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The Real Hero

By Roger Holtzmann

The World War II heroics of Rapid City’s Kenneth Scissons became wonderful content for comic books of the era.

Superman crash-landed in a Kansas wheat field in 1938. Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and their archenemies soon followed, and together they ushered in the Golden Age of comic books.

George Hecht and the Parents’ Institute swam against the superhero tide by launching True Comics. Hecht and his editorial advisory board published 84 issues from April of 1941 through August of 1950, believing that children might also like stories that were exciting and factual. Each issue carried a banner that proclaimed,”Truth is stranger and a thousand times more interesting than fiction!”

Hecht celebrated real live heroes: World War II raider Jimmy Doolittle, baseball star Stan Musial, inventor Thomas Edison and President Theodore Roosevelt. He found another in Sgt. Kenneth Cuthbert Scissons, a Lakota-English-Norwegian soldier from Rapid City who became a one-man army during World War II, a man the Nazis specifically targeted for capture, and a man whose seemingly superhuman exploits made him the epitome of Hecht’s real comic book stars.

Scissons was born on a ranch south of Colome in 1915, but came of age in Rapid City, where his father, John, worked for the Warren-Lamb Lumber Company. His Lakota lineage stretched back to his grandmother, Hannah Mule, twin sister of Little Big Man, the renowned Oglala Shirt Wearer from Crazy Horse’s band.

Scissons attended Rapid City Indian School through sixth grade, navigating the sometimes-treacherous ways of boarding school.”Dad said a lot of the bigger boys picked on him when he first started,” says Ruth Ahl, Scissons’ oldest daughter. That stage soon passed as Scissons proved to be a natural athlete who excelled at every sport, including boxing.

Wearing a bull snake necklace was likely tame for Scissons, who took heavy fire from Nazi troops during one particularly harrowing battle.

In seventh grade Scissons transferred to public school, but his formal education didn’t end well, according to Sharon Schaefer, Ahl’s younger sister.”What I picked up is that he was part way through his senior year and got into it with his basketball coach,” Schaefer says.”After that he just said, ‘I’m not going back.'”

Scissons’ first job was at Warren-Lamb; he spent 10 hours a day shoveling sawdust into boxcars, and was happy for the opportunity.”Times were tough,” he later recalled.”If you ever stopped and put your shovel down somebody else would pick it up, then you no longer had a job.”

When Warren-Lamb cut back during the Depression, Scissons joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and was posted to a camp near Hill City. He stood a stout 6 feet by then, and had energy to burn. At day’s end, when the other workers clambered into trucks for a ride down the winding mountain road to their base camp, Scissons would set off cross-country, racing over the rugged mountain terrain on foot.

“He ran so fast he thought his heart was going to burst,” Ahl says,”and he was always at the camp, leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette when they got there.”

Scissons met Melvin”Tuffy” Cory while he was with the CCC. One day Cory showed Scissons a picture of his sister, Evelyn.”My dad looked at the picture and said, ‘This is the woman I’m going to marry,'” Ahl says.”Everybody thought he was nuttier than a fruit cake.” Scissons had the last laugh, though; he and Evelyn met in the spring of 1937, and were married two weeks later.

Evelyn’s parents didn’t learn of the wedding until a relative sent them a clipping from the Deadwood newspaper.”My mother was working in Mitchell at the time,” Ahl says.”Grandma and Grandpa Cory drove there to see her, and Grandma said, ‘Well, hello Mrs. Scissons.’ My mom tried to explain things, and told them Dad was a Sioux Indian. Grandma Cory started crying and said, ‘Are you going to live in a tee pee?'”

Grandma Cory’s worst fear was never realized: the newlyweds’ first home was a snug one-room house that Scissons and his father built on New York Street in Rapid City.

Scissons hunted and fished in the Hills to put food on the table, and supplemented his CCC income by playing in a band for dances held in Hill City; he played saxophone, clarinet, piano and guitar, thanks to lessons he took at the Indian School. These attracted rowdy crowds, and Scissons felt right at home.

“One night Mom and Dad were walking down the sidewalk, and some guy wouldn’t step aside after Dad said excuse me,” Ahl says.”The guy said, ‘I’m not stepping aside for any damn Indian!’ Dad hit him so hard he flew into the middle of the street. A couple days later the police came to the house and told Dad that the guy had not regained consciousness, and if he died Dad would be charged with murder.

“Thank God the guy came around.”

Scissons and his wife Ruth were married two weeks after they met.

Scissons joined the South Dakota National Guard in 1936. After basic training he was assigned to the headquarters company of the 109th Engineering Regiment in Rapid City.

Scissons signed up for a second hitch three years later, a perilous moment in history. Germany overran Poland in the fall of 1939, plunging Europe into a war that many Americans feared would soon be at their doorsteps. Scissons and every other volunteer surely understood that the Guard might soon require more of them than one weekend a month, but they signed up anyway.

“Dad was extremely patriotic,” Schaefer says.”He believed in doing whatever was necessary to protect the country. That was how he was raised. You were loyal.”

With war on the horizon, Scissons and five other soldiers from the 109th — Leroy Anderson, Jerry Gorman and Richard Griffin of Sturgis, Bill Turner and Andrew Hjelvik of Lead — volunteered for federal service and were shipped overseas almost a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were among a contingent of Americans who trained with elite British Commandos and took part in raids on occupied Europe, the idea being that they would rejoin their old units when U.S. forces formally entered the war. Their combat experience would season the mass of green troops.

Scissons tried to transfer into the Army Rangers, an American battalion modeled on the Commandos, when it formed in mid-1942; his athleticism and outdoor skills would have fit perfectly within the unit, which specialized in operations behind enemy lines. However, the Rangers only accepted single men.

When the Allies invaded North Africa on November 8, 1942, Scissons was put ashore at Algiers, Tunisia. His first taste of combat came during a raid against the German-held airfield at Bizerte — a mission that blew up almost immediately when the attackers met heavy resistance and withdrew. Scissons was with a squad assigned to safeguard the force’s line of retreat, and their part of the plan also went sideways: they got ambushed and were embroiled in their own firefight.

“[German soldiers] pinned us down with tommy-gun fire from the ridge,” Scissons said in an account of the engagement carried in the Rapid City Journal and dozens of newspapers across the country.”I told our leader our only chance was to go around the hill and clean them out.”

Scissons and his comrades had to cross a stretch of open ground to get where they needed to be.”I didn’t stop to look behind me [as I ran] but when we reached a creek bed only five of our original 12 were left,” he said.”We got halfway up when we ran into more tommy-gun fire and lost another man. As we were down to too few to take the ridge we decided to withdraw.”

Scissons and Guy Wright, of Oklahoma, provided covering fire while Jerry Gorman and another soldier started back down the hill. When German soldiers rose to fire,”we really went to town on them,” Scissons said.”It was like popping off squirrels Ö every time I pulled the trigger over went a German.”

Scissons earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest military decoration, in just over 4 minutes that day. His account of the firefight sounded much less heroic than the official citation:

“Upon the ambush of his unit by the enemy, Private Scissons, seeing two of his comrades attempting to crawl to safety, did, without regard for his own life, engage the enemy with his rifle and draw their entire fire upon his position. Only after his comrades reached safety did Private Scissons attempt to withdraw, having accounted for approximately ten enemy soldiers. His coolness and courage under fire, and his desire to sacrifice himself, if necessary, for the safety of his comrades are a profound inspiration to members of the Armed Forces, and reflect the highest traditions of our country.”

The Nazis dubbed Scissons “Mustachio Commando” because he always wore a handlebar mustache.

Most of the attacking party died or were captured that day, and the airfield suffered no damage. Scissons and his squad managed to escape through country”swarming with groups of Germans,” he recalled. By the time they made it to friendly territory four days later, Scissons had lost,”everything but the shirt on my back, but what I missed most were the pictures of my wife and three-year-old daughter Ruth.”

Scissons’ story didn’t need embellishment to earn him a Distinguished Service Cross, but True Comics tweaked the tale for their young readers. In its version, the Bizerte raid was a smashing success, Scissons talked like an Indian from a western movie and he was a sergeant rather than a private; the last was a forgivable inaccuracy, as he seldom remained one or the other for long.

Scissons earned four Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, in addition to the Distinguished Service Cross, during his time in service. He was a good soldier in every respect but military discipline — a shortcoming that could be attributed to his pugnacious character, the very quality that made him an exceptional warrior.

“Kenny was a one-man army over there,” said Chuck Cory, who served with him in Tunisia.”He’d leave base and we’d never know when he was going to come back.”

Scissons infiltrated enemy outposts, struck silently, and then left a calling card to demoralize the rest. The Germans paid Scissons the ultimate compliment by hanging wanted posters of him across Tunisia; they dubbed him”Mustachio Commando” because he always wore a handlebar mustache.

When the Allies landed at Anzio, Scissons was asked to penetrate enemy lines and capture Germans for interrogation, an assignment he called his worst of the war. Month after month of mortal danger and operating on his own left him with little patience for rear echelon types, even those who outranked him.

“Dad went through hell over there,” Ahl says.”My understanding was that he had several court martials. My mother said she always knew when he was fighting because it was Sgt. Scissons. When he was back at base it was Pvt. Scissons.”

Scissons returned from overseas in the spring of 1945, but his first stop wasn’t Rapid City.”Dad spent six weeks at a base in Texas,” Ahl says.”He was a trained killer, so they thought they had to mellow him out, I guess Ö you don’t just come right back to your family after something like that.”

Scissons entered law enforcement as a conservation officer with the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department. After 20 years, he finished his career as a criminal investigator with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Scissons died on September 9, 1973. Ahl received many condolences upon her father’s death, including letters from Gov. Richard Kneip and longtime South Dakota promoter Almon”Hoadley” Dean.”I had the greatest respect for your father,” Dean wrote.”He was a gentleman, a patriot and a true warrior, held in high esteem and respect by all who knew him.”

No hero — real or fictional — could ask for a better epitaph.

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.

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Saving the Graham House

By Sue Speck

The Mentor Graham house in Blunt, once home to Abraham Lincoln’s teacher, is in danger of demolition.

Ramshackle and neglected, the Mentor Graham house in Blunt is far removed from its heyday as a tourist attraction and point of pride in the Hughes County town of 350 people.

Graham was the schoolmaster in New Salem, Illinois, where he worked with Abraham Lincoln to refine his speech and make the 16th president one of America’s most eloquent leaders. He moved to tiny Blunt as an old man in the 1880s and lived there just four years before his death in 1886. Now Graham’s home — Blunt’s claim to fame for more than a century — is in danger of demolition.

The Lincoln/Graham relationship dates back to the 1830s when Lincoln joined New Salem’s debate society. The divisive issue was slavery, and Graham and his fellow debaters encouraged the aspiring anti-slavery lawyer to enter politics. Lincoln often stayed at Graham’s home for work or to visit. Graham tutored him on grammar and the two studied late into the night. Lincoln then taught himself law and began his political career.

Lincoln’s inauguration, where Graham sat on the platform with new president, was the proudest day of the teacher’s life. The day the president was assassinated in 1865 was among the saddest. Graham was said to have never recovered from the loss.

Free land in Dakota Territory under the Homestead Act — signed by Lincoln in 1862 — beckoned to Graham’s son, Harry Lincoln Graham. In 1882, the aged teacher joined his son, and Lincoln’s namesake, for a new start.

