures. Lockwood, during his railroad career before he ever heard of Doc Middleton, lived in Douglas just blocks from the gravesite.

Knowing the geography of Middleton’s life was a plus for Lockwood in writing this book. So was newspapers.com, which allowed for electronic access to papers that Middleton knew and admired.”Sometimes I’d be so excited about what I found that I couldn’t stop at dinner time,” Lockwood says.”Other days I’d walk away and not care if I ever looked again.”

Such mixed feelings are to be expected about a man as conflicted as Middleton. Readers who love Western lore and the Black Hills — and are eager to rediscover a man nearly lost to history — will be glad he stuck with it.

Editor’s Note: Contact Scott Lockwood at b735198@gmail.com to purchase a book or to schedule an author talk. This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Art-Warming

By Paul Higbee

The grandchildren of Fred Mohling, pictured painting in his Aurora County farmhouse in 1957, are rediscovering his artwork and are exploring ways to share it with South Dakotans.

In 1959 Aurora County farmer Fred Mohling traveled to California for the Rose Bowl. Naturally, when he returned to South Dakota, friends and family asked about the game.

Mohling couldn’t tell them much. He hadn’t gone to watch football, he explained, but to see the roses in the famous parade. At home, in addition to selling grain and cattle, Mohling created paintings, including still lifes with flowers. Today, 40 years after his death, his descendants are sorting through his works: Midwestern and Western landscapes, people, waterfowl, horses, hunting dogs and still lifes. The family doesn’t necessarily want to sell the art but would like to exhibit some of it, maybe at libraries as a starting point. The learning curve is steep, exploring exhibition protocol, likely venues, copyright and even framing (when Mohling framed his art he sometimes purchased cheap and rather gaudy hardware store frames).

There’s another holiday season story about Mohling. Seventy years ago this December he skillfully painted a life-sized Christmas Nativity scene and other holiday images on plywood and illuminated them with 100 white and colored lights for his grandchildren. He set it up on his farm, just south of the Aurora-Jerauld County line, where it delighted more than his grandkids. As word spread, hundreds of South Dakotans drove 75 miles or more, on two-lane roads in winter, to see the scene. Memories of the Nativity art are mostly all that remain. The painted figures largely disappeared. Mohling’s farmhouse and ag buildings were razed for corporate farming, and the farmer-artist himself died in 1984.

Harmony Friends Church

His painting of a mountain scene is part of the Center for Western Studies collection at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, and another found a home in the Wessington Springs museum. But most were divided among family.”There are more than we remembered seeing around his house years ago,” says grandson John Swanson of Rapid City. He believes his grandfather completed more than 150 paintings, usually ranging from 8-by-10 inches to 16-by-20 inches in size. Another grandson, Greg Miller, notes that Mohling mostly used oils on board surfaces, and also drew with charcoal as well as colored pencils late in life.”There was something about winter scenes,” Miller says.”He looked at snow much of the year and liked it.” Miller has taken a lead role in documenting Mohling’s life through newspaper clippings and public records.

Great-grandson Ryan Aalbu of Spearfish was young when Mohling died and only vaguely remembers the man, but he treasures his paintings.”Mine are outdoor scenery and animals,” Aalbu says.”I didn’t know until fairly recently that he was a good portrait artist, too, painting people from American presidents to his own family.”

Fredrick Henry Mohling, born in 1894, grew up as the eldest of eight children on a Nebraska farm. At home he spoke German but made the mental switch to English for school. A capable student, Mohling hurried through his in-school lessons so he could draw at the end of classes, and at age 12 he won first prize for a painting he took to an Old Settlers picnic.

He married Tillie Maschman, and they had seven children, which left little time for art. The Mohlings moved to South Dakota to farm in 1920 and weathered bad ag prices that decade and the Dust Bowl and Depression of the 1930s.

The hard times led to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Gov. Tom Berry insisted that art be part of the WPA and Mohling renewed his interest in painting by taking three classes in Mitchell. He was also inspired by a landscape artist he saw at the State Fair.

Blue Jay Wonder

Sadly, his family thinks that Mohling’s main motivation to paint was his deep grief after Tillie died suddenly from an appendix ailment in 1940. Art became his therapy, perhaps, or at least a way to occupy his mind.”When you do something requiring great attention to detail, you can’t think about other things,” Swanson says. A family member recalled coming home from a dance to find Mohling working at his easel in the middle of the night.

Still, Mohling didn’t hit his stride with art, in terms of quality and output, for a few years. There was always work on the farm. He also landscaped his big yard, created a lily pond and outdoor fireplace, and he built swings for his kids and grandkids. When Tillie died, two of his children were young adults who helped to raise the younger five. Mohling enjoyed traveling by car with his family and drove them to the Black Hills to see Josef Meier’s Passion Play, a religious drama performed in Spearfish on what was billed as the world’s”longest outdoor stage,” all of it skillfully lighted. Maybe the biblical production was the inspiration for Mohling’s own outdoor Christmas presentation.

