Posted on October 16, 2023 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Lost 74

By Bernie Hunhoff

The Sage brothers (from left, Gary, Kelly Jo and Greg) posed for this photograph as a Mother’s Day gift before they left port in California for the waters off Vietnam.

There are worse things than being forgotten. Maybe you’re halfway around the world, in the dark of night on the South China Sea, when your ship collides with a much larger vessel.

Maybe you’re a sailor on a nearby boat that attempts to rescue survivors, but all you see is endless water and an eerie quiet.

Maybe you’re a Nebraska farmer listening to the TV news when you hear that the ship on which your three Navy sons are serving has been sliced in half.

Maybe you’re a young wife and mother whose father-in-law telephones to say that your husband — his son — won’t be coming home. You get a telegram from the Navy confirming the news.

A week later, the final note of”Taps” has faded to silence. The burial flags are folded and put away and the sympathy cards have been read and answered; then a lonesomeness settles over great tragedies.

That’s when the survivors contemplate the grace of remembering.

***

Brookings barber Linda Vaa was the young sailor’s wife who got that phone call from her father-in-law in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War. Fifty years have barely softened the pain.

Linda Vaa, a longtime barber on Brookings’ Main Street, strives to preserve the stories of 74 sailors who died in 1969.

She met Greg Sage in the summer of 1964 at the Knox County Fair in Bloomfield, Nebraska, just across the border from Yankton and Bon Homme counties in South Dakota.”My sister and I were walking around the fair when she noticed these two boys were following us. It was the day before school started. Finally, we turned around and started talking to them.” One was Greg Sage, a farm boy from nearby Niobrara.”Greg was very shy,” she says.”We probably dated three months before he held my hand. We were just 17 years old.”

Greg was the second of Ernie and Eunice Sage’s four sons. Gary, the oldest, was a typical first-born: serious and eager to help people. He was also a thinker who liked to read. As the United States became more engaged in Vietnam’s civil war, he told his family that he felt he should fight for his country.

Greg, who played football for Niobrara, was less studious than Gary. Kelly Jo, freckle-faced and artistic, was two years younger than Greg. The Sages’ fourth son, Douglas Dean, had barely started school. The boys and their father spent their days hunting, fishing and farming in the hill country of the Missouri River Valley.

***

Gary enlisted in the Navy after high school. Greg and Linda married as soon as they graduated from high school, and within a year Greg followed his older brother into the Navy.”Their dad, Ernie, encouraged them all to join the Navy because he thought it would be safer,” says Linda.

Kelly Jo signed up even before his high school graduation. Gary was on the crew of another ship when Greg was assigned to the USS Frank E. Evans, a 376-foot attack vessel commissioned in 1945 and deployed to the Pacific at the end of World War II. Sailors nicknamed it the Grey Ghost because of the way it looked at sea. The Evans was retooled in the 1960s for anti-submarine warfare. As fighting expanded in Southeast Asia, it began deployments there.

“Gary’s ship pulled into base at Long Beach, California, and he came to live with Greg and I for a while,” says Linda.”He taught me how to make a cherry pie. One day, Greg suggested that Gary transfer to the Evans so they could be together. About then, Kelly Jo graduated from high school and came to boot camp in San Diego. They asked him where he wanted to go, and he put down the Evans so he could be with his older brothers.”

Navy policies discourage family members from serving on the same ship, especially during wartime, but it is not expressly forbidden. In November of 1942, five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, were serving on the USS Juneau when it was sunk by a torpedo in Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. More than 600 sailors died in that tragedy; there were at least 30 sets of brothers aboard.

The three Sage brothers boarded the Evans along with their fellow sailors in March of 1969 at the Port of Long Beach, headed for Vietnam. Gary was 22. Greg was 21. Kelly Jo was 19.

***

For weeks, the crew of the Evans used their firepower to protect American troops stationed on the Vietnamese coast. When they ran short of ammunition, the 2,200-ton ship was sent to the Philippines to restock before it left for training exercises with the Royal Australian Navy in the South China Sea.

At 3:15 a.m. on the morning of June 3, the Evans crossed paths with the much-larger HMAS Melbourne. Someone described it as a collision between a Volkswagen and an 18-wheeler. The Evans was cut in half. Greg and Kelly Jo were off duty and asleep in the lower berths in the bow. There were reports that their older brother, Gary, was on duty on the stern, which stayed afloat.

The USS Frank E. Evans was a 376-foot attack vessel commissioned in 1945.

“Nobody knows for certain what happened because it was total chaos in the black of night,” says Linda.”But it seems likely that Greg was crushed, because he was probably right where the ship was hit. What we’ve heard is that Gary jumped to the bow to try to find Kelly Jo.

“Gary had a flashlight, and we’ve heard that he went to the top story. There was a ladder blocking a door there and some officers were trapped inside. A dozen people were trying to get the officers out. Gary gave them the flashlight and then left, we think, to go below to look for Kelly Jo.”

Some of the 204 survivors on the stern and witnesses on nearby ships reported seeing arms reaching out from the windows and hearing screams as the bow laid to one side and then, within just three or four terrifying minutes, sank into the dark sea with 74 men trapped inside.

“That is what haunts so many of the men,” says Linda.”One sailor told me he came off duty when Greg went on duty that night. He took a shower and put on a pair of my husband’s underwear because his were at the laundry. He felt the collision, was thrown around and crawled out from under a mattress. He got to the ladder, but the hatch flew closed. Then, someone who had already got off came back and opened the hatch. At last it was his turn to climb off. He thinks he might have been the last one off. He jumped or was thrown into the water and he swam and swam until he found something to hang onto. A small ship came to save him but he told them he was OK and they should go save someone else.

“Those are the stories we hear,” Linda says.”They still hear the ghosts of the sailors who died.”

***

Ernie Sage finished working the fields of his Niobrara farm on June 3 and went to the house to watch the evening news on CBS when Walter Cronkite reported that the USS Evans had been cut in half. Ernie screamed and his wife, Eunice, passed out.

As soon as he was able, Ernie called Linda, his daughter-in-law, who was living in Omaha with her 13-month-old son, Greg Jr.

A week later, the family held a private service in the Niobrara Lutheran Church, and then they joined the entire community at the school for a military funeral that was televised. Officers folded four burial flags; they gave three to Eunice, in remembrance of her three sons, and one to Linda. A photographer from Life came to document the terrible grief but the magazine never used the pictures; an editor told the family later that it was just too sad for words or pictures.

Ernie, the father, was quiet and crestfallen.”He was never the same,” Linda says.”I think he felt tremendous guilt because he had encouraged them to join the Navy, but it was only because he thought it was safer. He became sad and depressed, so sad that he forgot he had another son at home.”

Doug Sage, 6, the surviving brother, comforted his father in 1969. The family’s grief attracted much media attention.

The elder Sage spent a week at a state mental hospital, and then returned to his wife and son but he never smiled again — not until minutes before he died in a hospital bed at age 79.

Doug was 6 when his brothers died.”Ernie protected him and wouldn’t even let him drive a tractor or do anything where he might be hurt,” Linda remembers.”He didn’t get to grow up in the carefree way his brothers did, and he had to do naughty things to get his father’s attention.”

Linda says it was hard to return to a normal life. Sympathy letters poured into Niobrara from around the country. News reporters came to write about the little farm town that had sacrificed so much for a war that was growing more unpopular with every passing day.

She also noticed that her own toddler, Greg Jr., was being affected. Well-meaning townspeople spoiled him at every opportunity.

Three years after the crash, she and her son moved 120 miles north to Sioux Falls, where she was able to use her late husband’s GI benefits to attend beauty school and barber school.

In 1974, she was cutting hair at the Grange Avenue Barber Shop in Sioux Falls when Spencer Vaa, a Vietnam veteran who was injured in 1969, walked in and sat in the chair for a trim. They married two years later, and adopted a daughter, Sarah Jane, in 1982.

Spencer’s career with the S.D. Game, Fish & Parks Department led them to Brookings in 1978, where Linda went to work for Brookings Barbers. There, they raised Greg Jr. and Sarah.

***

South Dakota and Nebraska are 7,000 miles from the South China Sea, but the pain of June 3, 1969, could not be healed by time or distance.”He missed his boys so badly, he could never be the same strong man he was before they were killed,” Linda says of Ernie Sage. However, the father found some solace when he heard about plans for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.

“Their dream was to go to Washington and see the names of their boys on the wall,” says Linda,”so when I got a fundraising request for the project I wrote back and said we would help, and I asked for the list of names because I wanted to be sure they got everything right.”

When the list came in the mail, she saw that her husband and brothers-in-law — in fact, all 74 Evans casualties — had been omitted. The Department of Defense had determined that they died outside the war zone.”I had to go tell Ernie,” says Linda.”I would have rather taken a shot to the head than tell him. It was like he lost them all over again. He cried for hours.”

Doug also struggled after the tragedy.”He started out with a big family and then he lost three brothers, and in a way he lost his father,” Linda says. Today he lives in Colorado.

The three Sage sailors’ mother, Eunice, found comfort in her deep Christian faith. She regained her good sense of humor and became a source of strength to others. She was as surprised as anyone when she took on a role as comforter to hundreds of men who survived the nightmare at sea.

That began to happen in 1992, when survivors formed the USS Frank E. Evans Association and started to hold annual reunions. Ernie, who died in 1996, never attended the gatherings but Linda and her son, Greg Jr., began to accompany Eunice Sage.

“The first one I went to was in Niobrara for the 25th anniversary,” Linda says.”We met a bunch of the guys then, and I realized they were wonderful people and they really loved Eunice. When they met her, some broke down and cried and said, ëWe’re so sorry your sons are dead and I’m alive.'”

Linda says Eunice would hear none of that.”She shook her fingers at them and said, ëDon’t ever tell me that again! You’re alive to tell me what happened.'”

Eunice became known as the mother of the association. The Navy veterans took up collections to help her with travel expenses. Every time she arrived, someone would politely suggest that she rest in her hotel room, and she would respond,”I want a cigarette. I want a drink. And I want my boys.” She often remarked that she lost three boys,”but gained a hundred.”

The gatherings taught Eunice and Linda the sadness of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”We could see that they all felt guilty — survivors’ guilt. Every year we would all go into a room together, maybe 50 or 100 people or more, and every one of the survivors would tell how they got out of the ship. Every one of them has a story and they are haunted by their memories. They remember the arms reaching out of the windows or the screams coming from men in the water. They can still hear the ship breaking apart. They hear the ghosts.”

She says they all tried to restart their lives, but many struggled with work and relationships.”Many have been divorced three or four times. You would think the reunion would just bring back their worst memories but instead it seems to help because we are the Frank E. Evans family. I hug everyone three or four times, and I hug their wives because I know how hard it is for them, too.”

She knows a veteran who was a radarman, like Greg.”He doesn’t normally like to be around people. He moved to the U.S./Canadian border to be alone,” she says.”He has tremendous guilt because he thinks he should have been able to save someone. But he does come to join us.”

The 2018 reunion was held in the Black Hills of South Dakota, at the Grand Gateway Hotel in Rapid City. Linda says a familiar theme arose there: Why aren’t the names of the 74 Evans sailors on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.? Are they to be forgotten?

***

Darwin Sietsema leaves his home in Ruthton, Minnesota, every June and travels west into South Dakota. He visits a friend in Yankton, and then follows the Missouri River to Niobrara. After midnight on June 3, he parks his gray Chevy pickup at Farnik’s Market. He walks across the asphalt parking lot to a modest memorial with 74 names inscribed in stone. There he sits for several hours, in the quiet and darkness, reflecting on what he calls,”The worst day of my life.”

Darwin Sietsema was among many would-be rescuers who rushed to help the sailors on the USS Frank E. Evans. Now he makes an annual vigil to their memorial in Niobrara, Nebraska.

Sietsema grew up in Trosky, Minnesota, where his father operated the grain elevator. At age 18, he joined the Navy to avoid being drafted into the U.S. Army. After basics in San Diego, he was trained as a boiler tender.”It was miserably hot in the boiler room, though, so I worked my way into being an electrician.”

In the summer of 1969, he was assigned to join the James E. Kyes, a World War II-era destroyer. He had three deployments to the South Pacific.”Basically, we went from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines to Vietnam and back to the Philippines to Japan and maybe back to Vietnam. Each deployment was six to nine months. Our job was to fire our 5-inch guns in support of the troops. We could fire a quarter mile off the beach and our shells could go 12 miles.” Sietsema says the North Vietnamese had shore guns that could have reached his ship but the Kyes was never fired upon.

The mission was similar to the Evans, and Sietsema says it’s entirely possible that he crossed paths with one or more of the Sage brothers while they were all living in California. However, it’s a certainty that he was nearby when they died.

“I was asleep lying in my rack,” he says of the fateful night.”I thought it was a dream. Then came the command, ëMan the rail!'”

His ship hurried to the accident site, but they found nothing but the silence of the sea.”We didn’t even know, right away, what had happened. Then we heard rumors that there had been a collision. But the sea was as calm as glass. Right away we launched our motor whale boats.”

As daylight came, the sailors learned the sad news.”On the second day, about a half dozen ships gathered and we had a memorial service at sea. When they played”Taps” it seemed like a haunting echoing sound. I don’t know how it can echo when there’s nothing out there.”

Sietsema remembers that he and his crewmates felt helpless.”There was nothing you could do. It was over with,” he says. But it never really ended, not for him or hundreds of others who were survivors, would-be rescuers, friends and family.

***

As it became obvious that the Department of Defense was not going to add the names of the Evans sailors to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, the townspeople of Niobrara — who had already created a historical marker to the Sage brothers in 1999 — decided to build a memorial to all 74 in 2016.

“We wanted to make sure their names were on a wall somewhere,” says Jim Scott, commander of the American Legion post.”There are still efforts to add the names to the wall in Washington. I don’t know if that will ever happen. But these men will not be forgotten here.”

Residents of the small Nebraska town of Niobrara, which lies on the South Dakota border near Springfield, vow that they’ll not allow the 74 sailors to be forgotten.

