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The Verne Miller Story: From Lawman To Outlaw

By Brad Smith

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

No stone would be left unturned in the search for Verne Miller in the aftermath of the Kansas City Massacre of June 17, 1933. FBI photo.


In November of 1920 the Huron newspaper, the Evening Huronite, promoted a young candidate for Beadle County sheriff by editorializing that with his election “crooks and licentious characters will have no protection and the safety of our wives and children and the future well-being of our families will be fully guaranteed.” Thirteen years later the U.S. Justice Department announced a nationwide manhunt for a man they identified as “the most dangerous criminal in the country.”

Both observations were accurate and, incredibly, both referred to the same enigmatic man: Verne Miller. He has been described as “easily the most contradictory and mysterious figure of the 1930s Public Enemy community.” A handsome blue-eyed redhead, he did not drink or gamble and abhorred swearing. However, he was the chief suspect in from five to 12 murders and was rumored to have participated in many more. His path from respected South Dakota lawman to reviled national outlaw is a puzzling one, with unanswered questions at every turn. Even his early life is shrouded in mystery. Various documents list his birth date as 1892, 1895 and 1896, and his birthplace as Interior, S.D., Kimball, S.D. and Illinois.

What is known is that Miller’s parents divorced when he was young, leaving him on his own at an early age. He dropped out of school at the age of ten. In 1914 he moved to Huron to work as a mechanic. In 1916 he joined the Army and served on the Mexican border. In the spring of 1917 he returned to Huron and married. A month later he was recalled to military service. On April 17, 1918, Miller landed in France with the 164th Infantry. Color Sergeant Verne Miller returned from World War I a genuine hero. A decorated marksman and sniper, he was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravery. He was wounded twice and suffered lung damage in a poison gas attack.

Soon after his return from Europe, Miller joined the Huron city police force. The local newspaper heralded his arrival. “Lawbreakers had better watch out,” the editor announced, “if they want to keep their health.”

Right from the start, Miller’s law enforcement career was marked by dedication and courage, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness. Less than three months on the force, Miller arrested W.S. Davis, a member of a prominent Huron family, for blocking traffic with his car. Davis argued vehemently but his protests held little sway with the conscientious young patrolman and only earned him a night in jail.

On another occasion Miller’s courage may have saved a life. M.B. Balsiger, manager of the local theater, engaged R.E. Beckwith, a war veteran and popular speaker, to lecture on his military experiences. On the night of the lecture a disagreement arose regarding the speaker ‘s fee and Balsiger knocked the young man unconscious. The war was fresh in everyone’s mind and patriotic fervor was high. When news that Balsiger had beaten up a war hero reached the street, an angry mob gathered outside the theater. The building was doused with yellow paint and the mob demanded that the manager give himself up. A frightened Balsiger turned to Officer Miller for help. Miller first ordered the crowd to disperse. When they ignored him, Miller led Balsiger toward the protection of the police station. Someone in the mob threw a brick, striking the manager in the head. Miller drew his pistol and advanced on the mob. Finally the rioters dispersed and Balsiger’s life was spared.

This sometimes reckless devotion to duty did not go over well with everyone in Huron. In May of 1920 Miller resigned from the police force, saying that he and Police Chief Johnson suffered fundamental disagreements over the conduct of police business. But Miller had no intention of leaving law enforcement. By this time he had already been named the Republican candidate for Beadle County Sheriff. The 1920 sheriff’s campaign was hotly contested with Miller the focus of numerous rumors and accusations. Still he managed to eke out a 41-vote victory.

The career of the once-feared Beadle County Sheriff would come to an abrupt and startling end as Verne Miller turned gangster.

Sheriff Miller was an active community leader. He was a founder of the Huron American Legion post and served as its delegate to the state convention. He was an avid fisherman and amateur boxer. He proved to be an active sheriff as well. Records note that he located and destroyed nine moonshine stills during his first six months in office. So much bootlegged liquor was confiscated that Miller began using it as antifreeze in the radiators of the sheriff’s department vehicles.

Miller gained a reputation for being quick to use his weapon. It was said that, while a city officer, he twice fired on tourists for violating traffic ordinances. After the election the county commission warned Miller of the legal ramifications of an over-eager trigger finger.

On at least one occasion this reputation proved useful. A prison escapee turned himself over to authorities when, while hiding in a pasture, he heard what was apparently the backfire of a passing car. He told a reporter, “I thought Verne Miller was on my trail and had started shooting at me. I sure wished that I was back in jail again.”

In the spring of 1922 Sheriff Miller was well on his way to re-election and a second term. Then Miller’s wife, Mildred, was admitted to a Rochester, Minn., hospital. Miller told his deputies that he was taking a short leave to visit his wife and from Rochester they would go to a Washington, D.C. sanitarium to take treatments for his lungs. After a couple of weeks with no contact from the sheriff, his deputies became worried and then suspicious. They discovered that, shortly before he left, Miller had withdrawn $4,000 from various bank accounts, money that had apparently come from county property tax collections. The career of Sheriff Verne Miller came to an abrupt and startling end. The career of Verne Miller, gangster, was just beginning.

The State Sheriff’s Office was called in and a search begun for Miller and the missing funds. For three months there was no sign of the sheriff, then South Dakota officials received a call from a St. Paul, Minn., hotel operator wondering if they were still looking for Miller.

In the 1920s and 1930s there were several places where bandits and outlaws could go to “cool off”; communities where a tacit agreement had been reached between local officials and the criminal element. The most popular of these havens was St. Paul. As one criminal noted, “In those days if you hadn’t seen a friend for a few months you looked two places — prison or St. Paul.” The St. Paul police force of the 1920s was the most corrupt in the country, so it was inevitable that a renegade lawman like Miller would seek refuge there. Before the hotel owner notified South Dakota officials he had called the St. Paul chief of detectives and was assured that Miller was no longer wanted. The S.D. State Sheriff’s deputy who arrested Miller reported that Miller’s first phone call while in custody was to that same chief of detectives.

Back in the Beadle County jail where, just a few months before, he had been jailer rather than jailed, Miller displayed his resolute self-reliance. He turned down offers from friends to raise the $ 10,000 bond. Miller pleaded guilty to the embezzlement of $2,600 in county funds and was sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary.

Verne Miller’s 1923 FBI Photo.

Verne Miller entered the South Dakota State Penitentiary on April 4, 1923. Armed with numerous character references, including one from the states’ attorney who had prosecuted him, Miller soon landed the cushy position of warden’s chauffeur. He passed his prison term driving the warden about the city and corresponding with his many friends and supporters. Miller was released on parole in September of 1924. According to records, he found work as a farm laborer near Doland, making $70 a month. But Miller had sampled the good life and it could not be lived on that sum. Within a year he was indicted for bootlegging. He paid a $200 fine in Sioux Falls federal court in October 1925 and disappeared.

The next few years offer infrequent glimpses of Verne Miller and his activities. In February of 1928 he was indicted for his part in a Minneapolis speakeasy shootout. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence. In 1929 Miller was running Canadian gambling interests for Lepke Buchalter, one of the most powerful figures in organized crime on the East Coast and an important connection in Miller’s growing criminal resume.

In late 1930 Miller was back in the Twin Cities. He held up the Wilmar, Minn., bank with Machine Gun Kelly and the dean of American bank robbers, Harvey Bailey. In 1931 with Harvey Bailey and Oklahoma outlaw Frank Nash, Miller robbed a bank in Sherman, Texas.

In the summer of 1932 Miller paid his last visit to his father’s farm near White Lake. Friends and relatives remember that the gangster’s shiny new car and expensive clothes made quite an impression in that Depression-ravaged farm community.

In December of 1932 Miller drove a getaway car for the infamous Barker gang when they held up the Third Northwestern Bank of Minneapolis. That robbery resulted in tragedy when two city officers happened on the scene and were slain in a hail of machine-gun fire. The Barker gang split up after the Minneapolis bank robbery. Miller moved to Kansas City to cool off.

A few months later Miller received a frantic call from the wife of his old friend, Frank Nash, saying that her husband had been arrested by federal agents. That phone call touched off events that would culminate the next day in the bloody outrage that will forever be known as the Kansas City Massacre.

On the morning of June 17, 1933, the parking lot of the Kansas City Union Railroad Station was crowded with arriving and departing passengers, their family and friends. Few in the crowd paid any attention to the group of men moving warily among the parked cars. If they had they would have seen seven nervous lawmen surrounding a handcuffed prisoner. The prisoner was Frank Nash. The lawmen, FBI agents Vetterli, Caffrey, Smith and Lackey, Kansas City detectives Grooms and Hermanson, and Oklahoma Police Chief Otto Reed, had reason to be nervous. Nash was a well-known criminal with strong ties in the underworld. They feared that some of his friends might attempt a rescue.

As they loaded Nash into a waiting patrol car, their fears were realized. Three men jumped from a nearby car. One of them, brandishing a Tommy gun, commanded the law officers to “Hold it!” Time froze as the two armed camps regarded each other. Then one of the officers went for his pistol and all hell broke loose.

Within seconds it was over. Bodies were scattered about the parking lot. Grooms, Hermanson, Reed and FBI agent Caffrey were dead. Agents Vetterli and Lackey were seriously wounded. Nash, the object of the ill-fated delivery, was also among the dead. One woman, surveying the bloody scene, moaned, “It’s just like Chicago.” The bandits escaped unscathed.