The family bought a boarding house, staked land claims, built a house and planted trees. Harry and his wife, as well as Graham’s daughter and granddaughter, also carried on the family mantle of teaching school with Graham assisting.

One November day in 1886, the 84-year-old educator died when he was out for his daily walk. He was buried in Blunt, but descendants later moved his body back to Illinois.

The house he left behind was opened to the public as a tribute to the man who taught Lincoln, a tourist attraction and an inspiration to students.”Every year we took a field trip and came over here,” says city councilman Randy Pool, himself a retired teacher.”When you walked in, there was always a plate of homemade chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin cookies. All the kids got a cookie.”

But that was when the town still had caretakers who lived in the home and served as tour guides.”They appreciated it and took care of it,” Pool says.”In its day, this was an immaculate building. The yard was taken care of. There were flowers planted. But those days have come and gone.”

City councilman Randy Pool peers through the windows of the Graham House, long closed to visitors.

Eventually, the town could no longer find caretakers to live in the house that lacked modern conveniences. The city painted it and fixed the roof, but it soon fell into a state of disrepair.”When we ran out of finding caretakers, that was the downfall,” Pool says.”That and the floods.”

Two creeks meander through Blunt, and floodwater overflowed onto the floors of the house several times. Harnessing and diverting the water became a priority for the town. And there were other priorities such as streets and sewers that needed work as well, says city finance officer Trudie Feldman.

The house fell further into decay over the nearly 40 years it was vacant. The trees that Graham planted became overgrown, hiding the home until the city decided to clear the branches, reminding the community of the home’s history and significance.

So the town decided to clean up the house, too. But years of neglect come at a cost. The foundation needs to be repaired and the house raised out of the danger of floodwater. Then it has to be restored.

The city applied for a grant, but it was denied. Now council members are looking at other options. If they can’t save the house, ideas include repairing it just enough so people could look through the windows without entering or tearing it down and putting a monument in its place.

“You don’t want to see something like this destroyed, but when you have exerted as many possibilities as we have to try to find money to fix it …,” Pool says.”You’re looking at well over $100,000 to restore it back to where people could be in it. Now, you could put $40,000 into it and have a building that you could never go into. Does that building mean as much to people who would stop as it would if you could go in to look at it?

“It’s kind of a no-win situation. I don’t want to see it torn down, but I don’t want to see it fall down, and that’s not too far away.”

For more information on the Mentor Graham house or to donate, call Feldman at (605) 295-0486.

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Our Case for History

By Paul Higbee

Leland Case lived and worked around the world, but always considered South Dakota home.

Young South Dakotan leaves home, heads east to Chicago, earns a masters degree in journalism at Northwestern University and lands a job writing for the New York Herald‘s Paris edition. The year is 1927 and he loves Paris, where he interviews Charles Lindbergh just after the aviator makes history by flying solo across the Atlantic.

Conventional wisdom might tell you the South Dakotan would never return to his home state after Paris, might not even give South Dakota another thought. But there was nothing conventional about Leland D. Case. After a year in France, he was back in the Black Hills, researching a man he considered a true Christian martyr, Methodist preacher Henry Weston Smith, found murdered outside Deadwood in 1876. Most historians believe Smith’s attackers were Lakota defenders, although alternative theories have circulated over the years. In 1929 Case published a pamphlet about Preacher Smith, read widely by locals and Black Hills travelers alike. If the name Preacher Smith still resonates among South Dakotans, Case deserves a big part of the credit.

“If you put Leland Case on an unchartered jungle island at midnight,” said his friend and colleague Herman Teeter,”he would discover a Methodist connection by dawn.”

That might surprise contemporary Leland Case fans who think of him primarily as a historian of the American West, or perhaps as a newspaperman and national magazine editor. And Case does have fans, more than three decades after his death, in part because he left significant legacies on two South Dakota university campuses.

For all that, however, he is regularly confused in discussions for his older brother, Francis H. Case, who represented South Dakotans in Washington, D.C., for 25 years as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

But back to the Methodist Church. That was the institution that brought this remarkable family to South Dakota from Iowa in 1909, when Leland’s father, the Rev. Herbert Case, accepted a position at a Sturgis church. Leland, 9 at the time, never forgot the trip, crossing the vast treeless prairie by train. His family had arrived in the West. That meant two things — adventure and treasure. He found both when the Cases took up residence on a little farm at Bear Butte’s foot. Leland and Francis, sometimes accompanied by one or more of their three sisters, explored the butte’s draws and scaled its heights, hunted small game and found souvenirs that included cavalry buttons and artillery remnants from nearby Fort Meade maneuvers.

The Cases became friends with their neighbors, the Bovees, who ranched Bear Butte acreage. The butte was sacred ground to many Great Plains Native peoples, but in those years federal law forbade practice of Native religions. The Bovees snubbed their noses at the government, said the butte was theirs, and any Native people were welcome to pray and participate in religious ceremonies. It was South Dakota defiance of federal policy at its best. The Bovees’ young neighbor, Leland, grew up to write of the Lakota culture as something alive in the contemporary world, not just historical memory, in ways that would startle national audiences in coming years.

Case worked to establish The Westerners, clubs across the nation dedicated to study and celebration of the Midwest. At a Westerners function in Hot Springs, he displayed a bison skull, the symbol of the organization.

The Case family later lived in Mitchell, Hot Springs, Spearfish and Rapid City. Not surprisingly, the children grew up to enroll at South Dakota’s Methodist college, Dakota Wesleyan at Mitchell. That included Leland, although after a couple years he transferred to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from that school but then, as always, headed back to the Black Hills. He wrote for the Rapid City Daily Journal (Francis had bought into the paper’s ownership) and then the Lead Daily Call before Northwestern University beckoned. By this point it was apparent that Leland and Francis had evolved into remarkably similar men — journalists professionally, and thoroughly engaging personalities who were persuasive both in person and in print. What’s more, each was fearless. Francis’s sometimes-adversary in the U.S. Senate would be Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, and often colleagues cowered before Johnson. Not Francis Case. As for Leland, if he found himself or an institution he was part of disparaged, he’d likely show up on the critic’s doorstep and ask for an explanation.

Among institutions sometimes disparaged in the 1930s was Rotary International, the network of community service clubs. In 1930, a year after publication of his Preacher Smith pamphlet, Leland began writing for The Rotarian, a Chicago-based magazine sent to club members worldwide. Within months he was named editor and for nearly 20 years published quick-paced features, delving into everything from sports to science, but mostly themed around the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for their communities. As Americans struggled through the Depression, Case believed it was vital for everybody to polish skills that would benefit the community as a whole — very much in line with Rotarian philosophy. That felt small-town and unprofessional to some Americans who considered themselves well educated and perhaps elite, including author Sinclair Lewis. Lewis had dismissed Rotary clubs a decade earlier in his classic novel, Babbitt, so he was perhaps overdue for a visit from the editor of The Rotarian. According to Jarvis Harriman, who published a fine Leland Case biography in 1994, Lewis told Case sure, come by for a talk, fully intending to send the editor on his way after a few minutes. But Lewis found Case so engaging that the men talked for hours, and Lewis agreed to write a story for The Rotarian. It was a classic Leland Case encounter.

Other writers came much easier, including South Dakota poet Badger Clark, who found a national audience through The Rotarian. Babe Ruth, H.G. Wells, and Winston Churchill were published during Case’s time at The Rotarian’s helm. Case considered it imperative that Albert Einstein’s byline should appear in his magazine. He met the scientist at Princeton, New Jersey, and found him courteous but leery. Other American journalists and editors had mangled his words — not intentionally, Einstein knew, but because he thought in German and his concepts were, to say the least, complex. Case proposed what he called a”new idea” in magazine composition.

He would submit questions in writing to Einstein, involve a translator, and build a feature from the scientist’s typed responses, unaltered. Einstein joined the long list of people who found it impossible to say no to Leland Case.”Quite frankly,” Case later wrote,”I recall working up no feature that generated more personal satisfaction.”

Leland Case’s artifacts are preserved at Mitchell’s Dakota Discovery Museum, the former Friends of the Middle Border Cultural Center advanced by Case in the 1930s.

But even when working with personalities who would go on to be regarded internationally as 20th century giants, Case’s thinking never strayed far from South Dakota. He traveled home regularly, accompanied by his wife Josephine, a musician and teacher he met in Chicago. In South Dakota, Case worked on his brother’s political campaigns and spent time, in the 1930s, in Mitchell successfully advancing his idea of a Friends of the Middle Border cultural center. Part of the Dakota Wesleyan campus, it would preserve the arts, humanities and artifacts of the Great Plains which, at the time, appeared in danger of blowing away completely during the Dust Bowl. Carl Sandburg and Laura Ingalls Wilder, fellow Midwestern writers who felt the same urgency for cultural preservation, agreed to sit on an advisory board.

In the 1940s Case wrote a popular Black Hills travel guide, revised and reprinted over the years by the Black Hills, Badlands and Lakes tourism association. The same decade, with Chicago friend Elmo Watson, Case founded The Westerners, a network of clubs (or”corrals”) across the country where members met, ate, drank and swapped tales about the Old West. Amateur historians who discussed family lore were as welcome as academics and published authors. Many corrals still celebrate the West today.

In 1950 Case left The Rotarian and soon had an idea for National Geographic Magazine. How about a feature combining Black Hills history and travel tips? National Geographic wasn’t about to say no to Leland Case writing about his favorite place. It assigned him a photographer. Case visited significant locales and looked up old friends, including the Bovee family at Bear Butte.

National Geographic ran the feature in its October 1956 issue. Rather unfortunately, the magazine titled it”Back to the Historic Black Hills,” a play on Doris Day’s popular Black Hills song three years earlier. The story’s content was less playful. Of the region’s history Case noted:”A single lifetime bridges it — Custer to Coolidge, gold stampede to uranium rush, Sioux travois to jets at Ellsworth.”

But most striking about the feature, read more than 60 years later, is Case’s anecdote about a contemporary Lakota man, fined $25 in court for some infraction. Case quoted the man telling the judge,”I owe you $25. You owe me for the Black Hills. When you pay me, I pay you.” Nearly two decades before the matter exploded into national consciousness, who but Leland Case was telling Americans that the federal government had seized the Black Hills and owed compensation?

By the time the story was published, Case was once again behind an editor’s desk in Chicago, producing a new Methodist magazine called Together. Under Case’s leadership it grew quickly to a circulation topping a million. Like The Rotarian, its writing style was easily accessible and fast moving. The magazine featured profiles of personalities both well known and every day. Tips for activities that families could enjoy together were a staple.

In 1962 Case’s world changed when his brother, Senator Case, died in office, hit by a heart attack. Leland was 62 years old and the loss seemed to tell him that if he had projects he hoped to wrap up, now was the time. Over the next few years he began looking for a college or university that would work with him to establish a Western studies library.

Case retired from Together magazine in 1965. He and Josephine spent most of their time in Tucson, Arizona, partly because the climate was good for a respiratory condition Leland developed, and also because they liked Arizona. But Case’s search for a school that would support his project drew his thinking back to South Dakota, once again. He would contribute his personal history library, materials about the Case family (including some of his father’s sermons) and dollars to establish a history scholarship. He would encourage colleagues to donate their personal libraries, too. Case struck a deal with Black Hills State in Spearfish, in the center of the region where significant Western history played out.

