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Dakota’s Bullwhackeress

By Chuck Cecil

Emma Buckingham (center), at 37, and her freighting family, including husband Emmond Knutson, whose head can be seen in front of the wagon at left, and their son, Charlie, far right. All three are carrying their bullwhips.

Alice Ivers excelled at poker, while Martha Jane Cannary shot straight and drank with dispatch. Nineteenth century journalists extolled the talents of those Black Hills women but little attention was paid to Emma Buckingham, who could make a bullwhip crack as loudly and accurately as Calamity Jane’s pistol and pivot a 20-head bull train on a Poker Alice silver dollar.

Buckingham was among thousands of rough and tough-talking Black Hills bullwhackers who ate dust and beans on the grimy Sidney, Cheyenne, Bismarck, Chamberlain and Fort Pierre wagon trails, hauling tons of necessities into the busy Black Hills gold towns.

For a couple of decades before railroads nudged aside the massive animal-powered freight trains in the late 1880s, the Black Hills was a contentious, bustling place. All three women were born in the 1850s and moved to the Hills during those booming times after Lt. Col. George Custer’s 1874 exploration discovered gold.

There was great need for goods and machinery for a flourishing population and burgeoning industry. Deadwood was the most populous city in what would become South Dakota. The closest railroads — the Union Pacific to the south at Sidney, Nebraska, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Northern Pacific at Bismarck to the north — carried everything as far as rails would allow. Then bull trains, with faster mule and horse teams added to the mix, hauled goods by the ton at 2 miles an hour into the gold fields.

Much of the freight traveled the shorter route to the Black Hills from Fort Pierre. The Chicago & North Western line had barely reached Brookings County by then, so steamships fishtailed upstream to the rescue, hauling goods from Yankton and Sioux City to Missouri River docks at Chamberlain for a time, but mostly at Fort Pierre. From there, bull trains — three wagons powered by 10 pair of yoked oxen — plodded the 200 miles to Rapid City and Deadwood.

Black Hills towns and the mines and mills they served needed everything from bank vaults, water pipes, hammer mills, roofing nails, shovels, coat buttons, pool tables, placer pans, door hinges, mining monstrosities and more. The bull and mule trains (and teams of horses for special, faster deliveries) lugged millions of pounds across the prairie each year, bringing a modicum of civilization to the Black Hills. Most of what rolled overland, often in mile-long caravans of dozens of teams of oxen, didn’t need leather harness or iron shoe, and could eat what nature provided along the way.

Emma Buckingham, before her bullwhacking days took their toll.

Doing her part in urging the oxen on their prairie junkets was Emma Knutson Buckingham, who was the only known”bullwhackeress” in all of Dakota Territory. She made the three-week bull train runs from Fort Pierre to the Hills and also plied the routes from Belle Fourche to Valentine, Nebraska, with stops in between.

The woman with the whip soon became well known. In 1887, Deadwood’s Black Hills Daily Times opined,”the most industrious man in the Dakota Territory was a woman.”

The Deadwood newspaper on May 11, 1887, waxed poetic about her visit.”She was in town yesterday with a string of critters as long as Main Street and as scraggy as Old Rip’s Snyder, and yet she engineered the outfit though the city with ability, unloaded with alacrity and retired with dexterity.”

A few months later, on Nov. 11, 1887, the Sturgis Record reported on a picture that local photographer John Grabill displayed in the window of his photo studio of,”the lady familiarly known as the bullwhackeress.”

“In the operation of cutting an ox in two with a whip,” the Record reported,”this woman’s name is Knudson or Canuteson. She is married, her husband driving a ten-yoke team of bulls (oxen), and they both have been on the road between Pierre and the Black Hills for six or seven months. The couple drive their own teams, about 15-yoke of cattle with five or six wagons, and are reputed to be worth some little money.”

Emma Buckingham was born Ingeborg Botne in Vinge, Norway, in 1856. She came to America in 1873, settling in Minnesota. Nine years later, as Emma Botne, she moved to the Black Hills and married Emmond Knutson, also a native of Norway. The couple started a successful freighting business before they parted ways in 1888.

Emma married another bull train operator, George Buckingham, in 1889. They retired from the freight business after rail lines finally reached the Black Hills, and she and George took up ranching near Tilford a few miles north of Rapid City.

The Rapid City Journal‘s front-page obituary on Sept. 4, 1902, told of her death from cancer at age 46.”Thus passes away one of the characteristic pioneers of the Hills. In the days of freighting to the Hills she evinced her sturdy independence by driving her own outfit across the plains, and wherever she went she won the respect of all who met her.

“She it was who safely landed The Journal‘s cylinder press at its destination on Main Street in 1885. When the days of freighting ceased she took up ranching, showing the same independence and good judgment she had previously shown …

“But withal she was a womanly woman and her pleasant word and cheery smile will be missed by her friends, of whom she had many, and her passing away will be deeply regretted.”

Emma Knutson Buckingham, Dakota’s famous bullwhackeress, is buried in Rapid City’s Mountain View Cemetery.

This story is revised from the March/April 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Blazing Trails

By Paul Higbee

Spiraling pigtail bridges make Iron Mountain Road an unforgettable drive.

BECAUSE THE LANDSCAPES of the Black Hills are so beautiful, motorists don’t often pay attention to the road itself. That is a stirring testimonial to generations of roadbuilders who have bulldozed, dynamited and chopped their way through the mountainous terrain.

Black Hills roads wind through perennial rock (including some of the world’s hardest granite), dramatic elevations, and shape-shifting canyons — all obstacles that have been somewhat alleviated by the steady march of technology, bigger and sturdier equipment and technical schools with programs devoted to blazing trails through South Dakota’s remarkably diverse landscape.

However, the state’s most popular roads were built in eras when horses were powering the equipment, and the planners were mostly people who had little construction training. James O’Neill gets credit for Spearfish Canyon Highway, one of the state’s most loved scenic drives. Motorists climb 1,700 vertical feet over 22 miles through pines and aspens and under soaring rimrock, from Spearfish to Cheyenne Crossing.

O’Neill, born in Iowa in 1880, lived a childhood where poverty forced him to be adopted. His new family migrated west and he first experienced Black Hills stone as a young man, sharpening drills at Homestake Gold Mine. Later he established Spearfish’s first movie house, among other businesses, and won election to the county commission and as Spearfish mayor.

He was an advocate for the canyon road in the late 1910s or early 1920s. The first builders were mostly Spearfish men (sometimes including O’Neill wearing a nearly omnipresent fedora) equipped with picks, shovels and dynamite. When O’Neill was present as a hands-on leader, a tip of the fedora told the crew that a cigarette break was over, and it was time to hit the rocks. Later the Lawrence County Commission endorsed the project and supplied a tractor.

James O’Neill, pictured at far left with his trademark fedora, oversaw this crew grading what would become the Spearfish Canyon Highway. The road eventually shared the narrow canyon with a spur of the Burlington Railroad until a flood in 1933 washed the rails away.

Governor William Bulow spoke at the road’s dedication in August of 1930 and lit a fuse to ceremoniously blast”the last boulder.” In reality, the boulder was anything but the last. A highway built through a living, evolving canyon never escapes rocks, sometimes roiling with raging flood waters or tumbling from the rimrock. Damage from floods brought road builders back to the canyon many times, and to pave the highway in 1950. A destructive 1965 flood drew engineers who determined they could separate the highway from Spearfish Creek in strategic spots by cutting into canyon walls.

O’Neill lived to see many of those improvements. He also advocated for a long north-south federal highway through the Great Plains, from Mexico to Canada, and worked with like-minded representatives from other states in advancing it. The promoters celebrated in 1926 when sections of U.S. Highway 85 opened; South Dakota’s stretch enters the Black Hills between Lead and Newcastle, Wyoming. Not far across the state line from Wyoming, O’Neill Pass honors James, although mapmakers frequently misspell his name. Later, a spur called U.S. 385 took construction workers through many Black Hills geological zones ranging from sandstone and gypsum to ultra-hard granite as they built north from Fall River County to Lawrence County’s gold mining country.

Peter Norbeck — as a state legislator, governor and U.S. senator — worked to gain Americans access to the splendor of the Black Hills. Norbeck is considered the father of Custer State Park where, he believed, much of that splendor could be enjoyed through car windows if drivers moved at 20 miles per hour. After the park of mountains and pines and buffalo opened in 1919, Norbeck walked and rode horseback to see firsthand how automobile passengers might best enjoy the great granite spires of the Needles and the panoramic views.

*****

Always up for adventure, Norbeck in 1905 had become the first to drive from the Missouri River to the Black Hills, following nearly 200 miles of cattle trails and wagon roads. Skeptics mocked his developing Needles Highway, calling it the Needless Highway (after all, farmers wouldn’t use it for hauling produce to market, usually a priority when developing 1920s roads) and some engineers advised Norbeck that the route he liked was impossible due to the volume of granite. Norbeck scoffed, calling those trained engineers”diploma boys.”

Highway 244, part of the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway, winds along the backside of Mount Rushmore.

Suzanne Julin, author of A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism 1880-1941, noted that Norbeck’s main interest was aesthetics.”Norbeck used his popularity, his political skills and his policy-making power to promote the construction of roads in Custer State Park that would tempt motoring travelers ….” His supporters noted that as a well-digger by profession, Norbeck knew practical engineering and how to cut into the earth. He soon encountered Scovel Johnson, a state engineer whose vision and spirit of adventure matched his own. Supplied with enough dynamite, Johnson told Norbeck, he believed the 13-and-a-half-mile highway would be completed in a matter of months.

Born in 1877 in Washington, D.C., Johnson was drawn west and to the far northwest by the mining industry. If Custer State Park visitors found the area thoroughly remote, he didn’t see it that way. Johnson had once been lost in the Alaska wilderness for three months.”He did so many things,” says history writer Dillon Haug, noting that in addition to mining and road building Johnson served as Custer County State’s Attorney. “In lots of ways he was mostly self-taught.” Johnson likely gained basic roadway engineering knowledge when he worked with Forest Service crews building early logging roads. That know-how would have included surveying, soils stability, drainage and geometry indicating whether vehicles could navigate curves as designed.

Highway engineers and contractors nationally were among the first to learn of the Needles Highway project because of a trade publication, The Highway Magazine. An unnamed writer visited during construction and was ready to report when the route opened in 1922. A”weird and beautiful road” the magazine called it, and a photographer showcased its hairpin turns. More than anything, the publication seemed impressed with what Johnson called Crevasse Tunnel (known today as Needle’s Eye Tunnel). It was cut, the magazine reported,”sixty-six feet through solid granite and is approached through a rock crevice 180 feet long, four feet wide and 70 feet deep, as left by nature, but now widened at the bottom so that cars may pass with safety.” Compressed air machinery was put to work, the article continued, so that an”average of 140 linear feet of drill hole was driven each ten hour shift.”

Compressed air drilling and dynamiting were standard operations in Black Hills hard rock mining and would shortly be adopted for shaping nearby Mount Rushmore. Along Needles Highway soon after its opening, state historian Doane Robinson studied the Cathedral Spires formation and decided to find a sculptor who could transform it into a giant carving depicting historical characters of the American West. Gutzon Borglum was drawn into the project but preferred U.S. presidents and a granite cap at Mount Rushmore, a few miles away. Long before carving ended in 1941, Mount Rushmore had proven itself a Black Hills attraction like none other.”The number of visitors recorded at Mount Rushmore increased from 108,000 in 1932 to 197,000 in 1935 and to over 300,000 in 1939,” wrote historian John E. Miller in his book, Looking for History on Highway 14.

In 1938 the Federal Writers Project’s Guide to South Dakota advised:”Hard-surfaced road to Memorial; sharp curves require careful driving.” That was U.S. Highway 16 linking Rushmore and Rapid City, a little less than 25 miles. After final sculpting and the end of World War II, annual visitation soared into the millions.”A close connection existed between the monument itself and building roads in South Dakota,” noted Miller.”Good hard-surfaced roads were a prerequisite for substantial tourist traffic.” South Dakotans preferred their tax dollars to be spent on highways, not mountain carvings, he added.