The late 1920s and early 1930s marked a decade of lawlessness. Colorful outlaws such as Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, and Ma Barker were as familiar to the public as politicians and movie celebrities. Even in that context the Kansas City Massacre was a shocking and galvanizing event. The attorney general declared the massacre “a challenge to the government. The army of crime has declared war against the United States.” It took the FBI two weeks to identify Miller as the leader of the Kansas City gang and their reaction was certain and instantaneous. No stone would go unturned in their search for the gangster.

Controversy still surrounds the Kansas City Massacre. Historians disagree on the identity of Miller’s two accomplices. Even the motives behind the massacre are in dispute. Many say that Miller was trying to rescue Nash while a nearly equal number believe Nash’s death was a gangland hit. Regardless of motive, it is doubtful that the intent was to murder the law officers. Even someone as impetuous as Verne Miller would have foreseen the outrage that followed the unprovoked slaughter.

Miller left Kansas City immediately but the FBI, in their efforts to find the fugitive, put the heat on all of the underworld. Alvin Karpis, a member of the Barker gang, was called before representatives of the old Capone Syndicate. “Where,” they demanded, “is Miller?” Karpis asked what they wanted of his one-time partner. “Everybody’s after that bastard,” he was told.

Miller fled to New York, seeking protection from his old friend, Lepke Buchalter, but the word was out that anyone suspected of harboring Miller would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. No place was safe.

In October of 1933, the FBI traced Miller to Chicago. They surrounded his apartment but Miller escaped in a flurry of bullets. Miller’s escape, though, was an omen of the tightening dragnet. With every lawman in the nation as well as the might of the criminal underworld after him , Miller’s days were numbered.

On the evening of November 29, 1933, a motorist on the outskirts of Detroit discovered a naked mutilated body alongside the road. Fingerprints taken by the FBI confirmed that the search for Verne Miller was over.

News of Miller’s death was greeted by his family and friends in South Dakota with a mixture of regret and resignation. The Evening Huronite reported that most of the citizens of Miller’s hometown “refused to remember his reputation of a life of crime and grieved the Verne Miller, fearless sheriff and valiant soldier, they knew.” His wife, Mildred, though legally separated from Miller since 1929, stuck by him, saying “I don’t believe all the things they say about Verne. Because he became involved in a few scrapes nearly every major crime in the country was laid to him. He was wonderful to me and I have nothing against him.”

His grief-stricken father made plans for the funeral; plans that, like most of Verne’s life, were plagued with controversy. Miller, as a veteran and American Legion member, was entitled to full military rites. However, the national American Legion commander forbade the local post from participating, saying it would only bring embarrassment to the organization. National proclamation notwithstanding, Miller’s flag-draped casket was escorted from White Lake to Huron by a contingent of uniformed ex-servicemen, Miller’s friends. There, following a simple ceremony before an overflow crowd, Verne Miller’s doomed journey came to an end.

In one final twist in the tragedy of Verne Miller’s life, the erstwhile lawman contributed greatly to the future of law enforcement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used the outrage generated by the Kansas City Massacre to lobby Congress for a true national crime-fighting force. Prior to the massacre, FBI agents could not carry weapons and were not even empowered to make arrests. Within months of the Kansas City killings, Congress passed a comprehensive crime bill giving the FBI all the powers they sought.

Perhaps it is this that provides some final sense and purpose to the otherwise squandered life of Verne Miller–a lawman gone bad.

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Faith in the Voters

By Patrick Gallagher

South Dakota voters have enacted dozens of laws at the ballot box and challenged many more since we became the first state to adopt the initiative and referendum in 1898. We’ve nixed the inheritance tax, banned corporate hog farms, okayed a Right to Work law and said”no” to moving the University of South Dakota from Vermillion to Sioux Falls (7 percent favored the latter). Plus we’ve passed term limits, family farm acts and daylight savings time.

Some state lawmakers find the process insulting — even embarrassing — when their laws are referred and defeated by unelected common folk. Business lobbyists would clearly prefer to argue their positions in the halls of the state capitol than in 66 counties. But citizens and grassroots organizations — including some who can’t afford to send a lobbyist to Pierre — have won major victories because they collected thousands of signatures and took their ideas straight to the people.

November-style democracy was the inspiration of a feisty Catholic priest who harbored a healthy distrust of institutions and politicians. An Aberdeen fixture for a third of a century, Father Robert Haire played controversial roles in many important territorial and early statehood events. On his 70th birthday in 1915, an Aberdeen newspaper published a tribute to the pastor who was once called the Terror of all Evil-Doers:”A quarter of a century ago, Haire was one of the best loved and best hated men in the community, this because he was a pathfinder. Today, everybody loves him and looks up to him.”

Robert Haire was born in Freedom, Michigan, in 1845. His Irish Presbyterian parents named him Robert Emmet Haire after the Irish rebel Robert Emmet. As a young man he taught in a rural school near Flint and boarded with an Irish Catholic family. Inspired by their devotion, he converted to Catholicism in 1865 and later entered the seminary. He then changed his middle name to William because there’s never been a Saint Emmet. Ordained in 1874, Haire returned to Flint and developed a westward itch along with many of his parishioners. Hearing stories of prosperity in Brown County, Dakota Territory, they headed west, arriving on June 26, 1880. Haire celebrated Mass the very next day in a sod shanty. He filed a claim near Columbia and began plans for Brown County’s first Catholic church, an 18 by 45 foot sod structure.

Shortly after arriving, Haire went to Watertown to prove his claim. On July 4, 1880, he celebrated Mass in the Watertown courthouse and then stepped outside to deliver a rousing Independence Day speech, revealing his twin passions for God and country to his new neighbors.

Haire offered his services to Dakota’s pioneer bishop, Martin Marty, thus beginning a long and tense relationship. Marty assigned him a large territory running from the Minnesota border to the Missouri River and from Huron to what became the North Dakota border. Haire traveled on foot, horse, buggy, and train, celebrating Masses in homes, hotels, and railroad cars. He visited 40 to 50 stations and built churches in several communities. He took up temporary residence in Aberdeen’s Sherman House, which he referred to as”a lighthouse on the coast of hell.” His Masses in the Sherman House dining room sometimes drew as many as 150 worshippers.

In the winter of 1881-82, Haire’s sod church in Columbia caved in, so he looked to build again. That spring, the city of Aberdeen raised money to build a church but the Presbyterian minister was the first to apply so he won the funds. When Haire launched his own building campaign, both Catholics and non-Catholics donated land and money. He dedicated the new Sacred Heart Church on December 26, 1882 (the Presbyterian church wasn’t dedicated until 1883).

In 1886, Haire invited the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fargo to help him establish a school in the church. A year later, they launched an effort to build a freestanding school. Haire helped haul lumber during the construction. The three-story Presentation Academy of the Sacred Heart opened in 1888.

Haire also recruited the Knights of Labor, a national organization made up mostly of Catholics. The Knights of Labor was viewed with suspicion by the Church hierarchy until Pope Leo XIII gave his approval. Eventually Haire became the Knights’ state leader and newspaper editor. His early political activism also included the Dakota Farmers Alliance, formed in reaction to farmers’ sense of mistreatment at the hands of politicians, corporations and railroads. As Dakota Territory moved toward statehood (Haire was a delegate to a statehood convention), the Alliance attacked Gov. Arthur Mellette for being too friendly with the railroads. Still, Mellette later appointed Haire to the state board of charities and corrections.

Haire helped form the Alliance’s political wing, the Independent Party. Eventually becoming the Populist Party, it focused on regulating railroads, coinage of silver, and democratic reforms like the initiative and referendum. Haire is considered the originator of the American initiative and referendum process; he advocated for the idea several years before it became part of the Populist Party platform in 1890.

His political philosophy and his distrust of politicians led to his desire to create a way for people to propose laws without interference by elected representatives. He laid out his thoughts in an 1891 issue of the Dakota Ruralist:”These men make the laws to suit themselves — are a law to themselves. The people seldom get any law passed they want.”

Plutocrats resisted his proposal and he quickly refuted their arguments.”Of course, the entire plutocracy, given over to fleecing the values that labor produces, are afraid of the people,” Haire contended.”Such fellows will jump on any proposition with both feet when it is proposed to give the law-making power into the hands of the electors.” Nonetheless,”the people are capable of feeling for, giving form to, and finally decreeing their own laws.”

He described his program that would replace the legislature with a system for popularly proposed legislation:”any law that has been demanded by 25 percent or more of the precincts of the state shall be drafted and printed,” and distributed statewide. On the first Monday after the fourth of July,”the electors in their several precincts, shall either confirm or reject said law, using the Australian voting system. If a law passes, it is law. If it does not get a majority of the whole state electorate, it is no law.”

It wasn’t until 1898, during the re-election of South Dakota’s only Populist governor, Andrew E. Lee, that the initiative and referendum appeared on the state ballot as a constitutional amendment. The amendment passed easily, making South Dakota the first state in the nation to give voters such power.

“…Haire was one of the best loved and hated men in the community, this because he was a pathfinder.”

The initiative and referendum has become common in American democracy. Twenty-six other states have adopted one or both procedures. Since the first use of the initiative in Oregon in 1904, voters across the United States have considered about 2,300 statewide initiatives, approving 41 percent.

