Posted on November 29, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on May 26, 2011April 6, 2026 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

King Ziegler’s Car Farm

By Bernie Hunhoff

People came from miles around to search for treasures in Alfred Ziegler’s salvage yard near Scotland, South Dakota.

Auto junkyards were once a staple for a town. The carcasses of cars and trucks were kept in rows on the outskirts of town, where one or two grease monkeys made a decent living by selling parts.

Today’s salvage yards have more in common with K-mart than with the junkyards of yesterday. Vehicles are stripped of radios, rims, alternators and everything else of value. The parts are checked, cleaned, inventoried and available to buyers across the USA thanks to the Internet.

It’s a very efficient system of recycling, but something is missing from the business model practiced by King Ziegler, who ran a junkyard near Scotland in the 1990s. When South Dakota Magazine visited him in 1996, King was earning a living from a crop of rusted iron and nostalgia. People came from miles around — some from as far away as Europe and Asia — to search for treasure in his 30-acre field of cars.

His real name was Alfred. But if you asked for Alfred Ziegler at a cafe in his Bon Homme County town the locals would look puzzled until you added that he is the guy with all the old cars.

“Oh, you mean King,” everyone would say in unison.”King Ziegler.”

King ran a place some people would call an auto junkyard. In the phone book, it was called King Ziegler Salvage. So you’d expect to arrive and find workers removing parts from car carcasses. Grease. Oil. Sweat. Noise.

None of the above. Blackbirds sang in a nearby cornfield. A herd of sheep grazed between rusting automobiles. A rooster crowed on a nearby farm and a donkey brayed in reply. That’s about as noisy as it got at King Ziegler Salvage.

“When he went into business, everybody thought ‘How do you make any money on this junk?'” said Wilbur Foss who ran a hardware store in Scotland for 17 years.”He’s one of a kind. He built a reputation far and wide. Everybody likes him and he likes everybody.”

If that’s true, it’s not because he was so accommodating. King didn’t remove parts from the cars. That was understandable when we met him in 1996 because he was 79 years of age. But he never did believe in removing parts before they were needed.”I have the customer take the parts off. I tell them if they take if off, they’ll know how to put it on,” he told us.

That might seem quaint to big-city salvage yards with rows and rows of Chevy transmissions, shelves full of GM radios and boxes of Ford alternators.

Real steel builds lasting memories. And the proof is at King Ziegler’s car farm.

King’s self-serve salvage wasn’t tailored to the customer in a hurry. He didn’t have an inventory of the cars in his field. They were not inventoried on a computer. They were not even logged on a yellow pad. And he didn’t pretend to remember what’s available.”Just go take a look,” he advised. Customers seemed to like that attitude. It would never work for Wal-mart — but King Ziegler Salvage was as different from chain store retailing as a whale is different from an ocean liner.

A business school grad might think the Scotland salvage yard needed more modern management. But after spending an afternoon at King’s field, you’d start to wonder if maybe the rest of the world has gone overboard on organization.

After all, his system worked splendidly. He spent nothing on advertising, yet customers came from all over the world. He had only an eighth grade education, yet he made a good living without getting any grease in his fingernails.

He had no labor costs. No labor worries. No stress. No office expenses. No signs. The 1950 Chevrolet wrecker he used to hoist or haul cars had a phone number painted on the side. But it was not his phone number.

He spent nothing on mowing. Instead, he invited a good friend, Elmer Brandt, to bring a herd of sheep to the field every summer.”I guess I could run sheep myself but then I’d have to put up hay to feed them in the winter,” he said.

He closed when the weather was bad. He closed for much of the winter. Customers could call him in an emergency. But it’s hard to imagine why there would be a critical need for a 1949 Studebaker carburetor.

King Ziegler didn’t start out in the car business. He was raised on a farm near Tripp, where he had a stud horse called King (that’s where his buddies found his nickname). After service in World War II, he was in the oil business at Kaylor.”I bought cars to fix them up and all of a sudden I got into this business,” he remembered with a wry grin in 1996.

He didn’t have time to repair all the fixer-uppers he was buying so he started to park them in the field at his farm near Scotland. He bought most of the cars for $25 to $100. Sometimes, dealers sold him used cars they couldn’t move. He also attended farm auctions. And he bought many privately.”People even tried to give me cars but I always paid something. I wanted to be fair.”