Private sector highway contractors gained the state a reputation for fine roadways. Chuck Lien, and Northwestern Engineering Company co-owned by Morris Adelstein and L.A. Pier, were Rapid City-based. In the Mount Rushmore state, sometimes road elements became art in their own right. An example is Wind Cave National Park’s Beaver Creek arch bridge, engineered by Morris Adelstein.

A dam constructed on Rapid Creek in the 1950s created Pactola Lake, the largest and deepest reservoir in the Black Hills, as well as beautiful views for motorists traveling Highway 385 about 15 miles west of Rapid City.

U.S. 16 saw major rebuilds across the decades because of traffic growth and business development near Rapid City. By contrast, U.S. 16A passes mostly through Forest Service land and its route from Custer State Park to Mount Rushmore is unique, to say the least. This is the Iron Mountain Road, roller-coaster-like in spots. Some drivers love it, some find it intimidating. No one forgets it.

A decade after Needles Highway, Iron Mountain Road was another Norbeck-Johnson project, a stunning route over and through a great granite ridge. Norbeck brought in C.C. Gideon, a Minnesota-born building contractor. Gideon had constructed Custer State Park’s game lodge and several other buildings there, then stepped into park leadership roles. His chief contributions to Iron Mountain Road were three pigtail bridges.

Those wooden structures solved a dilemma. Scovel Johnson, during design, realized Iron Mountain’s west face was so steep that he couldn’t engineer roadway switchbacks, as he had planned for the mountain’s other side. The pigtail design has the road spiraling under itself in tight circles. Meanwhile, three tunnels would be blasted (in recent years the tunnels were named for Johnson, Gideon and Doane Robinson).

Upon completion, Iron Mountain Road became the stuff of legends, some far-fetched. Did the builders complete the first tunnel and express surprise that it perfectly framed Mount Rushmore, and then decide the other two should, as well? That claim makes Gideon’s granddaughter, Marilyn Oakes, laugh.”I’m quite sure they had it all figured out before the tunnel work started,” she says.”They wouldn’t have started such a convoluted road without a very clear idea of what they were doing.”

Boulder Canyon and Vanocker Canyon highways. The Wildlife Loop. Argyle, Nemo and Tinton roads. The maze of Forest Service routes. People lost on foot in the Black Hills National Forest should remember that despite immediate appearances, they’re never far from roads to safety. That’s something Scovel Johnson, the Alaska wilderness survivor, stressed. Most roads serve multiple purposes, but were usually designed with specific tasks in mind, including timber hauls, mine access, firefighting, and bringing visitors within view of buffalo herds.

All drivers traveling on American interstates owe thanks to the Black Hills’ own Francis Case. Serving in the U.S. Senate in the 1950s, Case argued that if the proposed interstate system was to function as the national defense highway (its original purpose) then it had to link rural America to the nation’s urban centers. As a powerful member of the Senate Public Works Committee, Case successfully pushed for a federal gasoline tax so that sparsely populated states like South Dakota could afford their long stretches of highways.

Black Hills roads, like this route through Custer State Park, follow the contours of the landscape, providing scenic views and safe travel.

The Gustafson family’s road crews built 63 percent of the original I-90 between Sioux Falls and Rapid City. That, said David Gustafson, was under his father’s leadership. Today the younger Gustafson is president of Heavy Constructors, Inc. of Rapid City. It’s a modern builder of roads and other facilities that hasn’t forgotten its roots in the days of horse-drawn wagons and road graders. The company’s name hints at one way its road building has evolved. Equipment is massive and heavy indeed, powered by great engines.

ìAnd computers changed everything,” Gustafson says.”With GPS, our dozers can almost do grading by themselves, although we still need people around with the old skills to double-check. Computers can make mistakes.”

Still, one can’t help but wonder whether today’s computer programs would have drawn plans for the roads we enjoy today. South Dakota’s mountain passages required a vision and a political savvy that probably can’t be captured in software.

Mike Vehle of Mitchell, who gained a reputation as an advocate of good roads during his years in the state legislature, believes the Black Hills’ historic roads warrant admiration.”I just got back from a trip to Croatia and their mountain roads make you appreciate ours even more. What they call a two-lane road is usually one lane, and if you move just a bit too far either way you are either over the edge or into the side of the mountain.”

Vehle chaired the State Senate’s transportation committee for eight years and was inducted in the South Dakota Department of Transportation’s Hall of Honor for his advocacy of better roads. He says the more he learned about South Dakota’s road history, the more he has come to appreciate Peter Norbeck and the other visionaries of yesterday.

Norbeck, the politician and self-made roadbuilder, once told his friend Francis Case that he would rather be remembered as an artist than a senator. Perhaps he succeeded. We’ve forgotten many of his other policies and programs, but we never tire of the roads he created.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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George Kingsbury: Eyewitness to History

By Roger Holtzmann

George Kingsbury is considered the Father of Journalism in South Dakota. He published the Yankton Press and Dakotan for 40 years and authored the impressive History of Dakota Territory.

George Washington Kingsbury stepped off the Marsh & Rustin stagecoach at Yankton, Dakota Territory, on March 17, 1862. The muddy little river town was then only three years old. Kingsbury, a journeyman printer, planned to work there for a few months, then return home to Kansas and get on with his life.

Things didn’t work out quite that way.

Kingsbury arrived at a historic moment. Gov. William Jayne had that very day convened Dakota’s first legislature in the rude settlement’s log-walled Episcopal church; its members were charged to lay the foundation of,”a government that would endure for all time,” Kingsbury wrote in his History of Dakota Territory.”[Their] duty was a sacred one.”

Which the delegates put off until they’d done a lot of logrolling and selected a permanent capital city. Vermillion and Yankton were the main contenders, but the latter’s supporters thought they had things buttoned up thanks to a back-channel bargain. They supported John Shober and George Pinney for council president and Speaker of the House; in return, the pair from Bon Homme was supposed to back Yankton’s bid.

Pinney was a man of no small ability,”the peer of any other member,” wrote Kingsbury, but he was also an inveterate schemer and”inclined to be erratic.” His fellow legislators watched him,”with constant apprehension of mischief … a harmless motion to adjourn from him would be accepted by half the members as portending a plot.” Pinney was elected Speaker, then promptly reneged on his deal with the Yankton delegation; he didn’t stay bought, as historian Doane Robinson put it, which set off days of parliamentary wrangling.

Excitement was”at a fever-heat” and spectators thronged the lobby when the capital bill came up for consideration, wrote Kingsbury. Suddenly, troops of the Dakota Cavalry, with bayonets fixed, marched into the legislative chamber and surrounded the Speaker’s podium. Pinney had secretly asked Gov. Jayne to dispatch the soldiers, either to quash a rumored conspiracy to have him replaced as Speaker or as part of a convoluted intrigue to embarrass the governor, but all the maneuver did was”arouse great indignation” among the membership. They demanded an explanation and Pinney’s scheme”went to pieces in an hour.”

Pinney was forced to resign and Yankton won the prize, but settling the matter didn’t calm the waters. John Boyle of Vermillion and Enos Stutsman of Yankton”had some hot words” over dinner at the Ash Hotel, wrote Kingsbury, and matters soon escalated.”Boyle seized the ketchup bottle and flung it at Stutsman’s head, narrowly missing him. ‘Stuts’ retaliated with a fusillade of tumblers, cups and the skeleton of a fowl that had contributed to the feast. The combatants then flung themselves … across the table for a finish fight,” that might have resulted in serious injuries had not friends of the two men intervened.

Lawmaking on the frontier was proving to be a less than genteel affair, which did not come as a surprise to the delegates. Jim Somers, the House of Representatives’ Sergeant-at-Arms, was a burly ex-lumberjack with a violent streak; he later shot a sheriff and was himself killed in a shootout near Chamberlain. This preference for solving problems with his fists or worse was common knowledge before he was appointed; the legislators apparently considered this a recommendation for the job of keeping order in the House.

Somers and a group of lawmakers were drinking one evening in Antoine Robeare’s saloon, the legislature’s second home, when Pinney came in the front door.”Suddenly the window … flew up and Speaker Pinney popped out,” wrote Kingsbury. Somers appeared at the window, grinning, as another legislator and Robeare took after the fleeing Pinney — a chase that ended when the ex-speaker drew a pistol and his pursuers'”belligerent ardor moderated.”

By the time the legislative session ended in May the members had managed to discharge their sacred duty despite all the side shows. Kingsbury, meanwhile, reconsidered his plans. Like many a young man in those years, he had headed west in search of adventure and opportunity. He found both in Yankton. There was no need to look any farther.

*****

George W. Kingsbury was born in 1837, on a farm in upstate New York. He learned the printing trade as an apprentice at the Utica Daily Evening Telegraph, but at age 18,”[he] removed to Wisconsin to work with civil engineers on the Watertown & Madison Railroad,” wrote Kingsbury in an autobiographical sketch he penned for History of Dakota Territory. When the Panic of 1857 brought construction on that line to a halt he drifted west, from newspaper to newspaper, eventually reaching Leavenworth, Kansas Territory.

The Territorial Capitol at Yankton, photographed in the early 1860s.

Fort Leavenworth was a staging point for army supply trains on the Santa Fe Trail in the late 1850s. Kingsbury decided this made for an opportunity,”to see the western country at government expense by signing on as a driver,” a plan he soon laid aside after he saw how much grueling work it took to yoke a dozen oxen to each wagon, never mind manhandle it across the prairie. He returned to town and found a position with the Leavenworth Daily Ledger.

Kansas entered the Union in 1861, and opportunity drew Kingsbury to Topeka, the new state’s capital. There he met Josiah Trask, who had parlayed his political connections into a contract as the official public printer for both Kansas and Dakota Territory, which came into being in March of that year. Trask hired Kingsbury to do the actual printing work in Dakota while he stayed in Kansas, a decision that had tragic consequences for him. Trask, a man of strong abolitionist beliefs, was among those killed when the infamous Confederate raider William Quantrill attacked Lawrence, Kansas, a hotbed of the anti-slavery cause.

Kingsbury had been in Dakota barely two months before he went from itinerant printer to publisher and co-owner of the Weekly Dakotian. Frank Ziebach and William Freney had started the paper in 1861 to help a third partner, Capt. John Todd, become the first territorial delegate; once Todd was elected, the Dakotian faded away. By the time Ziebach and Kingsbury revived what had been a Democratic paper the territory’s political winds had shifted, wrote Kingsbury,”and prudence suggested the formation of the partnership [in the name of Kingsbury], a Republican.”

Thus began what historian Bob Karolevitz called”a game of journalistic musical chairs” that went on for years. Newspapers in Yankton combined and split, opened and folded and opened again with different owners; opponents in one election cycle might be partners in the next. Kingsbury’s tenure at the Weekly Dakotian lasted until he fell out with Dr. Walter Burleigh, who had purchased a piece of the paper to promote his campaign for territorial delegate. Kingsbury and Moses K. Armstrong then started a new publication, the Dakota Union, and”fought a glorious fight” against the good doctor, as an admirer put it. Burleigh, the resident Indian agent who set a standard for corruption that was never bettered in Dakota, triumphed despite their opposition, and in the election’s wake the two warring newspapers merged to form the Union and Dakotaian.

Toward the end of his first decade in Dakota, Kingsbury purchased a state-of-the-art steam-powered press, the first in Dakota Territory, and used it to churn out the news under various banners. In 1875 he founded the Black Hiller, aimed at the gold seekers flooding into town. It proved so financially successful that it enabled Kingsbury and Wheeler Bowen to begin publishing the Press & Dakotaian, a daily newspaper that first appeared on April 26 of that year and is still publishing five editions a week in an era when many small daily papers have turned off their presses and closed their doors.