Case’s personal office has been recreated at the Dakota Discovery Museum in Mitchell with artifacts and books brought from Tucson, Arizona.

Case told Spearfish newspaperman Art Mathison,”I was in college here, even though nobody knew it.” His father worked in Spearfish in 1917, Leland’s junior year in high school, before the community had a high school. As was common practice in state college towns then, students wishing to pursue high school diplomas were granted credits if they succeeded in college courses. Case was proud of his success, academically and socially, among older students, and the experience seemed to spark the love he always had for colleges and universities.

The Leland D. Case Library for Western Historical Studies, located within Black Hills State University’s E.Y. Berry Library-Learning Center, was dedicated in April of 1976. Case delivered a heart-felt speech, calling for volunteer”field historians” who would help determine”how bits and pieces of Hills history may be saved from fire, flood, and the city dumps.” Like the old editor he was, he had story tips for historians willing to tackle overlooked history, including the Black Hills’ many connections to the Alaska gold rush. Another story waiting to be told, he said, was how the Black Hills National Forest pioneered federal policy about scientific tree cropping (today his library houses the Black Hills National Forest Historical Collection). Later, Case told Mathison that historians might be better off forgetting Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Poker Alice and Fly-Speck Billy, and focusing on more important figures.

Leland and Josephine visited Spearfish several times after the library’s opening, and Black Hills State awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1980. Case didn’t stop researching and writing until the very end of his life. He died in 1986, at age 86, in Tucson.

There are spots across South Dakota where anyone who knows Leland Case’s story can’t help but sense his spirit: Bear Butte tops the list, along with any clapboard Methodist Church on the prairie, and any ridge overlooking the Middle Border plains that recovered beyond his hopes after the Dust Bowl. But a special spot is his recreated office in the Dakota Discovery Museum, the modern name for his Friends of the Middle Border center in Mitchell, on the Dakota Wesleyan University campus.

There are furnishings, photos and artifacts from his Tucson office, and best of all some of his books that reveal his many passions. Volumes on the shelves include Black Elk Speaks, Louis L’Amour novels and books detailing vigilante justice, Chicago history and South Dakota’s role in World War I. And not surprisingly Case collected books that approached the Methodist Church from every angle — John Wesley’s life, the church’s roots in England and development across America, Methodist poets, and even a guidebook to Methodist tourism.

“Leland’s interests were vast and varied,” says Bobbi Sago, special collections librarian and archivist for the Case library at Black Hills State. She calls the library”a tremendous legacy from a fascinating man. It is a wonderful gift to the residents of South Dakota.”

Case was a driven man who understood American culture and who never doubted that South Dakota’s contributions were important to the nation’s character. His brother’s name may be more prominent in state history. On the other hand, Leland Case sat at his typewriter and composed much of that history.

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

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The Murder of Patsy Magner

By Roger Holtzmann

Patsy Magner’s scrappiness served him well as a young boxer, and through life. He parlayed his sporting prowess into the gambling and liquor arenas of early-day South Dakota. Photo courtesy of the Dakota Territorial Museum.

Cold cases are often neatly resolved within an hour on television. In real life, they mostly stay cold. Families mourn without resolution. Perpetrators remain at large. Communities wonder whether a killer walks among them. Such was the murder case of Yankton’s Patrick”Patsy” Magner.

David and Mary (Creighton) Magner came to America during the great Irish migration of the 19th century. They married in Woodstock, Illinois, where David earned his living as a shoemaker. Patrick and his elder brother Michael were born in Illinois, but they came of age on the frontier because, like many of his countrymen during that era, David Magner was a restless soul. In 1872 he headed for Yankton, Dakota Territory, and set up his cobbler’s bench.

David passed away two years later, when Patsy was 7 years old, leaving Mary to raise two young boys.”Little is known of [Patsy’s] growing-up years,” wrote historian Bob Karolevitz,”but by his early 20s he was already a professional fighter.” Magner compensated for his slight build with ferocity, a characteristic that came to the fore during his most notable bout — in 1899, before a crowd of 500 at the Sioux City Athletic Club — against one-time world featherweight champion ‘Torpedo’ Billy Murphy.

“In the first round Magner used foul tactics, and Murphy also began to rough it,” reported the Sacramento Record Union.”In the second, when the police intervened, the men were fighting like dogs on the floor of the arena.”

Prize fighting was illegal in Sioux City, so Murphy, Magner and the fight’s promoters were hauled off to jail. This wouldn’t be the last time Magner ran afoul of the law. Almost by default, boxing put him in touch with unsavory types, especially gamblers; it is easy to see how he drifted into schemes and ways mentioned with disfavor in the statute books. From then on almost all of Magner’s various enterprises, even the strictly legal ones, had a whiff of malfeasance about them. His murder shocked Yankton, but few people in town would have been entirely surprised that he came to a bad end.

Yet he was always a popular, charismatic figure. In a rose-tinted recap of Magner’s life after he died, the editor of the Yankton Press & Dakotan wrote that,”many older citizens remember when, during his pugilistic career, he used to walk down the street and, seeing a group of boys pining to get into the theater, would pay the admission for the entire crowd.”

Magner did have one legitimate outlet for his athletic ability. Yankton’s fire brigade in the 1890s was organized around five hose teams,”and competition among these was very keen to see who could recruit the most prominent citizens,” according to the Yankton County History. As a well-known fighter, Magner would have been a prize recruit, and he was no mere show horse. At the South Dakota fireman’s tournament in 1896 Magner served as captain of Yankton’s winning hose cart race team, and he personally won the 100-yard foot race.

From the 1890s through the early 1900s, Patsy Magner split his time between Yankton and Sioux City. Both he and his brother Michael, who were 31 and 33 at the time, were listed as members of their mother’s household in the 1900 federal census. Michael’s occupation was”merchant,” and Patsy’s”button maker,” which is either evidence of a mother in denial or an inside family joke.

Michael and Patsy’s true occupation was operating saloons in Yankton and Sioux City, and they acquired their place in Sioux City after the previous owner was gunned down in the street.”Nobody ever connected them to the crime, but that was the kind of environment they operated in,” said Jim Lane, a Yankton native with a decades-long interest in Magner’s murder.

After Patsy Magner lost his farm in 1915, he bought this small house located along Old Highway 50 near Yankton.

Gambling went hand in hand with the saloon business, and not always harmoniously. Magner was hauled into court multiple times on related charges, most notably by T.D. Becker, who lost $12,000 in what he claimed was a rigged faro game.

In the course of their protracted legal wrangling, Becker”proceeded to catch the saloon men in a violation of the law [by] hiring Claude Klegin and William Grensel, minors, to purchase liquor from them,” reported the Sioux City Journal. Before the merits of that case could be argued, Magner was found in contempt of court and fined $200; to make matters worse, his attorney, after two hours of”a most bitter denunciation of Becker,” was forcibly removed from the courtroom.

Magner’s checkered history was no obstacle to landing a gambling concession in Bonesteel during the land lottery of 1904. He operated a saloon and managed to thrive while the bad men ran riot; an article in the Norfolk Weekly News-Journal asserted that”crooks reaped a rich harvest of $75,000 for their three weeks trouble. Patsy Magner made $20,000.”

Yet when the town’s troubles multiplied and its citizens sought help they turned to Magner, who adroitly managed the transition from big-time gambler to municipal savior. Account after account of the conflict hailed him for his role in returning control of Bonesteel to”the respectable element.”

Magner shot himself in the foot during the commotion, but in the flush of victory no one seemed to care. He traveled to Sioux City on the same train as Chief Clerk John McPhaul, and according to the Sioux City Journal, the crowd that greeted them,”gave the gambler who cleaned out the town … an ovation upon his arrival.”

George W. Kingsbury published Volume IV of his epic History of Dakota Territory in 1915. He included a short biography of Patsy Magner that made no mention of gambling, liquor or anything unsavory. Kingsbury’s Magner was a progressive farmer who followed”advanced scientific methods” and sent more cattle and hogs to market than all but a few producers in the state.

Magner started with 160 acres in 1902, according to Kingsbury, and added to his holdings until his ranch comprised 520 acres,”on which he has one of the finest sets of farm buildings in Yankton County or in South Dakota.” What Kingsbury neglected to mention was how that increase occurred.

“Magner came into [his land] the old-fashioned way,” Lane says, laughing.”He married Maude Paul, who owned it.”

Maude A. Paul grew up on a Nebraska homestead. After moving to Yankton she purchased a 320-acre farm — an unusual step for a single woman in that era — and ran it successfully before she married Patsy in 1905. Kingsbury conceded that Maude’s,”knowledge of agriculture and stock-raising is equal to that of her husband,” but that assessment would seem to be a considerable sop to Patsy, who was more familiar with saloons than barns.

Nonetheless, Patsy did find ways to contribute to the bottom line.”One of the stories my dad told me was that Patsy used to pay his workers at the farm in cash, then he’d play cards with them, and a lot of times win it back,” Lane says.”Well, one week these two brothers cleaned house, beat him pretty bad, and he flew into a rage. They had to hide out in a cornfield until he cooled down.”

Patsy and Maude also owned a thousand-acre grain farm west of Yankton, but when the census taker came around in 1910 Magner listed his occupation as”liquor wholesaler.” He and Mike operated what they called a”Family Liquor Store” on Yankton’s Third Street, while Patsy and another partner owned a saloon in Bonesteel, where he carried on as he always had.

On Jan. 27, 1910, Bonesteel’s city commission met to discuss whether Magner’s liquor license should be revoked. They were charged with,”selling liquor to men who were blacklisted by their wives [and] carrying on gambling in a rear room,” according to the Norfolk Weekly News-Journal. He managed to retain his license after a vote by the commission, but that result led to one alderman bitterly denouncing another for yielding to Magner’s pressure.

Patsy Magner wrangled a gambling concession in Bonesteel, where the 1904 land rush attracted 104,000 men.

Magner’s career as a big-time farmer was short-lived. In 1915 he and Maude mortgaged their home place, perhaps to raise money and expand to take advantage of the spike in commodity prices caused by war in Europe. Whatever the reason, it didn’t pan out. Their farm and its fine buildings were sold at a sheriff’s sale just three years later; they moved to a small property on the east side of Yankton, and Patsy began raising show horses.

Worse yet was on the horizon. Prohibition came to South Dakota in 1918, two years before the nationwide ban took effect. Magner’s liquor store and saloons had to close, which likely abetted what happened next. Trapped between their accumulated debt and diminished income, Patsy and Maude were forced to declare bankruptcy in 1921.

Magner listed his occupation as”manager of a soft drink parlor” on the 1930 census form. Given his record, it is difficult to believe he spent the Roaring Twenties serving Yoo-Hoo while fortunes were being made in illicit liquor, especially considering the wide open situation in Yankton, where the county sheriff was reportedly in league with the bootleggers.

In any event, Magner opened a card room and beer parlor, the Blue Fox, in the spring of 1933, just days after President Roosevelt signed a law allowing the sale of 3.2 percent beer. Prohibition ended later that year. To Magner, it must have seemed that happy days were indeed here again.

Patsy Magner’s death was reported beneath a headline which spanned the Press & Dakotan’s front page on Dec. 31, 1934:”Patrick (Patsy) Magner, well-known businessman, age 65, was instantly killed about 10 o’clock while sitting in the parlor of his home … peacefully listening to the radio and talking with his wife.”