“That could be,” Swanson says.”He liked visuals, obviously, and things built big. He drove to Texas once to see the new Houston Astrodome, which was called the eighth wonder of the world.” The family has no record as to whether Mohling saw a ballgame during that trip or simply admired the big domed stadium.

Swanson describes his grandfather as a type of man most South Dakotans might know. He was accomplished in agriculture, could build anything, and — far from the stereotype some Americans held of rural Midwesterners in that time — wasn’t cocooned in his own locality but interested in the wider world.

Mohling took enough interest in his 20 grandchildren to buy or make each a meaningful gift every Christmas, granddaughter Jane Aalbu remembers. His gifts would only get better: one of his original paintings for high school graduation and another as a wedding present if a grandchild got married.

“He was mild-mannered and soft-spoken, and fairly easy to talk to,” says Swanson, who was in his 20s when Mohling died. The farmer-artist didn’t drink except for perhaps a glass of Mogen David wine on holidays. Knowing his distaste for alcohol, his descendants have had light-hearted discussions about whether it would be appropriate to serve higher quality wines at exhibits of his art.

Through years of raising children, bonding with grandchildren, and adapting to post-World War II ag technologies, Mohling kept improving his art techniques. Swanson recalls seeing the classic Blue Boy (a portrait by 18th century English artist Thomas Gainsborough) among his grandfather’s possessions and assumed Mohling admired it and bought a print. As it turned out, Mohling copied it stroke by stroke — a time-honored method that artists have used to fine-tune their skills.

Buckeye Brown

Mohling didn’t seem interested in selling his works but in 1955 Wessington Springs hosted a horse show. Mohling loaned horse paintings to Rukstadt Hardware Store for a window display during the event. An Indiana man admired a threshing scene and Mohling agreed to sell it to him. In 1956 he won two blue ribbons at the State Fair; he’d previously taken home art ribbons from Huron but never before a first-place honor, let alone two. Those blue-ribbon paintings almost certainly remain in the family’s possession, and they hope to determine which they are.

In the late 1950s and beyond, Mohling took his art to appreciative rural audiences in Clark, Faulkton, Wessington Springs, Mitchell and Fairbury, Nebraska, near his birthplace. Plankinton journalist Adeline VanGenderen reported on a show where a woman rhetorically asked how anyone could choose a Mohling favorite given the wide variety of scenes and subjects.”We got to thinking this over, and how could you?” VanGenderen wrote.”First your eye would be drawn to a moose beside the lake; deer drinking from the stream; an Indian pony and its rider; you could almost smell the dust of the covered wagon as it groaned westward.”

If art scholars had read VanGenderen’s description, they might have concluded that Mohling was part of the Regionalism art movement, especially popular in the rural Midwest in the mid-20th century and best epitomized by Iowa painter Grant Wood. The style became popular nationally as Americans first feared that the Midwest was being blown off the map by Dust Bowl winds, and then again as they celebrated that it wasn’t.

But there’s no evidence Mohling saw his art as part of any movement or school of thought. South Dakotans tend to be skeptical of those who categorize local visual art as Fine, Folk, Regionalism or any other grouping. Most would agree with the late University of South Dakota professor and author Graham Thatcher, who warned against associating with any”sophisticated art nerd who asks you what you think in order to get an opening for his or her well-rehearsed sermonette.” Thatcher stressed, in his book I Know What I Like! Everyone’s Guide to the Arts,“There are no rules in Art Ö there is only taste.”

Mohling met the tastes of South Dakotans half a century ago. In 1974, friends and family turned out in force for his 80th birthday celebration in a Wessington Springs ag building, its interior walls decorated for the day with 80 pieces of his art.

Today, Mohling’s descendants are working to determine whether 21st century South Dakotans find significance in the art, as well. In August the family put digitized images on a video loop and played it at Mitchell’s Corn Palace Festival. They may do the same at the State Fair next year. A professor has suggested the paintings may hold value for students learning about both the techniques Mohling used and the times in which his art took form.

Relatives don’t anticipate a posthumous discovery of Mohling’s talent beyond the borders of South Dakota. They’ll be happy if small groups of observers see something in his art that warms their hearts.

That’s what art did for Fred Mohling, and it was quite enough.

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

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Pedestrian Politics

By Bernie Hunhoff

Yankton’s Meridian Bridge carried traffic across the Missouri River between South Dakota and Nebraska from 1924 until its closure in 2008, which ushered its new life as a pedestrian walkway. Photo by Pat Hansen

Bridges are famously controversial. Yankton’s double-deck Meridian Bridge, which turns 100 years old this year, is a classic example.