*****

George Kingsbury wrote hundreds of thousands of words in his career, but next to nothing about his personal life. His autobiographical sketch in History of Dakota Territory is sparse and devoid of any sense of the man.”On the 20th of September, 1864,” he wrote,”George W. Kingsbury, of Yankton, and Lydia Maria Stone, daughter of Nathan and Laura Stone, of Lawrence, Kansas, were married at the home of the bride’s mother.”

Lydia and George returned to Yankton and settled down to raise three sons, George, Theodore and Charles. Lydia’s passing evoked the only morsel of emotion in the essay, and that sounded oddly stilted:”Lydia, the wife and mother, died February 1, 1898, and after a few years the little family was broken up, the home practically abandoned.”

George Kingsbury (back row, left) was honored as a pioneer of Dakota Territory during its 50th anniversary in 1911. Other honorees included C.J. Holman (back right) and (front row, from left) Horace Bailey, John Shober, William Jayne and Joseph Hanson.

Kingsbury spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Yankton, which afforded him a front row seat as the territory’s history unfolded, but he was more than an observer. When the territorial legislature convened for its second session in 1863 Kingsbury took a seat in the upper house as a delegate from Yankton, one of many public and private offices he held through the years. He sat on Yankton’s first city commission, was secretary of the corporation that launched the Dakota Southern Railroad and served as the territory’s assessor of internal revenue; he also captained one of Yankton’s two polo teams and produced a traveling play,”The Chaperones.”

When statehood arrived in 1889 Kingsbury served a term in the new legislature and was later appointed to the State Board of Charities and Corrections by Gov. Andrew Lee. On the journalism front, he found himself covering a familiar story. South Dakota’s voters were to select a new capital in the first statewide election of 1890, and the contending cities’ tactics often landed”within the boundaries of criminality,” the old-timer wrote.”[Their] unbecoming and disgraceful conduct cast a shadow upon the fair name and fame of the young state.”

Kingsbury sold his publishing interests in 1902 and began work on History of Dakota Territory, a project he was uniquely qualified to undertake. Modern readers may find fault with some of Kingsbury’s attitudes, his absolute belief in the superiority of white culture over that of the indigenous”savages” among them, but none can say he didn’t do a thorough job. History’s five ponderous volumes, bursting with original documents and encyclopedic detail, dealing with every major and many minor matters of the era, constitute an invaluable resource. Scholars and students of history alike are in his debt.

*****

Yankton’s business community had dreamed of a bridge across the Missouri River since the settlement’s earliest days, the better to draw trade from Nebraska. Financial and technical problems sidelined various schemes through the years; in the meantime, a ferry launched in 1870, and a pontoon bridge followed 20 years after that. This had to be dismantled and reassembled twice a year, however, so it was clearly only a stopgap measure.

Kingsbury had seen a number of bridge schemes up close over the years, and he was on hand when one finally succeeded in spanning the Missouri. E.J. Dowling and an informal group of Yankton’s leading citizens known as the Monday Evening Club resolved that the only way to ensure a bridge was built was to build it themselves.”Their spirit served as midwife to the project,” wrote Kingsbury in a special edition of his newspaper published when steel reached Nebraska.

When the Meridian Highway Bridge formally opened on October 11, 1924, the 87-year-old George Kingsbury rode across as an honored pioneer. It was one of his last public appearances. He grew more and more feeble and slipped away on January 28, 1925, leaving a legacy in South Dakota history and journalism that few scribes will ever match.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Painting the Trophies

By Bernie Hunhoff

The Hatterscheidt trophy room has evolved at the Dacotah Prairie Museum, says curator Marianne Marttila-Klipfel (left). With her are the artists who painted the scenes: Lora Schaunaman (center) and Debra Many Carson.

“This traveling circus of ours lives off the country,” wrote Aberdeen safari hunter Fred Hatterscheidt.”We shoot to eat. We hunt for pleasure. We kill for trophies.”

Few South Dakotans ever hunted the world with the passion of Hatterscheidt, or left the public his guns, journals and taxidermy mounts. However, the staff and board of Dacotah Prairie Museum in Aberdeen soon grew uncomfortable with the collection that they inherited when the hunter bequeathed it to them along with a three-story building that became the museum in 1970.

“The mounts had to be displayed,” says Lora Schaunaman, a retired curator of exhibits. That was part of the agreement Hatterscheidt made with the board even though the lions, tigers and other exotic species hardly fit the museum’s mission of exploring northern South Dakota history.

Perceptions of safaris have also changed since Hatterscheidt died in 1973. When he was circling the globe in the 1950s and 1960s, trophy hunting was accepted as the sport of wealthy adventurers. Ernest Hemingway, one of the most famous American novelists of the 20th century, wrote extensively about his African excursions.

Other celebrities also popularized safari hunts. Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president who is remembered as a conservationist, embarked on an African safari soon after leaving the White House in 1910. He later bragged that he’d killed 296 animals, including nine lions and 15 zebras. John Wayne roped a 450-pound wildebeest while filming Hatari, a 1962 movie about hunters who captured wild animals for zoos.

Even as those famous hunts were occurring, some game species were nearing extinction. Also, the concept of safari hunting became entangled with the colonialism that exploited native peoples in African countries. The stereotype of the rich American or European flying to an impoverished Third World village to kill for sport was reenforced when a Minnesota dentist shot a beloved lion named Cecil that lived in a national park in Zimbabwe.

However, the staff of the Aberdeen museum had recognized the dilemma long before Cecil’s death in 2015. A 1990 museum report recommended that Hatterscheidt’s gun collection be removed because it gave the appearance of”promotion of big game hunting.” The report, titled”A Man of His Times,” noted that the museum benefactor lived and hunted at a time when sensibilities were quite different.

Even for his own time, Fred Hatterscheidt was unique. He was born in Cologne, Germany in 1893 and came to America as a child with his parents, who were looking for an opportunity to farm. They arrived in Aberdeen when he was 10.

Hatterscheidt was with Frank Scepaniak in Siberia when Scepaniak killed the polar bear, which was mounted in full.

He studied at the Aberdeen Business College and Northern Normal (today’s Northern State University). He joined the South Dakota National Guard in 1914, the same year he went to work for a local real estate firm.

Hatterscheidt married Ruth Kimble in 1922. They did not have children, but they embraced the greater Aberdeen community. Today, their Hatterscheidt Foundation continues to provide scholarships to students in the region. Hatterscheidt immersed himself in business and 30 years later the son of immigrants had the wherewithal to travel the world. Ruth accompanied him on a few of his trips. She collected fans. Her husband collected animal trophies.

Hatterscheidt kept detailed journals as he traveled. Like the taxidermy mounts, his thoughts and writings deserve to be judged in the context of the era. He wrote honestly and bluntly, at times questioning the customs of other cultures and in other instances, seeking understanding.

In September of 1952 he was hunting giraffe in the Tana Forest of Kenya.”We followed the wounded animal for miles and miles over mountain and desert,” he wrote.”We had to quit on account of the darkness and we were still ten or twelve miles from Camp.”

He continued on September 19:”Six boys tracking the animal over mountains and desert, and finally we had to give up spoor. We located four Giraffe feeding. We circled and came in against the wind. Smith designated the kill, and Bob, our gun boys and I, dropped out of the hunting truck which went on the prescribed 200 yards. I got in the first shot with the .416. Bob used his 30.06 immediately after. The heavy impact of the .416 knocked the Giraffe clean off his feet. He jumped up and ran after the herd. Bob shot five times and registered three hits, but the bullets were flattened out under the skin which is nearly one-half inch thick. I got in another shot with the .416 and this slowed up the Giraffe to where Captain Smith headed him off near the road. The animal was about 16 or 18 feet tall and weighed nearly two tons. It was all our truck could do to pull and turn him over.”

On Sept. 29, 1952, he related an elephant kill.”Trailed Elephant for an hour or two (time means nothing in the African jungle). Elephant Camp on the Tana River. This was the highlight of our trip. Killed a six ton or more (7 tons) Elephant over 100 years old and carried 160 pounds of ivory (figuring both tusks). I fired three shots from the .416; the first one to the heart. He ran less than 20 yards and fell dead. Captain Smith stood silent in reverence to the dying giant of the Tana Forest. Tears ran from the Elephant’s eyes and perspiration formed in pools on his head.”

He also observed foreign commerce, noting in England on August 11, 1952,”There are men in charge of business who know nothing about it. They don’t even know what assets they have.”

A few days later he penned,”Sixty-eight colored natives were arrested in Johannesburg today.” It is one of several brief references to native Africans’ rebellions against apartheid and other injustices.

On the 1952 trip, he saw Hollywood movie star Spencer Tracy in a hotel lobby.”He is shorter than I, and his nose and cheeks are pot-marked,” wrote Hatterscheidt.”He is very homely and looked more like a tramp.”

In a 1959 trip to India, he scolded the leaders.”These ‘holier than thou’ politicians are no different than the Caesars of Rome as far as the masses are concerned. They wouldn’t let Bob and I walk on a street leading to the Palace of the President, nor take any pictures of Nehru’s palace. The people of India have never seen pictures of these in any newspapers. Nehru is always shown with (Hindu fashion) folded hands in greeting. Gandhi set an example of poverty but like our priests and ministers, those in power don’t follow Christ or Gandhi.”

He was more impressed with the rural people.”Bob and I have really experienced the life of an Indian Maharaja who used to have the exclusive right to kill a tiger. We have been waited on. We have been blessed and anointed with oil and sprinkled with rice, and a mark was put on my forehead. All good Hindus, especially the women, carry a red or black spot on their forehead. We were honored time and time again for being killers of the tiger, also their god. I can’t understand any of it.”

Aberdeen hunter Fred Hatterscheidt made the cover of a Minneapolis magazine in 1961.

Hatterscheidt welcomed publicity. In 1960, he offered his diaries to Farm Journal but the editor, Carroll Streeter, replied,”we are so terrifically crowded for space right now that I think it quite unlikely that we could.”

Regional newspapers were more receptive. In the museum files are several stories, including a 1959 account in the Aberdeen American News of a tiger hunt.”The Jeep lurched to a stop and as Hatterscheidt stepped down, the tiger was charging down on them,” wrote Sally Ross.”Hatterscheidt fired, but the tiger kept coming. Hatterscheidt fired again and again until the tiger reared on its hind feet and in one last roar, fell over backwards 20 feet away from the hunter.”

He told the Watertown Public Opinion that the 3,000-pound gaur he shot”represents a possible record kill.” He said it measured 6 feet, 1 inch at the shoulders ó 2 inches higher than the previously recognized record.

On March 5, 1961, the Aberdeen hunter was featured on the cover of the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune Magazine with a trophy Bengal tiger shot in India. He said the tiger was,”bagged by means of a beat, where natives form a huge circle and drive the animals forward,” while he waited in a blind, 16 feet above the ground.

His trophy kills were preserved by some of America’s best taxidermists in Chicago, Houston and Seattle. Once mounted, they were shipped to W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion, the oldest museum in South Dakota. Someone there had apparently assisted Hatterscheidt in gaining permission for some of the hunts.

However, in 1970 two of Hatterscheidt’s friends stopped at the Vermillion museum to see the trophies and were chagrined to discover that the heads were in storage and not available to the public. At that very time, historians in Aberdeen were looking for a permanent home for the Dacotah Prairie Museum.

Hatterscheidt and two partners, Herman Pickus and P.A. Bradbury, agreed to donate the historic, three-story Western Union Building on Main Street in 1970. However, the offer included a stipulation that the museum shall exhibit the wildlife collection ó including the aforementioned gaur and elephant.

Hatterscheidt died three years later, long before museumgoers began to balk at the mounted heads. However, by the 1990s, sensibilities were changing and the mounts, some now 40 years old, were aging. To make matters worse, the trophies were only separated from visitors by a rope, so some people were handling the mounts; bratty children were even pulling the whiskers from a leopard.