A coroner’s inquest was convened the next morning, and the first witness was Maude, who appeared”stoically calm” as she testified.”Mrs. Magner said her husband jumped from his chair as he was hit and said, ‘What the H— is going on here!’ and that as she started to arise from her chair two more shots were fired at her.” Patsy managed to stagger into the bedroom, where he collapsed and died within minutes. Maude ran onto the highway and flagged down a passing motorist, who called the sheriff.

Sheriff William Hickey had little to offer when he testified. He used string to determine that the shots were fired from outside, through a window, but the ground was frozen and so yielded no footprints. All he found at the scene were four casings from a Colt .32 automatic.

Magner’s funeral, officiated by Msgr. Lawrence Link, pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, was held at his home. By the Press & Dakotan’s reckoning, “the procession to the cemetery was a mile long.”

That very day the newspaper published a fire-breathing call-to-arms entitled”Smoke Out The Rat.” In the good old days, wrote the editor, men confronted each other”on the street, in plain view of the town’s people.” Magner, in contrast, was slain from the shadows by a perverted, cowardly rat,”the most stinking, furtive, unsocial and unclean [form] of animal life …. We wish to insist that this is more than a murder. It is the beginning of an obnoxious form of crime that must not be permitted. This ‘rat’ must be found and destroyed.”

By chance, new sheriff William J. Limpo and new state’s attorney Frank Biegelmeier took office one week after the murder. They vowed to vigorously investigate the case, and the county commission offered a $500 reward. But days, then weeks and months went by with no progress.

Scant physical evidence was no impediment to rampant speculation, of course; as with many murders, the first suspect was close to home.

“Grandma said Maude did it,” Lane says.”That’s my family tradition.”

Don Tucker and his wife, Ava, have restored the Magner home east of Yankton. Tucker points to the window through which the murder happened in 1934.

Patsy and Maude had a notoriously stormy relationship, according to this theory. Maude either did it herself or hired a guy, who left town right after the murder. In line with that explanation, the .32 caliber gun that was used indicates an amateur job rather than a big-time criminal conspiracy, according to Lane.”It’s not a very powerful weapon. A professional hit man probably wouldn’t choose it as his first option to shoot through a window.”

Magner’s past and current business dealings provided ample material for rumormongering. At the inquest, Maude testified”that her husband had intended to dissolve his partnership in [the Blue Fox Saloon] with Fred Fincke,” according to the Press & Dakotan.”She said there had been friction between the two men for some time and that the dissolution was to have taken place that very day.”

Fincke wasn’t called to testify,”and was not questioned by officers aside from being asked if he knew of any acquaintances who might possibly have had a motive for the slaying.” If he had any suggestions to offer they led nowhere.

Fred and Maude, as Patsy’s widow, sold the Blue Fox soon after the murder. That may have been Magner and Fincke’s plan all along, but it’s doubtful everyone in Yankton accepted such a benign explanation. Not when it became known Aage Christensen was the buyer.

“My dad was a big bootlegger,” says Aage’s son, Marvin ‘Pal’ Christensen.”He was partners with the sheriff. They did business all over Iowa, South Dakota and a lot of Nebraska.” Christensen senior owned a barn that served as the pair’s warehouse during Prohibition.”Whenever there was going to be a raid by the state they’d always let the sheriff know. So then he’d call my dad, and he’d get everything cleaned up before they came.”

Christensen went to work as a bartender at the Blue Fox after Prohibition ended. Buying the bar made for a simple transaction on both sides, but Frank Yaggie, one of Aage’s lifelong friends, couldn’t shake the idea that there was more to it.

“When Frank was on his death bed he called me in and said, ‘You know, I got to get this off my chest. We always thought your dad shot Patsy Magner,'” Christensen says.”So I told him, ‘Frank, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I doubt it.’ Then he died about 10 minutes later.”

Don and Ava Tucker now live in the house where Patsy was murdered. The house and its matching red-brick barn have both been beautifully maintained and restored. Tucker raises Rhode Island Red chickens and goats on the property, which sits on the eastern outskirts of Yankton.

Tucker is well-acquainted with the Patsy Magner story.”He was sitting right where I sit to watch TV,” he says.”I figure it’s safe enough. It’s not like lightning is going to strike twice in one spot.”

Tucker has had many conversations about Magner over the years, including several interesting discussions with Jerry Bienert, now deceased, a long-time county commissioner and storehouse of local history.

“Jerry said he tried to follow up [Magner’s murder] and figure out who did it, but he just kept getting stonewalled,” Tucker says.”It never went anywhere.”

Bienert did come across a rumor that the shooting was over Patsy Magner’s involvement with a young woman from a well-connected Yankton family, which could explain why the investigations always stalled.

So it goes when a crime remains unsolved. Every theory sounds plausible to someone, and they all have only one thing in common.

“Somebody just did it,” Tucker says,”and went on with their life.”

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

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Minnilusa Links Old and New

By Paul Higbee

Rapid City’s Minnilusa Pioneer Museum preserves all things Western. Pictured here is former museum director Reid Riner. Photo by Johnny Sundby.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. In 2017, Reid Riner left the Minnilusa and moved from Rapid City to Arizona . He passed away in a car accident near Phoenix in 2018. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

MUSEUM OBJECTS CAN sometimes speak more powerfully than words. Stroke Doc Middleton’s saddle at the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum in Rapid City. Feel the tooling, sniff the horn and let the leather scent transplant you to the open range.

That’s the very saddle the outlaw Middlelton used an 1893 cowboy race across the prairie, from Chadron to Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition. The man sure could ride, although it appears he cheated in this race and perhaps also used the saddle for cattle rustling.

Which brings up an important point. The Minnilusa collection documents the pioneer history of the Black Hills, and Rapid City especially. The western frontier drew a wide range of opportunists, most of them honorable and some anything but. To fully understand the frontier, which has been both glorified and marginalized by media professionals over the decades, it is important to let these objects speak as they will. In other words, an artifact’s presence here isn’t meant to say its original owner has been elevated as a role model for future generations.

That being the case, Peter Lemley’s boots, hat and Winchester carbine are here. He, like Middleton, was part of the vast open range cattle business of the late 1800s, and can be ranked as one of the meanest cusses to ever walk Rapid City’s streets. Lemley hated the Lakota people, was part of the civilian militia that played a role in events that led to the Wounded Knee tragedy, and it’s been rumored he had his own son murdered. The son’s offense? He loved animals and Lemley feared he was soft.

“But you never know what the rest of the story will be when you find someone like that in history,” notes museum director Reid Riner. “Something good came out of even Lemley’s story. Another son grew up to be a well-known Rapid City physician who started the Lemley Foundation. It’s still supporting charitable work today.”

Officers of the Sweeney Hose Company in Rapid City used this silver speaking trumpet to direct firefighters. The trumpet dates to 1888.

Juxtaposed between the Middleton and Lemley exhibits is a photo cutout of Gus Haaser, a cattleman Riner considers a remarkably moral man. “Haaser came from Norway, and he doesn’t really look like a cattleman, but he made himself into a good one,” Riner says. “He wrote that he never saw the horizon in Norway, but that South Dakota was nothing but horizon.”

Gold mining usually grabs most of the attention when historians discuss Black Hills pioneers, and it is represented at the Minnilusa museum. But the industry Middleton, Lemley and Haaser were part of (honorably or otherwise) was integral, too, particularly in Rapid City. “Beginning with the open range herds that came up from Texas, cattle brought in the dollars that changed Rapid City from a place of log structures to one of big stone business buildings,” Riner says. Indeed, the town grew from 202 residents in 1880 to about 2,000 when South Dakota achieved statehood in 1889.

STILL, RAPID CITY got off to a rocky start in 1876. On display here is the pocket compass John Brennan used, and the surveyor’s chain, when six blocks were laid out in February of that year. In the middle of that area Rufus “Pap” Madison built a little rough-hewn cabin, destined to play a big role in the Minnilusa museum’s own history 50 years later. In 1876, it was amazing the cabin survived as Lakota warriors repeatedly attacked the fledgling town. They were fully justified in their outrage because Rapid City sat illegally on land set aside for the Lakota people by federal treaty. By late summer most of the town’s original pioneers had fled 200 miles east to Fort Pierre.

They returned in force in 1877 when the government assured them the treaty had been changed — an issue that remains in dispute more than 140 years later. Never dreaming future generations could possibly question their right to the land, the first Rapid Citians rolled up their sleeves and built homes, businesses, Gothic Revival churches of many denominations and schools. Among the schools was an institution of higher learning, the territorial School of Mines. In the middle of this rush of construction, Grace French, a 26-year-old artist trained at Boston’s School of Fine Arts, stepped off a stagecoach in 1885. French made Rapid City her home for the rest of her long life, and today the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum displays many of her paintings and sketches. Her art documents the beauty of the Black Hills before roads and other development encroached, back when Rapid City felt like a tiny village nestled in the foothills.

Grace French is just one of the artists and storytellers remembered by this museum. Others include poet Captain Jack Crawford, early photographer Jack Collins, historian Annie Tallent, and husband and wife newspaper pioneers Joseph and Alice Gossage. The Gossages made the paper known today as The Rapid City Journal into western South Dakota’s premier paper, and in time Alice played a key role in launching the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum.

UNLIKE MANY HISTORICAL exhibitions across the West, the Minnilusa doesn’t dwell extensively on bawdy enterprises, although it notes madam Dora DuFran ran a house of ill repute in Rapid City in addition to her Deadwood and Sturgis franchises. There’s more emphasis on above-board businesses that filled those big buildings cattle money built.

Soldiers stationed at forts around Dakota Territory may have carried firearms similar to this 1877 Colt single action .45 revolver.

“In interpreting mercantile businesses, it’s effective to tell the stories of the personalities behind those stores,” Riner says. And to be sure, downtown Rapid City claimed larger-than-life entrepreneurs. Cattleman Peter Duhamel’s in-town job was overseeing a massive downtown store, and nearby he manufactured his famous Duhamel saddles. Tom Sweeney was a name known by everyone across western South Dakota and sizeable sections of Wyoming and Montana. That was because of signs and handbills that read simply, “Tom Sweeney Wants to See You.” Once drawn into his big Rapid City store, customers weren’t disappointed. They could buy everything from trousers to a freight wagon.

Sweeney didn’t claim the only local slogan well known a century or more ago. “Learn to say Cyco Cigar,” read old print ads, referring to a tobacco product manufactured by Rapid City’s own Gate City Cigar Company. Other early merchandise that has found its way into the museum include a wicker purse, fine china and a Red Wing butter churn. Most intriguing is the museum’s collection of patent medicine bottles and packaging. “People came to Rapid City from places where there were no doctors, and if there had been, they couldn’t afford them,” Riner says. “So they saw patent medicines as their best options for staying healthy.”

Lots of those patent medicines contained alcohol, Riner adds, so customers certainly felt better after a dose or two — for a little while. It’s unlikely the modern Food and Drug Administration would have seen much merit in Dr. Hobson’s stimulant, described as a “wonder drug promising to ‘cure while you sleep’ whooping cough, croup, bronchitis, coughs, grip, hay fever, diphtheria & scarlett fever.” But for ranch families living 100 miles from a doctor, knowing the “wonder drug” sat waiting in the kitchen cupboard brought comfort.