Despite the relatively infrequent use of initiatives in South Dakota, critics charge that it’s too easy to get issues on the ballot. By law, petitioners must collect signatures from 5 percent of the voters in the last gubernatorial election. Gov. Peter Norbeck raised the concern as early as 1917, but legislative efforts to increase the number of signatures needed to put a measure on the ballot have been rejected in statewide elections. During one legislative session, a proposal that would have required the requisite signatures from at least 33 counties was defeated when arguments arose over the”one-man, one-vote” principle. Shouldn’t two signatures from Mitchell count just as well as a signature from Eureka and another from Ipswich?

David Owen of Sioux Falls, president of the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce and Industry, has worked to both support and defeat ballot initiatives. He believes the process needs”respectful reform” and he lobbied successfully in the 2009 legislative session for several changes. Owen believes South Dakotans like the grassroots initiative process but he also thinks they’re put off by the”commercialization” that’s developed around the process, in which consultants and signature-gathering firms sell their services to interest groups.†

Before the initiative and referendum were approved, Haire served on the Board of Regents during some tumultuous years. Gov. Lee thought there were enough colleges in the state, but Haire believed at least one more was needed in Aberdeen. The governor vetoed the first attempt to create a”normal school” there, but later acquiesced. Northern Normal and Industrial School opened in 1901, and Haire received much credit. A memorial to him stands on the Northern State University campus, a rare tribute to a man of the cloth on a public campus.

By the time the college was formed, however, he wasn’t exactly a man of the cloth. Years earlier, his activism had put him in conflict with Bishop Marty. One of Haire’s earliest causes was temperance. He spoke around the state in support of a prohibition clause in the state constitution. While Bishop Marty shared Haire’s disdain for alcohol, he preferred to leave state regulation out of it. Others also disagreed with Haire. In 1888, the Aberdeen News reported that some of his parishioners were petitioning to get him removed, noting that,”this attack was conceived in the late Brewers convention in St. Paul.” Haire confronted them directly. During a Sunday mass, he asked those present who supported him to stand. The”congregation rose en masse.”

Haire was perhaps more directly antagonizing to his bishop when he launched Dakota’s first Catholic newspaper, the Dakota Catholic American. In the first issue in 1887, editor Haire wrote:”In politics we will be strictly non-partisan. In religion we will be what our name indicates. In economic measures we will be for the right. We have the approbation of our good father, Our Bishop Marty. Thus fortified, we cannot fail.” The good father’s approbation failed rather quickly. Future issues betrayed Haire’s politics, and Bishop Marty shut the paper down in November 1888.

Haire’s progressively radical politics probably sealed his fate. The Aberdeen News reported on a lecture he gave in 1888:

[Fr. Haire] emphatically declar[ed] that the time had come when the laboring masses would have possession, and if this could not be secured in any other way a bloody rebellion would certainly be the result. He said, also, that he was getting very tired of this representative form of government, but hoped with all his heart for the time to come when the old Puritan democracy principles would rule the nation; when the laws would be framed by the people themselves and not by a few pinheads and trading representatives of the Vanderbilt-Gould type.†

Bishop Marty soon traveled to Aberdeen and ordered Haire transferred to Wakonda in southeast South Dakota. When Haire declined the bishop dismissed him. He remained a priest, but could no longer serve as a parish pastor or administer sacraments.

Haire’s punishment weighed heavily on him. He later told a friend,”Do you know what has kept me in the church in spite of my exceeding bitterness against the bishop? It is the Blessed Sacrament. When I kneel before the altar, I seem to hear a whisper, ëStay a little longer. All will be well.’ And so I hang on in spite of everything.”

In religious exile, Haire grew more involved in politics. He took an active part in the Fusion Party, the coalition of Populists, Democrats, and Silver Republicans (Republicans who left their party to support coinage of silver) that elected Gov. Lee in 1896. Soon thereafter, however, Haire saw the coalition fragmenting and vented his disappointment. In speeches at Fusion Party meetings in 1898, he alternately raged at his comrades and called for harmony

Eventually, however, Haire began to step away from the state stage. He was a Socialist presidential elector in 1900, and in 1902, the Socialists nominated him for the U.S. Senate. Otherwise he seemed to be more interested in his local Socialist meetings, where he was recognized as a mentor according to a tribute published by the South Dakota Socialist Party after his death:”During the earlier years of the organization, he seldom missed a meeting, always taking a leading part, but gradually teaching us to think and speak for ourselves. Later on, he would take no part unless we seemed to be drifting from Marxian principles when he would set us right.”

Despite Haire’s challenges and successes in public affairs, there was a hole in his life. When Bishop Thomas O’Gorman replaced Bishop Marty, Haire submitted his case for reinstatement. O’Gorman asked Haire to make a 30-day retreat and a confession. When Haire complied in 1902, the bishop assigned him as chaplain to the Presentation Sisters and their new St. Luke’s Hospital in Aberdeen. He served there for the remainder of his life.

In January 1916 he wrote to his brother,”My own health is on the down grade, yet no grippe.” On March 4, 1916, he celebrated Mass and then went to his room. He fell ill and reportedly called for a local Baptist minister who had been a Socialist comrade, but the friend arrived too late.

Bishop O’Gorman presided at the funeral in the Sacred Heart Church that Haire had built three decades earlier. Both former Gov. Lee and Socialist leader Eugene Debs sent notes. Debs wrote,”Father Haire was a true follower of the Judean Carpenter. He gave all he had, and best of all, he gave himself to the poor. But he not only sympathized with the poor, he told them why they were poor and how they might put an end to their poverty.”

A newspaper profile after Haire’s death related a telling story. Haire and a parishioner were approached on an Aberdeen street by a vagrant who successfully solicited a dollar from the pastor. The parishioner scolded,”That bum’ll probably get drunk on your dollar.” Haire replied,”Let’s give the poor fellow the benefit of the doubt. If he was indeed hungry — and I believe he was — how would I have squared myself with the Giver of all good things had I refused him?”

A few months after Haire’s death, Bishop O’Gorman penned a fitting epitaph:”He had been in earlier years, when the State was still in the pioneer stage, a most zealous missionary. I believe that the last ten peaceful years of his life and his happy death were rewards of the good and fruitful work of the early years.”

†

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

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The Great Hyde County Prairie Fire of 1947

By Johnny Bown

Editor’s Note: Third-generation rancher Johnny Bown sent this account of Hyde County’s devastating prairie fire to his mother-in-law in St. Louis 64 years ago. His daughter, Eileen Bown Just of Hoven, sent it to us in 2000. The September 1947 fire was apparently started by a cigarette flicked from a car on Highway 14 between Highmore and Holabird. It burned north northwest across 40 miles of prairie, almost to Lebanon.

The fire started about 30 miles south of us, and the wind brought it directly at us. Our house set in dry grass with prairie on all sides, so when I first saw the fire, there went all my hard work building the house.

Eventually the wind changed enough to push the fire to the east of our house one mile, so we were in luck. We had a cattle sprayer with a fire hose attachment, so we took it down to the fire, but it was no use. There were five fire trucks there already and they were helpless. It jumped wide highways and burned through green fields. There was no stopping it.

The whole country was just a black desert. My brothers Fred and Bob and the home place and ours were the only places it spared. The rest of the boys plus people from all over the state were fighting the fire, so I came back and got the saddle horse and took off to try to push the cattle into bare ground, but the doggone things were scared and wouldn’t drive. The fire was coming right toward them at about 25 miles per hour, so I had to get them out.

Finally I got them crowded into a dam when it came roaring through, so I high-tailed it for home with the fire chasing me all the way. The heat was terrific! Never loved a horse as much as old Smoky after he took me out of that fire.

We fought side fires all that night, next day, and new fires flared up next night. Rosemary was out with an old water-soaked coat fighting too. She looked so cute all smoky and black. Ha. Most of the time she was patrolling the fire in the car, watching for fresh ones. In all it burned over 1,000 square miles, so it was fight or get burned up.

We were lucky. At one time about 200 square miles right next to us was roaring at once. Cattle, horses, rabbits, pheasants — everything was running madly ahead of it. When you drive around this black desert and see the paint burned off the sides of ranch houses and buildings, you wonder how those people ever saved them with water buckets and wet rags.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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First Lady of Sturgis

Editor’s Note: Carl Edeburn, a retired SDSU professor, is the author of Sturgis: The Story of the Rally, published in 2003. While researching the book, he spent time with Pearl Hoel, the woman many consider the matriarch of the rally. He wrote this story about Hoel for our March/April 2004 issue. Hoel died in February 2005 at age 99, but she is on the minds of many of the nearly 500,000 bikers descending upon the Meade County town for the annual rally, which runs Aug. 4-10.

By Carl Edeburn

Many of the thousands of bikers who make the annual pilgrimage to Sturgis would be surprised to learn that the much-heralded event now dominated by Harley Davidson was hatched at the workbench of an Indian motorcycle shop in Sturgis. They might be even more surprised that a steadying hand behind the rally for nearly six decades was a 98-year-old woman in a spiffy white pantsuit.

Pearl Hoel is a South Dakota living treasure. Closing in on a century, she is chipper, gracious and excited by life, an interesting person to visit, if you can catch her at home on Baldwin Street.”Any day but Wednesday is good,” she said.”On Wednesday I play bridge with my friends.” Of nine women in her bridge group, four are over 90, including Lillian Lushbough, who is 100.