Schaunaman, an artist and art teacher, was then a curator.”The original exhibit was a trophy room with just the heads hanging on the walls,” she says.”It told the safari story of one Aberdeen businessman, but the reaction wasn’t always great. I didn’t even like to go in the room. People would bring their little kids and they would be afraid. Sometimes they would cry and scream. Our director back then was Sue Gates. She knew I didn’t like the room, yet we all knew the trophies had to be displayed. That’s when we came up with an idea.”

Sherri Rawstern, the museum’s longtime curator of education, urged her fellow staffers to consider two goals: show the animals in their native habitat, and do it in a manner that was more lifelike. That was the genesis of a major undertaking.

Schaunaman immediately reached out to Debra Many Carson, an Aberdeen wildlife artist.”I called her and said, ‘Have you ever painted an animal life-size?'”

Buster the Bison has long been the mascot of the Dacotah Prairie Museum, but he became even more popular when artist Debra Many Carson painted a body to match his fuzzy head.

The two women began by researching habitats and drawing sketches, which were later enlarged to fit the walls. They especially worked on the proportion of the actual heads to the painted bodies. Along with the art scenes, they incorporated real tufts of grass, soils, branches and a massive tree trunk.

Schaunaman tried to contact the original taxidermists, hoping to learn how to clean the mounts. Chris Klineburger of Seattle was deceased, but she was able to reach his son, Kent, who had continued in his father’s footsteps.”I only expected to get some advice, but when he heard what we were doing he insisted on coming to help,” she says.”He was on his honeymoon, actually. He came with his new bride, and she helped as well. They were here for about a week.”

During the 18-month transformation of the trophy room, museum staff also embarked on a major restoration of the handsome 1888 building that Hatterscheidt and his partners had given to them. Replacing the huge windows was an important part of the renovation.

“As they were taking out the big windows on street level, Sue Gates told us, ‘here’s your chance!'” Schaunaman remembers.”The window holes made it possible for us to get the big mounts outdoors for cleaning. Somewhere there’s a picture of me, standing on a step ladder and vacuuming a polar bear on Aberdeen’s Main Street.”

Other repairs were more subtle. Many Carson, the wildlife artist, had pet cats.”When I realized the leopard’s whiskers were missing, I watched for my cats to shed their whiskers and I saved them and glued them on the leopard,” she says.

A golden eagle, mounted on a rock, was especially difficult.”We had a terrible time getting him off the rock without breaking his talons,” says Many Carson.

The elephant head was also challenging.”They didn’t have the foam plastic models in those days, so it is framed with 2-by-4s and other heavy wood,” Schaunaman says.”The tusks are fiberglass, but they are heavy as well. We had to consult a structural engineer to see if the wall would hold it. We drilled through three layers of brick to the outside wall and bolted the mount to a steel plate.”

Using large chunks of material from Benchmark Foam in Watertown, they also sculpted two front legs for the gigantic elephant.

Though the murals span the continents of Earth, they blend together as if you were circling the globe on a jet plane.”It begins with sunrise of the Arctic, and then morning over the Rockies, noonday on the Great Plains, afternoon in Africa, a sunset in India and nighttime in the Himalayas,” says Schaunaman.

Many Carson and Schaunaman have slightly different styles, but their work blended perfectly. A casual observer might think it was all accomplished by a single artist.

Reaction from the public was immediately positive.”It changed by leaps and bounds,” Schaunaman says. And that has continued, even though public perceptions of big-game hunting are still evolving.

Marianne Marttila-Klipfel, who now serves as curator of exhibits at Dacotah Prairie Museum, says the safari murals and mounts have stood the test of time.”Now, with improvements made by Lora and Debra, the room tells a story in an educational context. The animals were placed back into their natural habitats and through artistic magic, life was brought to the exhibit. The rest of us get to benefit from their vision and talent.”†

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Forgotten Giant

By Patrick Gallagher

Mike McHugh hoped Northern State University could preserve Lincoln Hall, named for Isaac Lincoln, his step-grandfather and a founder of the university. Sadly, the building was demolished in June 2024.

Editor’s Note: Demolition crews in Aberdeen tore down Lincoln Hall on the Northern State University campus in June. This story, revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine, tells the story of its namesake, Isaac Lincoln. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Mike McHugh sadly tore down the grain elevator on his Brown County farm a year ago. Built by his step-grandfather, the elevator was a local landmark for more than a century. As a teenager in the 1960s, McHugh unloaded grain there. A horse-and-buggy-days structure, even 60 years ago it had been too small for the trucks, but McHugh kept it long after it was useful.

He had that same sad feeling a few months earlier when he learned the fate of Lincoln Hall at Northern State University, 12 miles away in Aberdeen. NSU planned to demolish and replace the 1918 building after, like McHugh’s elevator, it had outlived its usefulness. Over the years, Aberdonians and Northern alums came to assume Lincoln Hall — originally built as a women’s dormitory — had been named in tribute to our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. But it was not, and that was the source of McHugh’s sorrow. Lincoln Hall honors Isaac Lincoln, a forgotten giant in Aberdeen and Northern State history — and McHugh’s step-grandfather, the same man who built the family grain elevator.

*****

Isaac Lincoln was born to a pedigreed New England family in 1863. His mother’s brothers served in Congress and in President Lincoln’s cabinet. Isaac Lincoln himself may have been distantly related to the president on his father’s side, but his destiny lay far from Washington. He developed wanderlust as a young man, moving first to Indiana, then Dakota Territory to work on farms.

Isaac Lincoln.

He arrived in Aberdeen in 1886 and made his mark in real estate and banking, eventually serving as an officer or director for several banks in Aberdeen, northeastern South Dakota and Minneapolis. In 1903, he bought 1,760 acres on the Elm River near Aberdeen and became a model farmer, known for sharing his knowledge with neighbors and students. He proudly loaded his livestock on a boxcar in nearby Ordway and showed them as far away as Chicago. The animals, especially his prized Galloway cattle, frequently won top honors.”He would paint the inside of his barn bright white to show off the cattle’s rich black coat,” McHugh says.

After a 1913 fire, he built a”palatial farm residence and a monster grain elevator,” according to one local newspaper report. Later that year, another fire destroyed a barn, and Lincoln built”one of the finest barns in the county.” The barn and house (a fire survivor) still stand. The”monster” elevator was the structure that McHugh sadly demolished in 2021.

The farm came to be known as Lincoln Ranch, the name McHugh still uses a century after Lincoln died. It became McHugh’s thanks to Lincoln’s 1906 marriage at age 43 to Margaret Ringrose McHugh, the 48-year-old proprietor of the Sherman Department Store. Arriving in Aberdeen in 1883, she married P.J. McHugh and they moved to Minnesota. After McHugh’s 1889 death, she returned to Aberdeen in 1893 with sons Phil and Frank, who became Mike’s father.

*****

Along with state senator James Lawson and Father Robert Haire, Lincoln is credited as a founder of Northern State University. On the committee to help select its location, Lincoln gave a tour of options to Gov. Andrew Lee, who chose the south end of town for the new Northern Normal and Industrial School.

In 1901, the Board of Regents appointed Lincoln its local secretary,”an entirely honorary position” with”no pay,” a paper reported. Doing much more than verify bills, Lincoln helped oversee the institution’s development, including the construction of its first building — even through disaster.

In the summer of 1917, Isaac Lincoln used a horse-drawn plow to break ground for the building that was to bear his name.

In late December 1901, young Phil McHugh, Lincoln’s future stepson, discovered the blaze on his way to skate on Moccasin Creek. When the fire department arrived, however, the building was beyond saving. As one man walked up Jay Street to view the flames, he found Lincoln.

“Well, Lincoln,” he said,”I suppose this ends our Normal School idea.”

“Hell, no,” Lincoln replied.”We have just commenced to fight.”

The building was rebuilt, and NNIS opened in September 1902.

Lincoln oversaw construction of a new women’s dormitory in 1904, a workshop to implement the”industrial” aspect of the new college’s name, and created an oratory contest that outlived him.

Perhaps inspired by his uncles’ public service, Lincoln sought and won election to the state senate in 1906. During his first term, he spearheaded a $60,000 bill for a new building at Northern. At its dedication, the senate appropriations chair credited Lincoln with securing a larger appropriation for Northern than the other state colleges received.”If the other schools had had a Mr. Lincoln in the senate they might have obtained more money,” the senator noted. After a reelection defeat in 1908, Lincoln returned to the senate in 1914 and served until his death in 1921.

In a posthumous postscript to Lincoln’s NSU and public service careers, his stepson, Democratic Sen. Frank McHugh, introduced the 1939 bill that changed NNIS’ name to Northern State Teachers College, a longtime Northern goal. About seven decades later, Mike McHugh, also a Democrat, ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature. Both men were also involved in many community service and nonprofit activities, inspired, McHugh believes, by Lincoln’s public-spiritedness.

*****

Lincoln resigned as Northern’s secretary in 1909. In 1917, the legislature approved construction of a women’s dorm, and the Regents named it after Lincoln to honor his long dedication to the school. A local paper was effusive:”When finished the new hall will probably be the finest, largest and most thoroly [sic] equipped dormitory in the two Dakotas.” It went on to make the same case that McHugh would champion a century later:”Mr. Lincoln has been largely instrumental in making the school what it is today, and it owes its success in a great measure to him.”

To kick off construction, the honoree and part-time farmer drove two horses pulling a plow to break ground at the site in the summer of 1917. Lincoln Hall opened in October 1918 during a World War and a worldwide pandemic. Since then, the versatile building has been enlarged and has housed students as well as an art gallery, the business school and international programs.

Just three years later, at age 58, Lincoln died of stomach cancer. Obituaries struggled to describe the man’s breadth.”It is a question whether Senator Lincoln was better known as a financier or as a farmer,” one tribute read.”His life has left its imprint on South Dakota development in both lines of activity.” Many businesses closed on the day of his funeral, and 1,000 people passed through his Aberdeen home to pay respects.

*****

When Neal Schnoor became NSU president in July 2021, he inherited the Lincoln Hall project. The original plan was to put the business school, the SDSU accelerated nursing program, an entrepreneurship center and the admissions office in a renovated Lincoln Hall. However, Schnoor said,”We encountered many obstacles in accessibility, technology — it still has the original 1917 wiring — and design. Contractors told us that renovating the building would double the $29.5 million project cost,” and it would still be a rehabbed dormitory, not a modern instructional and community engagement space. Plans shifted, and in one of those coincidences of history the demolition of Lincoln Hall was announced in the centenary year of its namesake’s death.

Lincoln Hall, photographed in 2022, was originally built as a women’s dormitory but also housed an art gallery, the business school and international programs.

Having faced similar issues with several buildings on Lincoln Ranch — including the”monster” elevator — McHugh understood the quandary, but he went to bat for his step-grandfather.”Had there not been an Isaac Lincoln, I don’t know what Northern would be today,” he says.”I’m not diminishing other contributions, but Lincoln had a very important impact on the early formative years of the institution.” Perhaps following his step-grandfather’s determination, he had just commenced to fight.

Hoping to preserve the name on the new building, McHugh spoke at events in Aberdeen and visited with legislators, Regents, NSU staff and Schnoor himself.”Mike is highlighting the achievements of a remarkable man and doing that highlights the supportive community that got Northern built,” Schnoor says.

While McHugh’s conversations were happening, NSU supporters successfully lobbied legislators to support a $29.5 million appropriation of American Rescue Plan Act funds for the project. Senate Bill 44, the title of which read in part”construction of the new Lincoln Hall,” passed both houses and was signed by the governor in March 2022.

Despite the bill’s title, Schnoor told McHugh that typically a building’s name continues only for its useful life. He added, however,”I have a plan for naming our most prominent enduring campus feature for Isaac Lincoln in perpetuity. I’m not saying that to appease anyone. History matters to us.”