By the 1920s, Black Hills pioneers were passing away and, in too many cases, taking their stories with them. Communities suddenly took great interest in monuments, celebrations and museums that would record pioneer names and adventures. That decade Spearfish unveiled its 11-foot-tall stone “Memorial to Spearfish Pioneers, 1876 – 1926.” Deadwood launched its Days of ’76 festivities in 1924. In 1926 in Rapid City, Alice Gossage, the newspaper owner, put money and her considerable community clout behind an effort to repair and move Pap Madison’s 1876 cabin to Halley Park, just west of downtown. “The story is she just walked into a city council meeting and said it had to happen, and so it did,” Riner says.

Richard Hughes, one of the best Black Hills historians and himself an 1876 pioneer, wrote this poem inscribed on a slab outside the cabin:

I was built in the olden, golden days,
When this was an unknown land;
My timbers were hewn by a pioneer
With a rifle near at hand.
I stand as a relic of ‘seventy-six,
Our Nation’s centennial year;
That all may see as they enter the Hills,
The home of a pioneer.

Not only was the cabin a museum artifact, it became a museum itself after items collected by the recently formed Minnilusa Pioneers’ Association were displayed within. “This society,” wrote Hughes in the late 1920s, “organized to preserve data and relics of the early-day West River country and Black Hills area, has in its membership many descendants of pioneers.” Those early members decided to use a Lakota term for their association’s name, one meaning “rapid water.” When translated to English it gave Rapid City its name.

This pocket watch with human hair fob was fashionable in the 1800s. Jewelry made with hair was often carried as a tribute to lost loved ones.

While the Pap Madison cabin can be considered the Black Hills’ first history museum (it predated Deadwood’s Adams Museum by four years), it was also one of the smallest. For decades most of the relics collected by the association were stored in a warehouse. Beginning in the 1930s the cabin shared Halley Park with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s world-class Sioux Indian Museum, a collection of Lakota artifacts placed in a new stone building built by the Works Progress Administration. In 1956 a new wing was added to that building, space that allowed the Minnilusa Association to take artifacts out of storage and into exhibits.

“In 1956, in the minds of some people, an Indian institution and a pioneer institution didn’t seem to belong together,” Riner says. But in Rapid City it worked, and nearly 60 years later the two museums still co-exist under one roof, although not in Halley Park. They were among four museums that remained independent yet moved into the Journey Museum complex in 1997 (the others are the South Dakota Historical Society’s Research Center and City of Rapid City’s Duhamel Plains Indian Artifact Collection). The Pap Madison cabin trailed behind, arriving in 2012. It stands in front of the Journey.

Riner became involved with Minnilusa in 2004. He grew up next door to Rapid City in Black Hawk, then left the state for 16 years for work and education. He earned a master’s in Public History at Arizona State. He enjoyed visiting the Journey Museum during trips home, and was ready to return to the Black Hills to stay when the Minnilusa position opened. Riner inherited a strong organization with a solid endowment and a collection that now numbers more than 6,000 artifacts, of which 30 to 35 percent are on display at any one time.

A West River cowboy made this horsehair bridle and rein set sometime in the 1880s.

The museum is also home to a collection of 8,000 to 10,000 photographic images, most scanned into a digital format. The collection is proving itself invaluable to historians, publishers and individuals hoping to learn more about their Black Hills roots. Well-known Black Hills photographer Johnny Sundby serves on the Minnilusa board and helps manage the photos. Among his favorites are those depicting the towns of Pactola and Sheridan before reservoir waters claimed the sites, Rapid City’s nearly forgotten Alfalfa Palace, mines, flume trails, Rapid City’s first airplane flight in 1909, and development of Mount Rushmore and the Hotel Alex Johnson. “We’re always looking for original prints people may have,” Sundby says. “They can take home a cleaned-up image where scratches, discoloration and tape marks are gone.”

Riner considers Rapid City’s true pioneer years to have been from the 1870s until 1934 and 1935, when manned balloon flights into the stratosphere (documented well by the museum) moved Rapid City into the nation’s consciousness in a new way.

But that doesn’t mean the spirit of old-fashioned town-building ended at that time. In fact, Rapid City’s downtown redevelopment over the past decade is unmatched regionally, resulting in Main Street Square, arts venues and new dining and retail. There’s increased emphasis on pedestrian access, ways for visitors to park their cars and move through what Riner describes as an evolving “cultural campus,” linking the museum to the civic center, historical district, public art and library.

“We’ve got the seeds for growing cultural tourism,” he says, “and a city government committed to making it happen.”

It’s happening even without Alice Gossage barging into meetings and demanding action.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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South Dakota’s Death Valley

By Colin Kapitan

Major League Baseball has long been known for its blend of interesting and controversial characters. One of the most interesting of the pre-1920 era was Deadwood native James “Death Valley” Scott.

Scott was enshrined in the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame in 1985 for his nine years of excellence as a big league pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. He is unquestionably the most successful pitcher among native South Dakotans.

Scott was born in Deadwood on April 23, 1888. His father, George, was a weatherman and telegraph operator for the government. The Scotts moved to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation west of Mobridge and later to Lander, Wyoming. It was in the country fields around Lander at the turn of the century where Scott first found the joys of hurling a baseball past aspiring hitters.

Scott refined his pitching skills as a one-year college student at Kansas Wesleyan. He also spent one summer at Oskaloosa, Iowa, pitching for a semi-pro team. In 1908, Scott signed on with a Wichita, Kansas, team in the Western League. After only one season of professional baseball, he was sold to the Chicago White Sox and made his debut in the big leagues and celebrated his 21st birthday just days apart. He spent nine years in the majors, all with the Sox.

Scott’s first appearance in a major league game was indicative of his career to follow. He won his debut 1-0, and he was glorified in print the day following by noted sports journalist Ring Lardner, who covered the game for a Chicago newspaper.

In his 1909 rookie season, Scott went 13-12, through his won-loss record is somewhat misleading. He pitched five shutouts that summer and was on the losing end of five 1-0 games. Scott lost four other games by a 2-1 score. It was the harbinger of his career.

The following year, Scott posted a 9-17 record for the White Sox. He spent that winter in Imperial, California, and upon his return for the 1911 season, he was quickly dubbed “Death Valley” after the legendary desert character called Death Valley Scotty.

The next two seasons were so-so for the tall, burly 235-pound, right-handed pitcher. In 1911 he was 12-11 and the following year only 2-2 as he saw limited pitching time.

But over the next three seasons, Scott was as good as any pitcher in major league baseball. In 1913, he was not only a 20-game winner but a 21-game loser for a second division ball club. He fashioned an outstanding 1.90 earned run average and highlighted the year in a game against the St. Louis Browns when he struck out 15 batters, including six in succession. Scott pitched in 48 games and totaled 312 innings that summer.

Scott’s hard luck pitching was perhaps personified in the 1914 season when he pitched a no-hitter …. and lost. His record was 16-18 that year, and his toughest loss occurred on May 14 when he shut out the Washington Senators on no hits for nine innings only to lose the no-hitter and the game, 1-0, in the 10th inning.

(According to no-hitter historian Dirk Lammers, in 1991, the Committee for Statistical Accuracy amended its definition of a no-hitter, “declaring it a game of nine innings or more that ends with no hits.” Scott’s “no-hitter” was officially wiped from the record books, along with 49 other such games that had been played throughout the history of Major League Baseball. Learn about them at Lammers’ website, www.nonohitters.com.)

His biggest season was 1915. Scott won 24 games in 35 decisions and led the league with seven shutouts. This was also the year that he was on the mound when Detroit Tiger Hall of Famer Ty Cobb’s 35-game hitting string came to an end.

Scott’s record slipped to 9-14 the following year. In 1917, he was 6-7 with a sparkling 1.87 earned run average when he left the team in the middle of the season and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was the first major leaguer to do so. He later earned a commission as a captain before his discharge in 1920.

His major league totals for nine years read 111 wins, 113 losses, 26 career shutouts and a 2.32 career earned run average. Scott’s career was noted by his character and sportsmanship almost as much as his superb curveball and deft pickoff move to first base.

Scott was one of the first baseball players to form a link with the world of show business. He and White Sox teammate Buck Weaver were married to two of the four Cook Sisters, whose singing act was the talk of Chicago in those days.

In 1914, Scott took his turn on the mound as the White Sox and the New York Giants spent the off-season touring places such as England, Paris and Tokyo. He even pitched before the Pope at the Vatican.

It was while Scott was at war that the famous Black Sox Scandal occurred. It involved eight White Sox players who contrived with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. In his later days, Scott confided to his son, “Had I still been with the team in 1919, it never would have happened. When I found out about it, I would have reported it for the honor of the game.”

Scott returned to baseball after his military service, but not to the White Sox. He refused an invitation because of conflicts with team management. Instead, he finished his professional career in the minor leagues, pitching four seasons with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and two years for the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern League.

In 1923, Scott needed permission from Pacific Coast League president W.H. McCarthy to wear a mustache on the playing field. Such facial hair had long been taboo in pro baseball. Scott grew the mustache as a result of a winter Canadian hunting trip. It quickly became a good luck piece, as he pitched a no-hitter in one of his first games that year.

His playing days ended the summer of 1927, when he suffered a broken leg. Scott remained active in baseball, working as an umpire in the Southern League. In 1930, he became one of the few big-league baseball players ever to return to the majors as an umpire, working for three National League seasons.

During his minor league days in the Pacific Coast League, Scott worked winters in the movie studios. Following his retirement from umpiring, he went to work full time with such major studios as Warner Bros., RKO and Republic Pictures. He retired in 1951 and died on April 7, 1957 in Palm Springs.

Although he left South Dakota at an early age, there was a return of sorts in 1939 when his son, Jim Scott, Jr., pitched for the Northern League Sioux Falls Canaries under manager Rex Stucker. Years later, the younger Scott compared his own and his father’s pitching skills.”I was a thrower,” he said.”Dad was a pitcher.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November 1986 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Herbert Hoover, The Historian

By Jon Lauck

Editor’s Note: Herbert T. Hoover, longtime South Dakota historian and professor of history at the University of South Dakota, died on March 21 at age 89. This story, written by fellow South Dakota historian Jon Lauck, appeared in our November/December 2007 issue.

In the spring of 1973, newspapers across the country carried reports from the Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota, from the village whose name recalled a tragic episode in our nation’s history: Wounded Knee. More than 200 activists, led by members of the American Indian Movement, occupied the town and held law enforcement officials at bay. South Dakotans had watched from the sidelines as riots convulsed America’s big cities during the 1960s. Wounded Knee brought those troubles home.

Herbert T. Hoover taught for four decades at the University of South Dakota and became one of the state’s premier historians. He provided an introduction and five chapters to A New South Dakota History, published in 2005.

Few people outside the law enforcement perimeter could relate to those inside as well as Herbert T. Hoover, a professor of history at the University of South Dakota. He learned of the planned occupation beforehand, while participating in a sweat lodge ceremony at St. Francis, and lent both monetary and ceremonial support to the effort. Once the occupation commenced, he was invited into the village, where he participated with tribal leaders in traditional ceremonies.

Later, when AIM leader Russell Means was on trial in Sioux Falls, Means announced he might go down to Vermillion and take over the University of South Dakota. His threat was a joke, apparently, but in the wake of Wounded Knee, and given South Dakota’s racially tense atmosphere at the time, people took him at his word. Police and highway patrol officers took up positions around the town.