In the 1920s, Yankton booster D.B. Gurney and his supporters sought to circumvent the political process by raising private funds, but they still had to navigate approval from both Washington and Pierre before they could drop the first barrel of concrete into the Missouri River channel in 1922.

They also confronted politics within the Yankton community as they cajoled friends and neighbors to make major investments in the bridge. Gurney once donned boxing gloves for a meeting and suggested that the fundraising could require fisticuffs. Though Gurney’s friends thought he was joking, they quickly offered more money.

When the $1.1 million Meridian Bridge opened on Oct. 11, 1924, it became the first highway bridge constructed across the Missouri River in South Dakota. The double-decker design was chosen in anticipation of a railroad line that never materialized, so motorists driving south into Nebraska used the lower deck and northbound traffic took the upper. Drivers paid tolls until the cost was recouped in December of 1953. Gurney’s wife Henrietta paid the final toll.

Seven decades after the first cars rolled across, Meridian Bridge politics re-emerged as local and state leaders debated where to build its replacement. Then, even after the Discovery Bridge was completed, the Meridian was not free of politics. In fact, some of the old bridge’s most highly charged moments came in 2008 and 2009, after it was closed and slated for demolition.

The new Discovery Bridge was opened to traffic on Oct. 11, 2008 — the same date as the Meridian’s official opening 84 years earlier — with a gala ribbon cutting. Dan Specht, then the mayor of Yankton, remarked that the bridge shows the river does not divide South Dakota and Nebraska, but truly brings people closer together.

On that exciting afternoon, busloads of school children were diverted over the Meridian; the very next day, it was deemed unsafe for any use. Entrances were fenced and a sign declared it off-limits to the public.

The late Father John Garvey, then a feisty and good-natured Catholic chaplain at Mount Marty University and Sacred Heart Monastery, was the first to demonstrate the bridge’s future potential.

Garvey was known for challenging authority. He once was arrested for trespassing at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha to protest nuclear weapons. He found it hilarious that the old bridge was strong enough for 18-wheelers and school buses on one day, and then unsafe for pedestrians the next. True to character, he climbed over the temporary orange fence and strode out over the river in the autumn of 2008. He did it with a twinkle in his eyes, and the Yankton police, with equally good cheer, led the grinning, white-haired priest back to Walnut Street.

Other Yanktonians were resigned to the idea that the old bridge would come down. Fortunately, a few local citizens — particularly Jim Means, a longtime businessman and civic leader who has been involved in nearly all of Yankton’s successful historic preservation projects over the last 50 years — patiently lobbied city commissioners, lawmakers and other officials to explore its potential as a pedestrian bridge.

“I always thought it was Yankton’s signature piece of architecture,” Means says.”I felt it would be short-sighted to let it fall into the river. Ever since it was built, it has set us apart from every other town. You could meet people from all over the country, and if they knew anything about Yankton it was that they’d traveled over the double-decker bridge.”

Opponents to preserving the Meridian included several of Means’ friends.”People thought it would be a waste of money. One of my neighbors said he didn’t think anyone would even want to walk on it.”

The Meridian Bridge was built with a lift span that rose 25 feet to allow steamboat traffic on the Missouri River to pass underneath. Raising and lowering the 220-foot span took about 8 minutes in each direction. It was deactivated in 1984, and the lifting mechanism was removed. Photo courtesy of the Yankton County Historical Association

But Means and others kept alive the notion of preserving the bridge, and eventually they gained support from two strangers south of the border: Bob Puschendorf, a native of nearby Norfolk, Nebraska, was then the state historic preservation officer in Lincoln, Nebraska, and John Kingsbury, a banker in Ponca, Nebraska, was chairman of the Nebraska State Highway Commission.

Puschendorf hoped to preserve the bridge for its historical and recreational possibilities. Kingsbury remembers that he was just looking for the finish line.

“The new Yankton bridge was one of the most controversial and environmentally complicated projects of my time on the commission,” he says.”As people in Yankton will remember, there were two factions. One wanted the bridge downtown as it is today and another group preferred a bypass bridge to the east. Nebraska was neutral, but at the time was generally preferring a bypass around communities.”

As the lead state for planning and construction of the new bridge, Nebraska was responsible for public hearings. Kingsbury felt the primary hearing should be in Yankton because the city had so much at stake.