Buildings might outlast their usefulness, but people don’t, even a century or more after they’re gone. McHugh’s campaign to preserve Isaac Lincoln’s name has brought his contributions back to light, and he has found allies in Schnoor, the NSU community and Aberdeen. Lincoln fought tirelessly for his town and school, and he’d be proud to know his grandson is fighting for him.

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Ship in a Bottle

By Lance Nixon

German prisoners of war were put to work harvesting beets on Jack Rathbun’s farm near Nisland.

The war hit home for the Lungrens on a Sunday in December.

“I can remember the Sunday when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” says Don Lungren of Pierre, who grew up in a German-speaking home near Vale.”We went to church. We came home, and on Sunday, Dad always turned on the radio to hear what the markets were going to be on Monday morning in Sioux City. Most of the time we didn’t have anything to sell, but he had to know what the markets were.”

On that Sunday in 1941, his father tuned in the set, as always; but he might have let it stay on longer than usual.”They were making a lot of noise on that radio, I can remember that — yelling and stuff,” Lungren recalls.”Dad shut it off and he told Mom he was going to see Grandpa.”

Lungren’s father returned with a strict order:”Henceforth, we don’t speak German anymore.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war against Japan and its ally, Germany. Perhaps because of the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in the U.S. during World War I, and perhaps because of fears that Japanese and German speakers might be suspected of harboring sympathies with the enemy, the family stopped speaking German then and there.

That Sunday the Lungren children also realized Germans were on the other side of the war. And if they had any doubts that Germans were the adversaries, there was more proof. South Dakota would be one of the places where German prisoners of war were stationed as World War II dragged on.

The first prisoners of war arrived in America in May 1942. Historian Arnold Krammer, who has written extensively about the era, notes that not only Germans but also Italian and Japanese soldiers would spend time in American internment camps before the effort ended in July 1946.

“It is remarkable how many people don’t realize that we held nearly 425,000 German POWs (as well as 53,000 Italian and 5,000 military Japanese prisoners) in some 550 camps across the country. They worked in factories, hospitals and brought in the crops since our boys were overseas fighting in the war,” Krammer told us.

In South Dakota, German POWs ended up in parts of Meade and Butte counties doing fieldwork; in Yankton doing bank stabilization work on the Missouri River; in northeastern South Dakota; and in the Sioux Falls area.

“Every farmer in the valley here used German prisoners for a couple years,” says David Rathbun of Nisland, who was about 9 and 10 at the time his family benefited from POW labor in the fields. His brother Grove, four years older, would drive the truck when they went to fetch prisoners from the Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Orman Dam.

The Rathbuns transported prisoners in their 1937 Ford beet truck. An American guard followed in the family’s Model A pickup.

“It was an old CCC camp in the’30s, and the government turned it into a POW camp. It had machine gun towers and barracks and the whole works, big fence,” Rathbun says.”We’d go up in a truck, get a load of German prisoners, maybe 20 at a time, and haul them back to the farm and they’d work. They had to do so much in a day. I’ll give them credit, they were hard workers.”

During threshing, the German soldiers gathered bundles of barley, oats or wheat into wagons. In that era before combines were common, they also pitched bundles into the threshing machine.

With the sugar beets, the POWs took on many tasks: thinning the beets, hoeing them when they were bigger, pulling them and taking the tops off, loading them on trucks for transport to the railroad, where they were loaded on cars and taken to the factory for processing.

There were also prisoners stationed at nearby Fort Meade. The prisoners came from different sectors of the war, Rathbun recalls.”North Africa was the first ones we got. They came in’43. That’s when we got Rommel’s Afrika Korps prisoners, and they were ornery bastards,” he remembers, referring to the German expeditionary force that fought in Africa under Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s favorite generals.”They were the old Nazi type. They stabbed one of their own prisoners, killed him with a butcher knife, up at Orman Dam at the prison camp because he was too friendly with American guards.”

Krammer says such incidents weren’t uncommon, though often concealed by the prisoners.”Almost every camp held a minority of die-hard Nazis who often terrorized the others and sometimes murdered one or two, listing the deaths as suicides.”

The prisoners stayed for growing season, and after harvest were moved to other parts of the country.”They shipped them all out, I don’t know what they did with them,” Rathbun says.”And then in’44, we got prisoners from Normandy. They were just run-of-the-mill German soldiers. They were different. They were damn glad to be out of that war. They didn’t mind working in the beet fields.”

Krammer cites studies saying about 40 percent of German POWs were pro-Nazi. Eight to 10 percent were considered fanatics in their devotion to the Nazi cause, while another 30 percent were”deeply sympathetic.” But just as Rathbun suggested, many of the German POWs were not Nazis.

The prisoners were given small breaks to split up the hours of labor.”Our place had the Belle Fourche River running through it. If they got done early in their work, the guard would let them go swim in the river, and they really liked that,” Rathbun says.

There were even stories that the guard would take a dip with the prisoners now and then.”He did, actually,” Rathbun confirms.”I saw that happen. The guard went swimming and left a sergeant, German sergeant, sitting on the hillside looking for the colonel.”

Locals would often practice German with the prisoners.”There’s a lot of German around here. Our neighbors were Low German, I think, and the prisoners were High German, but they could understand each other. They’d talk all the time.”

Another mode of communication was the universal language of food and drink. Don Lungren recalls that his parents and grandparents, Germans themselves, coaxed extra labor out of the POWs.

“They would make a big 2- or 3-gallon pail of chicken noodle soup, and man, I’ll tell you, they could pick cucumbers twice as fast. And Grandpa, he made better than that. His bribe was that if they would look at the end of the trees, by the hog house, there would be some beer there if they would get those cucumbers picked today. They had them done by noon, I think.”

After long days in the Butte County beet fields, prisoners sometimes enjoyed a swim in the Belle Fourche River.

Lungren said other locals would do favors for the POWs.”My family and most of the German families always gave them a treat — chicken noodle soup from the old roosters and that sort of thing and beer at the end of the grove in the trees. The guard would come. Grandpa would loan the guard his shotgun and the guard could go shoot pheasants. And because the guard couldn’t get the pheasants home, I suppose Grandma cooked the pheasants and fed them to the prisoners.”

Sometimes the farmers got more than they asked.”Grandma told one of the prisoners she wanted some little cucumbers because she wanted to make baby dills,” Lungren said. His grandmother had business to tend to, but when she got back to the field, the Germans had picked two bushels of tiny cucumbers — far more than she needed.”We had baby dills for years.”

Marian Ruff added that for German-speaking families, even though many of them had immigrated to America from German communities in Russia, it was awkward having German POWs work in the fields.

“My family, like the other German families, was looked down on because of the war — because they were Germans,” she said.”With the POWs, I think we felt sorry for them because of the way they were treated. They would bring this truckload of guys out to the Vale area and they would have two armed soldiers with them with rifles in case they tried to escape. They were supposed to shoot them.”

The guards weren’t just for show, Krammer says.

“There were escapes aplenty, but most were caught within three days,” he notes. But, he adds that many prisoners quickly figured out they would be treated decently in America.

“Those assigned to American farms were well-treated and modern flea markets still have POW-made handicrafts which they gave to the children of farm families,” Krammer said.

That was the case in South Dakota, too, Marian Ruff said.”They were just really happy to get out of the prison situation and do something. Several of them put together some ships inside of wine bottles. We have one of those. One was given to my grandpa. Several of the families that these prisoners worked for ended up with one of these ships inside of a bottle. It always fascinated me because I had no idea how they did it. Someone said to me recently, ëWell, they sawed the bottom of the bottle and put the ship in and sealed the bottom back on again,’ but I don’t know if that’s what they really did or not.”

And no one knows what it meant to a German soldier, either — building a ship inside a bottle in a prison camp to give to a German farmer in landlocked South Dakota.

David Ruff of Spearfish, Marian’s husband, grew up near Nisland during the war. He spoke German well enough to understand the German POWs who worked for his father and some of the neighbors.

The Rathbun family dog often provided canine companionship for Germans working the fields.

“I often wondered if they didn’t have feelings knowing that they were in a country so far from their homeland and had people there that could speak their language. I think many of the prisoners were quite pleased to find that there were German-speaking people here. They were appreciative of the extra food that was given them and the friendliness of the farmers that they worked for.

“I don’t know if I personally asked one of them or what, but somehow or another in conversation, I learned from them that they were quite pleased with the treatment they were receiving here. I’m not sure exactly where they became prisoners of war, but they mentioned that when they were in France, they were required to drink out of the troughs that the livestock drank out of.”

POWs also made an impact on the other side of the state. Yankton-area historians Lois Varvel and Kathy K. Grow reflected on the German POWs stationed in Yankton in their 2001 book, The Bridge We Built: The Story of Yankton’s Meridian Bridge. They noted that the Yankton Press & Dakotan reported on April 3, 1945, the arrival of the first contingent of German POWs from the Afrika Korps to take part in Missouri River bank protection work. Officials wouldn’t tell the newspaper how many German POWs would come to Yankton, citing policy on POWs, but the newspaper understood they would make up”a sizable force.”

The POWs worked on a project to make sure the main flow of the Missouri River steered clear of the city of Yankton’s water intake. The work had side benefits for the Meridian Bridge.”We had prisoners of war trucked in from Algona, Iowa, and they did revetment work on the Nebraska shoreline. That was their contribution to protecting the Meridian Bridge,” Varvel says.

After the war ended, most of the 375,000 German POWs went back to Germany — but not all stayed there. Some liked what they had seen of life in America. The United States didn’t track the number of former German POWs who ended up immigrating to the land of their captivity; but it was substantial. Krammer notes that John Schroer, a former POW who immigrated to America after being held as a POW in Alabama, estimated about 5,000 POWs made a similar move. Some reportedly returned to South Dakota, too, where the enemy they had fought showed them decency and kindness in victory.

Editor’s Note: The tally of German prisoners of war in South Dakota at any one time during World War II was a floating figure because they rotated in and out of different states depending on the local harvest and other demands. Curt Nickisch, a South Dakota Public Broadcasting journalist at the time, wrote a story for South Dakota Magazine in 2001 in which he reported the number at more than 1,200 POWs through 1944 and 1945. There are also several books available, including Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer. This story is revised from the March/April 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Homestake’s Pit Ponies

By Chuck Cecil

“Old Smoky was hitched to a train of carts, each loaded with gold-laden ore headed to a Homestake elevator 400 feet underground in 1908.

Homestake Gold Mine depended on manpower in its early years, but in 1889 seven horses and 15 snorting mules were sent down its candlelit shafts.

Sometimes referred to as”pit ponies,” Homestake’s horses were lowered into the mine as fillies. The remuda eventually reached about 90 head. Once inside, most of the horses never again saw the light of day, although a few were trundled topside during fires, miners’ strikes and for rare promotional purposes.

Lifting or lowering the horrified horses to or from workstations thousands of feet underground was difficult. The elevator’s small size as well as the horses’ flighty dispositions were not conducive to noisy, rocky rides, so they were bound head to hoof in wide leather strappings. Their eyes were covered to help calm them. The 3-inch-wide harness held them in what resembled a sitting position, like an apple hanging in a stocking. This package of nearly a ton of horseflesh was fastened to the underside of a vertical shaft elevator. The signal was given and away they went, headfirst and squirming. The practice was considered the most humane because there was no pulling force bound to the horse’s neck or head.

Homestake wasn’t alone in its need for underground horsepower, although only a few of the more than 300 other mines in the Black Hills used horses underground. Those four-legged and faithful power sources at Homestake spent their lives in darkness, plodding through dank tunnels, using steel rails and memory as their guides to the ore dumping stations. On 10-hour shifts, they pulled rattling trains comprised of as many as eight, single-hitch, four-wheeled ore carts, each loaded with about a ton of gold-bearing rock.

Every miner was issued three candles to light their way during the long shift; the horses also depended on those tiny flickering flames. Hay, oats and water for the horses was lowered to roughly built wooden stables sited at key points along each mining level. Veterinarians, harness makers and blacksmiths were always nearby if needed. Walking on rough, sharp mine debris meant the horses required regular shoeing.