At first, he put the cars in neat rows. But as the field began to fill, he squeezed the last few hundred in wherever they would fit. An open path meandered between the cars but it got narrow at some points — barely wide enough to squeeze King’s two-passenger three-wheeler motorcycle through.

King continued to operate his Kaylor company until 1972, when he sold it and moved to Scotland to run the salvage yard full time. He quit buying cars years in the 1970s, when the lot filled up. He estimated there were about 1,500 cars and pickup trucks in the field, as well as dozens of old tractors, grain threshers and other farm equipment. King Ziegler was one of the last people on earth who could still sell a manifold for a Cockshutt tractor.

Most of his collection dated back to the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Twenty years ago, there were lots of salvage yards with cars of similar vintage. But when iron prices increased and machines became available to crush cars, many dealers”recycled” their older models.

For sentimental reasons — and because it seemed like a waste of good parts — King never sold to the scrap dealers.”I just didn’t care to crush my cars. I thought they might be useful to somebody someday.”

It was a good business instinct.”I had people here from Sweden last week looking for Pontiac and Buick parts,” he told South Dakota Magazine. “We had somebody here today from California.” They came from all parts of Europe and Asia as well.

Most customers had so much fun looking around the field that King joked about charging admission. But he never would have done so. He made his money from the parts they hauled away. A man with an armful of chrome from an old Pontiac wrote a check for $35.”I’m not trying to get rich on anybody,” King said.”At least I’ve got something to do and I get to visit with a lot of people.”

Most of his visitors were professional car restorers. Others had an old car or two at home.”Most are fixing up a car like the first one they ever owned in their youth.”

King’s collection was especially well-stocked with Pontiac and Buick parts. That’s because Bon Homme County residents loyally supported the late Frank Pillar, who sold those name brands for decades at his lot in Scotland.

“Frank was one of the top-selling small town dealers in the United States,” said Wilbur Foss.”People in these parts were very loyal to him and he was loyal to them. He took care of their car problems, even if it had to come out of his own pocket.”

Frank’s brother, Ed, ran a Ford dealership in Scotland and many of his vehicles are also in the lot. Pillar decals can still be found on many vehicles.

Some insightful people, realizing King had a good thing going, have offered to buy the place. But how do you put a price on a business that markets rusted iron, chrome and nostalgia?

Besides, if an appraiser did a true inventory, Ziegler’s collection would have cost more money than most buyers would have available.”Some people tell me there’s a million dollars worth of cars out here,” says King.”I don’t think so.”

King lived modestly for a paper millionaire. A lifelong bachelor, he rented an apartment above Scotland’s main street and ate most of his meals at a local cafÈ.

He drove a 1980 Ford pickup. He also owned a fully-restored 1959 Ford convertible that he drove in local parades.

His business headquarters was a small, wooden building at the entrance of the field of cars. Inside, a girl-in-a-bikini calendar from an auto parts store stood out as the most colorful decoration. The office was full of reading material that he enjoyed between customers.

Like many entrepreneurs, King Ziegler was the first to admit that he sort of stumbled into success. Who would have dreamed that the cars he collected would be such prizes in the 1990s?

Which brings one to wonder whether today’s Tauruses, Intrepids and Escorts will be as popular in 50 years as the Studebakers, Mercuries and ’57 Chevies of yesterday? Should someone be saving today’s discards?

King had his doubts.”They make pretty light stuff these days,” he said.”They’re like a pop can. With all the salt on the roads I don’t know how long they’ll last. Years ago these cars weren’t exposed to all that salt. That’s why Minnesotans are always coming up here to buy parts. They used more salt.”

Besides that, he said, today’s cars have so many plastic and fiberglass parts that they aren’t likely to hold up long enough to become collectors’ items. People don’t tend to have fond memories of cars that are cracking and falling apart, he said.

Real steel builds lasting memories. And the proof is at King Ziegler’s car farm.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the Nov/Dec 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. King Ziegler died a few years later. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Muskegon Disaster

Remembering a deadly storm on Big Stone Lake

By John Andrews

The Muskegon was hailed as the finest boat ever on Big Stone Lake in 1909.

Just beyond the South Dakota border in Ortonville, Minn., lies a 100-year-old boat in such fine shape it almost begs for an outing on Big Stone Lake. But 94 years ago, that boat sat battered on the lake, the victim of the worst nautical tragedy in the history of the state.