He and others raised funds to construct a granite memorial with the names of all the sailors. Their pictures are nearby on a vinyl poster.

An observance of the 50th anniversary of the tragedy was held this year on June 2 at 3:15 p.m., the exact hour of the day when the Evans sank (there is a 12-hour time difference between Vietnam and the Central Daylight Time Zone in the United States).

Sietsema was there, along with many Sage relatives, community leaders and dozens of others from South Dakota and Nebraska. The burly Minnesota trucker spoke briefly about that horrible night on the South China Sea, and he lamented that the 74 young men are not remembered on the wall in Washington.

Martha Atkins, the town’s Lutheran pastor, offered a prayer.”On this day of remembering, we bring forth 74 souls who were lost in service on behalf of this country,” she said.”Lord, we call upon you to embrace those families, those comrades in arms and the many, many friends of those 74 courageous young men into your arms of healing, of comfort and into peace.”

***

Linda Vaa is now in her 45th year as a South Dakota barber, working at the shop on Brookings’ Main Street. She gives $8 haircuts to military veterans on the last Tuesday of every month.

She is a busy wife, mother and grandmother. She has also collected books, newspaper clippings and photographs related to the Evans, and she stays abreast of continuing efforts in Congress to add the 74 names to the wall.

Encouraging news came this summer when Kevin Cramer, a U.S. senator from North Dakota, introduced the USS Frank E. Evans Act to require that the names be added. Cramer noted that it’s”not unprecedented” to make changes on the Vietnam wall. He said duplicates, misspellings and omissions have been fixed through the years.

The Pentagon continues to oppose such efforts, maintaining its 50-year-old argument that the Evans sailors died too far from the Vietnam battlefields to be counted as war deaths. The government’s designated combat zone, drawn by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, did not originally include Cambodia and Laos.

Linda blames President Richard Nixon.”He was losing favor with the country over the war in the summer of ’69,” she says, so there is a theory that he and his generals were looking for ways to lower the number of casualties. She says she’s appreciative of congressional efforts, but she admits to some cynicism after 50 years.”I think it’ll take a president’s attention to change what started so long ago.”

She commends politicians, organizations and veterans who have worked to keep the memories of the 74 alive.”We don’t want them forgotten,” she says.”Those boys will never grow old, they’ll never enjoy their families. ëLest We Forget’ is a motto of the military, and that’s the one thing we can still do for them.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on August 28, 2023 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Violinist and the Sculptor

By Paul Higbee

Ruth Ann Karlen has traveled across the country to research and preserve the nearly-forgotten history of a woman who contributed greatly to the Crazy Horse carving.

Rapid City’s Ruth Ann Karlen believes Dorothy Comstock Ziolkowski Moreton fell through the cracks of Black Hills history.

The two women never met, but Karlen sometimes feels as though Dorothy is sitting in the room with her as she reads decades-old letters. She routinely calls her research subject by her first name. She describes a woman who was an accomplished violinist, writer, world traveler, and force behind the establishment of Crazy Horse Memorial.

“Dorothy was the first wife of Crazy Horse mountain sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski,” says Karlen, who believes the world’s biggest carving might not exist without Dorothy’s early efforts. Karlen can paint a detailed life story, in part because Dorothy’s cousin turned over to her photographs, writings and other documents.

“I would have been happy with a shoebox of materials,” Karlen laughs.”Instead, I got the jackpot.”

And eventually more. Karlen’s investigation has taken her coast to coast, spurred by a graduate history course that she took in 2005 while working as a Rapid City public school librarian. The class stressed how educators can uncover significant history by seeking out primary sources. Karlen’s travels included Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where Dorothy graduated in 1919, and the campus chapel where Dorothy and Korczak exchanged wedding vows in 1934.

Like most women at Vassar a century ago (the all-female school wasn’t yet coed), Dorothy came from East Coast social standing and wealth. Her father was a highly respected surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, and in 1905 he took his family on an ocean liner to the Far East — an incredibly rare travel opportunity. The trip was only part of Dorothy’s early international experiences. She lived in England for five years with her family, and after attending Vassar she moved to Paris to study violin with the renowned George Enescu.

Her trek into the interior of the American continent — specifically the Black Hills — can be traced to an encounter in Massachusetts after returning from France. She met Boston sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, several years her junior, who later told Dorothy he was sometimes his own worst enemy because of his brash, gruff manner. Dorothy experienced that immediately. Trying to make small talk by telling Korczak she admired two New York sculptors, she heard Korczak scoff, saying that most sculptors he liked were dead, artists of previous centuries who cut images from stone rather than molding clay for bronze statues, as Dorothy’s New York artists did.

Korczak revealed great admiration for one contemporary American sculptor: Gutzon Borglum, who at the time was carving presidential likenesses from hard mountain granite in South Dakota.

Despite Korczak’s antisocial ways, and possibly somewhat because of them, too, Dorothy found herself in love with the young sculptor. The attraction proved mutual, and the president of Vassar himself participated in their wedding because of his friendship with Dorothy. She was 36, Korczak 26, both driven by artistic spirits. Dorothy would play with the Boston Symphony. Korczak always called her Dorrie.

“She was very much an East Coast, proper lady,” Karlen notes.”I’m not sure she owned a pair of slacks.”

Korczak Ziolkowski and Dorothy Comstock were married in 1934. They adopted a daughter, Anne, and moved with Dorothy’s mother, Bertha Comstock, to the Black Hills in 1948 as Ziolkowski prepared to begin work on Crazy Horse Memorial. The family is pictured above in January 1944.

An East Coast lady, perhaps, only because she hadn’t yet experienced the American West. But five years after the wedding a dream position opened for Korczak: assistant sculptor under Borglum at Mount Rushmore for the 1939 carving season. Traveling to South Dakota by automobile in that year, of course, didn’t compare to steaming to Asia in 1905, but to some Easterners the adventure didn’t fall short by much. Dorothy’s writing documented the journey.

She described crossing South Dakota east to west — early summer croplands East River that looked like they could use rain, eerily fascinating Badlands and, finally, the splendor of the Black Hills, where they drove”up, up, up endlessly, into the dark pines which had been the sacred temples of the Sioux.” Dorothy called the Black Hills”mystic,” a region where,”anything might happen except the expected — and strange events lost their strangeness.”

For example, Dorothy and Korczak loved the area’s songbirds. Always attuned to classical music, Dorothy identified one”that repeated deliciously the theme of a Schubert Rondo!”

“We led the life of pioneers in Dakota,” Dorothy wrote to former Vassar classmates,”in a log cabin with porcupines, mountain lions, elk and rattlesnakes for company! Every day Korczak worked on the Mount Rushmore Memorial, as Borglum’s only sculptor assistant, and I spent all my dimes in telescopes, watching my only husband dangle on a tiny cable over the cliffs. In the studio below, I did publicity for Borglum, and I wrote a pageant, which was given there for the Golden Jubilee of the State of South Dakota.”

Dorothy’s pageant commemorating 50 years of statehood was part of the Theodore Roosevelt head dedication (each of the four Rushmore figures had its own dedication over the years).”Held on a Sunday evening, it was by far the best attended of all the Rushmore dedications,” wrote historian Rex Alan Smith in his 1984 book, The Carving of Mount Rushmore. Three thousand cars carrying 12,000 people showed up, and that number was dwarfed by a national CBS radio audience listening live.

While Smith wrote glowingly of Dorothy’s efforts at Rushmore, he did not mention her by name in the book — only as”Ziolkowski’s wife.” Researchers today won’t find Dorothy’s name in an anonymous Wikipedia article about Korczak, although the story makes clear he had two wives, the second of whom is named. Those kinds of omissions triggered Karlen’s thinking decades later about what sometimes happens to women in history, especially those from an era when no wife kept her original surname after marriage and often lost even her first name in newspaper accounts.

Before coming to South Dakota, Ziolkowski carved likenesses of great leaders in history. He and Dorothy (pictured) gifted this statue of Noah Webster to the city of West Hartford, Connecticut.

The year 1939 was significant for Dorothy and Korczak for reasons beyond Mount Rushmore. Korczak’s sculpture of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a musician and Prime Minister of Poland, won first place in a New York World’s Fair competition. Korczak suddenly had the international arts community’s attention. But the summer didn’t end well. Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon’s son and a key part of the Rushmore project, got into a fistfight with Korczak. Lincoln and Korczak made up quickly and, Dorothy later wrote, the pair”are good friends.” But Gutzon decided the men couldn’t work together and dismissed Korczak. The Ziolkowskis left the Hills, not certain they would see them again, and certainly not guessing that the Paderewski sculpture would aid in their return.

Back East, in Connecticut, the two immersed themselves in the lifestyles of professional artists.”Korczak has had no vacation since I have known him,” Dorothy wrote to her Vassar friends.”One piece follows another without so much as a half-day’s interim. We don’t even take weekends off. While he works, I fiddle, for there seems to be a lot of programs to be given.”

Music of another style came into their lives when they formed a patriotic drum and fife corps that performed as New England soldiers and sailors deployed for World War II service. Dorothy’s widowed mother, Bertha Comstock, lived with the couple and crafted authentic-looking colonial costumes.

Korczak himself left for the Army in 1943 and hit the bloody beaches of Normandy in 1944. Dorothy noted that war changed Korczak — made the hardened man harder still. Korczak railed against”what he called the veneer of civilization,” Dorothy wrote, and”was much more intolerant of people in general.” Karlen thinks Dorothy’s ability, well-practiced, to stand as a buffer between Korczak and others was a key to his acceptance in the Black Hills in the late 1940s.

His post-war vision of himself and his family was life in South Dakota or Wyoming; he had accepted Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear’s invitation to create a mountain carving honoring American Indians. Standing Bear had been impressed by Korczak’s World’s Fair accomplishment, and his time in the Black Hills was a plus. The Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming were considered as a site, but South Dakota’s quality granite won out. Korczak selected Thunderhead Mountain near Custer and declared he would shape it into Crazy Horse astride a horse. The land and mineral rights were purchased in 1947. The same year, Korczak built an on-site house, and his family followed him West — Dorothy, Bertha and a little girl, Anne, adopted by the Ziolkowskis (Standing Bear called her Maiden of the Dawn). They were prepared to live in the Black Hills for as long as it would take to complete a mountain sculpture considerably bigger than Mount Rushmore.

Also arriving from Connecticut were half a dozen young women who would volunteer at Crazy Horse Memorial. The drums and fifes and costumes came West, too, for occasional Black Hills performances but, of course, the focus was the mountain. A dynamite blast in June 1948 was a baby step in removing rock to reach carving surfaces — a process that continues 73 years later.

But in 1949, for reasons known only to the couple, the Ziolkowski marriage ended. A year later, Korczak married Ruth Ross, one of the young volunteers from Connecticut. Certainly, there were those who guessed the recently arrived Dorothy would return to New England, but she didn’t. She, her mother and Anne set themselves up in a little house on Franklin Street in Rapid City. Dorothy went to work as a Rapid City Journal writer. She also joined other Rapid City musicians as violinist in a small orchestra and endured an unhappy second marriage.

Divorce from Korczak didn’t mean complete separation from Crazy Horse Memorial. Dorothy watched its development, believed in it fully, and sent encouraging letters to Korczak. Two years before her death she mailed a note to Korczak, saying:”I am always extremely interested and stimulated as I hear of the tremendous progress for which you alone are responsible, and which is your gift to a world in need.” Considering both the sculpture and sculptor to be of permanent historical importance, Dorothy penned a 300-page Korczak Ziolkowski biography (never published).

The Ziolkowskis created a patriotic fife and drum corps while living in New England. The group came with them to South Dakota and is pictured with Henry Standing Bear, the man who convinced Ziolkowski to create a mountain carving in the Black Hills that honored all American Indians.

When it was time for Anne to go to college, she looked west, not east, and selected the University of Arizona. Dorothy and Bertha moved to Tucson with her in 1960. Dorothy played with the Tucson Symphony and gave violin lessons. Bertha died in 1961 and Anne sadly followed in 1968 after developing leukemia. Dorothy passed away in 1978 and Korczak in 1982.

Twenty-seven years after Dorothy’s death, Karlen took that history course and was advised by her neighbor, who had known Dorothy slightly, that the sculptor’s wife for so many years might make a good subject for a paper. Karlen found Dorothy’s obituary and noticed a cousin in Tucson listed as a survivor.

“Nobody’s ever asked about her before,” said Lenci Loring of her accomplished cousin when Karlen phoned out of the blue. She invited Karlen to Thanksgiving in Tucson in 2005. The women spent the holiday going through boxes Dorothy left behind — content Loring later gifted to Karlen.

Back home, Karlen looked up people who had known Dorothy and Korczak as a couple, including journalist Bob Lee. Lee gave Karlen a 1948 Rapid City Journal feature he wrote that mentioned Dorothy’s own artistry and credited much of the Crazy Horse project’s”super-salesmanship” to Dorothy and Bertha, who”showed hospitality-wise westerners how to entertain in a grandiose style.” In 2018 Karlen flew to Vassar, where no one in the alumni office or library knew who Dorothy was.”But they were mesmerized by her story when we talked,” Karlen says. Vassar staff helped her search registrar files and the library to find transcripts and the newsy letters Dorothy wrote to her class of 1919 friends (“Dear 1919,” each begins). Karlen had enough information and perspectives to do occasional history talks in Rapid City and typically found audiences no less mesmerized than the Vassar staff. Now and then, however, she met people who told her she had to be mistaken about Dorothy’s very existence.

She fully understood the confusion. Two generations of South Dakotans knew the second Mrs. Ziolkowski — Ruth Ross Ziolkowski, mother to Korczak’s 10 children, and the iconic leader who stepped up after Korczak’s death to take Crazy Horse Memorial into the 21st century. Ruth can be credited for the decision to complete Crazy Horse’s face, handled millions of visitors from around the world, and fulfilled an educational mission.

“She did a wonderful job,” says Karlen, who met the second Mrs. Ziolkowski a few times before her 2014 death.