“After discussion between the two states, it was agreed Nebraska could hold a public hearing in South Dakota,” Kingsbury remembers.”I am sure I was the first state commissioner to hold a large public hearing in another state. I believe [South Dakota transportation officials] felt a neutral Nebraskan would be a good choice to lead a controversial public hearing. There was a huge crowd with signs and buttons supporting their cause. The room was packed along with three television stations. The meeting went unexpectedly well. The speakers remained reasonably calm. In the end, both states agreed to the downtown location based on dozens of factors.”

Left in limbo, however, was the fate of the old bridge. A federal Environmental Impact Study favored preservation over demolition.

“Yankton was also asking Nebraska to make the new bridge more attractive than a flat, basic concrete bridge,” Kingsbury recalls.”Nebraska was opposed to the added cost because the many delays had greatly increased the cost projections. As negotiations continued, I recommended Nebraska beautify the new bridge with the pillars and lighting in exchange for Yankton or South Dakota taking ownership of the old, historical bridge.”

South Dakota authorities liked Kingsbury’s compromise, though they didn’t yet know if Yankton would accept responsibility for the Meridian. For nearly a year after car and truck traffic ceased on the old double-decker bridge, conversations and meetings continued in city hall and other locations.

Kingsbury’s proposal created an opening for Puschendorf and Jay Vogt, his counterpart in Pierre. Vogt was director of South Dakota’s historic preservation office; he was also well-acquainted with the Meridian Bridge. His grandparents had lived in Yankton, and one of his favorite childhood memories was of driving over the Missouri River on the double-deck bridge.

Yankton had yet another important connection: longtime local trucker Ralph Marquardt was then serving on the South Dakota Transportation Commission.

Puschendorf, Vogt and transportation officials from both states offered to work with the City of Yankton if its leaders wished to accept responsibility for the historic bridge.

Yankton attorney Nick Moser was a newly elected state representative in 2009.”It was one of the first things I worked on as a legislator,” he says.”All of the lawmakers from Yankton were in favor of preserving it but there were a number of people who were opposed for a variety of reasons: they thought no one would use it, they thought it might not be safe, some even thought it would be an eyesore.”

Moser and Yankton’s other lawmakers met on several occasions with Department of Transportation officials during the 2009 session, and they also organized meetings with Marquardt and city commissioners back home — often gathering at the publishing offices of South Dakota Magazine.

Demolition of the bridge would have involved liabilities, environmental issues such as lead paint and other unknowns, so preservation of the bridge appealed to some state officials who felt it was the safest decision.

Most city commissioners eventually embraced the view that the historic bridge still had something to offer but they were concerned that the city wouldn’t be able to afford restoration costs in the short-term, and that local taxpayers could be stuck with demolition costs sometime in the future.

Those financial worries were alleviated when state transportation officials agreed to devote $1.8 million from South Dakota’s share of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which had been passed by the U.S. Congress to stimulate the economy after the Great Recession of 2008.

Kingsbury and his Nebraska associates, anxious to close the chapter on the Yankton bridge, offered the remainder of the restoration costs, which totaled $5 million. The two states also agreed to deposit their respective shares of the estimated demolition cost into a trust fund so that monies are available for that purpose if needed. The fund was started at $2.8 million but it has nearly doubled.

Two years later — after rehabilitation and the installation of a railing and lighting — the Meridian Bridge was opened to pedestrians and bicyclists in November of 2011. It’s difficult to find any detractors today, and the officials who were involved see it as a success.

“Every time I drive across the new bridge, I smile at the beautification,” says Kingsbury, who is still a banker in Ponca.

“Today I can walk out the front door of my office and I have a full view of the bridge,” says Moser.”I see people walking it at all times of the day, and all times of the year. On weekends from spring to summer and fall it’s packed.”

Means walks the bridge regularly and enjoys seeing the various ways it’s used by the community — from weddings to fundraisers, lovers’ padlocks, family gatherings and, of course, the constant stream of people who simply want to stroll at treetop-level above the grand Missouri River.

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

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David Wolff’s Black Hills

By Paul Higbee

David Wolff spent 17 years teaching history at Black Hills State University in Spearfish. His new “Black Hills History Tours” book series blends travel with the region’s most colorful historical stories.

Every mountain range needs a few curious historians. They help the rest of us appreciate the peaks and valleys.

David Wolff of Spearfish fills that role in the Black Hills, and now the former professor is embarking on a six-book project that will not only recount the region’s colorful history but also serve as a guidebook for those who share the author’s itch to explore.

Mountain towns also need pharmacists — and that’s where Wolff got his start. Forty years ago the Denver native who was raised in Wyoming was working the pharmacy counter at a Pamida store in Sturgis. He wrote a history paper as an amateur and took it to a conference organized by university historians.”Pharmacists wear ties and that’s what I wore to the conference, and the history professors moved toward me when I arrived, assuming I was one of them,” Wolff recalls. He sensed they were less enthusiastic in greeting an amateur when they learned his identity.