Nobody paid much attention that infamous day — July 10, 1917 — as the skies grew darker around Big Stone Lake in extreme northeast South Dakota. The nine people who stepped aboard The Muskegon, an excursion boat docked at Hartford Beach, were probably thinking mostly of fun and relaxation. Summertime meant the Chautauqua season was in full swing, and people flocked to see the performances. To transport freight and keep up with the people wanting to attend the Chautauqua, The Muskegon and other boats on Big Stone Lake were busy. Captain Peter Luff of The Muskegon had set off toward the sister cities of Big Stone City and Ortonville, on his second trip of the day.

Rain began to fall as the boat approached the Brick House, about seven miles north of the cities. The crew closed the windows and pulled the side curtains in the back of the boat. Passengers noticed an ominous black ball forming in the sky, and the wind grew stronger. Rain pelted the boat, while wind gusts from the quickly forming tornado created massive waves. As The Muskegon neared Skeleton Island, the wind ripped the flag from the front of the boat and stuck it deep into the island’s rocks.

Eleven-year-old David Mengelt, a passenger on the boat, said the twister appeared to suck the water out of the lake. Crew member Ole Tranberg agreed.”It seemed as if there were two storms and they met right where we were,” he recalled.”On one side it seemed as if the water was all swept away, while on the other side of the boat the water seemed to come at us like a solid wall.” Captain Luff tried to get the boat to shore, but he was no match for the powerful wind and water. The Muskegon capsized.

When The Muskegon first arrived on Big Stone Lake eight years earlier, a local newspaper called it”the handsomest boat ever on Big Stone Lake.” It was built by Minneapolis millionaire Tom Shevlin and owned by M.W. Savage, who used it mostly as a pleasure boat on Lake Minnetonka. Captain Luff, co-owner of the North Star Boat Line with Fred Sanburn, bought it on a trip to Minneapolis in 1909.

It had a 60-foot hull, an 11-foot beam, a 75-horsepower steam engine and a capacity of 150. It was fully cabined and was finished in handsome mahogany and lush upholstery. The Ortonville Herald Star said the purchase”represents an investment that demonstrated the faith that Messrs Sanburn and Luff have in the lake business.” Now, the finest boat to ever cruise Big Stone’s waters was being torn apart.

After The Muskegon turned over, Tranberg crawled on top of the boat. He saw Captain Luff and passenger Albert Nelson in the water. He called for them to follow him to shore.”I grabbed Albert and pulled him toward the boat but the waves tore him from me,” Tranberg remembered.”Again I got hold of him only to meet with the same success. I turned around to look for Pete but he was not in sight. Albert seemed to have no strength with which to help himself and he disappeared.”

Tranberg returned to the boat and saw Mengelt through a window. After several tries, Tranberg finally pulled the unresponsive boy from the wreckage.”At first there seemed to be no life, but after working with him for several minutes he became conscious,” Tranberg said.”I told him to hold onto the boat and I grabbed a couple of life preservers. One of these I put on the boy and told him to hold onto the boat, that I was going to start for shore and if I got there would return to him; if not some one else would come and get him. I started for shore. At first I could not see land but after being in the water for some time sighted it and after swimming for what seemed to be an hour, I landed on Manhattan Island. Going to Cap Day’s house, I notified the authorities at Ortonville. Then I got a launch and returned for the boy, who was badly chilled from exposure.”

Soon rescue boats from Ortonville arrived. They pulled two bodies from the cabin, but persistent rain and wind made further recovery efforts impossible. The next day about 50 volunteers hauled The Muskegon to shore. They searched the hull for bodies, but found none. Volunteers continued the search on Thursday. By 5:30 p.m., all the bodies had been found. The story written for the July 12 issue of the Ortonville Journal reported the bodies were still missing, but shortly before it went to press editors squeezed in an update informing readers of the news.

Among the dead were Albert Nelson; Patrick Weatherly, a boy from Ortonville; Isabelle Larson, of Ortonville; Larson’s two nieces, Bessie and Hazel Erickson, of Audubon, Minn.; Barney Sweeney, a local barber; and Captain Luff. When searchers found Luff’s body his pockets were full of silver dollars he had collected from the passengers.

After the 1917 disaster, The Muskegon was towed ashore, restored and returned to the lake. Today it is dry-docked near the Big Stone County Museum in Ortonville.