But Karlen is making it her task to remind South Dakotans of Dorothy, remarkable in her own right and certainly deserving of a recognized place in state history.

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.

Posted on August 1, 2023 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Always on Our Minds

By John Andrews

A marker to Jack McCall stands in Yankton’s Sacred Heart Cemetery, but does not mark his actual grave. That remains one of many mysteries that still surrounds the man who famously killed Wild Bill Hickok in 1876.

A LEDGER BOOK is tucked away in the archives of the Mead Cultural Education Center, headquarters of the Yankton County Historical Society. Local historians have requested it often enough that museum staff have marked four pages with thin strips of white paper.”JAIL” is written in bold pencil across the top of one.

The book measures maybe 12 by 18 inches, contains some 600 pages and weighs about as much as a cinder block. Its first entry is dated Oct. 23, 1862 and is signed by George Pinney, the second United States Marshal in Dakota Territory. What follows are entries from each succeeding marshal — ranging from correspondence to reporting day-to-day activities of the office — ending on May 10, 1877.

Much of the reading is mundane, unless you’re captivated by expense reports, requests for 2-cent stamps, expense reports, applications for vacation time and expense reports. But there are a few needle-in-a-haystack nuggets that have consistently caught the attention of Yankton historians.

We first learned of the book’s existence from Bob Hanson, a tireless preserver of Yankton history until his death in 2018 and the man responsible for those bookmarks. Hanson was intensely interested in the story of Jack McCall, the man who killed Wild Bill Hickok in a Deadwood saloon, stood trial in Yankton and was executed just north of town. That sad and final chapter of McCall’s life spanned just seven months in 1876 and 1877, but its details have spawned nearly a century and a half of conjecture and speculation. What was McCall’s true motive? Was the crime a power play by territorial and federal politicians seeking a way to finally and firmly assert authority over the Black Hills? And where are Jack McCall’s remains today?

Hanson believed answers — or clues, at the very least — might be found in this book, hence his repeated visits to the Mead. But there’s another twist: two pages that would have contained official correspondence between Marshal J.H. Burdick and officials in Washington, D.C., between April 3 and 9, 1877 — just a month after McCall was hanged — are missing. To Hanson, they were akin to the 18 minutes of missing tape in the Watergate era.

Did the pages simply break free of their brittle binding and become lost among countless other documents? Or were they intentionally removed to forever obscure an incriminating piece of information? Most likely we’ll never know, but it hasn’t stopped people from asking questions. Nearly 150 years after his death, Jack McCall remains very much on many people’s minds.

***

WE KNOW VERY little about Jack McCall’s life prior to Aug. 2, 1876. Historians believe he was born in 1852 or 1853 in Louisville, Kentucky. He arrived in the Black Hills during the gold rush. One story contends that he entered the Hills as a wagon train driver for”Colorado Charlie” Utter, whose party also included the famed lawman Wild Bill Hickok, drawing the two figures of Western lore together for the first time.

Jack McCall.

Whether that actually happened is its own mystery, but we know McCall and Hickok were in Nuttall and Mann’s Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood on Aug. 2, 1876. Hickok was in the midst of a poker game when McCall approached him from behind, leveled a revolver at his head and pulled the trigger. Hickok died instantly and McCall fled down an alley, only to be apprehended later by a crowd of townspeople.

Since no established court had yet asserted jurisdiction over the Black Hills, crimes were often settled in miners’ courts in which a hastily assembled jury of locals convened to determine the fate of the accused. Such was the scene that awaited McCall the following afternoon in James McDaniels’ Deadwood Theatre. McCall claimed his deadly deed was vengeance because Wild Bill had murdered his brother in Kansas. The jury sympathized (or was swayed by a bribe of gold dust, as prosecutor George May surmised) and found McCall not guilty after a two-hour deliberation.

Believing he’d gotten away with murder, McCall fled for Laramie, Wyoming, where he seemed to relish in telling others that he was the man who had killed Wild Bill. Territorial authorities knew about the notorious crime and believed that McCall’s Deadwood trial held no legal standing. One day May, who had followed McCall to Laramie with Deputy U.S. Marshal Saint Andre Durand Balcombe, overheard McCall’s boasting. Balcombe arrested McCall on August 29 and escorted him to Yankton, Dakota Territory’s capital city.

As he awaited trial, McCall spent the next three months in jail. His cell mate was Jerry McCarty, who had been arrested for the murder of John Hinch in the Black Hills the day before the Hickok killing. The two hatched a daring and almost successful escape in early November. J.B. Robinson, the jailer, was preparing to lock them in their cells for the night when McCarty overpowered him and held him by the throat. McCall then beat him until he was nearly unconscious. They stole his keys, broke their shackles and were stepping out the door when they came face to face with Marshal Burdick and James Bennett, one of his assistants. As Yankton’s Daily Press and Dakotaian reported, in the wonderful language of 19th century journalism,”Marshal Burdick immediately comprehended the situation and placed the business end of his revolver in unpleasant proximity to the heads of the escaping murderers,” who were escorted without incident back to their cells.

McCall’s trial began on December 5, with Judge Peter Shannon presiding. Appointed to defend McCall were Oliver Shannon and William Henry Harrison Beadle, the man perhaps best known in Dakota history for his passionate defense of school lands. When Marshal Burdick escorted McCall into the courtroom, the Press and Dakotaian correspondent described him as”an evil looking man young in years but apparently old in sin.”

Townspeople filled the courtroom to hear testimony and closing arguments, which concluded after noon on December 6. George Shingle, Carl Mann and William Massie — all of whom were inside the No. 10 Saloon when Hickok was killed — identified McCall as the lone gunman. (According to legend, Massie still held the bullet that killed Hickok. After passing through Wild Bill’s head, it tore into Massie’s wrist where it remained until he died and was buried with it in 1910.)

The defense’s main argument was that Dakota Territory didn’t have jurisdiction over the Black Hills because it was still part of the Great Sioux Reservation, the boundaries of which had been established under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The jury of 12 men disagreed and found McCall guilty. He was sentenced to hang on March 1. (Curiously, six months after the trial, the Press and Dakotaian reported on a new map drawn of the Black Hills region which placed Deadwood squarely in Dakota Territory. The map caused controversy among those who attempted to claim that Deadwood was actually part of Wyoming. Territorial leaders sought advice from Beadle, the defense lawyer who at one time was also a surveyor in Dakota. He said he was convinced that Deadwood was part of Dakota Territory.)

Longtime Yankton historian Bob Hanson was a tireless researcher of the McCall case.

McCall languished in jail for another two months. During his time in Yankton, his story kept changing. At one point he claimed he’d been drunk. Later, he said a man named John Varnes paid him to kill Hickok. Varnes held a grudge over a disputed poker game, he said.

A few days before the scheduled execution, the marshal’s office received a letter from a Mary McCall in Kentucky asking if the prisoner was her brother.”There was a young man of the name John McCall left here about six years ago, who has not been heard from for the last three years,” she wrote.”He has a father, mother, and three sisters living here in Louisville, who are very uneasy about him since they heard about the murder of Wild Bill.”

The letter seemed to unnerve McCall and may have prompted him to get rid of a document that could have shed more light on the Hickok murder. McCall had been preparing a written statement and asked the Press and Dakotaian to publish it after his death. But the night before the execution he destroyed it.

March 1 was a cold and drizzly day in Yankton. By 9:30 in the morning, a large crowd had gathered outside the jail at Fifth and Douglas. They watched as McCall climbed into a carriage with Father John Daxacher, a Catholic priest, and Phil Faulk, a Press and Dakotaian correspondent.”This mournful train, bearing its living victim to the grave, was preceded and followed by a long line of vehicles of every description, with hundreds on horseback and on foot, all leading north, out through Broadway,” Faulk wrote.”The rain which was falling had moistened the earth and deadened the sound of the carriage wheels. Not a word was spoken during the ride two miles to the school section north of the Catholic cemetery. McCall still continued to bear up bravely, even after the gallows loomed in full view.”

The wooden gallows had been constructed so that the throngs of people who attended could watch as McCall ascended the steps and Burdick placed the noose around his neck. But when the floor beneath his feet disappeared, McCall plunged into a boarded-up enclosure that prevented witnesses from watching the condemned man struggle to his final breath.

Twelve minutes later, two doctors pronounced McCall dead. His body was placed in a walnut coffin and buried very nearly on the spot. Jack McCall’s life ended, but his legend in Yankton was only beginning.

***

A WEEK BEFORE we examined the U.S. marshal’s ledger book, Jim Lane visited the Mead museum to do the same thing. Lane is a local historian who has doggedly researched the Hickok killing and McCall’s time in Yankton.”I’ve got a book written,” he says.”But it’s all in my head.”

A sign proclaiming Yankton’s role in the saga of Jack McCall stood along Highway 81 before finding a home with the Yankton County Historical Society, headquartered at the Mead Cultural Heritage Center, where local historian Jim Lane researches McCall’s time in Yankton.

Lane’s interest in the ledger book centers more on the scruples of Marshal Burdick, the man in charge of the McCall execution, than any nefarious actions on the part of territorial politicians.”We don’t have a really good accounting on the McCall thing,” Lane says.”Burdick was a real reluctant guy. U.S. marshals weren’t Matt Dillon. They were political guys who took these jobs because it was a good way to make money on the frontier. He came under some fire and there was an investigation into his spending, right around that time frame.”

Hanson’s suspicions ran deeper. He believed there may have been a plan to kill Wild Bill Hickok so that federal marshals could swoop into the Hills, arrest the murderer and conduct the trial in territorial court, firmly establishing influence over the Black Hills. He turned to the book hoping to find clues.”Bob loved a good story, and he had a lot of fun with it. He kind of pushed the conspiracy theory,” Lane says.”When they hauled McCall back to Yankton, the territorial capital established legal authority over the Black Hills. That’s the case that does it. That’s when they say that if there’s going to be a trial out here, it’s going to be decided by Dakota Territory. Bob was a little bit right with the theory that they wanted this to happen. But I don’t think anyone assassinated Wild Bill Hickok for political means.”

There’s no smoking gun in the ledger book, either, though two of the bookmarked pages show that discussion of authority over the Black Hills was lively during the summer of 1876. On July 10, Marshal Burdick wrote to Attorney General Alphonso Taft regarding warrants that had been issued for the arrest of miners who brought whiskey into the Black Hills, still regarded as Indian Territory. Burdick’s position seems quite clear:”The Black Hills region as you are perhaps aware is located upon what is known as the Sioux Indian Reservation, within the limits of the Second Judicial District of this Territory, the Court being held at Yankton.”

Burdick said he had dispatched two deputies to arrest seven or eight men accused of bringing whiskey into the Hills, but that only one could be located. The others had escaped and probably could not be apprehended”by peaceable means.” He had requested military help from General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, but given the obliteration of Lt. Col. George Custer and his 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn just two weeks earlier, he suspected no help would come.

ìAny doubts which may have been raised in regard to the legality of the treaty under which the present Reservation was set apart I imagine has nothing to do with these cases. The United States Court here has never held that it is Indian Country,” Burdick wrote.”The people in the mining regions are firm in their belief that the Indians have no longer the right to prevent them through the action of the Government from occupying that section and working the mines. I state the fact without any reference to its correct basis.”

Still, he sought guidance.”The warrants in my hands are in proper shape for an offence clearly punishable under the Section referred to and are forced upon the indictments found by a qualified Grand Jury. I desire therefore in view of the peculiar circumstances which I have detailed to have your advice as to whether or not I shall proceed to execute them at all.”

The signature of U.S. Marshal J.H. Burdick, which appears many times in the historic ledger.

Two weeks later, in another letter to the attorney general, Burdick reported that his request for military assistance had indeed been denied, but he also provided more details about his interest in the Black Hills. In February, he dispatched a deputy and a posse to the Black Hills to apprehend several men, one of whom was accused of a murder at the Standing Rock Indian Agency. The lawmen captured only one, who was tried, convicted and punished in the Yankton court.”The expenses of this posse were included in my accounts for the Spring Term of Court at this place and upon my accounts being presented to the Court for approval by law the Judge struck out all that portion of the account relating to the expense of the posse and refused to approve them. I referred the matter to the Hon. the 1st Comptroller and he refused to audit the account although he virtually admitted its legality saying he would not look into an account which the Judge refused to approve.” Clearly, questions remained regarding what the marshal could and couldn’t do in the Black Hills.

Another marked page helps us to find the tangible reminders of McCall’s brief existence in Yankton. In September of 1865, Marshal L.H. Litchfield wrote to Secretary of the Interior James Harlan to ask again for a jail. He referenced a previous letter in which the secretary claimed that no request for jail space had ever been received. But Litchfield was insistent.”At the time I made the request I stated distinctly that the United States had no rooms suitable for the confinement of prisoners. There never has been in this Territory any rooms used for this purpose,” Litchfield said.”The Judges and myself could not complain of the unsuitableness of rooms, but we did complain that there were no rooms, and that prisoners had to be confined at a military post or in a county jail of Iowa, either of which is more than sixty five miles distant from here.

ìI wish the Department to distinctly understand that no rooms of any description have ever been provided or rented in this Territory for the safe keeping of prisoners. But there is great necessity for such rooms.”

Perhaps Litchfield’s entreaties resulted in construction of the federal jail on Linn Street, the facility in which McCall spent at least some time in custody. A tidy brown house sits on the lot today, just a block west of Broadway Avenue, the main north/south thoroughfare through Yankton.

McCall was also held in the relatively new county courthouse and jail, a large brick structure at the corner of Fifth and Douglas. Later, it was a lodge for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows but has since been converted into apartments. Its owner reported that before renovations, sections of bars could still be seen in the basement.

The building where McCall stood trial was part of the St. Charles Hotel, built in 1870 at Third and Capital. A portion of the building at the very corner of the intersection was rebuilt in 1891, but wings to the west and north — which included a courtroom where the trial occurred — remain. It also has been converted into apartments. A historic marker was placed on the east exterior wall along Capital Street in 1960. Its language, describing the courtroom’s location”directly back of this marker,” is to be interpreted literally.