Not all Homestake horses were destined to a lifelong assignment underground. In the 20-year horse era at Homestake, some lucky ones were rewarded with visits to the surface and temporarily blinding daylight. During an 1893 mine fire, horses working in that area of the mine were brought above ground until the fire was doused.

A miner’s strike in 1906 posed a problem for mine bosses because the strike did not allow union workers to enter the mine, though the animals had to be fed and watered. Until the walkout was settled, all the nearly 90 horses were brought to the surface for an unscheduled vacation. It is said that the horses, once out of the mine, had to be taught how to eat green grass again.

Homestake Mine mascot “Teddy” was born 300 feet underground on May 26, 1902. The colt was named after Theodore Roosevelt, then in his second year as president.

A surprising turn of events occurred in the early morning hours of May 26, 1902 when a colt was foaled at the 300-foot level. Underground births were not expected since all the horses below ground were mares. Apparently one mare had been impregnated before she was lowered to Level Three.

Homestake officials took advantage of the opportunity to impress then President Theodore Roosevelt as well as the thousands expected to attend Lead’s 1902 Fourth of July celebration. The two-month-old foal was brought to the surface. Named Teddy in honor of the president, it became the hit of the holiday. Teddy was never assigned underground work.

To help the City of Lead stage its 1903 Labor Day celebration, a veteran mare named Mollie that had worked in the mine for 14 years was selected to make the trip to the top and be featured in a Homestake Mine display. Her eventual work assignment was not disclosed, but it is doubtful that she was returned to her former purgatory. She probably joined the surface herd, re-learned how to eat grass and enjoyed the rest of her life working daylight hours.

Soon after Mollie’s hoist to sunlight, the last of the horses working underground also made the upward journey. By that time, improved underground transport systems rendered real horsepower obsolete in pit mining. Steam engines were the first mechanized replacement, followed by compressed air, battery and electrical inventions. With each improvement, fewer pit ponies were needed. Gradually, horses were retired and hauled to the surface. The phaseout began in 1908, though horses played a role in the mine’s surface work well into the 1950s.

The mine closed in 2002. Now in its depths is the Sanford Underground Research Facility, where scientists search for neutrinos and dark matter — particles so tiny, mysterious and elusive that brainpower is in higher demand than horsepower.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Historical Treasure Hunt

By John Andrews

Sarah Hanson-Pareek, the Curator of Digital Projects and Photographs for the Archives and Special Collections at USD, is digitizing the long-lost 1st Dakota Cavalry ledger, which dates to 1862.

WHEN ABNER M. ENGLISH wrote a history of the 1st Dakota Cavalry — the first military regiment ever assembled in Dakota Territory — his time in that unit was nearly 35 years behind him. Still, he remembered with remarkable clarity several stories from the cavalry’s three years of active duty — from their training days in Yankton, to the mundane everyday occurrences of a soldier’s life to their pursuit of Native Americans as part of General Alfred Sully’s campaign in northern Dakota.

He tried to recall the names of all his comrades in Company A, a task that would have been much easier had he been able to find the company’s descriptive book, which contained a full roster of the soldiers who joined along with some scant biographical data. However, English believed the book had been lost, and for decades historians of Dakota Territory and South Dakota — as well as descendants of our first military men and other ardent genealogists — also assumed that was the case. But what was lost is now found and will soon be available to anyone in the world with a computer and access to the internet.

The book is fragile — not surprising considering it is 160 years old. It contains a dozen pages of written names, ages, heights and hometowns or countries. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a list, but it has the potential to unlock countless stories that can tell us much more about the early days of Dakota Territory.

*****

AMONG JAMES BUCHANAN’S final acts as president of the United States was signing the document officially creating Dakota Territory on March 2, 1861, two days before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. That fall, the War Department authorized Gov. William Jayne (Lincoln’s personal physician from Springfield, Illinois and political appointee) to raise two companies of cavalry. As new states and territories were created, they were authorized under the Militia Act of 1792 to raise military units.

Kurt Hackemer, a history professor at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion who researches the Civil War era in Dakota, says those units were raised for varying purposes, largely depending upon geography.”In the South you have militias before the Civil War because of the threat of slave rebellion,” Hackemer says.”As you get into the Industrial Age, in parts of the Northeast and Midwest, militias exist in response to industrial violence. In Dakota Territory, when our militia is founded, it’s for protection because there’s contested land between the incoming settlers and the indigenous population.”

Recruiting stations were set up at Yankton, Vermillion and Bon Homme. As volunteers reported to each community, their vital information was recorded in a descriptive book: name, age, height, complexion, eye and hair color, home state or country, occupation and enlistment date. Company A of the 1st Dakota Cavalry officially mustered into service on April 30, 1862. (Company B, also known as the Dakota Rangers, mustered in at Sioux City on March 31, 1863.)

English, a 25-year-old carpenter from Vermont when he joined, later recalled the first weeks of the Dakota Cavalry’s existence. His reminiscence was serialized in 1900 and 1901 in the Monthly South Dakotan, state historian Doane Robinson’s turn-of-the-century version of a magazine devoted to history and culture. It was republished in its entirety in 1918 in the historical society’s South Dakota Historical Collections. English said the men trained under a regular army soldier named Frederick Plughoff, a 36-year-old from Germany.”His strict discipline was quite irksome but we had enlisted to become soldiers and to serve under the flag of our country and we obeyed all orders and soon became quite proficient in drill and discipline,” English wrote.

He said soldiers were issued old Hall’s carbines, French revolvers and a regulation cavalry saber.”The carbine and revolvers were miserable arms,” English wrote,”the men being in about as much danger in the rear as the enemy in front.” They were soon replaced with Sharp’s carbines and Colt revolvers.

Nelson Miner served as captain of the 1st Dakota. Company A’s original roster book remained in his family until the 1980s.

Although the Civil War was raging in the East and cavalry units from surrounding states were called to help fortify Union forces, much of the 1st Dakota Cavalry’s early actions took place close to home.”There’s an interesting misnomer that the Civil War was fought on the Union side by the U.S. Army, and it really wasn’t,” Hackemer says.”There are Army units, but the vast majority of forces raised during the Civil War are state-level units called volunteers in federal service. They are units that are under the authority of state governments who then sign up to serve in federal service, and that’s what the Dakota Cavalry is. They could have been sent east, in theory, to serve in Civil War battles like the 1st Nebraska Cavalry was, but they were kept here for local service because of the threat posed by the 1862 Dakota War.”

That conflict between the U.S. Army and the Santee erupted in violence in Minnesota in August of 1862 and spilled over into Dakota and Nebraska. English recalled that a detachment of 15 soldiers chased several Native Americans on horseback near Sioux Falls in the weeks before Judge Joseph B. Amidon and his son Willie were killed while cutting hay on a homestead claim on August 25. Soldiers and Indians actually fired upon each other in a skirmish near the James River east of Yankton. When rumors began circulating that the Yankton Sioux Tribe planned to join the Santee in war in southeastern Dakota, many residents of the new communities of Yankton, Vermillion and Bon Homme fled to Sioux City. Dakota Cavalry soldiers then helped build the Yankton Stockade, a 450-foot square fortification surrounding roughly a quarter of each block at the corner of Broadway and Third Street (historical markers still note the placement of the four sod and lumber walls).

Soldiers from Company A were also dispatched to Nebraska in July of 1863 following the murders of the five children of Henson and Phoebe Wiseman, who lived on a homestead in the Missouri River foothills south of Meckling. Henson was travelling through Dakota with Company I of the 2nd Nebraska Cavalry, which was under the command of Gen. Alfred Sully and ordered to push the Santee fleeing from Minnesota further west. Phoebe had traveled to Yankton to purchase supplies. She returned home and found her children — ages 16, 14, 9, 8 and 4 — dead or dying. The Yankton and Santee were blamed for the killings, though it was never proven.

In 1864, the 1st Dakota accompanied Gen. Alfred Sully on a campaign up the Missouri River into northern Dakota Territory. They saw action at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain in July, in which Sully’s force of 2,200 soldiers defeated roughly 1,600 Lakota, Yanktonai and Santee under the leadership of Gall, Sitting Bull and Inkpaduta. In August of 1865, a detachment of 24 soldiers from Company B took part in the Battle of Bone Pile Creek near present-day Wright, Wyoming. Privates Anthony Nelson and John Rouse were killed, the only combat deaths the 1st Dakota ever experienced.

Two other soldiers, James Cummings and John McBee, died from illness at the Fort Randall hospital. John Tallman died during the winter of 1864-65 when he crossed the Missouri River south of Vermillion to hunt deer and never returned. A settler found his frozen body lying on the ground and wrapped in a blanket. He was given a military funeral and buried in an unmarked grave on a bluff near Vermillion.

The rest of the 1st Dakota spent that winter in Vermillion, as well. When spring arrived, English wrote,”We rejoiced over the surrender of Lee and were depressed by the news of Lincoln’s death, but our spirits were soon revived by information that we would be mustered out on May 9.” Capt. Hugh Theaker of the regular army arrived to conduct the ceremony.”Then came the last roll call, the usual farewells, and the members of A company were out of the United States service, never as an organization to meet again.”

*****

YANKTON HISTORIAN Bob Hanson was always proud of his family’s long history in Dakota. His great-grandfather, Amund Hanson, immigrated from Eide, Norway, and was among the first settlers in Clay County in the early 1860s. He donated a portion of his land to build the Hanson School, among the first schools in the new Dakota Territory, and in 1862 he joined Company A of the 1st Dakota Cavalry as its bugler. That family connection to Dakota’s first volunteer soldiers fueled Bob’s passion for finding the long-lost ledger.

1st Dakota soldiers helped build the first school in Dakota Territory in Vermillion. The road in the photo is today’s Dakota Street. A monument along the road below the bluff marks the spot.

An introductory note to the 1918 republishing of English’s memoir reports that the descriptive book and roster for Company B was donated to the state historical society by the widow of Uriah Wood, a former soldier who had kept the book as”his most precious relic,” but on his deathbed in 1916 insisted it be turned over to the state. The note also laments the loss of Company A’s descriptive book. Historians apparently contacted the War Department in Washington, D.C., but the adjutant general replied that there was no record of it.

Fortunately, a historical treasure hunt was exactly what Bob Hanson loved. He worked diligently in the 1990s to locate the unmarked grave of John Tallman and place a stone there. Though he believed he knew where the soldier was buried, a stone never came to fruition before his death in 2018. He was successful in Yankton, however, where the final resting place of Pierre Dorion, an early explorer and interpreter for Lewis and Clark, is memorialized with a large boulder at West Second Street and Riverside Drive.

We’ll never know how many letters Bob wrote, phone calls he placed or visits he made to others who were connected to the early days of Dakota. But his daughter, Sarah Hanson-Pareek, recalls a conversation with him shortly after she went to work in the archives of the I.D. Weeks Library at the University of South Dakota.”He asked if we still had Grace Beede’s hat box,” Sarah remembers.”He said the missing ledger was in there and not to let anyone know we had it. I think he was afraid that some government archive might ask for it. He thought it belonged here because it was so important to our history.”

Discovering the book in the Beede collection allowed historians to construct its possible life story. It begins with Nelson Miner, the 36-year-old lawyer from Ohio who became Company A’s first captain. Miner was born in 1827 and came to Dakota Territory with his wife, Cordelia, in 1860. When the War Department authorized raising the 1st Dakota, Miner became the recruiting officer at the Vermillion station. After ably leading the cavalry for three years, he was appointed registrar of the U.S. Land Office in Vermillion. Miner also owned the St. Nicholas Hotel and was elected to the territorial legislature in 1872, 1876 and 1878, but died in October of 1879 before his final term expired.