There had been other shipwrecks on the 26-mile-long lake that separates northeastern South Dakota from western Minnesota, but none as devastating as The Muskegon‘s demise. The event had an impact on C.F. Foster, who wrote a song memorializing the boat shortly after the wreck:

Out from the port of Hartford
Down past Sylvan Beach
Gliding across the water
Ortonville for to reach
Born by the gentle breezes
Caught in that terrible gale
Cometh a voice of mourning
A sad and mournful wale
Staunch was that boat Muskegon
Precious the freight she bore
Gaily she loosed the anchor
Less than an hour before
Gaily she swept the harbor
Joyful she rang her bell
Little thought we of sunset
It was told so sad and nil
Oh! ‘Twas the cry of children
Weeping for father gone
Children so gay in the morning
Fatherless at the set of sun
Mothers for husbands weeping
Brothers also likewise
Those were the ties severed
In those seven people’s lives
Lost on this boat Muskegon
Sinking to rise no more
Number of death seven people
Who failed to reach the shore.

Despite the finality of Foster’s song, The Muskegon did rise again. After the wreck the boat was towed to a livery at Big Stone City, where it remained in storage for many years. In October 1927, Frank Douthitt, owner of the Big Stone Canning Company, added The Muskegon to his fleet of boats. The Big Stone Headlight reported that two locals — Joe Creese and Jack Luff — planned to spend the winter reconditioning the boat.”The Muskegon has been in storage for a number of years but is in pretty good shape, and when Joe gets through with her, she will be like new,” the paper said.

Under Creese’s guidance, workers spent the next two years rebuilding The Muskegon. They removed the old steam engine and lowered the deck to make it more stable. Renamed The Golden Bantam, it was officially christened and launched from the Creese Boat Yard in June 1930.

The Golden Bantam was roughly the same size as The Muskegon and was “staunchly built and finely tuned in every respect,” according to the Big Stone Headlight. Finished in mahogany and oak, it boasted electric lights and three compartments with velvet seats that could be turned into bunks.”Every convenience that can be found at home is present on the craft,” the Headlight said, including toilets, a stove, cupboards and a refrigerator. Appropriately, the paper called it the”finest craft ever seen” on Big Stone Lake. Not everyone could enjoy The Golden Bantam‘s amenities, though. The boat was for Douthitt’s private use only.

The Golden Bantam cruised Big Stone Lake for the next 30 years. In 1960, the boat was placed in dry-dock north of Big Stone City and was used as a lake cabin. In 1985, it was donated to the Big Stone County Historical Society and Museum, which already had a significant exhibit of Muskegon photos, artifacts and old news articles.

Today the boat is docked outside the museum, a scant few hundred yards from the lake. Freshly painted and well preserved, it looks as seaworthy as it did that fateful day in 1917.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the May/June 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Pettigrew’s Redemption

Might a sculptor vindicate Sioux Falls’ forgotten father?

By John Andrews

Darwin Wolf (above) wanted to honor Sioux Falls city father Richard Pettigrew through sculpture, but his project soon became a way to vindicate the reviled businessman and politician.

Richard Pettigrew sat at his writing desk in the second-floor study of his home at Eighth and Duluth in Sioux Falls and penned a letter to the city’s leaders. The town he helped build was quickly becoming South Dakota’s urban giant, but Pettigrew urged them to leave a strip of land near the falls of the Big Sioux River undeveloped. He believed it should become a park.

But by then, Pettigrew, one of the fathers of Sioux Falls and South Dakota’s first full-term United States Senator, was a washed up politician known for unpopular stances, failed businesses and crazy ideas. City leaders ignored his advice. Soon a salvage yard, warehouse and railroad moved in. The buildings remained hollow shells long after the businesses themselves left, and since the early 1990s, the city has been transforming that land into a park as part of its multi-million-dollar Phillips to the Falls project.

Pettigrew’s concern for preserving the river environment contradicted ideas he had held as a young businessman. Years earlier, he led a group of investors in building a stockyard and meat packing plant along the Big Sioux River in south Sioux Falls. They had a plan for everything except removing waste, so they simply dumped it into the water. Townspeople obtained a court injunction closing the plant, and Pettigrew and his investors lost over $1 million.

So was Pettigrew a visionary or a scoundrel? A bona-fide town builder or self-serving politician? Was he a Republican, Populist, Democrat, Socialist or Communist? At times in his life he was all of the above.