Pearl and her husband, Clarence”Pappy” Hoel (pronounced”Hoyle”), were instrumental in initiating the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in 1937. She and Clarence were married 61 years before he passed away in 1989. Before they met, Pearl taught school in Mystic and Piedmont. She and Clarence met at a dance in Piedmont, and married in 1928. Their only child, Jack, was born seven years later.

When electrical refrigeration arrived in Sturgis and Ft. Meade in 1936, the Hoel’s ice business began to wane. That’s when Clarence decided to open a shop in their garage, specializing in Indian motorcycles. To enhance the new business, Clarence organized a riding club similar to a larger club in Rapid City supported by the Harley Davidson dealer. One Sunday the club was picnicking in the Black Hills when an automobile tourist said they looked like a bunch of Gypsies, and the Jack Pine Gypsies was born.

During the Depression of the 1930s, Pearl assisted needy rural families with the WPA. She drove the countryside in an old car, delivering clothing and food. One night she was driving a lonely country road with the backseat and trunk filled with fresh beef when she had a flat tire. By the time she had dragged a couple of hind quarters out of the trunk to get at the spare tire and jack, a pack of coyotes had surrounded the car and begun to howl. That was more exciting than riding two-up with Pappy, Pearl said.

After the WPA era, Pearl went to work as deputy to the Meade County clerk of courts, and when the boss retired, she was appointed to the job. Later she was elected register of deeds, and still later, county auditor. In the lean years of the motorcycle business, during World War II and in the 1950s when the Indian motorcycle was fading, the Hoel family stayed well fed through Pearl’s jobs at the courthouse.

Pearl still lives in the Hoel home on Baldwin Street. Her son Jack checks in with her every morning after he stops at the post office.”Last year she asked me to get her a bigger snow shovel,” he chuckled as he introduced himself to me on my first visit.

I was writing a book about the Sturgis Rally, and knew Pearl could provide a wealth of information about its history. When she discovered that I was staying in a motel, she insisted that I stay with her”to save money.” Great hospitality and hot breakfasts.

After my book, Sturgis: The Story of the Rally, was published last summer, my wife Cleo and I stopped by Pearl’s house to deliver a copy. Pearl was excited about the book, but more excited about the pending 63rd Rally.”I’m going to have 24 people here this year,” she said.”Last year it was down — only 18 showed up.”

For years, people have arrived on Pearl’s doorstep on the Thursday and Friday before the motorcycle rally. Eight to 10 people roll sleeping bags out on the beds and on the floors of her two spare rooms. Another group sleep in the garage, two couples park motor homes in the yard, and others sleep in tents on the front lawn. Needless to say, Pearl’s one bathroom is well used that week. Another dozen bikers stay next door at Pearl’s neighbor’s house, and mingle with her two dozen guests.

For Pearl Hoel, Rally Week retains its excitement. Monday evening she attends the short track races, and on Tuesday the half-mile races at the Meade County Fairgrounds. Last summer she took an honorary lap around the track in Neil Hultman’s sidecar. Everyone stood and clapped, while Pearl smiled and waved to the crowd.

Wednesday is long and busy for Pearl. It begins with the Sturgis Hall of Fame breakfast, held in Spearfish last summer because Homeland Security closed Fort Meade’s Assembly Hall for the week. The breakfast honors motorcycle journalists, engineers, politicians, and racers who have made significant contributions to the sport. For this event, Pearl generally buys a new outfit and gets her hair done. This year was no exception; she dazzled the crowd in an exquisite white pantsuit.”I want to look good for this party,” she chuckled. First-time attendees who know little of the history and legacy of dirt track racing at Sturgis are suitably impressed when nationally-significant motorcyclists stand to honor the grand dame of the motorcycling world.

On Thursday, with help from local ladies and visitors, Pearl hosts her backyard breakfast for The Retreads, a national organization of motorcyclists over the age of 40. In 2002, former Sturgis racing champions from Ohio, New Mexico and California showed up, a delight to Pearl, who hadn’t seen them for years. Then the party was crashed by a television crew from the Travel Channel, who were taping a show on Sturgis.

In 2003 the surprise visitors were authors Jean Davidson and Marian Hersrud. Davidson, the granddaughter of motorcycle manufacturer Walter Davidson, was signing her book, Growing Up Harley Davidson, and Hersrud her novel, Sweet Thunder. Ms. Davidson’s book was in such demand that she ran out of copies. I even got to sign my book.

Friday begins with the White Plate Flat Trackers Association Breakfast in the Gypsy Club room at the J. C. Hoel Short Track. The WPFTA, conceived and organized by Pappy Hoel and Al Burke in 1979, is dedicated to the memory of early racers. Fearing that these legends would be forgotten by contemporary riders, Burke and Hoel organized an annual reunion for White Plate (Expert) Riders at the 1980 Rally. Pioneer dirt track racers who are able, ride a lap at the half-mile race. Pearl helps plan and cook for the event.

By Saturday, the downtown rally crowd is pulling up stakes and roaring out of Sturgis. But Lady Pearl and other true dirt track fans are attending the last short races at the Jackpine Gypsy Club grounds.

On Sunday, Sturgis feels like a ghost town. The crowd is gone, and Pearl and other club members and locals start talking about next year’s rally.

In the early rally days, Pearl and Clarence Hoel pitched a circus tent in their back yard to provide a place for visiting riders to meet, visit and sleep. The Hoels and the Jackpine Gypsies provided coffee and donuts in the evening, after riders returned from daytime tours.

The Gypsy Tours were initiated by the motorcycle club in 1938 to add an extra day to what was then a weekend rally, and to introduce visiting riders to the exquisite scenery of the Hills. On Friday, bikers rode to Sylvan Lake, Mount Rushmore and the State Game Lodge. Later, a northern tour to Wyoming and Devil’s Tower was introduced. At the end of the day, bikers returned to Sturgis for the Friday Night Feed. The Gypsy Tours were so popular that by the early 1970s the train of motorcycles reached eight miles long. It became necessary to break riders into six, and then 12 separate tours.

When the touring groups were smaller, Pearl and a couple of other Gypsy wives provided a midday picnic for the riders. To plan for the event, they went downtown Thursday evening and counted bikes, guessing that two-thirds of the riders would take the tour. They bought the makings for baked beans, potato salad, wieners, coffee, iced tea and watermelon. They packed the food in an old pickup truck, and Friday morning led the bikers south toward the designated picnic site. Lunch was 65 cents, Pearl said,”all you could eat.” The truck followed the riders back to Sturgis and picked up motorcycles that broke down along the way.

Once Pearl helped an automobile tourist whose old Ford was stopped in the middle of the Needles Highway, its radiator”steaming like Old Faithful.” Pearl offered the man her remaining iced tea, assuring him that it contained no sugar.

By the late 1950s, crowds had grown so large that Pearl had to give up providing lunch. But at 98, she still hosts breakfast for the Retreads and the Flat Trackers. When somebody asked what her favorite downtown rally food was, Pearl replied that she had been so busy cooking and providing for her company that she hadn’t had time to visit the Main Street vendors.

Pearl Hoel is the unsung hero in the birth, growth and long-term success of the Black Hills Motor Classic. It’s hard to imagine Sturgis without her.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Big Sioux’s Mighty Flood

Editor’s Note: Here is a story that longtime Sioux Falls Argus Leader reporter Fred Masek wrote in 1990 about the major floodwaters that swept through Sioux Falls when the Big Sioux River swelled in 1881.

By Fred Masek

This is the story of a Sioux Falls hotel where the guests departed and then the hotel departed. It is the story of a reporter whose apparent assignment was to identify and record the buildings floating by. When a building broke loose from its foundation and floated away, a news account referred to the episode as a”departure.” Sioux Falls experienced a major flood in April 1881 in which 33 buildings, most of them commercial structures, were swept away by swollen waters of the Big Sioux River. A winter of hardship and sacrifices had already preceded the flood disaster. The setting for the 1881 flood began with the big blizzard of October 1880, and continued with frequent snowfalls.

The snowfall of 1880-81 was unprecedented in the history of the Northwest. It was noted in the History of Southeastern South Dakota,”Not only were the snowfalls immense in volume, but they followed each other with provoking promptness and a strife for ascendancy, worthy of a better cause.”

By the beginning of 1881 the railroad was hopelessly blockaded, mail arrived only at intervals and provisions and fuel became scarce in Sioux Falls. The capitalist, as well as the dweller in the sod shanty, was compelled to take his coffee straight. Sugar was a luxury not to be found. Settlers were described as having to”gather their robes around them to keep warm.”

Thousands of ties, piled up for extension of the Worthington and Sioux Falls Railroad, instead were sold at cost to persons in dire need of firewood. Dana Dailey’s History of Minnehaha County reported that during the winter of 1880″Sioux Falls was isolated from the outside world as it would have been if surrounded by a hostile army.”

There were signs of easing on April 9, 1881, when trains reached Luverne, Minn. carrying provisions for Sioux Falls. Teams of horses were used to relay the supplies 25 miles to Sioux Falls. However, the town’s 2,000 residents began to feel new apprehension when thawing of the heavy snow accumulation started. Ice began breaking up April 17, and the river started to rise. By Wednesday, April 20, the flood hit hard.

The Dakota Pantagraph and Independent gave its graphic account of the disaster by referring to floating buildings as”departures.” It appeared that a reporter was perched on the riverbank counting and identifying business places and other structures as they floated by.