Jack McCall stood trial on the second floor of the brick building at Third and Capital in downtown Yankton. The location is prominently marked.

A second marker stands at the intersection of 31st and Broadway near Yankton’s soccer fields. In 1877 this was the place where hundreds of people watched Jack McCall hang. The area has been graded and built upon several times through the years as Yankton gradually expanded to the north, but Lane believes the gallows were built somewhere in today’s Highway 81 right of way near the southbound lanes.

Perhaps the most intriguing mystery surrounding McCall is the location of his gravesite. Four years after the hanging, construction began on the Dakota Hospital for the Insane. McCall’s body, along with several others that had been buried in the pioneer cemetery, had to be relocated. When they opened McCall’s coffin, onlookers were surprised to discover that he’d been buried with the noose still tied around his neck.

McCall was moved to the Catholic cemetery, adjacent to the city cemetery. Over the years, his gravesite became a tourist attraction, much to the chagrin of the city’s Catholic leaders. Local historians say that in the 1930s, Father Lawrence Link, who served Yankton’s Sacred Heart Church from 1895 until his death in 1946, supervised a third relocation of McCall’s remains. This time, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Sacred Heart Cemetery along Douglas Avenue, where he lies today.

A headstone claims to mark McCall’s grave, but in fact it threatens to eventually muddy the historical waters. It was placed in 2017 when the Amazon television show Fireball Run passed through Yankton. The premise involved teams of people traveling through communities on missions or adventures that allowed them to see and experience unique aspects of each city. When the city’s Catholic priests balked at placing a headstone at the actual gravesite, a marker was set inside the adjacent city cemetery instead. The inscription on the stone reads,”Here lies Jack McCall,” but it was placed on a spot where the legendary outlaw definitely does not lie.

The real location of the gravesite is a closely guarded secret. Local legend says that no more than a few people at a time know exactly where it is. Bob Hanson was one of those people, and he remained coy about it, even among his closest family members.”Before he died, he told me where McCall is buried, but I think it was to throw me off the trail,” says Sarah Hanson-Pareek, Hanson’s daughter and a library archivist at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.”I’m not sure if I got the true account.”

A true accounting of anything surrounding Jack McCall would be difficult to put together.”There are so many trails that lead off this story that just haven’t been followed,” Lane says.”Everyone’s done Hickok and Calamity Jane to death. Nobody really looks at McCall because there hasn’t been much there. But we should be hopeful that the current interest in genealogy and clues such as the Mary McCall letter might lead to new discoveries.” Easier access to materials online, such as digitized newspapers and ancestry websites, could help further investigations.

Then there’s the ledger book. Is the paucity of information simply due to the time that has passed, or is it at least partly intentional? What of missing pages 509 and 510? Lane is convinced.”I don’t see any evidence of anyone cutting pages out,” he says.”It just ended before it got to any of the stuff that we were interested in.”

With Jack McCall, it seems there will always be more questions than answers.

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

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Rocky Road

By Paul Higbee

Photos by John Mitchell

In some places, the modern Spearfish Canyon Highway closely follows the route of the old Spearfish Canyon railroad, especially approaching Spearfish Mountain from the south.

THE JOKE ALREADY felt stale when I was a teenager in Spearfish:”No one grows up on the wrong side of the tracks here because there are no tracks.”

No tracks, no whistles, no rattling train cars through Spearfish nights. When the town lost rail service of any type in 1933, its population was under 2,000, yet Spearfish ranked as the biggest community in the United States where no locomotives rolled. Most people didn’t seem to care. During the same decade in which Spearfish said goodbye to trains, it gained mail and passenger service by air and developed an outdoor drama (Black Hills Passion Play) that would soon draw 100,000 travelers annually who were”tin can tourists”– packed into automobiles.

Within just a few years, the Spearfish Canyon railroad became a Black Hills legend: the train that had to be tied down at stops so it wouldn’t roll away down the steep grade, a friendly rail service that dropped off passengers at their favorite fishing spots in the morning and picked them up again in the afternoon, the transportation that President Theodore Roosevelt selected for his sons so they could access the rugged West.

This summer I spent two beautiful but futile days searching for signs of the railroad in the canyon’s heart. I splashed along Spearfish Creek’s banks hoping to see just a piece of one of the 33 railway bridges that crossed this water and its tributaries. Nothing. The railroad boasted that by necessity it built remarkably well in the canyon, that”ties are bedded in rock the whole way.” Probably so, but in the heart nothing survived a railroad salvage contractor in 1934 and the relentless erosion that is the essence of any living canyon.

Out of the canyon’s heart, on its fringes, I’ve seen photographs of surviving abutments for great trestles that dropped trains off Bald Mountain and into the canyon, but I haven’t found them myself yet. In Spearfish a cycling and walking trail utilizes the old rail bed. A feature all Spearfish Canyon highway drivers recognize is a cut through which they pass 3 miles from Spearfish, considered by many to be the canyon’s north entrance. Originally, the cut was blasted for Grand Island & Wyoming Central trains (later known as the Burlington & Missouri River, or just the Burlington).

The first locomotive steamed through that rock cut and into Spearfish in December of 1893. Engines had to be powerful to handle the steep grades but were limited to 25 mph when moving passengers and 15 mph when passenger cars and freight cars were combined.

The Burlington’s interest in the canyon stemmed from a series of proposed mines and ore processing mills that investors believed would utilize new technologies to extract gold and other precious metals. These canyon mines did indeed take form, but their production lives were short. The canyon railroad also carried passengers seeking tent camping, berry picking and steep hikes to spectacular vistas. There had been no outcry against sacrificing natural splendor to make way for mines and mills. Prior to the railroad, very few Black Hills people knew anything about Spearfish Canyon. Even in the town of Spearfish, only the most intrepid game hunters ventured into the canyon because its lower end was tightly packed with great boulders.

Spearfish-bound passengers from Deadwood knew they were more than halfway to their destination at Elmore and that they had descended into the canyon proper.

Thanks to the Burlington, Spearfish Canyon burst into consciousness. Modern South Dakotans don’t like reading early Black Hills historian Annie Tallent’s racist views, but it’s hard to dispute that in 1899 she wrote a perfect description of riding the rails through Spearfish Canyon:”A trip over this marvelous piece of mountain railway — up the dizzy heights to the extreme summit of Bald Mountain, around a labyrinth of lofty crags in perfectly bewildering curves, and a plunge down into and through the most beautiful canyon in the world (the Spearfish) — is a revelation of grandeur and beauty unsurpassed and the treat of a lifetime.”

Six years later passenger James Doyle wrote in Spearfish’s newspaper, the Queen City Mail, that the canyon,”has no common place in it. It everywhere plays homage to omnipotence.” And much of it could be observed, through all seasons, from the comfort of passenger cars. Changing seasons, others noted, could sometimes be experienced in a single day due to the variance of elevations along the route. It wasn’t out of the question for passengers to board at Deadwood in a spring mist, encounter drifts and even blowing snow in the canyon’s middle, then step into summer-like sunshine down the grade at Spearfish.

An industrial aspect of the line remained through its four-decade history, chiefly lumber and wholesale deliveries to Spearfish, and farm produce and livestock shipped up the hill from Spearfish. But by the time the railroad merged into the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy in 1904 there could be no doubt that excursions were the main function. Recognizing that the average patron was now more likely to board with family members than livestock, the line stressed safety.”The passenger takes no risk when he rides,” read company publicity.”The history of the line proves this. Collisions are out of the question because there’s nothing with which to collide. One train has the canyon to itself all day.”

While no other train could cause a wreck, engineers had to watch for boulders that came bounding down the canyon walls. There’s no record of one hitting the train, but now and then passengers were asked to climb out and help clear the tracks of rocks.

It was about 40 miles one way between Deadwood and Spearfish, but just as often the rail line was referred to as a 32-mile run — the distance between Englewood and Spearfish. In the early 1900s, round trip tickets cost about $2.50. Passengers boarded at Deadwood’s Depot 47 on Sherman Street, a couple blocks east of the Franklin Hotel, in the morning and arrived in Spearfish early that afternoon. The Spearfish depot was a wood frame structure where the community’s main fire station stands today, on Canyon Street. By mid-afternoon the train had been turned around and was headed back up the canyon. Today, almost universally, the railway is recalled for its Deadwood to Spearfish and back runs, strangely inefficient because the geography forced the engine to actually steam in the direction opposite of its destination much of the trip.

Remnants of trestles that were part of the Seven Mile Bend can still be found near Annie Creek. The train dropped (or climbed) 800 feet in elevation over those 7 miles.

Less well remembered is the fact that passengers could disembark and connect with another Burlington train at Englewood. That route (today the Mickelson Trail) took them south through the heart of the Black Hills and, in many cases, out of the Hills to distant cities.

Spearfish Canyon developed as a destination in its own right with construction of overnight lodging early in the 20th century. Deadwood’s Glen and Doris Inglis first opened the Glendoris Inn (now the storied Latchstring Inn) mid-canyon at Savoy where the train passed dramatically over a trestle across Spearfish Falls. Later, Martha Railsback and Maude Watts journeyed into the canyon by rail, bought the inn and brought it to full fruition. Sometimes elfin-sized, bewhiskered gold prospector Potato Creek Johnny greeted rail passengers at the inn and played his fiddle late into the night.

The canyon railroad had a role in one of South Dakota’s boldest engineering and construction feats ever between 1909 and 1912. Homestake Gold Mine diverted creek water through Spearfish Canyon’s west wall by way of 23,862 feet of tunnels it cut through solid rock. The diverted water spun turbines in a new state-of-the-art plant at Spearfish, generating electricity that powered mine operations for the next 90 years. The canyon rail bed was a reference point that surveyors used in determining the tunnels’ course, and the rails delivered drills, laborers and supplies. Canyon rail passengers were among the first to notice Spearfish Creek’s diminished flow in the lower canyon after the power plant went online.

A bit later Homestake built a second, smaller hydroelectric plant in the canyon, with water mostly channeled to it through an above-ground pipeline. Today, people sometimes mistake the pipeline path, visible along a ridge north of Savoy, for the old Burlington bed.

In the 1920s, Spearfish Mayor James O’Neill advocated for an automobile road through Spearfish Canyon. In fact, his enthusiasm led him onsite to work with the road crew some days after funding was secured. This first version of the Spearfish Canyon highway opened with ceremonial dynamite blasts and a speech by Gov. William Bulow in August of 1930. Hard as it is to imagine today in narrow parts of the canyon, the highway and train co-existed for two years and nine months.

Then on May 20, 1933, according to railroad records,”Engineer Steinberg and Fireman Kaup” made what proved to be the Spearfish line’s final run. Three days later a raging Spearfish Creek wiped out rails and bridges. In July, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy filed a request with the Interstate Commerce Commission, seeking to abandon the line rather than rebuild. The Queen City Mail grumbled and Spearfish gasoline retailers stepped up to state they got better rates for customers when their product was delivered by rail. But the railroad had no difficulty documenting it was losing money, and called passenger service”not important,” because travelers preferred”moving principally over the highways.” That was exactly what Mayor O’Neill had sensed a decade earlier. The Commission authorized abandoning the lower 25 miles into Spearfish but told the railroad to continue serving mines in the Bald Mountain vicinity.

In coming years Spearfish leaders sometimes contemplated re-establishing a rail connection, not through the canyon but by way of a northward spur to Belle Fourche. Nothing came of it. Then in the 1960s the community decided it wanted to be an interstate highway town. Leaders were successful in getting Interstate 90 routed past town in the 1970s, just as new Catholic priest Father Eugene Szalay arrived. As a hobby, he sought out people who recalled the old canyon line and preserved their stories.

Apparently no one confessed to Father Szalay what the railroad knew: Poachers at least once”borrowed” hand cars to sneak out-of-season bucks from the canyon. Much of what the priest heard came from former employees who recalled their canyon railroading as a grand outdoor adventure. Roger O’Kieff, for example, was hired at age 14 and sometimes tied one of those hand cars to the back of the train. He was pulled along until spotting snow or rocks to be cleared away from the track. Then he cut himself loose to tackle the job.

That would have been a dream job for any teenager during the golden, but short-lived, era of railroading through Spearfish Canyon.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on June 6, 2022 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Larger Than Life

By Bernie Hunhoff

Buffalo County farmer August Klindt was photographed on a Colorado main street while performing with the circus.

“How tall are you?” was a question August Klindt probably was asked a hundred times a year.”Six feet, 14 inches,” he sometimes answered, or”five feet, 26 inches.” He probably had a dozen such quips depending on the day and the inquirer, because he was a practiced politician and performer. He left South Dakota in the 1920s and 1930s to perform in circuses with sword swallowers, tattooed ladies and a three-legged woman. But he tired of the freak shows and came home to farm and run for elected office before eventually retiring to Wessington Springs.

“I remember him walking the streets when I was a little boy,” says Craig Wenzel, Wessington Springs’ retired newspaper editor.”I was a kid and he was 7 feet, 2 inches, and when I looked up at him he seemed as big as the sky itself. He wore a 10-gallon hat, like a Hoss Cartwright hat, and he liked to take it off and place it on our heads. It landed on my shoulders and the hat itself never touched my head.”

That hat now hangs in the Wessington Springs museum, along with other memorabilia from the Gann Valley Giant, including a ring he wore (a 50-cent piece, which measures nearly an inch in diameter, fits inside).

South Dakota has spawned other tall men who’ve achieved celebrity status. Mitchell native Mike Miller (6-foot-8) played NBA basketball for 17 years and is now an assistant coach at the University of Memphis. Mitchell Olson, a Vermillion farmer’s son, grew to 7 feet and parlayed his height into a spot on the 2001 Survivor: The Australian Outback reality TV series. He’s now a singer, songwriter and entertainer based in Sioux Falls.