One thing is certain: following his death in 1926 many in Sioux Falls chose to forget rather than memorialize the polarizing Pettigrew. Darwin Wolf hopes a sculpture will change the city’s attitude toward its long-forgotten pioneer. In 2003 Wolf began planning a larger-than-life Pettigrew bronze.”How many great cities in the country have sculptures of their pioneers somewhere in the community, and we don’t have a Pettigrew,” Wolf says.”It began more out of my love for Sioux Falls than Pettigrew. It just seemed like there was a hole in Sioux Falls.”

Few lifelong Sioux Falls residents would have shared Wolf’s opinion, but the sculptor is an outsider. Born in Doland, he grew up in Aberdeen and studied art at Northern State University. He worked at Stein Sign Display there for five years after graduation, doing sculpture on the side, but soon realized he needed a more stable job to support his growing family. In 1988 he moved to Sioux Falls and spent the next 15 years in sales and marketing.

In 2003 St. Therese Catholic Church commissioned him to sculpt”St. Therese and Admirers,” for the church’s rose garden. About the same time, he won a competition to do a bronze for Avera Health. The projects led him back into a full-time art career. East River South Dakotans may recognize his work. His bronze of Monsignor John McEneaney stands at McEneaney Field. St. Joseph and two children are at St. Joseph Indian School in Chamberlain.

Wolf researches each subject before he ever picks up a knife in order to sculpt an appropriate likeness. When South Dakota Magazine visited his home studio in 2010, a pile of Pettigrew photographs sat atop his table. Wolf used one to shape the eyes, another the nose, a third the forehead and so on. When finished, the bronze will depict Pettigrew as an elder statesman. Dressed in a full suit, his left hand is clenched tightly around his lapel, symbolic of his fight for agrarian interests in the Senate. His right hand clutches the letter he wrote about preserving land along the river.

But Wolf’s research on Pettigrew has gone beyond a pile of photos and a few biographical tidbits.”It really sucked me in,” he says.”The more I learned, the more I found that I liked and disliked. There’s always another story about him, and it’s tough to figure out what’s true and what’s not. He was such a tenacious fighter and did so many good things for Sioux Falls, the monument evolved into being a project for some redemption. His aggression and passion for Sioux Falls and South Dakota cost him dearly.”

Sioux Falls was beginning its second life when Pettigrew arrived with a surveying crew in 1869. Founded a decade earlier, settlers abandoned the town site during the Sioux Wars of the early 1860s. They returned after the U.S. Army established Fort Dakota (along today’s Phillips Avenue between Seventh and Eighth streets) to protect pioneers from Indian attacks. Pettigrew claimed 160 acres and returned permanently the following year, intent on making the village of Sioux Falls succeed.

Sometimes his ambition trumped compliance with the law. In 1870, already with an eye on politics, he told people living within Fort Dakota that they could claim land within its boundaries as soon as the land was surveyed. Pettigrew and Nyrum Phillips circulated a petition asking Congress to open the reservation, but too few people lived within Minnehaha County to sign it. So the two added names of men they thought would soon settle in the county, and sent it to Washington. Congress soon complied.

Shady actions clouded his first successful run for the territorial House of Representatives. Before the election, Pettigrew destroyed a number of ballots that had omitted his name and sent a new batch to some northern counties. As it happened, many of Pettigrew’s votes came from non-resident railroad workers laying track into the new town of Gary. Pettigrew was never charged and took his seat in the House, but the”Deuel County Fraud” accusations haunted him the rest of his life.

While in the legislature, he helped make Sioux Falls the seat of Minnehaha County and wrote a bill creating Lake and Moody counties. To his own benefit, Pettigrew ensured that Flandreau became the Moody County seat. He and his brother, Fred, owned large tracts of land there. He later served a term as Dakota Territory’s delegate to Congress in the early 1880s, where he helped secure funds to build the state penitentiary.

Pettigrew was also a strong proponent of division of Dakota Territory and statehood for the southern half, a cause that endeared him to people living south of the 46th parallel (roughly today’s North Dakota/South Dakota border). When South Dakota gained state-hood in 1889, the legislature elected the Republican Pettigrew the state’s first full-term U.S. Senator.

In that role, Pettigrew secured funding for some of Sioux Falls’ landmark buildings, including the federal courthouse and post office building (which he insisted be built from native Sioux quartzite) at 12th Street and Phillips Avenue. He also balanced business with his political life. He helped bring five railroad lines into Sioux Falls and formed a railroad and trolley company with his brother. His biggest dream was creating a transcontinental railroad running from Sioux Falls to Seattle.