The weekly newspaper’s flood story began,”The departure was noted last week of the railroad and two highway bridges, Weber’s Restaurant, Henjum’s and Olson’s Blacksmith Shop, McKinnon and Ross Planing Mill and Sash Factory, the Cascade Mill office, the Queen Bee Mill office, Cochran’s Stable and Gilbert’s Ice House.

“A blockade of lower water set in on Wednesday morning so that the departure of buildings was suspended. But the rise of Friday after midnight caused them to resume. The first to start were Winchell’s dwelling from below the site of the 10th Street bridge and Jensen’s Blacksmith Shop.

“At 2 o’clock Saturday morning, the remnants of the Riverside Hotel moved out after the guests moved out. There were no further departures until 7 a.m., when the Sioux Falls Mill shoved out.

“Just after dinner, Phil Plaster’s Saloon, near the St. Paul Depot, moved off with its full stock of liquors and cigars. Some of the boys overhauled the wreck below the Falls and had a jamboree.”

“The lumberyards started on their trip about 9 o’clock,” the paper reported,”and some of the contents moved off in nice piles.” Scavengers were busy retrieving boards, shingles, planks and lath from the river.

Most ice storage facilities were lost. A telegrapher sent a message to Worthington, Minn. asking that an icehouse and contents be furnished to the Cataract House.

One man saved his dwelling by the good fortune of his occupation. He operated a brickyard. His house stayed in place after 10,000 bricks were loaded on the first floor.

Although 33 buildings were swept away, there were no deaths attributed to the flood. The newspaper reported,”No funeral was provided with a subject by the flood. Fortunately almost everybody was careful enough to avoid peril.”

One light moment was related to a miller’s experience. The miller was fixing a gangway for crossing water surrounding the Sioux Falls Mill. The story was related as follows:”He had stooped for a board and when he straightened up the mill wasn’t there, so he didn’t get aboard.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1990 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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The State of Absaroka

Redrawing our borders would have left us without the Badlands, Black Hills and Mount Rushmore.

By Nate Pedersen

When disgruntled westerners tried to redraw the map of the United States in 1939, one of the big land-losers would have been South Dakota. If the secessionists had their way, the Great State of Absaroka (pronounced ab-SOHR-ka) would have consisted of western South Dakota, northern Wyoming, and southeastern Montana.

The exact origins of the movement are hard to trace, but rumors of secession found willing ears in the 1930s. Ranchers and small town citizens, ravaged by repeated years of droughts and grasshopper plagues, were frustrated with the lack of federal aid from the New Deal sweeping the nation. Several South Dakotans met with like-minded residents of northern Wyoming to contemplate secession. Rock-ribbed Republicans with a libertarian bent populated both regions.

The Wyoming contingent was upset with the Democratic control of the state legislature in Cheyenne. They felt misunderstood and largely ignored by the southern half of the state. The movement gained momentum when residents of southeastern Montana joined the cause.

Named after the Crow word for”children of the large-beaked bird,” Absaroka was short-grass country populated primarily by self-reliant ranchers who eked a living from the land. Suspicious of federal involvement, they were united by the desire to be left alone — unless they needed help with those grasshoppers.

Some of the same regionalism that inspired the secessionists is present today. In the height of the Depression, state funds found their way more easily to towns with institutions, such as a college or hospital. Communities under the Absaroka banner were more sparsely populated and, especially in the days of the Model A, a tedious drive from the state capital and decision-makers who wrote relief checks. Feeling short-changed by state officials and by the federal New Deal programs, the rural leaders found common cause in the Absaroka movement.

The secessionist fervor peaked in 1939 when A.R. Swickard, the street commissioner of Sheridan and a former baseball player, took charge of the movement and proclaimed himself governor of Absaroka. Half kidding and half serious, Swickard and his compatriots drew a map of their proposed state in the basement of the Sheridan Rotary Club, which served as rebel headquarters. The map cut a straight line through northern Wyoming, a straight line through western South Dakota, and took a square chunk out of southeastern Montana. Swickard wasn’t particularly concerned about natural boundaries such as the Missouri River.

With borders established, the secessionists turned to the obvious next steps to forming a new state: printing license plates and holding a Miss Absaroka contest. Every legitimate state needs a beauty queen. The one and only Miss Absaroka was crowned in 1939. A few surviving photographs show her with a demure smile and an Absaroka banner draped proudly over her shoulder.

License plates were printed and distributed to rebels and their supporters. The year 1939 also saw the first and only”state visit” for Absaroka, when the King of Norway toured southeast Montana. Absarokians claimed the event for their own, portraying it as an official recognition of their claim to statehood.

Helen Graham was a teenager at Belle Fourche High School during the’30s. Her family lived in the southeast corner of Montana where all three states meet. She doesn’t recall that her parents were unhappy Montana residents.”It wasn’t a well-known movement,” she told us in 2009.”I always felt it was a group of men, like Rotary Club members, getting together and throwing ideas around. I don’t think it was anything serious,” she laughs.

Graham, who worked 31 years at the Sheridan Public Library, doesn’t regret that the attempt was unsuccessful. “I hardly think anyone would have been happy with that deal, do you?”

Well, perhaps A.R. Swickard would have been pleased. Capitalizing on publicity from the Miss Absaroka contest, Governor Swickard held grievance hearings in Sheridan. Residents of Absaroka came to seek redress for wrongs committed against them by the state of Wyoming. With the hearings came the media, and the news coverage attracted the overdue attention of legislators in Cheyenne. Slightly embarrassed by the publicity generated by a secessionist movement within their borders, Wyoming and Montana leaders began to pay more attention to their eastern ranchers. South Dakota’s governor during the New Deal was Belvidere rancher Tom Berry, so it’s unlikely that the West River people felt as neglected as their counterparts in would-be western Absaroka.

Pacified by increased attention, the secessionist activities subsided toward the end 1939 and ceased entirely with the onset of World War II. Absarokians united with their fellow citizens in common dedication and sacrifice. After the war, the country set about healing itself from its wounds and enjoying its first brush with prosperity in 20 years. The Eisenhower era descended on the U.S. and the Absaroka movement was largely forgotten.

However, South Dakotans still debate the geographic and cultural differences between East and West, and whether they impact the character of the people. Is West River a land of rough-and-ready ranchers and libertarians? Is East River the place for farm populists and business types who more willingly embrace government as a means to solve peoples’ problems?

A.R. Swickard sought to exploit such differences — real or imagined — to create a new state. He either ignored or failed to recognize the thought that a state’s diversity might make it stronger economically, as well as a more interesting place to call home.

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.

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The Original Badger Hole

South Dakota nearly lost our beloved poet’s first Black Hills cabin

By Shebby Lee

Badger Clark’s original Black Hills cabin (shown here) has been rescued by the Badger Clark Memorial Society.

The Badger Hole is missing! The cabin home of the cowboy poet, Badger Clark, located in Custer State Park has been demolished! No, it has not been demolished, it has been moved. But where? And why? Rumors are flying about the former home of beloved cowboy poet, Badger Clark, and it’s time to take the wraps off the mystery.

Most South Dakotans know about the state’s first Poet Laureate, the charismatic cowboy known as Badger Clark (full name: Charles Badger Clark, Jr.). During the first half of the twentieth century he lived and worked in a cabin in Custer State Park, writing evocative Western poetry and speaking to countless graduates across the state and region. His cabin was known as the Badger Hole, and the park maintains it today just as he left it, for visitors and school children to visit during the summer season.

But there was another Badger Hole, a one-room cabin that Badger Clark lived in from 1924-1937 while building his permanent four room cabin nearby. Badger Clark did not build that little cabin and never actually owned it. After his tenure, it was moved, changed hands many times, was added on to, and eventually ended up in the hands of the Badger Clark Memorial Society, which used the wings for a caretaker’s residence and storage, while returning the original central room to the way it looked when Badger Clark lived there.

In recent years the wings of the older cabin became unstable and the park added it to its list of surplus property slated to be torn down. This triggered a frantic effort to save the edifice — or at least the original central portion — as a piece of South Dakota history. After many months of negotiations, an agreement was reached between Custer State Park and the Badger Clark Memorial Society under which the park agreed to demolish the wings, if the society would move the main cabin out of the park.

The society set about finding a suitable location where the cabin could not only be preserved but serve an appropriate role. The park upheld their end of the bargain and prepared the cabin to move, but negotiations with various entities for the cabin’s new home were inconclusive. So Society Vice President Paul Jensen of Wasta, arranged to have the cabin removed from the park without a definite place for it to go. Society member Dorothy Delicate of Custer offered her land as a temporary resting spot, but somehow it never got there.

Enter Linda Flounders, owner of the historic Newton Fork Ranch, located on Deerfield Road, 1/2 mile from Hill City’s Main Street. Linda is slowly restoring the 18 acre property comprised of six full round log cabins built in 2000, a large picnic shelter plus her grandparents’ 1912 home. Her grandmother was a prolific writer, albeit unpublished, and her uncle Paul Lippman, from whom she purchased the property, was a published writer and held several workshops on the property in the 1980s. Writing is obviously highly revered in her family. When Linda built the cabins at Newton Fork Ranch, it was with the intention of creating a writers retreat. As such, the cabins do not have telephones or television sets. Linda has placed the original Badger Hole on an undeveloped lower portion to the ranch property along the Mickelson Trail and incorporated it into her writers retreat.