The pharmacist eventually left the Black Hills, off to greener medicinal pastures, people in Sturgis surmised. In fact, he left to study history, first at the University of Wyoming where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and then at Arizona State University where he gained a Ph.D. In 1998 he returned to South Dakota to teach at Black Hills State University. He became Dr. David Wolff not as a matter of pursuing a personal goal or for job security (no one will tell you a historian’s position is more secure than a pharmacist’s). Rather, Wolff became a historian because he considers the field vital, especially the multi-layered history of the Black Hills and its mining culture — a significant component to American history overall. And yes, the snub he sensed at that long-ago conference was a motivator in reinventing himself. He didn’t want the lack of academic credentials to limit his ability to reach the public through university offerings, writings and at local history society talks that are free and open to all.

“He comes across as an everyday person,” says photographer and author Paul Horsted, creator of books with photos that compare and contrast historic and modern images.”But he’s got such a depth and command of knowledge at his fingertips, especially gold rush history and what happened afterward. As I was feeling my way in learning that history, David was so kind in being a sounding board.”

When Horsted mentions Wolff’s depth, he could include his friend’s recognition of romance in even the gritty business of mining. Wolff remembers the soft glow of light emanating from windows in Deadwood and Lead’s mining mills, reduction plants and slime plant at night as his family vacationed there –“evidence of workers’ massive efforts, round the clock, in grinding out wealth from the earth,” he says. The Wolffs lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, when he grew up. His dad was a traveling salesman, mostly supplying drug stores. David sometimes tagged along and that was his introduction to pharmacists — nice people and important members of their communities. Wolff’s parents encouraged him to pursue pharmacy himself. Sure, they knew David’s interest in history and his love for Wyoming’s past as documented throughout the capital city and at nearby Fort Laramie.

“But nobody in the world I grew up in thought you could make a living in history,” Wolff says. Still, the idea briefly crossed his mind in college after reading Watson Parker’s classic Gold in the Black Hills. Wolff wrote to Parker, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and Parker replied. He thought Wolff might be better off using money that would cover tuition for building a personal library of good books delving into history.

If Wolff got a delayed start as a historian, he more than made up for it — and continues to do so with an agreement with the South Dakota Historical Society Press to author six books in the coming years that will combine Black Hills driving with learning history. He taught 17 years at Black Hills State, a period that overlapped 18 years as a member of the South Dakota State Historical Society board of trustees. Still, the term he feels best describes him is simply”a history buff.”

Which is exactly how he comes across sitting in downtown Custer’s Way Park talking to a couple friends about historic cabins. Specifically he mentions this park’s Daniel Flick cabin, long proclaimed as the first built in the Black Hills. And that may be, Wolff says, although it’s unlikely the structure would pass a test by modern historians for such designation. Judge Henry Way pretty much declared the Flick cabin as first while developing the park across the street from the county courthouse in the 1920s.”That was fifty years after the presence of gold in the Black Hills was first confirmed in Custer,” Wolff says,”and the men and women who were here soon after gold discovery were aging and wanted credit for what they built. Almost every town in the Black Hills had its cabin.”

Wolff met with author Paul Higbee (right) in Custer’s Way Park. Despite his long academic career, Wolff says the title that best describes him is “history buff.”

Wolff believes the demand for credit by pioneers is more interesting than whose cabin came first. And while the Black Hills claimed structures more impressive than those humble dwellings — especially its great mines — there was something uniquely American about log cabins. They seemed to assert the Black Hills had become part of America rather than uncharted territory.

“There are a lot of myths and mistakes in history,” Wolff says.”I started out thinking I could correct those things. But misinformation hangs on so tenaciously.” People tend to believe what their families told them as kids, whether they lived in the Black Hills or visited as tourists. Embellished tales survive because they incorporate good storytelling techniques. Deadwood, most South Dakotans understand, has spawned myths since its founding in 1875 and 1876, and the HBO series Deadwood, which ran from 2004 to 2006, took that mythology to new heights. Wolff, frequently asked to comment on the series during its run, understood it as historical fiction and not a history lesson.”Something I looked for in the show, though, was whether or not it remained true to the personal qualities of the historical characters it portrayed,” Wolff says.”And I think it mostly did.”

For example, take Deadwood’s first sheriff, Seth Bullock. The series’ writers and actor Timothy Olyphant created a lawman who was mostly hands-off when it came to little things.”That was authentic to Bullock,” Wolff says.”He didn’t go after the drunk and disorderly and thought that celebrating by shooting into the air was okay.”