Unfortunately, most of his business investments happened during the economically turbulent 1890s. The trolley went bankrupt and the rail line to the West Coast fell through. It marked the beginning of a drastic change in Pettigrew. He began to question capitalism and lost trust in the country’s business leaders, many of whom comprised the core of the Republican Party. Pettigrew saw a solution to the country’s economic woes in the free and unlimited coinage of silver, and in 1896 he bolted the Republican Party to become a Silver Republican and, eventually, a Populist.

The move put him at odds with President William McKinley. Pettigrew was a vocal opponent of the Spanish-American War, despite strong support across the country. He was also an outspoken anti-imperialist, opposing the United States’ annexation of the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands. Pettigrew openly criticized the president and U.S. military leaders. He called the American flag a”rag,” a comment not well received in South Dakota. Pettigrew became such a thorn in McKinley’s side that Ohio Sen. Marc Hanna, McKinley’s presidential campaign manager in 1900, said he had two goals that year: to re-elect McKinley and defeat Pettigrew,”and I did not know which I wanted worst.” He got both. A well-organized fund-raising drive within the national Republican Party pumped nearly $500,000 into the South Dakota campaign, and Pettigrew lost his bid for re-election.

Pettigrew joined the Democratic Party and split time between Sioux Falls and New York City. In 1912, he supported the Progressives and their presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. After Roosevelt’s defeat, Pettigrew’s politics became even more radical. He flirted with Socialism and Communism and wrote two books ó a collection of his Senate speeches called The Course of Empire, and Imperial Washington, praised by Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. He died at his home in Sioux Falls on Oct. 5, 1926, and was entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Pettigrew lost favor with nearly every influential business and political leader in Sioux Falls. Negative stories persisted for decades. The only physical reminder of Pettigrew was his home and museum, which he willed to the city, and even that was nothing more than a hodgepodge of artifacts with no interpretation, remembers Wayne Fanebust, Pettigrew’s biographer.

Fanebust grew up in Sioux Falls during the 1940s and ’50s, when no one talked about Pettigrew.”Had there not been the Pettigrew home and museum, I would have known nothing about Pettigrew, and no one else would have known anything,” Fanebust says.”He wanted to be remembered, and until the professionals at the Siouxland Heritage Museums took control, it was a pretty sad affair. It was like an old curiosity shop. It really didn’t explain his life at all. He was lost to the community for a long time after his death.”

But Fanebust rediscovered Pettigrew in California. After graduating from Sioux Falls Washington High School in 1959, he moved to Los Angeles, studied history at UCLA and got a law degree. He was an attorney in San Diego for 13 years, but his interest in history and Dakota Territory never waned. His first book, a history of Minnehaha County called Where the Sioux River Bends, was published in 1985.

Fanebust paged through hundreds of old newspapers during his research and noticed Pettigrew’s name appeared often. He learned more about Pettigrew’s rise to prominence and decided to pursue a biography. His first step was visiting the Pettigrew House, where the senator’s personal papers were locked away.

ìWhen I went there to ask to see his papers, I could tell I had asked the wrong question,” he says.”They weren’t interested. She reluctantly let me in there, but I couldn’t take any notes. It seemed silly to me that it was kept under lock and key the way it was.”

Fortunately for Fanebust, Augustana College’s Center for Western Studies had put Pettigrew’s papers on microfilm in 1974. He spent four years researching and writing every evening from 10 p.m. to midnight. His book, Echoes of November, debuted in 1997.

Fanebust says his work was better received outside of South Dakota than locally. But Sioux Falls attorney Dennis McFarland and Second Circuit Court Judge Bill Srstka read it, and it inspired them to help rebuild Pettigrew’s reputation.

McFarland first encountered Pettigrew while researching Blood Run, a large Indian village outside of Sioux Falls along the South Dakota-Iowa border. The first white men known to visit the site were Pettigrew and his brother, both amateur archaeologists. McFarland became interested and read Fanebust’s book. Then he passed it to Srstka, an old high school classmate. Both have become amateur Pettigrew scholars, and believe his ideas and contributions to Sioux Falls are often overlooked. Srstka keeps a”Pettigrew file” in his sixth floor office at the Minnehaha County courthouse and uses it to craft presentations for local service clubs.

ìOf all the founding fathers of South Dakota, he towers above everyone in terms of his personality, what he did and who he was,” Srstka says.”Unfortunately, along the way he made an enemy with everyone.”