Why all this fuss over a dilapidated old shack? Well, for one thing history was made there. Not only was it the home of South Dakota’s first Poet Laureate for 13 years, but his first book of poetry on South Dakota subjects — Skylines and Wood Smoke — was written there. Badger Clark also wrote prose, including contributions to the South Dakota Writer’s Project, a Depression-era compendium which was almost certainly written while residing in that one-room cabin. His letters to the editor were frequently printed in Hills papers, and his poetry was published in national magazines such as Scribner’s, Outing, Arizona Highways, Sunset, the Pacific Monthly and the South Dakota Poetry Society‘s Pasque Petals, during this period.

The cabin is a part of South Dakota history. After a season of drift it has finally found a home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shebby Lee is a writer, Black Hills tour guide and member of the Badger Clark Memorial Society in Rapid City. For more information, contact the society at 343-4852. The society website is www.badgerclark.org.


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A Sheepherder Named Gilfillan

By Paul Hennessey

Archie Gilfillan rented a log cabin in Spearfish which he called “The Shepherd’s Paradise.”

Archie Gilfillan was South Dakota’s sagebrush philosopher. His prairie wit entertained people in the ranching areas of Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and South Dakota through the Great Depression.

He talked at colleges, high schools, livestock conventions and smoky bar rooms, giving neighbors and friends a chuckle or two during hard times. Public speaking seems an unlikely sideline for a man who spent 20 years as a lonely sheepherder in northwest South Dakota.

Perhaps even more ironic, however, is the fact that Gilfillan authored one of the funniest and most introspective works on early 20th century West River life. Sheep: Life on the South Dakota Range remains in print even today. Stories from the book are told and retold, especially in the bar rooms and kitchen tables of Harding County where he spent his sheepherding days.

Archer Gilfillan was born Feb. 25, 1886, in White Earth, Minn., where his father served as an Episcopal missionary. In 1898 the family moved to Washington, D.C., after Archie’s father suffered a nervous and physical breakdown.

During his teenage summers, Archie worked on farms in Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. He grew to like the farm animals, especially sheep. He claimed to have bought a sheep for $3 when he was a youngster and the animal was sold for $6, along with the wool, just one year later. He invested the $6 in three more ewes and sold them for $18.

Years later he wrote,”While I had never been especially good at mathematics, it seemed to me that 100 percent a year was a pretty good return on an investment and that if I could keep it up regularly I ought to be worth quite a bit some day. So I bought as many ewes as I had money for, and left them, supposedly, on shares, with a neighboring farm woman who had a few sheep of her own.”

But the woman mailed him a check for just $10, claiming the pasture bill ate up the rest of his investment.”I learned about women from her,” he wrote.”I was wiped out. But while women are men’s ineradicable weakness, sheep are not; and it was many a year before I again took up the trail of the Golden Hoof.”

He started high school in 1902, two years late because he suffered from typhoid fever and traveled Europe for two years with two aunts while he recovered.

He wore glasses and was short and stout. Sensitive about his height and roly-poly appearance, he avoided sports. An inferiority complex seemed to haunt him all his life, but he maintained a friendly, good-natured personality.

Archie graduated from high school in 1906 as an honor student. He started at Amherst College but transferred to the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an emphasis in Latin and Greek in 1910. Archie enjoyed debate and excelled in most of his courses.

After graduation he followed his dream west to South Dakota where he worked on a ranch near the Black Hills. Big cattle ranches of the free grass era had just gone out of business and little people with big dreams were arriving to homestead. Archie caught the”free land” bug and decided to homestead in Harding County near Slim Buttes. He raised sheep but never seemed to find the rhythm of buying low and selling high. In three years he gave up ranching and decided to follow in the ministerial footsteps of his father and grandfather.

For three years he attended Western Theological Seminary in Chicago, an Episcopalian institution. On the day before graduation he had a change of heart and dropped out of school to join the Catholic Church.

Gilfillan’s sheepherder’s wagon is now on exhibit at the Dakota Discovery Museum in Mitchell.

Archie returned to Harding County. For two years he herded sheep on ranches with small flocks. In 1916 he hired out to Almon”Al” Dean and herded sheep for him until 1932.

During those 16 years, Gilfillan developed a problem with alcohol. When Dean caught him in a wagon drunk, he moved him to the home ranch to do chores. Such confined quarters were unbearable to Archie and he took another herding job at a neighbor’s ranch in the spring of 1933. He soon retired from the sheep business and rented a log cabin in Spearfish. He named the cabin Shepherd’s Paradise.

He had kept a diary in cipher, a system of secret writing based on a key, for eight years and four months starting in December of 1924 when he was 38. During those years he filled 9,010 pages of standard letter-size paper.

The diary was later transcribed by John Jenson, rare book librarian at the University of Minnesota, after Emily Heilman, Archie’s sister, donated the work to the university.

Gilfillan claimed that he never failed to make a daily entry in his diary but some days are missing. Perhaps the wind grabbed a page occasionally when the sheep wagon door opened. Some of the jottings were reportedly not meant for public consumption because they contained juicy gossip about the pioneering families of the northwest.

Information from the diary filled the pages of his book Sheep, which was published in 1929 by Little and Brown Co. after being rejected by several other publishers. It sold for $2.50. Gilfillan received 10 percent and he voiced the writer’s lament that the publisher gets 80 percent while the writer gets peanuts.

Gilfillan said his first royalty check should have been about $600 but he gave away too many books so the publisher subtracted $200.

In his diary, he was extremely frank about his day-to-day life. His book reveals a sheepherder’s western humor and philosophy that can only be fully appreciated by readers who understands sheep or people.

He never stopped learning, and he devoured books. At one time, he subscribed to 15 magazines and claimed to have a library of 500 books.”Even if a herder does not particularly care for reading, he will be driven to it in self-defense,” he wrote.

Reading was more than a pastime, he quipped.”If the herder on an intensely cold day can get interested in a good story, it will serve to take his mind off his other troubles, such as how much colder his feet will have to get before they crack and break off, and whether the sun is really standing still, or whether that is merely an optical illusion.”

Gilfillan wrote in an earthy, irreverent style. He detested arrogance in writing or talking. In reference to Mary Austin’s book, The Flock, he said that she never used a word in its right meaning if she could distort another to take its place. Of course while writing a book about sheep it would be impossible to avoid profanity. If it answered a question or released pent up frustration, Archie could curse but he never condoned vulgarity in any form.

Sheep was reprinted in 1930, 1936, and 1956 and 1957. Gilfillan complained that he never did find out how many copies were sold in the first two printings. In recent years, it has been reprinted by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

During his years as a sheepherder, Gilfillan suffered many hardships including lightning, cloud bursts, floods, blizzards, rattlesnakes, wolves, coyotes and two-legged camp robbers. Once, as a tornado approached, he was forced to seek shelter in an old well.

Gilfillan had other challenges in life. Card games, especially poker, were his downfall. He liked to socialize and always found an excuse for a drink. Unfortunately, he never seemed to realize that cards and whiskey did not mix. Al Dean let him borrow on future wages to pay off his debts and the Ivy League sheepherder was always overdrawn.

In 1924 Gilfillan gave a talk to the Woolgrowers Association at Helena, Montana. He caught everyone by surprise with an outstanding, well-informed speech he called The Secret Sorrows of a Sheepherder. He never gave his name so he remained unknown for several years in spite of efforts in Montana to identify him.

His three secret sorrows were sheepmen who didn’t know as much about sheep as the herder, cowboys who got all the glory while the sheepherder was looked down upon, and women who wanted to be substitute sheepherders.

He maintained that women were ill-equipped for the occupation.”The truth is that in many respects they are unsuited to the work,” he wrote.”With no more than a discreet allusion to the three quickest means of communication, can you really picture a woman engaging in an occupation which would leave her more or less in the dark with regard to the doings of even her immediate neighbors?”

Language would be an even bigger problem, he thought.”There are frequent occasions in herding when the feelings seethe in the herder’s bosom like white-hot steam in an engine boiler. His anguish finds vent in language that he has picked up at odd times around garages, stables, poker games and from autoists who were changing tires. Women, not having frequented these places, would be at a distinct disadvantage.”

Gilfillan liked women. He just didn’t think they should be sheepherders. But he disdained cowboys.”Is there any intrinsic reason why the man who takes care of cattle should be a romantic, half-mythical figure, while the man who takes care of sheep is either a joke or anathema?” he wrote in Sheep.

Gilfillan argued that the sheepherder was superior to the cowboy because he was his own boss most of the time while the cowboy”may be able to carry more than one day’s orders in his head, but he seldom has the opportunity of proving it.”

In spite of that, he acknowledged that,”every kid in the range country looks forward to the day when he can get hold of hair pants, a ten-gallon hat, a Miles City saddle and a pair of big spurs, and then cultivate a bow-legged walk and hire out to a cattleman.”

Gilfillan gave a commencement address at Buffalo on May 22, 1930, and the graduating seniors enjoyed his sharp, western wit. He quipped,”I have the suspicion that Prof. Chanson has asked me to appear before these graduates to serve as a warning, so that they can see what may happen to them if they do not watch their step and be just a little bit careful.”

The herder-author often referred to himself as a Phi Beta Kappa gone wrong. The Gilfillans were a literary family. Archie’s grandfather wrote The Origin of Sin. He surmised that it was not a commercial success because people are more interested in their daily practice of sin than finding its origin.