Because of Hoover’s experience and credibility with AIM, USD President Richard Bowen called upon him to help manage the situation. When Hoover went to find his history department colleague, Joe Cash, at the USD Oral History Center, he discovered just how seriously the other professor took Means’ words: Cash had a pearl-handled revolver on the desk in front of him.

“They will never get the oral history collection,” Cash said grimly.

Hoover’s response was,”Get real, man.”

No one ever did try to occupy the USD campus, but Herbert Hoover’s involvement underscores the role he’s played in some of the most significant, highly-charged episodes in Indian affairs of recent memory. He has been rightly recognized for his many years of work chronicling Indian history, but he’s lived it as well.

In 2006, after more than four decades teaching South Dakota history, Herbert T. Hoover retired from the USD history department. All those who care about the history of South Dakota should know Hoover’s story. He is part of an elite group of historians who have delved deeply into our state’s past; their work, hopefully, will help us better understand South Dakota’s present and future.

What is most immediately striking about Herbert Hoover is his name, particularly for those who lived through the Dirty Thirties, the most traumatic decade in South Dakota’s history. When Hoover’s parents named him in 1930, Herbert Hoover was still a Midwestern hero, a small-town Iowa boy who became president. They weren’t alone: the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, has 13 folders of letters from Americans who wrote to President Hoover and proudly announced they had named their sons after him.

Hoover’s middle name is Theodore, after Theodore Roosevelt. With such namesakes his passion for American history was virtually guaranteed. After the Great Crash of the American economy in the 1930s, and the staining of President Hoover’s reputation, our Herbert Hoover wisely chose to go by the name”Teddy” until the animus against President Hoover passed.

Hoover was raised on a farm in Wabasha County, Minnesota, which is also the home of Eugene McCarthy. Hoover’s mother, a school teacher, instilled a love of books in her young son. He attended Plainview High School, then went on to the University of Minnesota. After his studies were interrupted by service in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, Hoover returned to UM as a more serious student and completed the requirements for a degree in chemistry. Hoover preferred history, however, and quickly abandoned the”dull” life of being a pharmacist. He enrolled at New Mexico State University and in 1961, earned a master’s in history.

In graduate school, Hoover turned to the history of the American West. That wasn’t a cutting-edge field at mid-century, but by the 1970s Western history was booming. After finishing his master’s thesis, he moved on to the Ph.D. program at the University of Oklahoma, which was known for its study of American Indian history. His Ph.D. advisor was Eugene Hollon, who was himself a student of Walter Prescott Webb. (Students of the history of this part of the United States will recognize Webb as the author of The Great Plains, a seminal tract published in 1931 that is still in print.)

While at Oklahoma, Hoover came to know another famous South Dakota historian, Gilbert Fite, who was beginning his career in the University of Oklahoma’s history department. (Fite’s first book, Prairie Statesman, a biography of South Dakota governor Peter Norbeck, was recently reissued by South Dakota State Historical Society Press.) Fite helped set Hoover on his path to a lifetime of teaching South Dakota history. In 1967, long-time USD historian Herbert Schell was reaching mandatory retirement age. Fite, who had studied under Schell as an undergraduate at USD, recommended Hoover to the university.

As the years went by, Hoover’s courses at USD increasingly focused on American Indian history, one of the most explosive areas of historical research in recent decades. Hoover’s great interest in the history of the Sioux was complemented by the large body of work generated by other historians. Hoover once noted that,”no other province in the United States ever attracted greater attention,” than that claimed by the Sioux. In the recently released A New History of South Dakota, to which he contributed the introduction and five chapters, Hoover wrote that the Sioux have garnered more international attention than any other tribe, in part due to their famous resistance to white encroachment.”You couldn’t push the Sioux around,” Hoover says.”They never lost a battle against the U.S. Army.”

Hoover’s interest in the Sioux stems in part from his own Indian heritage. His father was part Ioway, the tribe which gave the state its name.”I was always the dark guy in the school picture,” says Hoover.”Every time I got in trouble they would say it was that Indian blood.” He endured much less than other Indians because of his heritage, says Hoover, and in later years it was”a marvelous asset” in his professional development.

Hoover helped spur scholarly interest in Indian history with his published writings and research work in archives and library stacks. These professional interests also positioned him to appreciate what he terms the”Indian renaissance” of roughly 1965-85, when traditional spiritual ceremonies and cultural practices that had been driven underground were revived on the reservations.

Hoover’s interests and academic position made for a unique opportunity. Several of the movement’s leaders asked if he would host traditional ceremonies on his farm near Vermillion, which would give Indians in the east and whites alike a chance to learn about and participate in them. Hoover built a sweat lodge and environment for the sacramental use of peyote on his farm.”I had to be careful of the peyote church, because the FBI was creeping around,” he recalls.

As a lodge keeper, Hoover came to know many medicine men,”who wanted to educate the people of South Dakota about the fact that they weren’t a bunch of heathens, or pagans.” Indian leaders, including members of the American Indian Movement, also took part in the ceremonies. Hoover’s involvement with AIM and his research on American Indians unfolded against the backdrop of growing Indian activism in both the nation and South Dakota, creating a unique fusion of academic standing, experience with traditional Native culture, and first-hand knowledge of a burgeoning social movement.”That farm made things out of my career that I could not have made any other way,” Hoover says.

Hoover’s experience and years of study have made it possible for him to begin work on his next book, a history of the American Indian renaissance. Many of Hoover’s photographs from the days on his farm and the period of the Indian renaissance are currently being placed at the Center for Western Studies, on the Augustana University campus in Sioux Falls.

Hoover also became involved in a famous murder trial during his early years at USD. In the late 1960s Baxter Berry, a West River rancher and the son of former governor Tom Berry, shot and killed an Indian who was trespassing on his ranch. Berry was acquitted of murder charges but ended up suing NBC News for defamation for the story they ran about the shooting. When Hoover testified for NBC, he was accosted on the steps of the courthouse in Pierre by one of his university students who sympathized with Berry.

While at USD, Hoover also began writing for encyclopedias, and, with the aid of a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, he began collecting oral histories of Indians on all of South Dakota’s reservations. Hoover interviewed over 750 people and deposited many of the interviews in an archive at USD. With the help of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Hoover also completed a study of Indian-white relations in Sioux Country. For South Dakota’s centennial, Hoover organized a book of essays entitled South Dakota Leaders, which chronicled the lives of prominent South Dakotans.

In one of his greatest accomplishments, Hoover collected two bibliographies of publications about South Dakota, one of which was completely dedicated to the history of the Sioux. After countless days”in dusty archives and libraries across the United States and Canada,” Hoover compiled and annotated a list of 4,614 sources relating to South Dakota history.

That experience caused Hoover to realize there is no”state in the history of the West that has received as much attention from legitimate scholars.” With good reason, he says. South Dakota has been favored with what he deems exaggerated diversity, a mix of races and nationalities that few other states can match. Compared to South Dakota, the history of neighboring states”is really dull.”

Hoover thinks that the production of books about South Dakota could have been larger, however. USD’s master’s degree program in history should be complemented by an equivalent program at South Dakota State University, he says. He also believes the state is limited by the lack of a Ph.D. program in history, one which could promote historical research on South Dakota. Even so, Hoover opposes the creation of such a program without a substantial increase in the size of the history departments at the state universities, additional funding or the merger of the state’s largest universities.

Hoover is not afraid to break with conventional wisdom and ruffle feathers. Despite his great respect for Indian culture, he believes that Indians are as much to blame as whites for any remaining racial enmity between the two groups. On another matter, he thinks tribal governments desperately need a civil service system because,”every time there is a turnover in the presidency or tribal council, everybody gets fired,” causing political instability on Indian reservations.

Hoover also believes that the disappearance of”legitimate medicine men” has created a vacuum of spiritual leadership in Indian Country. The political and spiritual problems on the reservations today represent a step backward from the revival years of the 1970s.”The renaissance gave Indians a chance,” says Hoover,”but they are losing it.” In his next book, he hopes to explain what went wrong.

After many years in the trenches of South Dakota history, Hoover joins the pantheon of the state’s great historians, which includes Doane and Will Robinson, George Kingsbury, Herbert Schell, Howard Lamar, Gilbert Fite, Lynwood Oyos, Gary Olson and John Miller. Never afraid to speak his mind, Hoover plans to continue his writing regimen and his contributions to South Dakota’s historical corpus. His coming history of the Indian renaissance will not pull any punches, he promises. He will not spare Indian leaders the failures he’s seen in Indian country during recent years.†

Yet Hoover is unafraid.”I mean, who’s going to knock off a 77-year-old man who wears glasses?”

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Who Lies in the Custer Graves?

By John Andrews

Six members of the Seventh Cavalry, dead since 1873, lie in the Bon Homme Cemetery, though their identities and their exact connection to the Seventh remains a mystery.

On a summer’s evening in 2011, a retired stonemason from Yankton toiled on his hands and knees in the Bon Homme Cemetery. Behind him stood a cracked granite tombstone marking the graves of six men whose brief sojourn through Dakota Territory in the spring of 1873 gave rise to legend and mystery.

The men are said to be soldiers from Lt. Col. George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, who passed through Dakota on a 400-mile march from Sioux City to Fort Rice, south of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. An inscription on the stone reads,”In memory of six unknown soldiers,” because the men were apparently hastily buried and left with no indication of who they were.

After the cracks on the gravestone were repaired, we began to think more about the men buried in its shadow. It seems a cruel fate to lie anonymously for nearly 150 years in a prairie cemetery far from your home and family. Because of Custer’s ignominious end at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, and his regiment’s later presence at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, he and the Seventh are among the most researched and written about soldiers in the United States. Could it be possible to find mention of the six men who died along Snatch Creek and end their century and a half of anonymity? As it happens, we aren’t the first to try.

Our search began at the University of South Dakota’s I.D. Weeks library. The second floor houses microfilmed rolls of the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan, which began publication in June of 1861, making it the oldest newspaper in the Dakotas. A weekly paper in 1873, its April 16 issue included an announcement of the Seventh Cavalry’s arrival on the outskirts of town beginning April 9.

The Seventh had been created during an Army reorganization after the Civil War and tasked with protecting settlers, travelers and railroads as they filtered into the Great Plains. George Armstrong Custer, still known throughout the country for his heroics at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, was chosen to be its lieutenant colonel. The new unit was based at Fort Riley, Kansas, and while it had been designed to be a peacekeeping force, the Seventh became embroiled in more than 40 fights with Indian tribes in the three decades after its inception, including the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn in June of 1876 that decimated the Seventh and killed Custer.

In 1873, the Seventh was reassigned to the Army’s Department of Dakota, with orders to depart Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory on an expedition along the Yellowstone River during the summer. The War Department began planning the Seventh’s springtime route from the southern United States to Fort Rice. It included an encampment of several weeks either in Sioux City, Iowa, or Yankton to allow time for prairie grasses to grow enough to feed the livestock.

Yanktonians can thank Walter Burleigh, the town booster and often-unscrupulous politician and businessman, for bringing Custer their way. Burleigh was a Pennsylvania native and a Republican who helped Abraham Lincoln win the state in the election of 1860. As a result of his new connections in Washington, D.C., Lincoln appointed Burleigh to be the Indian agent for the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory.