Nate Brown Bull is lesser-known but even taller. He grew to a height of 7-feet-1 on the Pine Ridge Reservation and was a star basketball player for Little Wound High School, graduating in 2015. Foot injuries have interrupted his efforts to launch a college hoops career but he’s still hopeful.

The Gann Valley Giant always had time for children. In about 1940, he posed with Dennis Younie, who grew up to become a popular auctioneer in Buffalo and Jerauld counties.

Who knows what the future might hold for these modern-day giants of South Dakota life? It’s unlikely that they’ll join a circus or run for sheriff but — like all of us, short and tall and in between — may they be remembered with the same fondness that the people of Jerauld and Buffalo counties still share for their Gann Valley Giant.

A baby named August was born March 23, 1894 to Henry and Anna Klindt. His parents were of average height, as were his sisters, Lydia and Hazel. A brother, Henry Jr. (later called Prince) was tall but he never reached August’s legendary height or weight.

Mr. Klindt was born in Germany in 1850 and studied to be a doctor, but his education didn’t qualify him for the medical profession in the United States so he immigrated to Dakota Territory. He settled by Elm Creek in Buffalo County, about 3 miles west of the tiny community of Gann Valley.

Little is known about the young giant’s childhood. As he grew (and grew and grew) to adulthood, he stayed on the farm until he eventually succumbed to invitations to join the circus as one of the”freaks” in the traveling shows popularized by P.T. Barnum in the 19th century.

Klindt traveled and performed with a three-legged woman, a two-headed man, a tattooed woman, a sword swallower and others with unusual appearances or talents. To earn extra cash, he hawked 25-cent rings that fit his big fingers. Klindt told the Sioux City Journal in March of 1930 that he liked the work, except for trips to the South where he said malaria”gave him the shakes.”

However, that quasi-positive response may just have been the story of a polished performer. Klindt’s niece, Rosemary Hof, remembers hearing that her Uncle August wasn’t fond of being on display, though there’s little doubt that he got along famously with fellow performers and curious spectators.”He was a very friendly man who always had a big smile,” says Hof, who now lives in Walla Walla, Washington.

Klindt worked for the Sells Floto and the John Robinson circuses in the 1920s and 1930s, good work at a time when Buffalo County and all of South Dakota were mired in drought and depression. He parlayed his show business contacts into a short stint as doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a Hollywood movie palace still operating today.

Klindt eventually quit show business because of his personal distaste for the exploitation of people with unusual features or physiques, as well as the mistreatment of elephants and other beasts. Later generations came to share this opinion, which led to the demise of such circuses.

Klindt never left Buffalo County for long. He soon utilized his people skills to launch a hometown political career. In 1928, a year after his father was killed in a farm accident, he ran for county judge. The Evening Huronite plugged his candidacy in an article that began,”If size adds prestige to a judge on the bench, August Klindt, Gann Valley, reputed to be the largest South Dakotan, should speak with authority …”

The newspaper described Klindt as,”a single man, 35 years old, 7 feet tall, weighs 350 pounds, wears size 16 shoes [and has] a 22-inch collar. He has toured the country with well-known circus troupes and has played roles in Hollywood film studios.” It’s unlikely that the newspaper editor revealed the heights and weights of the other candidates.

Klindt lost that race, but 10 years later he ran for sheriff, seeking to succeed Morris Nelson, who stood just 5 feet tall and weighed only 125 pounds. As often happens in politics, voters went from one extreme to the other and elected Klindt, who stood at least 26 inches taller and weighed nearly three times as much as Nelson.

August’s destiny as a tall man became obvious at an early age. Family photos show him quickly outgrowing his brother, Henry Jr.

“Law breakers will want to watch out for a man measuring 7 feet, 2 1/2 inches, and that weighs 325 pounds when they are trying to escape the law in Buffalo County,” read another article in the Nov. 24, 1935 Evening Huronite. But the giant’s law enforcement career was uneventful. He was a model of Sheriff Andy Griffith, 20 years before there was a Mayberry. Nobody can recall any stories of confrontation during his tenure.

Klindt was re-elected to a second term in 1942 and served until 1945, when he hung up his badge at the age of 51 and returned to full-time farming.

Jim Keyser remembers the Klindt farm as a simple place in a simpler time.”He farmed a little, not really too much,” says Keyser, who now lives in Wessington Springs.”To begin with he had a team of horses and a wagon and an F-20 Farmall tractor. He raised a couple of pigs and some chickens. He never had electricity in his house. He had a wood-burning stove and a kerosene lantern.”

While that may seem like extreme rural poverty today, Keyser said it wasn’t unusual in the 1950s.”When I was little, maybe 6 or 7 years old, I used to walk over to his house to see what he was doing. We’d sit and talk. Sometimes he would let me help him put straw around his rhubarb plants or clean out the chicken house.”

He recalls the giant as a patient man.”Not too many kids know how to put straw around rhubarb, but he taught me,” he says.”I probably walked over there three or four times a week. If he wanted to take a nap, he’d tell me, Ã«It’s time for you to go, now.'”

Keyser says Klindt kept a tidy house and yard, and he was not a hermit.”I think he liked the solitude of the farm but he also liked people. He used to ride into town with us on Saturday nights. I remember one time he asked if I had my allowance, and then he reached in his pocket and took out some pennies and filled my two hands. I’ll never forget the size of his big hand covering both of mine.”

Other neighbors also remember giving the giant rides to Wessington Springs.”He had me figured out,” laughs Fred Knight.”We lived 3 miles north of his farm and he could see my car’s cloud of dust from far away so he would be standing by the mailbox looking for a ride. I had a ’55 Plymouth and the car would tip toward the ditch when he got in. His knees were up higher than the dash. I don’t remember him ever owning a vehicle, he just hitched rides.”

Knight says the giant dwarfed his little red Farmall tractor.”I went by his place one day and all I could see was this man going up and down the field. You couldn’t see the tractor because the corn was too high but you could see August gliding over the corn.”

“People liked him,” Knight says.”He was just a big cowboy who wore a big Stetson hat and these big bib overalls. When he got to town, he talked to everybody walking down the street.”

August Klindt posed for pictures on a rock levee near the family farm. His father died from injuries suffered while building the dam in 1927.

Brookings journalist Chuck Cecil, who was raised in Wessington Springs, says he and other youth always hoped for a sighting of the giant on Saturday nights. He says Klindt cut a”wide swath through the crowd.”

“He wore the biggest bib overalls you ever saw. The legs had been elongated with material that didn’t match and the suspenders had been over-suspended and were over-taxed. We all got awfully quiet when he walked by. We hoped he wouldn’t see us and maybe step on our car.” The giant drove his tractor short distances from the farm, perhaps to Gann Valley or to the Ray Etbauer ranch where he filled water bottles because his own well water was not fit to drink.

Kenneth Wulff, the Buffalo County highway superintendent and proprietor of a little gas station and store in Gann Valley, says everybody liked August Klindt. “When I knew him he never had a car. He drove an old Farmall Regular tractor. Maybe getting in and out of a car was too hard for him. He would drive over to have a visit with us and get some eggs and milk, maybe, and have a meal. He survived with what he had. Nobody had much in those days.”

Klindt made some spending money by occasionally helping neighbors on their farms. One family remembers that he slept on a bed with a chair at the foot to hold his feet. He gathered with the family every evening to sing songs and tell stories.

Storekeepers at Habicht & Habicht in Huron helped dress the giant. They ordered the largest overalls they could find, but even then Klindt needed several inches of material sewn to the bottom of the pant legs, resulting in a cuffed look.

Eventually, the giant left his farm for the comforts of Wessington Springs, where he rented a room in the Hotel Pheasant and often ate his meals at Aggie’s Cafe.

“It was a big hotel, a wooden structure on Main Street, and sort of a retirement place for old guys,” says Wenzel, the newspaperman.”They had a room at the hotel and would sit on their rockers on the front porch at night and watch the street.”

Rosemary Hof, the giant’s niece, also remembers her uncle’s stay at the Pheasant.”He was my mother’s brother, and they stayed close. As a small child, he would always reach out to shake our hand and as a little kid his hand was five times the size of mine. It was kind of a scary feeling, having your hand enclosed in his but he was also very gentle.”

Hof’s family still owns property in Buffalo County.”I try to go back once a year to visit Wessington Springs, my hometown. In our travels, sometimes we run into other South Dakotans who don’t know much about my home area unless you mention the Gann Valley Giant. They’ve heard of him.”

The Gann Valley Giant had several titles. The Sioux City Journal billed him as the Biggest Farmer in South Dakota and the Tallest Mason in a 1927 story. In the circus he was simply called The Large Man.

A contemporary of Klindt, Johan”John” Aasen of Sheyenne, North Dakota, was billed as the tallest man in the world. One report listed him as 8-feet-9, although his actual height was never officially determined. Aasen profited from his physique much more than Klindt; he played a role in the Todd Browning cult classic Freaks in 1932, and also performed in Charlie Chan at the Circus. However, he lost his wealth with the stock market collapse of 1929 and then suffered numerous health issues before succumbing to an infection in 1938. To pay medical bills, Aasen had willed his body to Dr. Charles Humberd of Barnard, Missouri, who later hung the skeleton from his living room ceiling.

Klindt and Aasen lived in an era when Americans were the tallest people in the world. However, as childhood health care and nutrition improved around the globe, people from other countries did more than catch us: today Americans rank 40th in height. People in the Netherlands, Latvia, Estonia and Denmark are tallest.

Today, the average American male stands 5 feet 9 1/2 inches tall, shorter than a century ago. Experts blame our height stagnation on fast food, lack of health care for poor families and overall wealth inequality.

Klindt was never wealthy, not even by Buffalo County standards. Still, he reached the age of 73 before dying in June of 1967 while visiting his brother, Prince, in Aurora, Oregon. His remains were returned to South Dakota and buried alongside his parents at Spring Hill Cemetery near Gann Valley.

There’ll come a day in the not-so-distant future when he’ll be forgotten — like most of us — but 51 years after his death he remains a gentle giant and a country celebrity to everyone who ever stared at him on the streets of Wessington Springs.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Goodnight, Mrs. Pierre

By Lance Nixon

Pioneer radio broadcaster Ida McNeil used her microphone to creatively assist rural South Dakotans who had limited opportunities for communication in the 1920s and 1930s.

Winter settled into the West River country as if it had come to stay. Ranchers couldn’t escape from their own yards for the drifts. Even the mailman couldn’t make his rounds. It was the 1950s, and communication was the first casualty of bad weather.

“The roads were completely blocked. We were having lots of snow that winter, and we hadn’t had the mail for well over a week,” recalls Phyllis Fravel, who still lives in the Orton Flat area near Mission Ridge.

Fortunately, ranchers had one slim connection to the outside world. Several times a day, a woman’s voice came crackling across all that cold and distance in the friendly static from radio station KGFX. Many listeners couldn’t have said who she was — she never gave her name over the air but once, from the time she started broadcasting in 1922 until the time she sold the station in 1962. They called her Mrs. Pierre.

Her name was Ida McNeil. She was a widow by then, broadcasting from a studio in her house in Pierre, just the way her husband, Dana, had taught her when they were puzzling out this new gadget, radio, together. One of the things she quickly learned is that people needed public service news — if the post office was planning to use extraordinary measures to deliver the mail, for example.

“Carl Kerr decided to deliver the mail by airplane and he told us through the radio — Ida McNeil — that they would be out with the plane,” Fravel recalled.”Cecil Ice was the pilot and Carl Kerr was the mailman. They landed just a short distance from the house and he left our mail and some of the neighbors’ mail at our place.”

For Fravel, watching a ski plane land on her ranch because Mrs. Pierre had said it over the radio was nothing unusual. It was just the way people communicated about many things, including the doings at Orton School, where Fravel herself had been a teacher. You talked to Mrs. Pierre; she talked to central South Dakota.

Residents who remember her said Mrs. Pierre was invaluable, inventing a service that didn’t exist before radio.”I would make up a message and get it to Ida McNeil, and she would put it on the radio that we were going to have a party on such and such a date. That’s the way we got the word around,” Fravel recalled.”If there was somebody that was in town and got stranded, they would send a message that as soon as the snowplow got out, they would be home.”

“She was a groundbreaker. There was nothing to model after,” said Mark Swendsen of Pierre, chief executive officer of Ingstad Family Media, the company that has owned KGFX since 1968.”She had a keen sense for what the community needed.”

And the community stretched far and wide. Carol Jennings recalls that when she was growing up on a farm south of Highmore, about an hour east of Pierre, her parents were always tuning in to KGFX.”I remember Mom had the radio on all the time to listen to ‘Ma Pierre,’ they called her.”

They listened because the news was curiously intimate. Ida McNeil carried messages from wedding parties worried about forgotten dresses and from sons in the Navy who’d come down with diphtheria, asking KGFX to pass word to the family back in the Plains that everything was going to be all right.

“She did a great service for the people in this area at that time,” adds Betty Harding of Pierre.”What they appreciated so much with KGFX is that she would give the hospital report and tell who had had a baby, who was in the hospital, who was being discharged.”

Mrs. Pierre couldn’t pass a message from one party to another because of federal rules. But what she could do, and did, was announce it to everyone. An article by Ida B. Alseth in Coronet magazine in March 1947 described why that sort of news item mattered to central South Dakota:”There are some 221,000 persons in Mrs. McNeil’s listening audience, and they seldom miss one of her broadcasts. For them, KGFX is not just another radio station; it’s an over-sized country party line where they may listen in for the latest bits of news and gossip — and often a deep chuckle.”

A chuckle, and maybe a sigh of relief.”During the bad winters, Mrs. Pierre was a vital thing for the whole community. Everybody listened when she came on. They counted on her,” said Willie Cowan of rural Pierre.

“I don’t know what my Virgo horoscope would say, but it seems to me I must have been born under a star of communication — which included rivers, railroads and radio, from the Mississippi to the Black Hills,” Ida McNeil said at the outset of a speech she gave in 1970 to the Minnilusa banquet in Rapid City, where she moved in the 1960s after she had sold the station.