Wolff accepted an invitation to discuss Bullock on the Discovery Network’s Gunslingers series. It turned out well although he had to tell producers there’s no evidence that Bullock slung his guns or engaged in shootouts. And the program prompted this question: What does a professional historian facing TV cameras look like? It seems there’s a school of thought that says anybody living in the West and writing its history must be so enmeshed in the culture that they dress in character.”The Discovery Network asked me to show up with my look,” Wolff recalls.”I don’t have a look,” and he didn’t invent one for the appearance.

Wolff accepted another invitation related to Bullock, this one from the state Historical Society Press to write a biography, Seth Bullock — Black Hills Lawman. The book came out in 2009 and addressed aspects of the subject’s life that were not fodder for a TV shoot-em-up: personal friend of Teddy Roosevelt, government official who worked to establish Yellowstone National Park, federal Black Hills Forest Reserve (today’s Forest Service) superintendent, ranching innovator and Belle Fourche founder.

Wolff’s next book for the Historical Society Press profiled a remarkable Deadwood man, James K.P. Miller, strangely forgotten by history. Even Watson Parker told Wolff he never heard of him, although when Miller died at age 45 in 1891 a local paper predicted”his name will always be coupled with the prosperity of Deadwood and the Black Hills.” But it wasn’t, and no one was more instrumental in retrieving it than Wolff 130 years later. Among tools Wolff worked with in exploring Miller’s life and times was newspapers.com, technology that didn’t exist when he wrote the Bullock book. Miller was a native New Yorker, frontier grocery proprietor, builder of Deadwood’s Syndicate Block, and a wheeler-dealer who brought two railroads into Deadwood by setting up something of a competition between the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad and the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad.”Sometimes we forget,” Wolff says,”how competitive railroads were back then. They hated each other.” Miller apparently understood that industrial hatred and made it work for Deadwood, which became one of a select number of South Dakota towns served by two railroads. Very likely that saved Deadwood from deteriorating into something unrecognizable and beyond rehabilitation in the years after the gold rush.

Without Miller, would there have been Days of ’76 celebrations, today’s gaming industry or the Deadwood TV series? Maybe not. The Miller biography, The Savior of Deadwood, James K.P. Miller and the Gold Frontier, was published in 2021.

The Gold Rush and The Gateway to the Hills are the first two installments of Wolff’s “Black Hills History Tours” series.

Wolff’s new book, The Gold Rush, is far from a biography. It resembles the Works Progress Administration’s state guidebooks of the 1930s, with more detail yet retaining a thumbnail listing format. The book identifies driving routes from Custer northward (later volumes in the series will take travelers elsewhere through the Black Hills and surrounding plains), identifying historic locations along the way.”It is a travel book,” Wolff says,”but I don’t recommend places to stay or eat. It’s all history.”

It’s history that is found along roads accessible by regular cars — no ATVs required. Among the author’s favorite sites, most retaining an air of historical mystery, are the Flick cabin and the so-called China walls at Galena (on Galena Road off U.S. Highway 385 south of Deadwood). Galena was best known for its silver mines in the 19th century but in 1909 it was announced that the area held great quantities of copper. Construction began on a copper mill but only stone walls, impressively crafted, were completed.”It has become commonplace,” Wolff says,”to look at old rock work and mistakenly assume Chinese did it.” Indeed, Chinese laborers contributed to much construction during the Black Hills gold rush early on, but by 1909 few remained. Was there really a copper fortune to be mined at Galena? No, says Wolff.

There was no shortage of nefarious mine developers who attracted naÔve investors to sink money into operations that would never yield profits. Three-and-a-half miles below today’s Pactola Dam, about 10 miles west of Rapid City on Highway 44, the Fort Meade Hydraulic Gold Mining Company (perhaps named for Fort Meade army officers who invested) began blasting a tunnel to move water for a sluice box that would work supposedly gold-rich gravel. The company’s very real tunneling, done from 1879 to 1882, probably kept investors engaged, but it closed. Soon, another company picked up the work, also relying on investors, but disappeared in 1889. Not much gold was recovered. What remained was a tunnel moving swiftly flowing water and an underground falls, later illuminated with electricity and named Thunderhead Falls for tourists. The attraction is permanently closed now, but the inspiring natural setting of cliffs and rushing waters makes it easy to see how investors thought something good was bound to take root.

Another site Wolff introduces is one the Forest Service calls the”only gold mining site on the BHNF (Black Hills National Forest) with a standing mill frame.” That’s the Gold Mountain Mine, northwest of Hill City down Burnt Fork Road. Lots of infrastructure work was done there in the 1920s and ’30s.”There is, however, no record of production,” Wolff says. That didn’t stop the Black Hills Historic Preservation and Trust Society from deciding to preserve the mill, rock work and exterior boilers a few years back, with volunteers and students from the Boxelder Job Corps Work Center, joining the effort.