Archie’s father, a minister like his grandfather, wrote an unsuccessful book trying to restrain people from seeking what they wanted. S.C. Gilfillan, Archie’s brother, wrote books, too, and his nieces also enjoyed writing.

At Spearfish, Gilfillan became a freelance writer for several South Dakota newspapers but money was scarce. In 1936 he published A Shepherd’s Holiday. It was 52 stories collected from his newspaper articles and published at Custer.

Late in life, he also authored A Goat’s Eye View of the Black Hills, with assistance from longtime friend Hoadley Dean of Rapid City. He retold many legends of the South Dakota mountain towns, adding his personal perspectives and a big dose of his dry humor.

He also explained in the book why he remained a bachelor.”You profess sincere and unbounded admiration for the beauties of the opposite sex and you practically lay your heart at their collective feet; and then you meet some individual who combines the poorer qualities of a mama wildcat and a bitch wolf, with a voice like a buzz saw, the temper of a slapped hornet, and a disposition that would curdle the milk in four adjoining counties. And then you have to revise your opinion of the sex all over again ññ and downward.” In short, he never met a woman he liked who would have him as a husband.

The Great Depression spread across South Dakota before local writers heard about the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) being promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt. Unemployed writers were hired to interview old-timers, search files and records, collect folklore, and preserve the history, culture and contemporary life of American communities.

The project was considered a work program and no one expected it to produce anything of lasting value. Today, the books and material these men gathered and wrote are valuable treasures. M. Lisle Reese, a talented Montana native, was hired as director of South Dakota’s Federal Writers Project and he hired Gilfillan as his assistant.

He stayed until the project ended in the spring of 1942. For the next seven years he worked at the Black Hills Ordinance Depot at Provo (Igloo). He wrote for the Igloo Magazine, did clerical work and served as librarian. When that job ended in 1949 he moved to Deadwood. In failing health, he lived in retirement.

When Gilfillan retired to Deadwood, he stayed at the Wagner Hotel. He usually sat on a straight back chair and read a book or walked along Deadwood streets, visiting with his neighbors.

While enjoying a walk on December 17, 1955, he dropped to the sidewalk. He had moved on to greener pastures.

Family and friends buried the old sheepherder at Belle Fourche. But Gilfillan’s bad luck continued even in death. They buried him beside two great cowboys, Paul Bernard and Joe LaFlamme.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the Nov/Dec 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. Paul Hennessey was teacher, and also worked as a private investigator on the West Coast. Hennessey knew Archer Gilfillan during the sheepherder’s years at Igloo. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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History Hunters

Can we stop the illegal artifact trade?

By John Andrews

 

Faith Spotted Eagle, a Yankton Sioux tribal elder, is an outspoken protector of sacred sites and burial grounds. Artifact looting is a common problem at sites such as those on South Dakota reservations and along the Missouri River valley.

Faith Spotted Eagle was fishing with her father the first time she saw artifact hunters searching the banks of the Missouri River.”My dad was disgusted,” Spotted Eagle says.”He looked at me and said, ‘You know, my girl, you’re going to have to do something about this someday.’ I was only 12 years old. I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ But that stayed with me.”

The memory rushed back one morning in 1999 as Spotted Eagle traveled Highway 18 toward the Yankton Sioux Reservation.”I was coming across the dam and I had this weird feeling,” she remembers.”We call it nagi ksapa, which means spirit smart. It’s an awareness, or a sixth sense. I could feel my father’s presence, and I knew something was going on.”

When she arrived, Spotted Eagle learned that the remains of at least 35 of her ancestors buried along the Missouri River at White Swan had been exposed by lowered water levels, and looters were plundering the graves. She and members of the Yankton Sioux Tribe set up a spiritual camp at the site where they prayed and held sweat lodges. They obtained a temporary restraining order that prevented the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from raising the water until the remains could be gathered and re-interred on higher ground. The process took three months but looters lingered. Once, while Spotted Eagle walked a remote country road, two men in a car stopped and asked directions to White Swan. They said they were divers.

Ten years after White Swan, Spotted Eagle sees boats lurking near the old gravesites. Looting still happens regularly on the Yankton reservation and on other public lands in South Dakota. Millions of years ago prehistoric creatures roamed the Great Plains. Humans arrived about 12,000 years ago. The bones and artifacts they left behind can be worth a lot of money in today’s artifact trade, a worldwide industry that is as lucrative as it is illegal.

Some parts of South Dakota are archaeologically richer than others, but valuable artifacts can be found everywhere within the state’s borders, according to Michael Fosha, assistant state archaeologist with the Archaeological Research Center in Rapid City.”There’s an incredible wealth and diversity of material that can be recovered in South Dakota,” Fosha says.

Bone tools, groundstone materials (like atlatl weights, arrowpoints, scrapers and other specialized tools) as well as artifacts made from shell can be found.”The shell items can be quite exotic,” Fosha says,”all the way from large shell mask gorgets made out of conch shell to small shells etched with human-like forms or animals. They might even be carved themselves into shell beads to be worn as decoration.”

Looters search for”anything and everything” on the Cheyenne River Reservation, says Donna Rae Petersen, the tribe’s cultural programs administrator. Like Spotted Eagle she was young when her mother and great-grandmother took her to the Missouri River to watch as men working on the dams sifted through the exposed graves of her ancestors. It’s the same all along the Missouri River shoreline, a popular destination for artifact hunters because South Dakota’s earliest inhabitants settled in the river valley.”The Missouri River has been here a long time,” says Richard Harnois, senior field archaeologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Pierre.”People have populated the river for 12,000 years. When people live in an area like that for that long, it leaves a lot of stuff behind. That creates the archaeological sites that these people are interested in.

“Some of these guys are what we call human vacuum cleaners,” Harnois says.”They go out and just suck up everything they find, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.”

More experienced hunters are selective. They know what to take and what to leave.”As they’re digging, they go to their favorite sites, knowing what age the artifacts are and what they hope to obtain,” Fosha says.”They have a good eye for what’s valuable.” Those items include ceramic pots that are intact or can be easily reassembled, large conch shell masks, pipes and arrow points depending on quality and age.

Artifacts and fossils on private land are not protected but federal laws prohibit removing them from public lands. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (passed in 1979) bans removal of funerary objects, sacred items and human remains from public or Indian land without a permit. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) provides a way to return those artifacts to the tribes if they are uncovered. But looting along the river occurred long before their enactment.”It started with families out digging this stuff, taking it home and hanging it on their walls,” Harnois says.”So there’s this background of collecting that goes back a long way that leads people to think it’s not a bad thing to go out and do this.”

Scavengers know exactly what they’re doing, while others are simply unaware of the laws.”A lot of times, they’re not really trying to be felons,” Fosha says.”They just happen across an artifact, they find it of great interest and they pick it up and take it home. It’s still illegal, but quite a bit of it is not knowing it’s illegal.”

Others consider themselves amateur archaeologists and work with professionals like Fosha when they make discoveries on their land.”We certainly encourage them to give us the information, but we don’t necessarily encourage them to go out and dig things up,” Fosha says. When that happens, artifacts lose their context. It’s more difficult for archaeologists to assess an artifact’s importance if they don’t know exactly where it was found and what other items, if any, surrounded it.

People have been prosecuted under those laws in South Dakota, but Marty Jackley, South Dakota’s attorney general and former U.S. Attorney for South Dakota, says looters are being caught with more items than ever. In January, five men — four South Dakotans and one from Wisconsin — were indicted on artifact trafficking charges, accused of taking more than 10,000 artifacts (including human remains, funerary objects and pottery), mostly from the Missouri River valley. All pled guilty except one: Scott Matteson of Fort Pierre. Matteson is a lifelong collector who turned his 7,000-piece collection into the Mobile Museum of the Prehistoric Plains Indians, which authorities seized in December 2008. South Dakota might be the most diverse state in North America when it comes to fossils, says Darrin Pagnac, a vertebrate paleontologist at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. That lures fossil poachers, particularly to Badlands National Park and publicly owned lands in northwestern South Dakota, the two fossil hotspots in western South Dakota. Pagnac says his field research team finds at least one looted site every summer.”One of the first hints is holes where they shouldn’t be,” Pagnac says.”The second good clue is bits of plaster lying around, because that’s how we excavate the fossils. We wrap them in burlap soaked in Plaster of Paris. It’s almost impossible to do that completely cleanly, so it drips and little chunks of it fall. And sometimes we’ll find trash and tools.

“They’re looking for the most spectacular specimens they can find. They want pristine skull elements, teeth, or complete skulls. Anything that looks impressive that will up the resale value of these things are what they’re after.”

Keeping watch over culturally important sites is challenging. Looters often work under cover of darkness, their presence detected only when officers find holes dug in the ground. Cheyenne River reservation has one monitor enforcement officer, Halley Maynard, who knows the locations of particularly valuable sites and is responsible for protecting them. Locals know about most sites, but if word spreads, artifact hunters are tempted to find them.

Maynard patrols the shoreline by boat and the rest of the reservation’s three million acres by truck, ATV and mule for the most remote spots. He’s never caught looters in action during two years on the job, but he has seen the damage they inflict. In the spring of 2007 low river levels exposed a burial site in the northeast corner of the reservation.”They dug 17 holes in the bank,” Maynard says.”Because of what they did, plus the good rainfall and the rise of the river, it eroded half of that site. We couldn’t save it.”