“My mom was the oldest of five girls and her father was a riverboat engineer. That’s how they got to Pierre,” remembers Richard McNeil, the younger of Ida’s two sons, now 92 and living in Rapid City.

Mrs. Pierre was born Ida Anding in 1888. In 1896, Chicago Northwestern railroad officials asked her father to go to Pierre to supervise the overhaul of the machinery of a steamer, the Jim Leighton, Ida told in her speech. The Jim Leighton is well known in local history as a ferry that operated between Pierre and Fort Pierre. Ida and her sisters and their mother came out to Pierre that June and found the South Dakota capital hot and dry.

Eventually Ida went to work for what was then South Dakota’s Department of History from 1906 to 1921 as clerk, legislative reference librarian and finally as an assistant to Doane Robinson, secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society, who saw that she found her niche in state history in small ways. She left there about the time she married a widower from down the block, Dana McNeil.

KGFX, the 12th radio station to be licensed by the federal government, was operated from the big McNeil house on West Broadway in Pierre. Radio was such a new concept that the local newspaper reported on some of Ida’s unusual broadcasts, especially when she assisted rural families in times of crisis.

“My dad was much older than my mom. She was his second wife,” Richard McNeil says.”He got his interest in things electrical when he was in high school. He grew up in Clarence, Iowa, on a farm, and the railroad had a siding there. They parked a boxcar there with a guy who was a telegrapher. My dad learned to read code, and when he got out of high school, he got a job as a telegrapher with the railroad and gradually moved west and ended up in Chadron. He was involved in a lot of the railroad building in those days.”

But telegraphy was a 19th century invention; the next big thing had already arrived.”When he got to Pierre, he got interested in amateur radio,” his son said. He also became interested in Ida, who was about 20 years younger.

As Ida told in her Rapid City speech in 1970,”On June 16, 1916, Dana McNeil was licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to operate a radio station he had built. The call letters were 9 Z P, later becoming 9 C.L.S., with 200 watts of power. We were married in November of 1921 and my radio work began in February of 1922.”

And it all began in the McNeil home — what some Pierre residents remember as the big yellow house at the top of the hill on West Broadway in Pierre.

Dana taught Ida to read Morse code, and then they experimented with her broadcasting voice. Because Dana had moved into a position as a conductor on the route between Pierre and Rapid City, she started transmitting short messages to him; soon they learned that others were listening.

As Ida told in her speech,”One morning a young woman came to see me and asked me if I would tell her mother by radio how she was getting along after the operation she was to have at the Pierre hospital. Of course I did — but thereupon all the patients wanted me to tell their folks how they were doing. At first the doctors were dismayed and thought it was unethical to make such public announcements, but eventually when they found what a useful service it was they gave us their complete cooperation.”

Ida’s hospital report became a big deal in the middle of South Dakota.”Her main thing was ‘resting fairly well,'” says Loretta Cowan, of rural Pierre. But there were variations, open to interpretation; such as ‘doing as well as expected.'”If she said that, you might be in a little bit of trouble,” Cowan said.

It wasn’t all public service announcements and weather. There was live local music, too. Danny Hall of Fort Pierre remembers when he was asked to sing and play guitar on KGFX when he was about 10 years old in the 1950s. The station’s most important days came with the flood of 1952, Ida later recalled. And the greatest honor might have come when McCall’s magazine announced in early 1957 that Ida was one of seven women in radio and TV who had won the McCall’s Golden Mike award for 1956. Ida was recognized for service to the community.”The personal impact of her broadcasts is so great that her listeners, among them Governor Joe Foss and Mayor A.E. Munck of Pierre, refer to her affectionately as ‘Mrs. Pierre,'” the magazine reported.

Newspaper clippings stored at the state archives show what a stir Ida’s broadcasts made. Radio was so new that even the newspapers reported on what the McNeils were broadcasting.

The Potter County News noted on Jan. 20, 1926:”In giving the hospital report Tuesday, the Pierre radio station announced the birth of a child to Mr. and Mrs. Jay Eidom of Forest City. Another item broadcast was that a Highmore school teacher had passed away from the effects of small pox and that the school at Highmore had closed as a result.”

The Pierre Daily Dakotan carried this item on Feb. 15, 1926:”Philip, S.D. — An unusual use of the radio was made near here when Mrs. R. B. Trenchard of Milesville was notified of the death of her father at Janesville. A telegraph message was sent to the McNeil broadcasting station at Pierre and was broadcast from there. It was picked up by receiving sets in the vicinity of Milesville and Mrs. Trenchard was notified. She left the next day for Janesville to attend the funeral.”

The McNeils’ station became KGFX on Aug. 15, 1927. It was approved as a 200-watt station, and the 12th amateur station licensed by the federal government.

“We made no charges for any of our radio services until 1932 and only once, on my 50th birthday, did I ever announce my name,” Ida recalled.”I would have felt very self-conscious to that all day long, since practically all the announcing was mine.”

The station started a longer broadcasting schedule and commercials in 1932. Ida became sole director after her husband died in 1936.

The McNeils’ eldest son Robert — who retired as a colonel after a military career that included teaching at West Point — also became interested in broadcasting. Richard, the younger, was more interested in the technical aspects.”That was the founding interest for me in becoming an electrical engineer,” he says. He taught at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City for 35 years.

Through the years, many newspapers — Pierre, Rapid City, Sioux Falls, even the Minneapolis Tribune — sent writers to watch Ida do her thing. She sold the radio station in 1962 to Black Hills Broadcasting Co. and subsequently watched as it grew to a 10,000-watt station. Ingstad bought it in 1968 and the family has owned it ever since.

South Dakota State University recognized Ida as a broadcast pioneer in 1970. Her peers elected her to the South Dakota Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1972. She died in August 1974.

Perhaps the greatest reward for Ida Anding McNeil as a broadcaster might have been the work itself. Perhaps that’s why she snapped back into her old role in her 1970 Rapid City speech.

“I will never forget the solemn wonder I felt at the marvel of radio — knowing that your voice, unseen, was reaching people far away, perhaps with a message of comfort or cheer,” she said.”Perhaps I should close by saying what I have said for many years — ‘This is Station K.G.F.X. at Pierre, operating on an assigned frequency of 630 kilocycles, now leaving the air. Goodnight.”

And to you, Mrs. Pierre.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Ironman Governor

By John Andrews

Editor’s Note: Former South Dakota Governor Frank Farrar died on Oct. 31 at age 92. We visited him in his Britton office during the summer of 2018 for this story, which appeared in our May/June 2019 issue.

Just a few black and white pictures hang on the walls of Frank Farrar’s office. They are nearly the only reminders that a visitor finds of Farrar’s political career, which included six years as attorney general and a single, two-year term as governor of South Dakota. Politics was just one chapter of Farrar’s life — a chapter that ended nearly 50 years ago.

Frank Farrar, a lawyer from Britton, was South Dakota’s attorney general from 1962 to 1968 and governor from 1968 to 1970.

Instead, when you walk in the door of First Savings Bank on Main Street in Britton, head to the back and hang a couple of rights, you’ll find Farrar at his desk, focused deeply on the paperwork before him and surrounded by dozens of medals, plaques, posters and certificates commemorating his athletic prowess. The former lawyer, attorney general, governor, banker and businessman has completed 36 Ironman endurance races. That’s a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bicycle ride, and a full marathon. He’s also completed several triathlons and other smaller races — all since turning 65 and on a leg held together with nails.”I’m not much of an athlete,” he says, with a slight grin.”More of a plug horse.”

At age 90, he’s still active as chairman of Performance Bankers, Inc., which oversees banks in several states. Dozens of banker’s boxes stacked in the hallway outside his office serve as proof. It’s a career he launched in the wake of a financial crash in the 1980s. Farrar bought struggling savings and loan institutions in small towns, rehabilitated the balance sheets and then sold them back to members of the community. He’s bought and sold banks from New Mexico to Montana to Indiana.”But I’m not a banker,” he says with a wave of his hand.”I just have outstanding people working for me.”

What of his career in law and politics? Nearly three generations ago, the lawyer from Britton launched a successful campaign for attorney general of South Dakota, and after three terms was elected governor in 1968.”I wasn’t much of an attorney general,” he says, almost predictably at this point in our conversation.”I had outstanding assistants. When I had a really difficult case, I picked the best lawyer in South Dakota, put them on the payroll and had them try the case. And we never lost.”

If there were a gold medal for modesty, you might find that on Frank Farrar’s wall, too — or tucked into the back of a desk drawer, more likely.

***

The Britton into which Farrar was born on April 2, 1929 was home to about 1,300 people. The Marshall County seat, tucked into the northern reaches of the Coteau des Prairies, has seen population fluctuations over the decades, but by and large Britton has withstood the outmigration that has preceded the demise of many other South Dakota small towns; around 1,250 people still live there today.

Main Street, running north and south through town, remains busy. The Marshall County Prayer Rock Museum anchors the corner of Highway 10 and Main Street; a mural by Adam Eikamp that honors the town’s history greets travelers entering Britton from the east. Jean Amacher and her daughter, Kelsi Heer, do brisk business at their boutique called Dizzy Blondz. Movies still screen at the historic Strand Theater; its bright red, white and blue faÁade stands out on the east side of Main among the surrounding brick buildings. The brick hospital in which Farrar was born still stands, though health care services have moved to the Marshall County Healthcare Center Avera on the southeast side of town. Farrar’s office inside First Savings Bank is across the street at the end of the block.

The Farrar family, which included (from left) Sally, Jeanne, Pat, Anne, Frank, Robert and Mary, moved into the governor’s mansion in Pierre in early 1969.

Many South Dakotans are descended from homesteaders who emigrated from Europe in the 19th century, but Farrar can trace his maternal ancestry to George Soule, who crossed the Atlantic as an indentured servant on the Mayflower in 1620, signed the Mayflower Compact and helped establish Plymouth Colony. Shortly after he was elected governor in 1968, the Soule family historian documented Farrar’s lineage and included it in the 70-page newsletter sent to family members around the world.

Legend says another Farrar ancestor had a run-in with Abraham Lincoln, when the future president was piloting boats along the Mississippi River.”Our family was involved in boating, and they didn’t think this guy would amount to anything,” Farrar recalls with a chuckle.”They got into a fight over a girl and Abraham Lincoln threw a solid ear of corn at him. He was scarred for life.”

Eventually, Farrar’s parents — Virgil and Venetia Farrar — found their way to a homestead near Newark, a long-forgotten village 9 miles north of Britton and just a half-mile from the North Dakota border. Farrar attended school in Britton, where he became an Eagle Scout, was elected student body president and played football, which had life-long consequences.

During a game in about 1946, Farrar took an awkward hit to his left knee. A knee replacement procedure would have been the perfect fix, but such an operation didn’t exist 70 years ago. Instead, doctors at Mayo Clinic gave him two options: amputation at the knee or plastic cartilage nailed into the bone.”I said, ‘I’ll take the nails.’ My mother didn’t raise any smart children, but I was smarter than that.” The nails are still there, even after a left knee replacement in 2017.”They’re not hurting anything,” he says, nonchalantly.

Farrar dreamt of becoming an engineer, so he applied to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. The school replied with an aptitude test, which Farrar completed and returned.”They sent a note back,” he recalls.”‘We sure appreciate your interest in our school, but you’re in the lower percentile and we don’t think you should be engineer.’ So I went to the university.”

That was the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where he studied law and was again elected president of the student body and of his fraternity. He graduated in 1951, and two years later he married Patricia Henley, a farm girl from Claremont. The Farrars raised five children and remained close partners in life until Pat’s death in 2015.

With a law degree in hand, Farrar set out to find work, but prospects were slim.”That put me on the map to do something,” he says of his success at USD.”But when I got out of school I tried to get a job, and nobody would hire me as a lawyer.”

Farrar’s parents were living in the state of Washington at the time, so he and Pat moved west in 1955. Farrar took a job with the Internal Revenue Service as a state gift tax examiner. When Pat’s father was diagnosed with cancer, the couple moved back to South Dakota. Farrar was elected Marshall County Judge in 1957 and state’s attorney in the fall of 1958.

***

Four years later, at age 33, Farrar became the youngest person in state history ever elected attorney general. He investigated abuses in the insurance industry, resulting in a complete rewrite of the state’s insurance laws. His dogged prosecution of corporate officers and his tough stance on drug and narcotics violations engendered a broad base of support, which translated into a successful bid for governor in 1968.

The Governor and First Lady helped celebrate South Dakota’s 80th birthday in November of 1969.

It was a turbulent time to take the helm. Protests against the Vietnam War popped up throughout the country, including in South Dakota. Farrar and members of his administration were attending a national governors meeting in New Mexico when they received word that a riot had broken out back home. Farrar quickly returned, only to discover that he had a personal connection to the disturbance.”One of my staff members was in the riot, so I politely fired him. I said, ‘We don’t do riots.'”

Farrar hoped to avoid more unrest when the fate of Thomas White Hawk landed in his hands. White Hawk was an 18-year-old student at the University of South Dakota in 1967 when he murdered Vermillion jeweler James Yeado and raped Yeado’s wife.

White Hawk had been sentenced to death, but after becoming governor in 1969, Farrar commuted his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Tensions were rising on South Dakota’s Indian reservations, and the American Indian Movement had been created during the summer of 1968. Farrar hoped the commutation would quell any further violence.”I wanted to give him the death penalty. I believe in the death sentence,” Farrar says.”But I got more than a thousand letters from Indians saying if you give this guy death you’re discriminating. I said to myself, ‘They think I’m prejudiced.’ So I gave him life without parole, with the addition that as long as I lived I’d go to the parole board to ensure they didn’t let him out. I kept my promise. He was there 30 years, and whenever the parole board met I’d send a note: Do not let him out. And he died in there in 1997. I did that for the Yeado family.”