This is a travel book, yes, but it will undoubtedly reach armchair travelers around the world and find use as a well-organized reference. A glance reveals the remarkable range of historic personalities connected to the Black Hills across the years, from giant American industrialist George Hearst (who developed Homestake, the western hemisphere’s biggest gold mine at Lead) to Lakota traditionalists committed to retaining a modern presence. Wolff is certainly describing more authentic Indigenous historical views than the WPA writers and in part credits landing on the faculty of Black Hills State, a university committed to Native course offerings and its Center for American Indian Studies. In particular he appreciated his late colleague Jace DeCory, a widely respected Lakota elder and teacher.”She was invaluable in helping me understand Lakota perspectives, and was always balanced and thoughtful,” Wolff says.

The book was released this summer, and surely readers will want to collect the entire series of six. They won’t wait long. There’s a chance the second will come out later this year, and Wolff and his editor and designers are working at a pace that could see two more published in 2025 and the remaining two in 2026. Upcoming books will address the Lawrence County triumvirate of Deadwood, Lead and Spearfish, Rapid City and the central Hills, the southern Hills, the Belle Fourche River and Wyoming Black Hills, and what Wolff calls”unknown, under-told or under-appreciated stories.”

The Black Hills delight people who sometimes declare they’ve found a pristine natural environment. But travel with David Wolff and you’ll see it’s a rare patch of the Hills that hasn’t been touched profoundly by humans — Lakota defenders, the U.S. Army, railway builders, miners, loggers, engineers who transformed land and water, town builders and, after devastating fires, town rebuilders.

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

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Bombs Over the Badlands

By Paul Higbee

Once in a while, in or near the Badlands, a hiker will chance upon a gleaming, fully exposed, big caliber shell casing on the white hardpan ground. Sometimes the discoverer guesses it to be a remnant of the frontier wars, maybe from a great Gatling gun.

In fact, it’s a remnant of 20th century military exercises. More than 300,000 acres in southwestern South Dakota were designated by the federal government as a gunnery and bombing range, active from the 1940s into the 1970s.”The Badlands were littered with .30 caliber and .50 caliber shell casings,” says historian Phil Hall, author of Reflections of the Badlands.”And I’ve found some unexploded shells.”

He’s also come across scattered pieces of tin that, brought together, form the shape of World War II era bombs, a couple feet long with fins.

“Dummy bombs,” Hall says.”They looked and flew like real bombs, and they were filled with sand so they had the weight of real bombs.” It was possible, he adds, for dummy bombs to incur real damage, like one that slammed through a church roof in Interior.

Much of this debris was cleared away in recent years, but not all. What remains is easier to find than first-hand accounts of gunnery and bombing action during World War II. The range was cleared of people and livestock in 1942, although some ranchers didn’t hesitate to briefly sneak cattle back when grass conditions were good. There were no reports of civilian ground deaths, and only rumors of animal fatalities.

With a world war looking likely in the late 1930s, South Dakota’s congressional delegation pushed for developing an Army air base within the state. Preliminary plans took form in 1941, and moved into implementation phase after Japanese bombers hit Hawaii that December. By the fall of 1942, Army Air Corps pilots were flying B-17 bombers out of spanking new Rapid City Army Air Base — today’s Ellsworth Air Force Base. Much touted empty land immediately to the southeast helped South Dakota win the base and bomber mission, because airmen-in-training could pelt the rugged terrain with bombs and smaller ammunition.

Only the land wasn’t empty. The Rapid City Daily Journal in 1942 assured readers the range sat south of Badlands National Monument so that tourist travel wouldn’t be impacted. A curious reader could glance at a map and see south of the national monument meant the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. More than 100 families across the reservation’s north side lost homes and ag land when the federal government declared eminent domain.

“My grandfather had an allotment from the time the reservation was started, and in 1942 he and my grandmother had six kids and had just built a new house,” says Clifford Whiting of Kyle.”He had about 400 acres and was given 15 days to get out, and got very little money for the land.”

Unless they were able to enlist, many of those forced out had great difficulty finding work. In the case of Whiting’s grandparents, who had created a sophisticated irrigation system and spring cellar, the reservation lost a key dairy supplier.

None of which, of course, diminished the courage and commitment airmen demonstrated in the skies over the Badlands and reservation. They learned the functions of big four-motor B-17s, manned by crews of 10. Additionally pilots, typically 21 or 22 years old, were expected to develop qualities so they could effectively lead their crews into combat. Full crews included a pilot and copilot, navigator, radioman, engineer, bombardier and gunners. All jobs were tough to master; failing and”washing out” was a universal worry. What’s more, crew members learned as much as they could about one another’s jobs so they could step in when in-flight emergencies struck. Crews who demonstrated top proficiency departed Rapid City for eventual combat stations around the world, including England to become part of the Eighth Air Force as it destroyed the German oil industry and supported the Normandy invasion. Late in the war B-29 bomber crews also trained in Rapid City.