He used his position to line his pockets whenever possible, and that remained true in 1873. Burleigh had purchased a steamboat, the Miner, several years earlier, and stood to profit nicely if he could convince the War Department to use his boat to carry supplies for the Seventh up the Missouri River from Yankton to Fort Rice. He also owned land east of Yankton near Rhine Creek (today called Marne Creek) that would support a spacious campsite for the regiment’s 800 soldiers, 40 laundresses, 700 horses and 200 mules. Burleigh successfully lobbied military brass all the way up to General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri. When the final plans were revealed, they included a stay at Yankton.

Yankton’s Third Street, pictured in 1875, appeared much as it had when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry paraded through two years earlier. The Seventh spent nearly a month encamped east of Yankton on its way to Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory. Photo courtesy of the Dakota Territorial Museum.

In the days after the Seventh arrived, a city of tents sprang up on the prairie about a mile east of Yankton, just across Rhine Creek. The camp had barely taken shape when a severe spring blizzard (still known as the Custer Blizzard), nearly buried it under several feet of snow.

Several soldiers made it into Yankton before conditions worsened. They sought shelter for their horses, then found their way into the saloons and hotels along Third Street. But there were many other soldiers, wives and laundresses who hunkered down under blankets as the snow slowly weighed down their canvas tents. Custer and his wife endured the storm inside a log cabin, which they had rented from a local upon their arrival.

The storm slowed business to a trickle for several days and pushed the Seventh’s scheduled departure into early May, as they waited for the snow to melt and the grass to turn green. The delay allowed the citizens of Yankton to host a ball for Custer and his officers on the second floor of Stone’s Hall at Third and Capital. Felix Vinatieri, Yankton’s town bandmaster, assembled a group of musicians to provide entertainment. The talented Vinatieri, a graduate of the music school at the University of Naples in Italy, played every instrument except piano. Custer noticed his vivacity, and asked if he would serve as the Seventh’s chief musician on their journey to Fort Rice.

Vinatieri accepted, and when the Seventh finally departed on May 7, he led a 16-member band as the cavalry paraded from their campsite down Third Street and west out of Yankton along the Sioux City to Fort Randall Military Trail. Burleigh’s Miner was loaded with the regiment’s supplies and followed the column upriver.

The Press & Dakotan reported that the first day’s march took them to Lakeport. The second day, the regiment advanced to Owen’s Ranch along Snatch Creek, 19 miles from Yankton. But flooding had swelled both Emanuel Creek and Chouteau Creek farther west. Custer sent soldiers ahead to bridge both waterways, and the Seventh was delayed.

Soldiers tried to make the best of the delay. Local women brought fresh bread and kolaches, a traditional dessert from their native Czechoslovakia. Soldiers and their wives spent time aboard the Miner, which anchored along the riverbank not far from camp each night. Custer and his wife, along with several officers, took meals daily at the Cogan House, a hotel in the village of Bon Homme run by Bridget Cole Cogan, an Irish immigrant.

Finally, after four days, the regiment continued its 400-mile march to Fort Rice. What they left along Snatch Creek became a local legend and a mystery that remains unsolved.

Greg McCann’s Cogan House overlooks the Missouri River not far from where his great-aunt, Bridget Cogan, housed Custer and his officers.

Greg McCann is the great-nephew of Bridget Cogan. Her hotel and restaurant stood just a few hundred yards northeast of the current Cogan House, a bed-and-breakfast and hunting lodge that McCann and his late wife, Diana, built along a Missouri River bluff in 2008.

His riverfront property has seen plenty of history over the last 225 years. Lewis and Clark paddled past in 1804. Private Shannon, a member of their Corps of Discovery, famously became lost a short distance downstream and was reunited with the group near the mouth of the Niobrara River. Several years later, trappers like Jim Bridger and Hugh Glass followed the same path, as the Missouri River became a highway of sorts.

McCann also knows well the story of the Seventh Cavalry’s visit. He says during their delay, Custer and his officers entertained the people of Bon Homme with shooting contests (they were reportedly good shots). According to his family’s oral history, a depression in the earth just a few paces from the modern day Cogan House marks the site where Custer himself camped, chosen because of its ideal views of the river, the military trail and the village of Bon Homme.

As a caretaker of the Bon Homme Cemetery, he also knows the story of the six soldiers who supposedly contracted typhoid fever and died at the regiment’s main encampment along Snatch Creek. According to local legend, two graves were quickly and quietly dug on the creek’s western bank. Six of the men were buried in one and an officer named Abraham Hirsch was supposedly placed in the other. The regiment moved north the next day, and the bodies remained there until 1893, when they were disinterred and moved to the Bon Homme Cemetery. In 1922, William Thomas Harrison crafted the large tombstone that was carefully repaired in 2011 by Yankton brickmason and historian Bob Hanson and his friends.

The identities ó and even the correct number ó of the soldiers interred there have stumped historians for decades. For years, Abraham Hirsch was believed to have been an officer in the Seventh Cavalry. But Mark Chapman, of the Seventh United States Cavalry Association, says no Abraham Hirsch is listed in the regimental records. Similar searches by historians in the National Archives also come up empty.

When South Dakota historian Herbert Hoover wrote his history of Bon Homme County, he found paperwork that showed $6 paid for a coffin for A. Hirsch, but the date was April 17, 1873, nearly a month before the soldiers died at Snatch Creek. Given the evidence, it seems likely that even though Hirsch has long been associated with Custer’s soldiers, he was not part of the Seventh.

As for the other six, the only accounts of their deaths seem to be in the stories that have been passed down through the generations. Chapman says there are no deaths recorded in the May 1873 regimental record (although it does note 46 desertions). Only five fatalities were noted during the months in which the Seventh was transferred from the South and sent to Fort Rice: one in Charlotte, North Carolina; two en route from Memphis to Cairo, Illinois; one between Louisville, Kentucky, and Cairo; and one on May 4, when Private William Donovan of B Troop drowned.

Retired Yankton stonemason Bob Hanson repaired the worn and cracked Custer tombstone in 2011.

Contemporary accounts are equally fruitless. The Press & Dakotan reported on such details as the songs played during the grand ball in downtown Yankton, but after the regiment moved out information grew scarce. The newspaper told readers about the delay along Snatch Creek, but said nothing about the deaths of six soldiers. Its final mention of the Seventh came on June 18, with a report that the regiment had safely reached Fort Rice.

Custer’s wife, Elizabeth, wrote about the trip through Dakota in her memoir called Boots and Saddles. Her chapter describing the march out of Yankton focused on subjects such as the cold weather, wildlife, food preparation and sleeping accommodations. Second Lieutenant Charles Larned wrote regular letters home to his mother during the journey from Sioux City to Fort Rice and provided articles for the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Neither penned a word about any soldiers dying.

So if other deaths were reported in the regimental record, why the secrecy surrounding the men who died along Snatch Creek? McCann was always told Custer wanted the deaths kept quiet because if word leaked that he had lost six men, it would reflect poorly on his leadership. Another argument is that medical records were only sporadically updated while the regiment was on the move. For example, in their new book called Health of the Seventh Cavalry, P. Willey and Douglas Scott note that the number of men who suffered frostbite and endured subsequent amputations during the Custer Blizzard at Yankton was far more than what the record actually reveals. Several soldiers in the early stages of frostbite stumbled into the Custer cabin, where Elizabeth Custer helped treat them, yet those and other cases are absent from the official record.

But the most widely accepted theory is that Custer did indeed want the deaths kept secret, though for a different reason. The regiment relied heavily on cooperation from local settlements throughout the journey to Fort Rice. Custer was concerned that if word of a contagious disease such as typhoid fever within the Seventh became public, friendly relations with both Indians and non-Indians could be compromised. It seems the success of the march took precedence over the memories of six soldiers.

Bon Homme Cemetery lies along the bluffs of the Missouri River, on a county thoroughfare quaintly named Apple Tree Road. It was established in 1859 and is the final resting place of several Czechoslovakian pioneers who began trickling into southeastern Dakota Territory in the 1860s.

Local families keep the grounds and the graves well tended ó including the anonymous Custer six. McCann believes if they can confirm that the men belonged to the Seventh Cavalry, federal funds may be available to help maintain the cemetery, but so far all paper trails have gone cold. And it’s not as though no one has tried. Hazel Belle Abbott, a Bon Homme County native who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University, spent her last years compiling a history of the county and tried earnestly to uncover more information about the Custer soldiers, but could never identify them. She died in 1971, and her research is housed in the state archives in Pierre, waiting for someone else to build upon it.

Perhaps somewhere a family diary notes a son or brother who marched off with the Seventh and never returned. But for the citizens of Bon Homme County, the six bouquets of flowers and American flags that decorate each grave have always been ó and may continue to be ó”in memory of six unknown soldiers.”

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

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Christmas at Wounded Knee

By Sidney H. Byrd

My grandparents were sent to the Pine Ridge Reservation as Presbyterian missionaries from their home at a newly established Christian colony located on Wakpaipaksan, the Bend of the River, at what is now known as the town of Flandreau. They left before the turn of the century in a wagon loaded with camping gear, implements, provisions and other necessities.

Grandfather’s ministry on the Pine Ridge continued for four long decades. We lived in Allen and Porcupine during those depressing years of the “Dirty Thirties.” Grandfather was struggling under some of the most adverse conditions. Missionaries were paid woefully inadequate salaries for those times, but their efforts continued faithfully. There began a gradual increase in membership in our churches, because the Christian faith offered hope for people in despair.

One particular winter, he was serving two churches; one was at our home in Porcupine and the other was the historic village of Wounded Knee, located 7 miles to the south. During the winter months, I made many sleigh trips with my grandfather. We used that means of winter transportation out of necessity and not as a luxury.

The most memorable Christmas experience for me was when I was invited to accompany grandfather to a celebration at our little church in Wounded Knee. Immediately before Christmas, Indian families residing in the outlying areas came to our Porcupine church to pitch their tents and remain for the duration of the holidays. It was an exciting time, especially for a little boy. There, a great celebration was concluded on Christmas Eve.

At noon on Christmas Day, there had been a great feast at our church at Porcupine where members of the Christmas encampment generously shared their food and enjoyed fellowship. It was a time of great rejoicing. The second celebration was to be held at our little church at Wounded Knee that same evening.

It was Christmas Day as grandfather began loading our sleigh in preparation for our trip to Wounded Knee. Missionary boxes containing gloves, mittens, stocking caps and other useful gifts were carefully packed in the back of our sleigh.

Grandmother had made me a muff to keep my hands warm during the trip. She even heated bricks in the oven and placed them at our feet. She also put a big wool blanket on the seat for additional warmth in case of an emergency. Grandfather pulled a great lap robe to cover our lower extremities. All was in readiness. Grandmother added a basket of food and gave me a reassuring hug. She always gave me special attention. Finally, she made an extra wrap of the big wool scarf around my neck. With a twinkle in her eye and a beaming smile, she waved to us. Her last words to me before our departure were, “Keep warm, takoja.”

It was mid-afternoon when grandfather spoke gently to our little ponies. They eagerly responded to his command and we left as the people cheered. The little ponies seemed to sense there was something festive about this trip. They nodded their heads and quickened their pace in the glistening snow. It was as if they were dancing as the jingle of the chains kept in time with their trotting hooves. I, too, was caught up with the excitement of the moment. The beautiful landscape made me feel like we were soaring in the clouds. Only the slight swishing sound of the sleigh runners told us we were on solid ground.

When we finally arrived at the little church; the glowing red sun was just beginning to touch the western horizon. There was a group of parishioners eagerly awaiting our arrival. The men were dressed in sheepskin coats, which were popular in those days. The women covered themselves with warm woolen shawls. The local committee began unloading the boxes.