Farrar met many of the same challenges that subsequent governors have faced, including funding for education, health and welfare programs (which made up 85 percent of his budget for the 1971 fiscal year). He also tried reorganizing the executive branch (which ultimately occurred in the mid-1970s after he left office), tax reform and a program to help settle disputes between rural electric cooperatives and privately held companies. Pundits thought that controversies surrounding these and other issues led to his defeat in 1970, a 55 percent to 45 percent contest against Democrat Richard Kneip, a wholesale dairy equipment salesman and state senator from Salem. But Farrar believes the reasons were much simpler.”One was the war and the other was the economy. It went down right during the time of the election,” he says.”Oil went from $3 to $30 a barrel. We went from 32 Republican governors to 21.”

Farrar left the state capitol in 1971 after a single, two-year term as governor and never again sought political office. He’s lived the longest (48 years) of any South Dakota governor after leaving office. But he still remains connected to state politics. Former attorney general Marty Jackley sought and received Farrar’s endorsement during the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary. And as we sat in Farrar’s office on an unseasonably cool and cloudy August morning, his cell phone buzzed with an incoming call from Dusty Johnson, then campaigning for South Dakota’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.”He can wait,” Farrar said, and silenced the call (sorry, Dusty).

***

Farrar re-entered the private sector by resuming his law practice and eventually getting into banking. A financial crisis in the 1980s led to the demise of hundreds of small savings and loan institutions throughout the country. He founded Performance Bankers, Inc., and became adept at buying them, turning them around and then selling them back to members of the community. He also believes in financial education.”I sponsor and pay for a program to teach high school students how to take care of their money, what a FICO score is, what a credit card is, and how important it is to stay out of debt,” Farrar says.”It takes 6 to 10 years if you go bankrupt to get out again. Wherever I have banks I sponsor and pay for that program.”

At age 65, Farrar began competing in triathlons and Ironman competitions, including the Scheels Dakotaman Triathlon at Lake Alvin in 2015. Photo by Jon Klemme.

Perhaps the achievements that garner the most attention these days involve endurance races that he travels the globe in which to compete. Farrar has always believed in the importance of diet and exercise. As governor, he often swam across Lake Oahe. Occasionally, he could be found practicing with the Pierre Governors high school basketball team. One old black and white photo shows him and Pat and their children riding bicycles around the capital city.”If you properly exercise and have the right diet, you’ll live a longer life and a more comfortable life,” Farrar says.”But exercise really does not lose weight. Food loses weight. So our problem in America is food. But the beauty of exercise is that it’s great for people who have to be on medicine. There’s really no reason to take all these opioids that are killing people if you do those two things: exercise and eat properly.”

Farrar would have been a triathlete at an early age, but the races didn’t exist until the early 1970s. Still, in his early 60s, he got involved. Then he set his sights higher.”I was doing all of these little sprints, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I work myself up to an Ironman?'”

Since making that decision, he’s competed in 36 Ironman events, most recently the 2018 Grand Final on the Gold Coast of Australia. He’s been one of the very few competitors in the 85-89-year-old division.”If nobody shows up I win. If they do show up, then I’m last,” he says.

Farrar has also completed more than 380 triathlons, both sprint (750 meter swim, 20 kilometer bike ride and 5 kilometer run) and Olympic (1.5 kilometer swim, 40 kilometer bike ride and 10 kilometer run) distances. He attributes the vigorous exercise to saving his life several decades ago.

In 1973, Farrar was in a business meeting in Pierre when he felt a lump on his neck. Doctors at Mayo Clinic diagnosed him with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and told him he had two months to live.”I said, ‘What are you talking about? I don’t even hurt.’ But he said, ‘At your age, and based on what we know, you’ve got two months. We’ll give you chemo.’ I was doing triathlons and kept doing them. I took chemo and kept swimming and in six months I was in remission. The doctors were amazed. I attribute it to exercise and attitude.”

***

Farrar was surrounded by athletic medals and plaques in his Britton office.

Life in Britton these days is exciting, yet simple for Farrar.”I get up, I work out, go swimming. I work all the time, every day including Saturday and Sunday.”

A few days after we left Britton, the town unveiled a historic marker commemorating the 50th anniversary of Farrar’s inauguration, although he didn’t mention it during a 90-minute interview. Jean Amacher told us about it later at Dizzy Blondz.

The town was also preparing for Harvest Days, Britton’s annual summer celebration, and Farrar expected that many of his five children and nine grandchildren might soon arrive for the festivities.”They’ll probably all come roaring in here because it’s a fun time,” he said.

Farrar envisions many more Harvest Days, triathlons and Ironmans in his future.”You can control your life, and life is beautiful,” he says.”I want to live forever. I don’t want to die. I put in my will, ‘If I ever dieÖ'”

Frank Farrar turned 90 on April 2. If you ask, he’d probably say that he will be a poor nonagenarian. Let’s hope he’s right.

†

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on October 18, 2021April 8, 2026 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

West Friends

By Paul Higbee

Black Hills lawman Seth Bullock led the efforts to build Friendship Tower, a memorial to his friend Theodore Roosevelt near Deadwood. Photo by John Mitchell

The Mount Roosevelt Friendship Tower Trail, says Black Hills National Forest North Zone Archaeologist Michael Engelhart, can be thought of as an easy”tiptoe into the woods.” For children, or adults unaccustomed to long Black Hills hikes, the trail is a mile-high, 0.6-mile loop that’s moderately rugged and gains altitude as it passes through pines and aspens. It offers vistas of the northern Black Hills and adjacent plains.

The site is also a step into local and national history, a perfect tribute to President Theodore Roosevelt, who knew these hills and plains well, and labored hard to preserve all western lands.

The trail leads to a 35-foot-tall rough-hewn stone tower, a structure that some observers liken to an artifact straight from medieval Europe, or a gigantic chess piece. In fact, the tower was the nation’s first memorial to Roosevelt, erected in a flurry just months after the 26th president died in 1919.

Pushing aggressively for the memorial, as soon as he learned of Roosevelt’s death that January, was Seth Bullock — former Deadwood sheriff, marshal, Rough Rider, U.S. Forest Reserve superintendent, and posthumously the inspiration for a character in HBO’s Deadwood TV series. Photos taken at the tower’s July 4, 1919, dedication reveal Bullock looking unusually weary and drawn. Working with the Society of Black Hills Pioneers, Bullock had obtained land on Sheep Mountain 3 miles northwest of Deadwood, renamed it Mount Roosevelt, led the memorial tower’s construction, and organized a high-powered dedication program — all while battling intestinal cancer. Bullock died on September 23, 12 weeks after the dedication. He was 70.

Yes, the tower officially memorialized the president. But it also stood in testament to two remarkable friends — Roosevelt and Bullock — and people alternately called it the”Friendship Tower.” The stone structure has endured for more than a century, though in that time the elements took their toll. But a recent restoration and rededication project led by the U.S. Forest Service has encouraged hikers to traverse the trail and once again visit the magnificent monument that forever links two of the West’s most intelligent and hard-nosed characters.

Bullock and Roosevelt met while the future president was ranching in northern Dakota Territory. They remained friends the rest of their lives.

Bullock was born in Canada in 1849, moved to Michigan with his family, and hoped to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War, but it ended before he was old enough to enlist. At age 20 he embarked on a different kind of adventure to Montana Territory’s gold fields.

His biographer, David Wolff of Spearfish, writes that despite Bullock’s thirst for rugged outdoor adventure, he had taken school seriously and grown up to speak softly and properly like an educated gentleman. Wolff added that Bullock was strong-willed,”with firm opinions to match. He befriended people he saw as equals and ignored those he looked down upon.”

Except when people he looked down upon were outlaws that he arrested as a Montana and Dakota lawman. He believed they impeded vital progress in the West. After nearly a decade in Montana, Bullock rode into Deadwood, part of the great Black Hills gold rush that boomed in 1876 (ironically, the courts would eventually determine the gold rush itself was outlawry, because the Black Hills were reserved for the Lakota people in 1876). For a few months he served as Deadwood sheriff.

Among the people that Bullock ranked as his equal was Roosevelt, nine years younger than himself and a New Yorker. After Roosevelt’s first wife Alice died, the future president sought solace in Dakota Territory. In the process, he became a cattleman and jumped into civic affairs as fledgling units of government took form. An enduring legend claims that Bullock and Roosevelt first encountered one another as each was pursuing the same horse thief. Wolff, however, believes the pair met along the Belle Fourche River in 1892, and that when Roosevelt announced he was currently serving as a federal civil service commissioner, Bullock was impressed. While that story isn’t as colorful as the one involving a horse thief, it points to the men’s mutual belief in government and civil authority as means for moving the West forward.

Beyond that, what cemented the Bullock-Roosevelt friendship? According to Roosevelt, Bullock was a man who could always get him to laugh, and that counted for a lot in a life touched by personal sorrows and the immense pressures of the presidency. A story Roosevelt loved was the time the two men were in London, and Bullock approached a stuffy-looking Englishman and asked him the name of a nearby”creek” — knowing full well it was the River Thames.

The men were in London because Roosevelt wanted,”Britishers to see my typical ideal American.” That, to Roosevelt’s thinking, had to be a westerner. After he remarried and had sons, who grew up in New York and Washington, D.C., Roosevelt sent the boys on South Dakota vacations so that under Bullock’s tutelage they would become westerners, not greenhorns.

Seth Bullock is pictured at the While House with President Roosevelt during a reunion of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

In Bullock and Roosevelt’s minds, the toughest westerners were working cowboys. The men successfully advanced an idea to send mounted cowboys — Rough Riders — into combat during the Spanish-American War. These cowboys mostly hailed from the Dakotas and neighboring states. Although he was 50, Bullock jumped into the Rough Rider adventure, and volunteered to do so again at age 70 during World War I.

As had been the case in the Civil War, however, Bullock missed seeing combat in the Spanish-American War. But Roosevelt did, making his famous charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba that became a key to launching his national political career. He was elected vice president in 1900 and assumed the presidency following President William McKinley’s assassination in September 1901. Just nine years had passed since Roosevelt, on horseback along the Belle Fourche River, had introduced himself as a federal civil service commissioner.

Much later, in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge would bring the federal government’s executive branch to South Dakota for three months when he established his”summer White House” in the Black Hills. Yet no American president understood the state more intimately than Theodore Roosevelt. To use modern terminology, Roosevelt was”hands-on” in executing policy in South Dakota, including reclamation that would create Belle Fourche Reservoir and his 1902 order for stock growers to remove unauthorized cattle grazing on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Indian reservations. The resulting 1902 Roundup is legendary today, but at the time was seen chiefly as reflecting the president’s concern about reservation lands that were being damaged by overgrazing.

Likewise, Roosevelt worried about limited timber and water resources in the Black Hills. So did Bullock, who noted that all local industries were dependent on those resources and that their loss could turn the Black Hills into”a desert.”

This concern prompted Roosevelt, as vice president, to convince McKinley that the president should appoint Bullock supervisor of the Black Hills Forest Reserve — today the Black Hills National Forest. This Reserve, established in 1897, had already made history as the site of the nation’s first federal timber sale — about 30 miles south of what would become Mount Roosevelt. This regulated sale of timber to loggers was a big step as national forests everywhere embraced a multiple-use philosophy, with private industry playing a role in forest management.

Still, there were plenty of Black Hills people appalled by the thought of the federal government asserting itself into a forest they considered their own. Roosevelt sensed correctly that South Dakotans would accept Bullock as the face of the Forest Reserve over an outside bureaucrat. Roosevelt settled into the White House confident he had the right man — based in Deadwood — to fight fires, chase timber and game poachers out of the forest, handle timber sales, and encourage replanting efforts that would rejuvenate overcut forests (it was later determined that the Black Hills usually regenerate pine growth naturally).

Gen. Leonard Wood and Seth Bullock posed in the foreground of a photo during the dedication of the Friendship Tower. Around 1,000 people attended the ceremony.

In 1906 the president named Bullock, who had secured a firm place in history as a pioneer forest manager, to the South Dakota U.S. marshal position. Bullock set up his office in Deadwood; the westerner had no intention of living in Sioux Falls, the established base of operations for marshals.

Roosevelt chose not to seek re-election in 1908 and regretted it immediately. When he attempted to regain the White House in 1912, Bullock — still South Dakota’s marshal — campaigned for him. But Roosevelt’s comeback resulted in little except a badly-fractured Republican Party and a bullet left lodged in the ex-president’s chest after a campaign trail assassination attempt. Later, Roosevelt’s rigorous exploration trek to South America left him ill and injured, further compromising his overall health. Bullock contracted his cancer at about the same time.

But World War I proved to be the saddest struggle for the friends. President Woodrow Wilson nixed their hopes to reorganize the Rough Riders for combat in Europe. In July 1918, Roosevelt’s son Quentin died in an aerial battle over France. Six months later, Roosevelt himself passed away in his sleep at age 60.

The Society of Black Hills Pioneers and Deadwood civic leaders liked Bullock’s idea of honoring Roosevelt permanently in the Black Hills, but believed the memorial should stand in Deadwood, not miles out of town up a very steep grade. A revised plan could allow visitors to step off the train in Deadwood and walk to the site. Bullock dug in his heels and successfully made the case that Roosevelt’s chief legacy in the West was preservation and protection of lands. Bullock wanted visitors to experience those lands, to climb a winding metal staircase in the tower and survey them as far as their eyes could see.

A thousand people made their way to the tower’s dedication on Independence Day. The program Bullock arranged was, appropriate to the man being honored, awash in Republican politics. Gov. Peter Norbeck, whose natural preservation philosophy mirrored Roosevelt’s, spoke. So did Gen. Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s Army commander during his San Juan Hill charge 21 years earlier. Wood was preparing to run for president himself, on a platform Roosevelt would have approved. Wood, in fact, came close to winning the Republican nomination in 1920.

In the 1920s and ’30s, automobile tourism surpassed vacation travel by rail into the Black Hills. Deadwood’s municipally owned Pine Crest Tourist Park catered to those new-era tourists and sat within hiking distance of the tower. For locals, the spot was a popular picnic venue when a road took their cars right up to the structure. The great Deadwood forest fire of 1959 nearly wiped out the town; flames came within a half-mile of the tower. In years following the fire, school groups, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and others made trips to the tower to gaze across charred hillsides and absorb the destructive fury of wildfire. Some youth on these field trips grew up believing Mount Roosevelt had always been Forest Service land and the tower a fire lookout.