Just as Uriah Wood kept the roster for Company B, it seems Miner held on to its counterpart from Company A as his own”precious relic.” It passed through the family until it ended up with Grace Beede, his great-granddaughter. Beede, born in 1905, earned a bachelor’s degree at USD in 1926 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1936. She joined the faculty at USD in 1928 and taught classics there until 1970. She donated the Beede Family Papers to the USD Archives in 1985, five years before she died. Today’s Coyotes might better recognize her as the namesake of Beede Hall, a girls’ dormitory within the campus’ North Complex along Cherry Street.

*****

KEEPING THE LEDGER’S location a secret was never a top priority for campus librarians, but Bob Hanson’s rediscovery of it in the late 1980s certainly didn’t make a lot of headlines, either. Still, knowing the artifact is right across campus opens a lot of doors for historians like Kurt Hackemer.

ìHaving it here is pretty exciting,” he says.”At first glance, things like rosters look pretty boring. But the real value of a roster like this is when you see who is serving in a military unit you can then find those names in other records, and you can start building a story about the 1st Dakota Cavalry that is far more than just what the unit did.”

Among those records Hackemer hopes to utilize is a special 1885 census. Congress offered to pay half the costs of conducting an off-cycle census, but only a few states and territories accepted, including Dakota Territory. While debating its structure, territorial legislators created a special schedule within the census to catalog veterans.”They specifically wanted those settlers to be remembered for posterity’s sake. That was their goal,” Hackemer says.”It is the only census of its kind that you can find at a state or territorial level anywhere in the United States. When I’ve taken my research about this to national conferences, historians are floored. There is literally nothing like it anywhere else in the United States.”

The ledger contains a dozen handwritten pages that record the names, ages, heights and hometowns or countries of the 1st Dakota soldiers.

Comparing the 1st Dakota roster to that census and subsequent counts could lead to countless research projects, articles and books.”I learn a lot more about the men who made up that unit and it lets me ask interesting questions,” Hackemer says.”Who felt compelled to volunteer for military service and why? Who thinks they have a stake in this? There are both native born American citizens and immigrants living in Dakota Territory at the time. Is one group more or less likely to volunteer and why? It can help tell you a lot about the creation and the early years of the territory, and for a historian, that’s exciting. There are a lot more stories to be told there.”

When Bob Hanson located the ledger, he had it photographed for preservation. This past summer, his daughter Sarah — the Curator of Digital Projects and Photographs for the Archives and Special Collections at USD — photographed it again to the highest standards of digital preservation in the country. The archives was awarded a CARES Act grant of $193,000 to purchase new equipment to help make primary source and collection materials available to a larger global audience.”Because of COVID and the inability for researchers to travel as easily, there really is this increased need to get materials online for distance researchers,” Hanson-Pareek says.

The new equipment allows archivists at USD to digitize documents, archival manuscript materials, bound volumes, maps, oversize materials, film and glass plate negatives and two-dimensional artworks at standards that comply with FADGI, the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, a collaborative effort launched in 2007 to establish common practices and guidelines for digitization.”We’ve never had the equipment to do it justice,” Hanson-Pareek says of the ledger.”But with this grant funding, we have a camera with significant resolution and power to digitize it.”

The cavalry ledger is among the first historic documents to be digitized with the new equipment, along with a scrapbook belonging to John Blair Smith Todd and a ledger from Cuthbert DuCharme’s trading post. All will be available to researchers online this fall, but for historians curious to see the real thing, the USD Archives — after a long closure due to the pandemic and an extensive renovation project — plans a full reopening in October. Sarah Hanson-Pareek will be there, and her father will be in spirit.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Alcester’s Music Man

By John Andrews

DeeCort Hammitt organized the Alcester Community Band in 1921 and directed it for 25 years. Hammitt, an Alcester banker and musician, is best known for composing the state song, “Hail, South Dakota.”

WHEN DIGNITARIES GATHERED in downtown Yankton in November of 2013 to officially begin South Dakota’s upcoming sesquicentennial (125th birthday), students from the city’s elementary schools were on hand to sing our official state song,”Hail, South Dakota.” My daughter, Elizabeth, a student at Beadle Elementary at the time, was part of the energetic young chorus. I remember her singing snippets in the car rides to and from school or at home in the evenings and feeling glad that she was learning a bit of our state’s history.

This summer, we were all gathered in our living room. The television was on but not tuned to a program, which meant that after a certain period of inactivity it went to sleep and reverted to its screensaver. Photographs that we’ve uploaded to our Amazon account travel via a Fire Stick and appear as a slideshow during these entertainment downtimes.

As we watched the images roll past, we saw our daughter, dressed in the patriotic red, white and blue dress that my wife had sewn in advance of that gathering nine years ago. I recalled speeches by the governor and lieutenant governor and the swing band that played well into the evening. But Elizabeth remembered none of that.

“What was I even doing there, anyway?” she asked.

When I reminded her that she and her classmates were there to sing the state song, it didn’t jog a single memory.”Hail, South Dakota,” with its lines praising the”Black Hills, and mines with gold so rare,” and our”farms and prairies, blessed with bright sunshine,” was long forgotten.

*****

LAURA BAKER AND her siblings, Jane Allard and Mark, Kurt and Paul Hammitt, grew up immersed in the culture of the state song because it was written by their grandfather, an Alcester banker and musician named DeeCort Hammitt. The five of them grew up in Elk Point, where their parents, Howard and Dorothy Hammitt, had taken on the mantle of promoting the state song. Every spring, the Hammitts would give each graduating Elk Point High School senior a card with a two-dollar bill and a copy of the song. Dorothy called schools around South Dakota to make sure they all had the music and lyrics.”Everybody wanted a copy of it, and every school played it,” Baker says.”Community groups sang it.”

“I remember having to sing it when I was in school,” Allard recalls.”I don’t know when it started to fade away.”

In fact, that’s not something they thought much about until Howard Hammitt died in 2012 and his children found an assortment of photographs and clippings about their grandfather tucked away in the service station that Howard ran for decades. They began to learn even more about DeeCort (pronounced DECK-ert) and worried that his legacy as the man behind South Dakota’s state song might disappear.

Hammitt learned to play piano by ear and provided the sound for silent films shown in his family’s movie theater.

Hammitt was born in Spencer in 1893. His father, Franklin, started the town’s drug store in 1888 and worked both there and in Montrose. Franklin was preparing to move, buying a new house, drug store and theatre in Alcester, but he died in 1900, shortly after the purchases became final. His wife, Mae, and their five children still made the move. She hired a druggist and operated the movie theater, where DeeCort demonstrated his remarkable musical abilities to the rest of their new community. He had learned to play piano by ear and provided the sound for silent films.

Hammitt graduated from Alcester High School in 1912 and married Bessie Durkee from Alexandria in 1913. That same year, he composed a song called”The South Dakota Rag.” The Hammitts settled into life in Alcester, eventually raising 11 children. DeeCort worked at the McKellips family’s Alcester State Bank by day and served terms as the city treasurer and assistant postmaster. Music, however, remained his passion.

Hammitt formed the Sunshine State Music Company and continued writing music that found its way into the repertoires of bandleaders like Tommy Dorsey and Lawrence Welk. In 1915, the John T. Hall Music publishing company in New York selected his song”Don’t Take My Lovin’ Baby Away” as the winner in a nationwide songwriting contest with more than 1,500 entrants. Three years later, the Pace and Handy Music Company published a Hammitt song called,”I Want to Love You All the Time.” W.C. Handy, a composer and musician who often called himself”the father of the blues,” said it was one of the year’s best blues songs. His company advertised it as a”beautiful one-step ballad, different than the rest.”

Hammitt organized the Alcester Community Band in 1921 and directed it for 25 years. The group took regular trips to the Belle Fourche Roundup and played for President Calvin Coolidge when he and First Lady Grace Coolidge vacationed in the Black Hills in 1927. Hammitt wrote a piece called”The Roundup March,” and included special lyrics for Coolidge’s visit. The Alcester Community Band earned such a good reputation that it was chosen to represent South Dakota at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933 and 1934.

He also dabbled in radio, forming the Hammitt Radio Company in 1922, just two years after the nation’s first commercial radio broadcast originated in Pittsburgh. The inaugural program included a saxophone solo, a vocal solo, a men’s quartet and a poem recited by his son, Keith. Hammitt created weekly programs for several years, entertaining farmers within a 5- or 6-mile radius of Alcester.

A Chicago hat salesman eventually vaulted Hammitt to statewide prominence. Warner Putnam sold hats and other clothing around South Dakota. In 1941, he discovered that South Dakota did not have an official state song that could be performed at certain functions. He approached the Sioux Falls Argus Leader about organizing a statewide song contest.

The Hammitt brothers, from left: Ralph, Forest, DeeCort and Charles (Chick).

The newspaper assembled a committee of judges headed by Carl Christensen, a professor and band director at South Dakota State College in Brookings. Out of 158 entries, the judges chose six finalists including”Hail, South Dakota,” a renamed version of a Hammitt favorite.”When he read about the contest, he knew that ‘The Roundup March’ would be the perfect song for our state song,” Baker says.”It remained a very popular song with marching bands in the years after 1927. He got a lot of traction out of ‘The Roundup March’ right up until the contest.”

Ballots were printed in all South Dakota newspapers. Radio stations in the state’s largest cities scheduled 30-minute blocks on January 9 and 10, 1942, during which all six entries were played. South Dakotans sent their ballots to the Argus Leader, where staff tallied the results and declared”Hail, South Dakota” the winner. Gov. Harlan Bushfield presented Hammitt with an award for composing the new state song, and the legislature made it official in March 1943.

To honor DeeCort after the contest, he and Bessie were the guests of honor at the South Dakota Press Association’s annual banquet in Sioux Falls. The new state song was performed in public for the first time since the contest concluded.”While Hammitt was pleased with the honor and attention the song received, he said he simply wanted to promote the state he loved,” a newspaper reported.

DeeCort and Bessie moved to California in 1947, where he continued to write and publish music. He operated the C&H Music Store in Sacramento with his son, Orlin, until his death in 1970.

*****

TODAY, 48 STATES have at least one state song. New Jersey never adopted one and Maryland retired its state song,”Maryland, My Maryland,” in 2021 because of language that was deemed inappropriate. Tennessee has the most with 10, including”Rocky Top,” which you’re likely to hear throughout University of Tennessee football games. Other states have adopted songs from popular culture as well. In 1979, Georgia chose”Georgia on My Mind,” written by Hoagy Carmichael but made popular by Ray Charles. John Denver’s”Take Me Home, Country Roads” became a state song of West Virginia in 2014.”Home on the Range” is among Kansas’s three tunes, and Louisianans sing”You Are My Sunshine.”

But since 1943, DeeCort Hammitt’s”Hail, South Dakota” has remained South Dakota’s stalwart single tune, though there have been occasional challenges.”A couple of times they’ve tried to change the state song,” Allard says.”They wanted a newer, livelier and more modern state song. Mom would just send more copies to the legislature.”

While it may not hold the place it once did in the state’s popular culture, it remains an important part of certain musical catalogs. Terry Beckler is a music professor at Northern State University in Aberdeen and commander of the South Dakota National Guard’s 147th Army Band.”I’ve played the state song many times. It’s the last part of a march titled ‘The Roundup,'” he says.”By regulation, military bands should play the last 32 bars of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ following ‘Ruffles and Flourishes’ for a governor. In South Dakota, tradition has been to play ‘Hail, South Dakota’ instead. We’ve done this for every governor, as long as I’m aware.”

For that, the Hammitt family can be proud.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Finding Frank Ashford

By John Andrews

Aberdeen’s Troy McQuillen became fascinated by the work of Frank Ashford at the K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library, which owns several oil paintings by the Brown County artist. McQuillen is searching the world for more of Ashford’s work, and hopes to answer at least some of the questions that remain about the quiet painter from Stratford. Photo by Stephanie Staab

There’s a painting in the Dacotah Prairie Museum in Aberdeen of a woman wearing a salmon-colored sleeveless dress, a floral print shawl, her left hand drawn to her chest as she gazes off the canvas directly at the viewer. Twelve years ago, when South Dakota Magazine assembled a list of paintings every South Dakotan should see, the late John Day — a widely respected art scholar and then curator of the Oscar Howe Gallery at the University of South Dakota — included Woman with a Shawl on his list of the 10 best paintings ever produced by a South Dakotan.