The tribe has signs on all of the reservation’s main highways alerting motorists of its no-dig, no collection policy, in place since 1966. Still, Petersen and other tribal members can’t understand the fascination artifact hunters have with disturbing the graves of their ancestors.

“I have family buried in several cemeteries, but going back five generations, I have a grandmother who is buried on a hill a mile behind my house,” Petersen says.”Those are family cemeteries, but why do people feel that because they are Native Americans it’s OK to rob those graves? If a body washes out on the shore of the Missouri River and there are artifacts that are readily available, people pick those, as well as the skeletal remains. Why do people feel that Native American human remains and funerary items are any different?”

The biggest reason is money. Artifacts sell for hundreds of dollars and some fossils can go for tens of thousands of dollars.”Almost anything that’s really attractive and well-prepared is going to have a market somewhere, legitimate or otherwise,” says Sally Shelton, collections manager at the Museum of Geology at the School of Mines.”For every museum or nonprofit that buys something like that, which is not very common, there are 10 times as many people buying it for private possession. People love these things and they want to have them at home. The problem is, many of these things are dug up so fast they lose all the associated information with them, and they’re no longer valuable scientifically or educationally.”

The Internet auction site eBay.com is a popular marketplace for Native American artifacts. A search for”Indian artifacts” returns over 1,000 results, including arrowheads, grind stones, baskets, pipes and tomahawks. The price for one collection of hand tools was $500.

Family auctions and reputable auction houses also market artifacts. Petersen says she’s seen items from the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee sold at auction.”I think people just look at this like a nostalgia thing, but they don’t connect these things to human blood, or somebody losing a life,” she says.”The eyes of the law are so few and far between, especially when it comes to the river,” Petersen says.

That may have been true in the past, but people like Petersen urge law enforcement to more seriously pursue thefts, and they’re asking for help. Harnois directs people to call the Corps’ hotline at 1-866-NO-SWIPE (1-866-667-9473) if they spot suspicious activity.

“If people are considering doing anything illegal, they better take care because chances are somebody’s going to be looking over their shoulder,” Harnois says.”There are a lot of eyes and ears out there.”

 

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Clamming on the James

Clams once thrived in the clean, steady waters of the James River

By John Andrews

Clamming pioneer “Fisher Bill” Richards spent most of his life digging clams and living in a tent along the James River.

Clams still lie in the beds of some South Dakota rivers and lakes, but 100 years ago they filled the James River and created a thriving business. People from Mitchell to Yankton spent summers prying the mussels from the muddy river bottom and then sent the shells east to become pearl buttons.

Families set up summertime clamming camps along the river. A hub developed near Tuscan, a water station about four miles southwest of Menno in Hutchinson County where the river and railroad met. Trains got water for the steam engines and clammers loaded their harvest into railcars, which took them to button factories in towns along the Mississippi River like Muscatine (the Pearl Button Capital of the World), Davenport and Guttenberg in Iowa.

Clammers were busy on other area waters, like the Vermillion and the Minnesota River across the border in Yellow Medicine County, Minn., but the demand for clamshells and the abundance of mussels in the James River made Tuscan the”Mother of Pearl Capital of the World” by the 1890s. Trains regularly left Tuscan loaded with clamshells. Once the Hutchinson Herald reported a train headed east with 17 boxcars full of shells, worth $35 per ton.

The murky Missouri River held few clams.”At one time the Missouri River was the ‘Big Muddy,'” says Doug Backlund, a wildlife biologist with the state Game, Fish and Parks department’s Natural Heritage Program.”It was a big, turbid river with a shifting bottom. That’s not a good habitat for clams. Clams like clear streams with a fairly firm substrate that doesn’t shift around a lot.” Hundreds of years ago, the Missouri’s tributaries in southeastern South Dakota — the James, Vermillion and Big Sioux rivers — were cleaner and more stable, providing prime habitats for clams that arrived attached to fish and then burrowed into the river bottom.

Robert Coker and John Southall, working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, explored the James River’s mussel beds from its source in North Dakota to its mouth southeast of Yankton in the summer of 1913. They found few decent shells until they reached Riverside, near Mitchell, where they discovered a large commercial shelling operation. A pair of fishermen there took 20 tons of shells from the river. Three miles downstream another man had harvested 15 tons. The busiest stretch of the river was from Milltown to Yankton, where clammers dug 400 tons of shells by the time Coker and Southall visited late in the season.

Arnold Diede built boats (top) for he and his wife, Evelyn, to use during clamming expeditions near Menno, South Dakota. After cleaning clams, they piled shells at their camp near Milltown (bottom) before trains carried them East to button factories.

Arnold and Evelyn Diede were newlyweds when they began clamming near Menno in 1929. That spring Arnold built a boat using the engine from a Ford car. He fashioned a digger out of a 2×4, an iron shovel and a hand-woven basket that could hold 100 pounds of clams. The Diedes attached the digger to the front of the boat and Arnold pried clams from the mud while Evelyn drove.

“Arnold would drop the digger to the bottom of the river, the power of the motor pulling the digger along on the bottom of the river as we rode over the clam bed,” Evelyn wrote in a family history book years later.”By holding the handle Arnold could feel what sort of clam bed it was, how long and wide, also how deep. When the basket was full, he would tell me to turn around on the river and as I did so, it aided Arnold in lifting up the full basket. He then would dump the clams onto the boat and lower the basket again and I would follow the same line we had taken before and repeat the whole process.”

Another method was used for clams in shallow water. The Diedes ran a small boat and dug them out by hand.”We used to wade in mud 4 to 6 inches deep,” Evelyn recalled.”It seemed we always had clothes hanging on the line.”

When the boat was fully loaded they returned to their riverside camp. The Diedes used a homemade cooker placed over an 18-inch deep pit near the riverbank to steam the clams open. Then they removed the meat and threw the shells in a pile. Farmers used the discarded meat as pig feed, while rotten meat became catfish bait. Buyers paid the Diedes $25 to $35 per ton for their clamshells, depending on the quality.

Clamming attracted unique characters. Bill Richards, a clamming pioneer, spent much of his life in a tent by the river west of Menno. Known as”Fisher Bill,” Richards lived a rough life before moving to Tuscan. Originally from New York, he spent his early years in an Illinois orphanage. He ran away at age 14 and found work with a railroad crew at Council Bluffs, Iowa. One day a prairie fire burned him so badly his co-workers thought he was dead. He crawled to the Missouri River where a settler found him and cared for him until he regained his strength. Fisher Bill then went to Tuscan, where he spent years clamming and living year-round in the tent. When Bill was 80, townspeople convinced him to move the tent into Menno. He lived behind the funeral home, where a small creek and wooded area replicated his longtime home along the James. He died in 1954 at age 92.

Another clam fisherman was known as Swede Al. He worked the James River from its mouth to Mission Hill. Longtime Yankton County resident Paul Nelson remembered that Swede Al’s territory was limited because his big houseboat couldn’t fit under the railroad bridge west of town.

Nelson, born in 1915, grew up in a”tar paper shack” along the James River. He saw many clam boats, but Swede Al had the biggest operation.”Other people used to fish for clams, but not like he did,” Nelson said when South Dakota Magazine visited him before he died in 2009.”That was his life.”

Some clammers worked solely to find pearls. Fisher Bill found and sold a few pearls, as did the Diedes. One pearl looked like a strawberry and brought them $15. Evelyn had two silver rings made with small pearls. Nelson’s uncle and aunt, Matthew and Nancy Seddon, bought clam meat and pearls from Swede Al. Men searching for pearls on the Vermillion River at Centerville found $500 worth by the time Coker and Southall arrived.

But most Dakota pearls were poor.”They weren’t shaped well and they were colored,” Nelson told us.”They weren’t like the pearls that were on the market from oysters, but you could make a pretty good necklace.” Two-thirds of the pearls in the Riverside fisherman’s 20-ton haul were worthless. Evelyn Diede thought it was because valuable pearls are found in clearer water, and”Jim River water was always dirty and muddy,” she wrote.

Clamming boomed from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. Over harvesting and environmental changes nearly wiped out the James River’s clams by the 1940s. The railroad left and Tuscan disappeared. And the emergence of plastic buttons brought an end to the American clamshell button industry. In 2002 Backlund and Keith Perkins, a biology professor at the University of Sioux Falls, studied the James River’s mussel population. It was the first scientific study of its clams since Coker and Southall’s nearly 90 years earlier. They found live clams, but only a handful for every hour of searching, and many long dead shells, indicating their former abundance. Today one of the best places to find clams is in the Missouri River below Gavins Point Dam. The firm bottom and clean, warm water the dam releases create a perfect habitat.”The Big Muddy is now the nice, clear river with a good habitat for clams, and the Jim River and Big Sioux River have become turbid and muddy,” Backlund says.”There are still some species that thrive there, but not the same ones that used to be there.”

Though clamming on the James ended in the 1930s, artifacts from the era can still be found. The Menno Heritage Museum has a clamshell button display along with an old rake used for clam digging. Elmer Mueller, who lives southwest of Menno a quarter mile from the James River, has a few clamshells. He also found a clam rake along the riverbank near his home. And the Diedes’ granddaughter, Debbie Palmer, has a small jar of pearls Arnold and Evelyn found during their clamming summers. They’re all reminders of an era when people living in the James River valley could make money off corn, cattle or clams.

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