The public always grasped what bombardiers did but sometimes forgot that B-17s and other bombers were also armed with machine guns. Quality machine gunners were essential, and the Army was surprised by how difficult it was to train them. Even country boys who bragged they could dispatch a rabbit at 300 yards found aircraft gunnery — firing at aerial or ground targets from a moving plane — a whole different challenge. Lots of .50 caliber machine gun bullets were spent fixing the deficiency. Hall thinks flaring tracer bullets that accompanied volleys of machine gun fire largely accounted for grassfires that occasionally ignited during maneuvers. Sometimes incidents happened far off the designated range, in surrounding counties and on the Rosebud Reservation. Crews found the vast prairies a navigational challenge.

Whether it was a bomb that wasn’t a dummy, or a tracer bullet, something from a plane triggered a fire half a mile from Sand Hill School east of Wanblee, recalls Joe Stratton. He was a student there, 12 or 13 years old, and he heard no explosion.”It was a grass fire,” he remembers,”but it was early spring or late winter and it didn’t amount to much.” Another time an entire plane dropped from the sky near Wanblee, making a safe landing after an apparent malfunction. Stratton says it was able to fly away off frozen ground after mechanics arrived to make repairs.

Airborne, the B-17 was an impressive sight.”Some of them were quite low, maybe 500 feet or lower,” Stratton says. Future U.S. Senator Jim Abourezk recalled the novelty of seeing a bomber fly over his hometown of Wood when he was a boy. In December of 1943, a B-17 crashed at Soldier Creek west of Mission, killing the crew.”I was awed by the stories of the kids from Mission who had hurried out to pick up pieces of the airplane as souvenirs,” Abourezk wrote in his autobiography. That set up a dilemma for him. He found himself hoping for a bomber crash near Wood, but couldn’t imagine how it could happen”without killing one of our service men.”

Or many more than one. A B-17 accident never rocked Wood, but planes did crash at Rapid City, Kadoka, Soldier Creek and other South Dakota locations, typically resulting in the deaths of all 10 airmen aboard.

After the war ended, the bombing land wasn’t offered to those who previously owned it. The matter of cleanup had to be considered, the federal government said. In the 1960s the South Dakota National Guard gained permission to train there. That was the era, Hall believes, when the use of live ordnance peaked, more so than during World War II. By the 1970s something else explosive played out across Pine Ridge. As more and more residents embraced the idea of tribal sovereignty, questions were raised. What were the feds thinking, repurposing reservation land after the national emergency that justified eminent domain passed? How was it the federal government’s prerogative to invite the state National Guard in, and to eventually transfer part of the bombing range to the Interior Department for creating the Badlands National Park’s south unit? Memories of the government’s assertive presence decades ago still colors discussions about land use today, with issues ranging from grazing leases to a proposed tribal national park.

Eventually some families, including Clifford Whiting’s, were able to repurchase land — at much higher prices than what their parents and grandparents received in 1942, of course.

Ansel Wooden Knife, who ran a cafe at Interior for many years, became a go-to guy for stories about the bombing range. He recalled his mother-in-law’s description of shells hitting her house along Highway 44 during World War II. Wooden Knife found artifacts, sought out abandoned installations and could guide curious people to historically significant sites. A lonely site some consider the epicenter of bombing range history sits north and west of Potato Creek. A hilltop is ringed with 80 or 100 old cars, forming a circle a couple hundred feet across. It was an aerial target.

Wooden Knife directed photographer Mike Heintz to the cars several years ago. Heintz recalls”driving and driving across probably 15 or 16 miles of raw prairie. When I got there it was windy so the grass was lying down, and the cars were creaking.”

Heintz thought of the spot as an isolated, metallic memorial to airmen who once passed overhead. It’s appropriate that there’s somewhat of a mystery to this eerie place. Some histories and press reports say the cars were hauled here for National Guard exercises in the 1960s, but most local people interviewed for this article believe the big target dates back to World War II. Car bodies from the 1930s are dominant, but Heintz photographed at least one post-war model. Is it possible an original group of cars took hits from World War II airmen, and that the site was expanded with more cars brought in years later?

Either way, Wooden Knife thinks, this place that feels like a memorial should be considered an actual one.”I think everything should be preserved,” he says.”They’re reminders that there’s a price for freedom.”

During both World War II and the Cold War, South Dakotans enlisted at high rates. That was especially true for the Lakota people. And even on the home front, their loved ones experienced the sights and sounds of warfare, literally in their back yards.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.