Pettigrew saw issues in black and white, and was unwilling to comprise or concede a point, McFarland says. Time, however, has proven Pettigrew right on many of his unpopular positions, including his opposition to the Spanish-American War and American expansion.”The anti-imperialists had it right,” Fanebust says.”It’s hypocritical for a country to believe in self-determination for its own people and yet interfere and meddle in the affairs of other countries for the purpose of conquering them. Pettigrew was right. I don’t think you’ll find anyone now who would take the imperialists’ side.”

Pettigrew also finds more support in the 21st century for comments against World War I that almost landed him in jail. In 1917, during an interview with a reporter from the Argus Leader, he said the war was simply a capitalist scheme to make the rich even richer, and he urged young men to avoid the draft. The Argus editors passed the comments to the U.S. Attorney, who charged Pettigrew with violating the Espionage Act, a measure that outlawed even the most faintly critical comments about the war.

Pettigrew faced a stiff penalty. Socialist leader Eugene Debs, indicted and convicted under the Espionage Act, served three years of a 10-year prison sentence. Pettigrew assembled a legal team headlined by good friend Clarence Darrow, but delays kept the case out of court, and eventually the charges were dropped.

Fanebust thinks the indictment helped usher in America’s modern civil liberties movement. Pettigrew was proud of his defiance. He framed the indictment and hung it next to the Declaration of Independence in his home, where it remains today.

Time has also helped disprove the most popular urban legend about Pettigrew ó that he dammed the Big Sioux River to build the Queen Bee Mill, another failed venture whose ruins still stand along the river. Pettigrew was instrumental in building the state-of-the-art, seven-story flourmill in 1881, but he and his partners soon realized there wouldn’t be enough waterpower or wheat to keep it running. He convinced wealthy New York financier George Seney to invest in the project. Legend says that to impress Seney, Pettigrew dammed the river, then released a rush of water as Seney toured the site. Fanebust is convinced it never happened.”There’s no evidence that Seney was even here,” he says.”If a man like George Seney had come to Sioux Falls, it would have been all over the local papers. He was one of the richest men in New York. When people like that came out, they attracted attention. That’s why I’m sure he was never here in the first place.”

When Fanebust began writing Pettigrew’s biography, he was surprised to discover nothing in Sioux Falls, except his home and museum, bore the senator’s name. Only recently has that begun to change. The neighborhood near Pettigrew’s home is now known as Pettigrew Heights and R.F. Pettigrew Elementary School opened on the city’s southwest side in 2009.

ìHe was a rough-and-tumble person in a rough-and-tumble era,” Srstka says.”All the good things he did ó bringing the railroad, building this and founding that ó there’s no color in that. There’s honor in it, but there’s no color. In history, unless you do something absolutely huge, we’ll remember more of the colorful things. Abraham Lincoln did a lot of tremendously bad things, but we don’t remember that because of his stature.”

Maybe Sioux Falls residents will remember Pettigrew for his role in building their city and state when Wolf’s sculpture is placed downtown. The project began as one artist’s idea, but others have become involved. The Minnehaha County Historical Society now leads the project and continues to seek donations. Contributions from private individuals and businesses have helped work continue. Wolf has also taken the Pettigrew sculpture to schools, service clubs and organizational meetings as part of the South Dakota Arts Council’s Artists in Schools and Communities program.

And if vindication is Wolf’s goal for the project, the final step might ensure it. The 10-foot bronze Pettigrew will be placed atop a five-foot granite pedestal at the corner of Fifth and Phillips, near the Phillips to the Falls archway, overlooking the very land he sought to keep undisturbed.”He was right about so many things ó women’s suffrage, the misguided zeal of imperialism, and the value of this plot of ground,” Wolf says.”It’s sort of a final ëI told you so.'”

Pettigrew wouldn’t want it any other way.

Pettigrew the Collector

Brothers Richard and Fred Pettigrew, in addition to being surveyors and town builders, were also amateur archaeologists. They excavated nearby Indian mounds, and Richard collected artifacts from around the world during his two terms as a U.S. Senator. His vast collection is displayed at the Pettigrew House and Museum in Sioux Falls. Inside you’ll find Indian artifacts, guns, a piece of the Great Pyramid and a bottle of water collected from the Jordan River. Pettigrew also collected canes; one was a gift from Queen Liliuokalani, the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands before the U.S. annexed them. To arrange a tour, call (605) 367-7097.

EDITOR’S NOTE ñ This story is revised from the Sept/Oct 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Category: history