In fact, the Society of Black Hills Pioneers transferred the site to the Forest Service in 1966. By that time, it seemed every Black Hills teenager had access to a car, and some of them discovered Mount Roosevelt to be a dark, secluded destination for underage beer parties. Some mornings broken bottles littered the tower’s base. The Forest Service closed the road leading to the tower, and for safety removed stone steps that took people into the tower. The interior metal stairway was also blocked.

When visitors reached the top of Friendship Tower, Bullock wanted them to enjoy a sweeping view of the Black Hills that he and Roosevelt both loved. Photo by John Mitchell

More damaging than glass was water — season after season of rain and snowmelt that slowly broke down mortar between the tower’s stones. Brett Ewald, Forest Service archaeological technician, says the situation never reached the level of”benign neglect,” where a site begins a slide into complete deterioration.”But,” he says,”the Forest Service did come to a point where it had to reassess how it managed the tower.”

A condition survey in 2001 was the start of a sequence that saw the tower added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and then survey recommendations were gradually fulfilled, including stabilizing the base, replacing the exterior stone steps and unblocking the metal interior ones, and working up new visitor interpretation. The loop trail from the parking lot was fully developed, and a metal cupola added to the tower’s top to improve drainage.

The site was rededicated exactly 100 years after Bullock’s original dedication. Some local people who attended admitted it was their first visit, while others declared decades-long affection for Mount Roosevelt.

It’s fair to say that the memorial has never won the national attention that Bullock hoped, but another Black Hills monument certainly has. If Bullock had lived another 20 years, he surely would have attended the 1939 dedication of his friend’s likeness on Mount Rushmore. Had someone asked if Roosevelt really merited inclusion with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, there’s little doubt that Bullock would have defended his old friend, whose granite gaze now falls forever over the rugged land that they both so loved.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on September 27, 2021 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Bombs Over the Badlands

By Paul Higbee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

From Coach to Congress

By Paul Higbee

Jim Abdnor (center) coached Kennebec’s Legion baseball team before embarking on a state and national political career.

Jim Abdnor talked constantly, but no one in Kennebec had any inkling that their baseball coach would ever go to Washington. Two decades before he ran for the U.S. Senate in a race that drew national attention, Abdnor was simply a kind-hearted farmer who volunteered to coach the Legion team.

Nobody doubted his baseball smarts. He told Jim Cooney to try playing catcher, a position that didn’t appeal to the 9-year-old. But Abdnor, who would eventually gain a reputation as an astute spotter of green talent, recognized something in Cooney.

“I played baseball until I was 19 or 20,” says Cooney. “Always a catcher.”

Coach Abdnor chattered non-stop at the ballpark. And he talked at the coffee shop and the grain elevator and the school. He avoided gossip, however, and he never ranted when things went bad in a ballgame. In those years, the late 1950s and early 1960s, Abdnor almost always dressed like a working man in khaki pants and a green shirt.”It was like he had three sets of the same clothes,” Cooney recalls. The coach wore a mitt during practices but, in his late 30s, he was a bit too stocky to demonstrate proper fielding.

Abdnor eventually became a familiar figure in other South Dakota towns along old Highway 16 — Oacoma, Reliance, Presho, Murdo and Kadoka. He soon grew to understand and appreciate the culture of rural America. He inherently understood that the independent spirit and work ethic that defined the towns could also be found in many of the young people who grew up there.

Abdnor was born in 1923, the son of Sam and Mary Abdnor, immigrants to South Dakota from Lebanon. The couple farmed and ran a Kennebec store. They weren’t the only Lebanese-Americans working hard for a living on the West River plains. Their good friends, Charlie and Lena Abourezk, owned the Abourezk Mercantile store at Mission. The two families got together regularly for Sunday dinners of traditional Lebanese food and to listen to records of music from the homeland.

Abdnor’s parents, Sam and Mary, were Lebanese immigrants who sold groceries in Lyman County.

What’s more, the Abourezks also had a son named Jim, a few years younger than Abdnor. In time, the remarkable careers of the two Jims paralleled each other in uncanny fashion.

As was often true of children in immigrant families, Abdnor found sports as a way to absorb American values and cultural understandings. His Kennebec friends and neighbors were never too busy to support their teams. They also had political connections beyond what you might expect in a town of 400. Kennebec was home to U.S. Congressman William Williamson when Abdnor was a child, and M.Q. Sharpe — governor when Abdnor was a young man. The Lyman County courthouse sat on a hill on the south side of town, and the state capitol at Pierre was only an hour’s drive to the northwest.

Abdnor believed small communities had value, but he knew the economics of rural America were challenging, so he supported the Kennebec grain elevator and civic organizations that moved the town forward. As his political career grew, he made certain to use the Kennebec post office for his mailings — boosting local postal numbers. And it seemed almost as if he kept a roster in his hip pocket of the next generation of movers and shakers.

“If it were not for Jim Abdnor there is no way I could be doing what I’m doing today,” said current U.S. Senator John Thune in a eulogy for Abdnor in 2012. Abdnor first took note of Thune as an outstanding Murdo High School basketball player. While South Dakotans recall Abdnor as anything but flashy, Thune remembered”an understated charisma about him and an optimism that anything was possible.”

People responded to that throughout Abdnor’s life. He left Kennebec to earn a business degree at the University of Nebraska and served two years in the Army during World War II. Then he came home to help run the family businesses, teach history at the high school, and begin a 20-year stint coaching baseball. Soon another kind of work with young people put him on the road, in his spare time, building a network of Young Republican clubs. After World War II, both Republicans and Democrats recognized shifting South Dakota demographics and took action to strengthen their voter bases. In fact George McGovern — who will always be linked with Abdnor in South Dakota history — was crisscrossing the state to rebuild the Democratic party at about the same time Abdnor was connecting with young Republicans.

In 1956 Abdnor decided to seek a seat in the state legislature. Simultaneously, he knew he had to go to work on a very personal problem — a speech impediment that caused him to slur certain words. He feared that people meeting him for the first time in Pierre and elsewhere might think him drunk. Abdnor enlisted the help of a high school teacher, who understood speech problems, and he read books aloud, watching for problem words. His speech improved, although he never defeated the impediment completely. Eventually it became an endearing characteristic for many constituents and political contemporaries who understood that only a remarkable person could speak so poorly and still get elected to office.

He entered the state senate at Pierre in January of 1957, a time when the legislature was all male and not known for transparency. Committee meetings could be closed to the public at the whim of the chairman, and lots of deals were sealed in smoky rooms down the street from the capitol at the St. Charles Hotel. In both state and federal government, Abdnor always told friends in Kennebec, he disliked seeing colleagues vote against their principles in order to win votes later for another bill.

Abdnor in the legislature could be counted on to support public works (especially water projects), electric cooperatives in their territorial fights with public utilities and agricultural development.

Abdnor was reelected to the legislature five times and became president pro tem of the state senate. He ran successfully for lieutenant governor in 1968, following in the footsteps of A.C. Miller, another Kennebec politician and his personal mentor.

As president pro tem of the South Dakota senate, Abdnor handled ceremonial duties while also delving into tough governmental issues.

Then in 1970, his friend who shared his first name and Lebanese heritage, Jim Abourezk, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. He would represent the state’s old Second Congressional District (generally West River), and it could have been the two Jims running against one another that November. Abdnor sought the Republican nomination for the congressional seat but lost in the primary. Immediately, supporters urged him to try again in 1972, including Phil Hogen, an attorney who had just moved to Kennebec after completing law school at the University of South Dakota. Abdnor knew Hogen from a decade before, when he worked to get Hogen — then a Kadoka High School student — a position as a state senate messenger.

Hogen was among those who campaigned hard for Abdnor, and his story was typical of many volunteers and staff. They met Abdnor as young people and were committed to him for life.”He had a remarkable rapport with young people, and I’m not even sure why,” says Abdnor’s friend and Kennebec attorney, Herb Sundall.”I only know he could sit down and talk to them like no one else I ever saw. Jim never had children himself, never married, so maybe that had something to do with it.”

Abdnor and his young campaigners won the 1972 congressional race. Abourezk, after just 24 months, vacated the Second District seat and ran successfully for U.S. Senate. Abdnor reported to Washington as the only Republican member of South Dakota’s congressional delegation, consisting also of Democrats Abourezk, Sen. George McGovern and First District Congressman Frank Denholm.

He quickly needed to assemble a Washington staff. He soon had a Red Wing shoebox full of applications, many from Capitol Hill professionals who had been working for just-defeated members of Congress. Abdnor, though, decided he wanted his Kennebec friend and campaign organizer, Phil Hogen, to serve as his administrative assistant.

“Jim, I don’t want to do this,” Hogen remembers telling Abdnor when first asked.”But I changed my mind, and the two years I was in Washington were exciting. We’d been there 45 days when AIM occupied Wounded Knee, and we got to be on a first name basis with lots of people in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI.”

Hogen quickly came to understand he worked for a man who hated paperwork but loved people.”Lots of politicians go home and walk along the street, glad-handing and smiling at everyone they meet. But Jim did that with everyone he met, not just constituents who could vote for him, and he became very well known and liked in Washington.”

Abdnor watched the Watergate scandal engulf Washington from an unusual perspective in 1973 and 1974. Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford became a personal friend, and Abdnor saw Ford quickly elevated from Congress to vice president and, soon, to president of the United States. Three months after Ford replaced Richard Nixon in the White House, South Dakotans re-elected Abdnor, even though Republicans fared poorly nationwide due to the Watergate repercussions.

“For South Dakotans he was the personification of goodness in a rural state,” says Kay Jorgensen of Spearfish, who also grew up on the West River plains and served in the state legislature.”People saw his entire goal being to make individual lives better.”

In Washington, Abdnor was as comfortable shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth as he was on the baseball diamond back in South Dakota.

The state never knew a more accessible congressman, Jorgensen added.”He was someone you could always call. Often he answered the phone himself. And if you agreed or disagreed on an issue, it never affected the friendship.”

But even Abdnor’s most loyal friends wondered if the old coach was up to the challenge of running against George McGovern for U.S. Senate in 1980. McGovern had been the Democratic nominee for president eight years earlier, carried tremendous clout in Washington, and was a polished speaker and debater. How would Abdnor fare in a debate against George McGovern?

As it turned out, McGovern’s debating skills went for naught. The old baseball coach did the political version of an intentional walk: he declined all debates. Rather, he said, he would let his conservative record speak for itself. The national press took notice of the race, partly because of McGovern’s stature and partly because a Republican win would confirm that the party was making a strong comeback six years after Watergate.

Perhaps because it was so high profile, the 1980 Senate race split South Dakota communities and families, at least temporarily.”Although Jim’s mother, Mary, was my godmother, and his uncle Albert was my godfather,” wrote Jim Abourezk in his biography,”I never let that divert my attention from what I could do to campaign — unsuccessfully — for George McGovern.”

Abdnor won a landslide victory, claiming 58 percent of the vote, thanks in part to the Reagan revolution that swept across South Dakota and the national political landscape in 1980.

Though he declined debates during the campaign, Abdnor was not a silent senator. Three weeks after taking office, he spoke powerfully on behalf of a new group of individuals whose lives he hoped to make better. In the House of Representatives he had been an advocate for quality veterans’ health care. Now he discussed a particular category of veterans whose needs were just creeping into national consciousness: former Vietnam War prisoners whose problems, especially mental health issues, might not be evident for years. If symptoms did appear, Abdnor asserted, these veterans deserved prompt attention without waiting to prove their needs stemmed from the war.”We have waited for too long,” he said,”in addressing the unique and often severe problems former prisoners of war and their families face because of their internment and their services to their country.”

Abdnor especially appreciated his appointment to the Senate Appropriations Committee. He was sometimes asked how that worked for a fiscal conservative.”I didn’t spend any more money,” he later told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.”I just tried to make sure South Dakota got its fair share. I don’t know of any other committee where I could have had as much influence.”

Overseas tours exposed Abdnor to cultures far removed from life on the South Dakota plains.

But he was unsuccessful in winning a second senate term in 1986. His support of the 1985 Farm Bill certainly cost him votes at a time when South Dakota farmers were suffering economically, losing their farms in some cases, and generally skeptical of federal agriculture policy. Gov. Bill Janklow had challenged Abdnor in the Republican primary. Abdnor prevailed over Janklow but the party was divided heading into the general election.

The old Abdnor-Abourezk connection re-asserted itself. Abdnor was defeated in 1986 by Tom Daschle, Abourezk’s former legislative director. Daschle would go on to serve three senate terms before being defeated by Abdnor’s protÈgÈ, John Thune, in 2004.

After leaving the Senate, Abdnor was appointed by President Reagan to lead the U.S. Small Business Administration. He served until after Reagan left the White House in 1989, then came home to South Dakota. He remained a sidelines force in the state Republican Party, and played golf.”Not very well, though,” Sundall says.”But he was always buying a new club that would make him the next Jack Nicklaus.”

He even formed a friendship with his 1980 opponent, George McGovern, who also spent many of his sunset years in South Dakota.”They didn’t agree politically but they respected one another’s honesty,” Sundall says.”Jim said when George told you he would do something, he did it.”

Abdnor also rekindled his love for youth baseball. He lived in Rapid City for several years and was a regular presence at games of the national powerhouse Post 22 American Legion team, even traveling to out-of-town games and out-of-state tournaments.

Baseball diamonds are where many South Dakotans had their last encounters with the senator from Kennebec. He would talk baseball, applaud the good plays and grab the hands of friends old and new.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Category: history

The Lost 74

The Violinist and the Sculptor

Always on Our Minds

Rocky Road

Larger Than Life

Goodnight, Mrs. Pierre

The Ironman Governor

West Friends

Bombs Over the Badlands

From Coach to Congress

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