We know nothing about the identity of the woman and, for many years, very little about the man who painted her, even though Frank Ashford was considered among the best American artists of his time. Ashford grew up near Stratford and traveled the world, painting portraits of governors, Supreme Court justices, a U.S. president and the First Lady and other members of high society. He painted in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Paris and the banks of the James River in Brown County.

Ashford likely produced hundreds of paintings, many of which have been lost since his death in 1960, several years before a young Troy McQuillen began noticing the few Ashfords hanging in Aberdeen’s public library. Decades later, those childhood memories sparked a quest to find as many of the old artist’s paintings as he can, and maybe learn something about the man along the way. Among his early discoveries? He’s not the first Aberdonian to go looking for Frank Ashford.

***

Elderkin Potter Ashford was a Civil War veteran, serving with the 23rd Iowa Volunteers at Milliken’s Bend, Vicksburg and Mobile, among other prominent battles. He moved his family to a homestead in Rondell Township, southeast of Aberdeen along the James River near Stratford in 1893. The Ashfords included his wife Cassandra, who suffered from arthritis and spent many years confined to a wheelchair, daughters Grace and Helen, and sons Ward, Fred and Frank, who was born in 1878.

The elder Ashford never lost his sense of patriotism. He hosted a grand celebration at his homestead every Memorial Day. Hundreds of people met to decorate graves at nearby Oakwood Cemetery, then heard speeches delivered from the front porch of the Ashford home. Many locals believed that Frank’s interest in painting portraits of politicians stemmed from those annual gatherings.

Just before he turned 18, Frank left Brown County for the Chicago Art Institute, where he studied drawing under Frederick Frier and John Vanderpoel. After three years in Chicago, he spent a year at the Pennsylvania Art Institute in Philadelphia and another year at the New York School of Art, studying in both places under William Merritt Chase, an Impressionist painter perhaps best known for his portraits.

Ashford’s self-portrait.

Following his studies, Ashford established a studio in Paris, where he painted for seven years. He visited home in April of 1912, sailing on a French ship called the Bretagne, which passed through the same North Atlantic iceberg field that doomed the Titanic later that same day.”We passengers aboard could not grasp the full purport of the tragedy,” Ashford told the Aberdeen Weekly News when he arrived in town in May.”It was so overwhelming, and many did not believe it until we reached New York.”

As World War I embroiled Europe, Ashford returned to the United States permanently in 1914. He spent time painting in New York, Minneapolis and Seattle before settling down in South Dakota sometime in the 1920s. A Sioux Falls Argus Leader story from that decade referred to Ashford as,”such a simple, common, everyday person, friendly and unassuming, and not at all what one would think of an artist who had lived in Paris.”

Ashford was briefly married around that time to a model he’d met in New York named Marjorie Rickel, but they divorced in 1929. Locals around Stratford believed the marriage ended because Rickel could not get accustomed to South Dakota’s rural lifestyle and was bitter about supporting her husband, who excelled in making art but struggled with financial management.

Ashford painted several prominent politicians and judges beginning in the 1920s, including Louis Brandeis, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. He painted three South Dakota Supreme Court justices, as well as governors Andrew Lee and Charles Herreid. He later painted governors Leslie Jensen, Sigurd Anderson and Joe Foss twice, once as a politician and again as a World War II aviator.

His work was attracting an audience. In the late 1920s, he sold 11 oil paintings to be placed around the campus of the Dakota Hospital for the Insane in Yankton (today the Human Services Center). The purchase was an extension of the efforts of Dr. Leonard Mead, the hospital’s superintendent from 1891 to 1899 and again from 1901 until his death in 1920. Mead believed that creating a more welcoming environment through art and architectural beauty would help patients recover. He began an art collection with several watercolors in 1906, and the Ashford oils added to the campus dÈcor.

Perhaps Ashford’s biggest professional achievement came in 1927 when he learned that President Calvin Coolidge planned to spend the summer in the Black Hills. He asked his friend, state historian Doane Robinson, if it would be possible to have Coolidge and his wife Grace sit for portraits. The two exchanged letters, and eventually Sen. Peter Norbeck — among the architects of the president’s vacation to South Dakota — was added. The flurry of correspondence resulted in a sitting at the Custer State Park Game Lodge in July.

Remarkably, Ashford had the Coolidge paintings nearly finished by mid-August. He often said that he only needed to sit with a subject for three to five hours and could finish a nearly life-size portrait in about 10 days. Ashford produced two paintings each of the president and the First Lady. A portrait of Coolidge seated and wearing a light-colored suit and another of Grace Coolidge in a green dress hang in the lodge’s lobby. Another showing the president wearing a headdress and Grace in a red dress hang in the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum at Forbes College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Frank and his brother Fred (right), pictured in about 1940, were among five siblings who lived on the Ashford family’s Brown County homestead.

Ashford was happy with his Coolidge work.”The portrait of Coolidge, I think, is one of my best and it pleased him very much,” he wrote to a friend in Seattle.”Mr. Coolidge remarked that he thought it was the most satisfactory portrait that had been painted of him, which I considered a high compliment, as he had been painted by several noted artists.”

The following year, Ashford was commissioned to paint a portrait of William Henry Harrison Beadle, known in South Dakota as the savior of school lands because of his foresight to preserve two sections in each township for schools at a time when speculators gobbled up land at tremendously low prices. To commemorate the 90th anniversary of Beadle’s birth, the Young Citizens League and E.C. Clifford, the state superintendent of schools, created a plan to place Beadle’s picture in every South Dakota school. Ashford would paint the oil portrait and hundreds of prints would be made.

Ashford reportedly painted a portrait based on a photograph of Beadle, but the whereabouts of the original art and prints is a mystery.

Painting opportunities were slim during the Depression, World War II and the postwar years. Growing older and feeling lonely, he went to live with his brother and sister-in-law, Ward and Violet Ashford, in Salem, Oregon, in 1948. He became re-energized by the beauty of the Willamette Valley and painted several landscapes around the Ashfords’ farm. He also opened a studio, where he painted until returning to Aberdeen in 1956.

Ashford moved into the Boyd Apartments on the second floor of the Malchow Building downtown and settled into a routine. He met with locals for coffee and meals, and every afternoon stopped at Plymouth Clothing to visit a group of downtown business owners and friends. When he didn’t arrive on Nov. 21, 1960, they went to his apartment where they found him dead of a heart attack. Ashford was 82.

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This story would be considerably shorter if not for the tireless work of Frances”Peg” Lamont. She spent more than a year researching Ashford for a paper presented at Augustana University’s annual Dakota Conference in 1990 and uncovered many of the aforementioned details about his life and career. Lamont served seven terms in the state senate from Aberdeen and was a longtime advocate for historic preservation, women, senior citizens and mental health. She was a founding member of the Dacotah Prairie Museum and Historic South Dakota, helped launch the Northeastern Mental Health Center and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Council on Aging, where she served three terms. She remained active in several endeavors until her death in 2008 at age 94.

McQuillen discovered Ashford’s Yellow Chrysanthemums at Pomona College in California.

Lamont was visiting the Black Hills with her parents, Fred and Frances Stiles, in the 1930s when she first saw the 1927 Ashford portraits of Calvin and Grace Coolidge hanging at the Custer State Park Game Lodge. It served as her introduction to Ashford, who was never far from her mind, even as she left South Dakota to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison and found work as a researcher and copy writer for the Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s in New York City.

She and her husband William Lamont, a Harvard-educated fellow South Dakotan, made their home in Aberdeen after their marriage in 1937. The Lamonts became entrenched in life in the Hub City while Ashford painted in and around Aberdeen and Oregon. When he died in 1960, Ashford left 23 paintings in his apartment and the family home near Stratford. Local attorneys Hugh Agor and Douglas Bantz became the executors of Ashford’s estate and struggled to sell the art. They bought several paintings themselves and donated others to the Alexander Mitchell Public Library (today the K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library) and the Dacotah Prairie Museum. Lamont ensured that the two Coolidge portraits made their way to Massachusetts. Others have simply disappeared.

Nearly 30 years later, with Ashford fading into obscurity, Lamont began to wonder what became of his paintings. She launched a worldwide search and tried to learn as much about Ashford as could be discovered.”For years, bits and pieces of Frank Ashford’s life had delighted me,” Lamont wrote.”Finally came the time to write about him, but libraries, art schools and records were scarce. The search for Ashford paintings has all the elements of untangling a mystery.” Fortunately, there were still several families in and around Stratford who shared their memories of Ashford. Those interviews, along with a smattering of publications and newspaper articles, revealed a prolific and energetic artist.”It seemed that wherever he stopped, even briefly, and found an interesting client, he established a studio and proceeded to paint with vigor and enthusiasm, turning out untold hundreds of artworks.”

Lamont successfully located several of those paintings, and today McQuillen is continuing her work. He is the owner of McQuillen Creative Group, an advertising and marketing business located across the street from the building where Ashford lived his final years. He also publishes Aberdeen Magazine and wrote a story about his Ashford quest in early 2018.”I used to go to the Alexander Mitchell Library a lot when I was a kid, and his paintings were all over,” McQuillen says.”The images were just burned into my brain. Then as an adult, I started a magazine and got on the library board and really started to wonder what these paintings were about. I learned about his national and international reputation for being a pretty good artist.”

The internet makes searching a little easier, with paintings occasionally showing up on online auction sites such as eBay (a seller in Portland, Oregon, is currently offering an Ashford portrait of a boy in a cowboy outfit for $795). But there remains a lot of sifting through historical paperwork. For example, a newspaper article from the 1950s mentioned that a couple donated two Ashford paintings to Pomona College in Claremont, California on behalf of a friend. McQuillen contacted the school, which had no record of it. But staff at the college’s Benton Museum of Art searched the archives and found a still life called Yellow Chrysanthemums, dated 1916 and signed”Ashford.” The second painting remains lost.

Woman with a Shawl, among Ashford’s most famous portraits, hangs at Aberdeen’s Dacotah Prairie Museum.

Another elusive painting is The Three Sisters, a critically acclaimed work that Ashford exhibited in Paris in 1912. Records indicate that he kept the painting, and a photograph from an exhibition in Aberdeen during the late 1950s shows it hanging on the wall. But The Three Sisters was not listed among the paintings in Ashford’s estate when he died.

Other works have disappeared even more recently. During Lamont’s search 30 years ago, she documented only five of the 11 paintings that were sold to the Human Services Center in Yankton. When McQuillen inquired in early 2021, he found just three: Modern Madonna, Lincoln the Lawyer and a portrait of former administrator George Sheldon Adams.

For South Dakotans wishing to see Ashford’s work firsthand, a trip to Aberdeen in the best bet. The Dacotah Prairie Museum owns a winter landscape and six portraits: Marjorie (his wife), Fred Hatterschiedt and Ole Swanson (both local businessmen), Woman with a Green Headband, Woman with Coral Necklace and Woman with a Shawl. The museum also has Ashford’s palette, easel, his lamp for portrait painting and his wooden traveling painting case, still filled with supplies.

The K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library has Woman in Pink; Abraham Lincoln (based on a rare ambrotype photograph that he owned taken of Lincoln in 1858 and similar to the Lincoln portrait at the Human Services Center); Governor Joe Foss, The Aviator and War Hero; Woman at Piano; and Ashford’s self-portrait, among other works.

McQuillen has also launched a website, which includes photographs of nearly 40 paintings that he has rediscovered, with more to come.”My goal here is that if people or antique stores have paintings by him, then at least they would know who he is and what they have,” he says.

It’s a modest goal to honor an equally modest man, who should always be remembered in South Dakota’s art world and beyond.

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