A distinguished elder opened the door and cordially bade us to come in. The place was packed with Indian families and all had smiling faces. A grandmother came over and helped me remove my wraps. She invited me to open my hands to the big potbellied stove in the center of the room. Then she had me sit next to her in the front of the church. She knew I was being reared by my grandparents and wanted to make sure I was given proper attention, as is our Lakota tradition. The church bell rang and echoed through the hills to announce the beginning of the evening’s service.

Grandfather taught that in the Lakota way we are always to express gratitude (wopila) for gifts.

There was a pleasant fragrance from a freshly cut cedar Christmas tree and also from some of the boughs, which were made into beautiful wreaths. These decorations were artistically displayed on the interior walls of the sanctuary. There was also the sweet smell of fresh apples, as many boxes of the fruit were stacked near the tree. At regular intervals, one of the local elders would stoke up the stove while another man pumped up the Coleman gas lanterns, which were suspended from the ceiling. In those days, none of our Lakota churches had electricity.

Then there was a visit from a fat man dressed in a red suit. English speaking people call him Santa Claus, but Lakotas call him Waziya or the Northerner. This one needed an interpreter to convey his greeting in the Lakota language. He also had a keen sense of humor and kept the congregation shaking with laughter. Strangely, he wore a long white beard and displayed a pink face, but he had brown hands like a Lakota.

The excitement rose to a momentous crescendo when it was time to distribute the gifts. Names on the tags were read aloud by committee members and the packages were delivered to the designated recipients. Seeing a little girl clutching a doll tightly with her dark eyes shining brightly and wearing a big smile was a joy to behold for a little boy like me. I had already received my gifts at our Porcupine church. I saw a boy wearing a stocking cap that matched his mittens he was putting on. He too had a big smile on his face. There was something like electricity in the air, especially for the little ones. Everyone was happy!

The grandmother who made me sit next to her brought me a box that contained a beautiful hand-knit sweater. She asked me to try it on. It fit perfectly! She smiled and gave me a big hug. Grandfather taught that in the Lakota way we are always to express gratitude (wopila) for gifts. I shyly extended my hand and politely said, “Thank you grandmother. You are a very kind woman.” I forgot to ask if she had knitted the sweater for me. Other grandmothers also brought me gifts.

When this distribution was completed, an elder got up and instructed us to remain in our seats. Women, almost like magic, produced dishes and utensils that had been wrapped in cloths. From the doorway men brought in pots of food that had been kept warm on cooking fires on the church grounds. Grandfather was asked to offer the blessing. Amid the clatter of dishes and the laughter of children a great feast was enjoyed. At the conclusion of the meal, the elder announced there would be a Christmas dinner the following noon.

The grandmother helped with my wraps and instructed grandfather to follow her family in our sleigh. They had a spare bed where we could spend the night. The horses were fed and watered. I brought in our spare bedding in case we needed additional warmth during the long, cold night. A cast iron wood stove provided all the heat we needed and we slept like logs.

We ate a leisurely breakfast over cups of strong, black coffee, which was grandfather’s favorite pleasure. Our horses were properly cared for as they were always given first priority. Grandfather spoke to them affectionately, like people, in the Lakota language. They seemed to understand. After all, they were Indian ponies! I enjoyed those special moments when grandfather spoke to the animals in this fashion.

Just before noon we headed back to the church. A crowd of people was gathered there. An elder greeted us and showed us to our seats on the platform where a table was set for special guests, including a shy little boy. After a few speeches by members of the local committee, an announcement was made by a woman about the distribution of the food. There was a brief service of devotion and a prayer. The feasting began. The food was delicious and plentiful. Two lard pails were filled with extra food for grandfather and me to take home. The Lakotas call it wateca. It was a happy time for the humble folk who came together as a people of God to express their gratitude. When the feast was concluded, a final hymn was sung and grandfather gave the closing prayer. Many came to clasp our hands and grandmothers embraced me tenderly.

It was past noon when we finally left in our sleigh. I was cozy and warm wearing my new sweater under my coat. Grandfather carefully tucked me under our lap robe again. I observed our little ponies and there seemed to be just a hint of playfulness in their manner. It was almost as if they too were caught up in the festivities of the previous night. My grandfather chuckled as he spoke to them. They resumed their prancing in the sparkling snow. I called the ponies by name. Then I repeated what the children from the day school said during the evening program at our church. I shouted in English, “Merry Christmas!” Grandfather laughed louder and the ponies danced harder.

Editorís Note: Sidney H. Byrd followed in his grandfather’s footsteps and served the Presbyterian church. He died in 2016 at age 97. This story is revised from the November/December 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Stories Beneath the Stones

By Paul Higbee

Black Hills National Cemetery near Sturgis is the largest national cemetery in South Dakota. Photo by Buck Lovell.

Seventy years ago, sailor Daniel Baughman sent a letter home to his family and it has never been opened. Baughman, who was serving on a submarine during World War II, presumably wrote another of his typically upbeat letters. He was safe. Don’t worry.

Military personnel arrived at the sailor’s house ahead of the letter. He was lost at sea, they said. He wouldn’t be coming home. Later, the postman delivered the letter.

Only the family knows why the letter was never unsealed.

Maybe the pain of reading the young sailor’s optimistic words while knowing his true fate simply felt overwhelming. Or maybe preserving an object as he last saw it, un-torn, brought comfort and froze an earlier moment in time. Whatever the case, the letter is a personal memorial to one soldier, and there are hundreds more across the state in the form of carefully kept letters, photos and dog tags. Wherever the American military has engaged in combat or peacekeeping the past 120 years, South Dakotans have served — sometimes in numbers that lead all other states per capita.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs provides the stark white gravestones emblematic of national cemeteries. Photo by Ryan Clayton.

Public memorials have been constructed in many South Dakota towns, including the state capitol grounds in Pierre where life-size statues represent all branches of the military. Thousands of grateful people will visit those locations to remember fallen and surviving soldiers this Veterans Day, and many will also gather in western South Dakota’s five national cemeteries. Most veterans laid to rest in those cemeteries were not combat casualties. Most left the service, entered professions, raised families and lived many more years as former soldiers than enlisted soldiers.

But there’s something powerful about committing a deceased family member back to the ranks of the military, back to the beautiful straight lines and uniformity that mark national cemeteries, back to military precision.

Visitors to our national cemeteries might wonder how western South Dakota got five when there are entire states with none. Our state’s impressive per capita enlistment rate hardly seems to justify five national cemeteries in a state with fewer than a million residents.

South Dakota’s frontier military history, along with astute national politicians and Native people who seized a 2006 ruling that allows tribal governments to establish national cemeteries, all contribute to the state’s surprising number. Yet visitors to any of the five might simply conclude that beautiful landscapes, starry black skies far from urban lights and an overall sense of tranquility make West River South Dakota an unparalleled location for memorial grounds.

The national cemetery movement took root during the Civil War. Proponents believed that the federal government owed deceased soldiers a place of eternal rest. In 1862, the war’s second year, Congress authorized President Abraham Lincoln to set aside lands for burials for Union veterans. Tragically, because the war was so horrific, these cemeteries quickly grew to great size. In the East they became prominent landscape features, instantly recognizable.

No part of the federal bureaucracy was more eloquently defined than national cemeteries, thanks to language President Lincoln used in November of 1863 when he dedicated the burial grounds at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s description of hallowed ground consecrated by the blood of soldiers, living and dead, still resonates — as does his call for Americans who visit to”resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” Inscriptions of the Gettysburg Address are standard features of national cemetery designs.

Only a few burials have occurred at a new 18-acre cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation near Kyle.

South Dakota’s biggest, Black Hills National Cemetery, sits at the eastern edge of the Hills near Sturgis. It turns 70 years old in 2018 and continues to expand, with more than 650 burials annually. Views combine the dark ridge of the Black Hills, rugged foothills and Bear Butte rising to the east. U.S. Senator Francis Case, who led the way to secure the cemetery and was himself a World War I veteran, is buried there.

Two national cemeteries categorized as historic, no longer open to burials, are at Hot Springs — longtime site of state and federal medical and residential services for veterans — and at Fort Meade outside Sturgis. Veterans as far back as the Civil War and Army campaigns against American Indians were laid to rest at the two historic graveyards. Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Charles L. Russell is buried at Hot Springs. The New York state soldier was recognized for gallantry during the bloody battle of Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia, and later he headed west.

By contrast the two newest national cemeteries in the state are on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations. Sicangu Akicita Owicahe Veterans Cemetery (Rosebud) and Akicita Owicahe Lakota Freedom Veterans Cemetery (Pine Ridge) came about after the U.S. Veterans Administration opened its cemetery grants to tribal governments. The VA recognized that Native people have long enlisted in numbers exceeding the national average, and that many reservations in the West are a long drive from other VA cemeteries. Rosebud’s tribal government was the first to apply, won a $7 million grant, and opened its cemetery in 2013. The grant was the first of its kind awarded to a sovereign tribal nation and resulted in a unique, turtle-shaped cemetery layout. Turtles, in Lakota tradition, represent longevity and fortitude.

Pine Ridge wasn’t far behind its neighbor reservation, and its national cemetery occupying 18 acres opened in 2014 east of Kyle. Both reservation cemeteries honor those interred as United States soldiers and Lakota warriors. United States, tribal and POW/MIA flags fly in the prairie winds.

A handful of national cemeteries operate under the auspices of the Army (Arlington outside Washington, D.C., for example) or National Park Service (Custer National Cemetery at Little Bighorn Battlefield in our region). But most, including all five in South Dakota, are part of the VA’s National Cemetery Administration.

About the same time the National Cemetery Administration decided to support new reservation burial grounds, its leaders began thinking about what they call”stories beneath the stones,” some of them along the lines of the submariner’s unopened letter. Or, just as important, stories about what veterans who survived their service did with the rest of their lives.

The NCA selected three universities nationally to research those stories, including Black Hills State University in Spearfish.”This is a phenomenal way for our students to look at big national history through intimate, local stories,” says Kelly Kirk, a history instructor at BHSU and the project’s coordinator. Much of the initial research was done this past summer.”Once the community realized we were doing veteran research, they reached out to undergraduates,” Kirk says.

The concept of national cemeteries came during the Civil War. Veterans of that conflict are buried at Fort Meade. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

Student researcher Sidney May appreciated”the incredible connections I was able to make with people,” and the details families shared. She emailed back and forth with the Huntsville, Alabama family of Andy Andrews — and learned he earned his wings as an Air Force jet pilot before age 18, flew in Korea, and built a distinguished military resume that made him eligible for interment at Arlington National Cemetery had his family wished it. Red Pesek’s family told May that he fought German troops in Europe and also read Mein Kampf to better understand his enemy. Andrews and Pesek are buried at Black Hills National Cemetery.

Recent graduate Courtney Buck met a woman with an unusual set of World War II letters written by her parents, Patrick and Shirley O’Leary, when Patrick was stationed in Europe. Shirley kept not only Patrick’s letters but also her own, so that”we were able to see directly into the world of a soldier and his family statewide,” Buck says.”These letters are very rare because it’s hard to find someone who copied their letters before they were sent overseas.” The O’Learys are interred at Black Hills National Cemetery, and their story led Buck to the story of Daniel Baughman, the submariner lost at sea who wrote the never-opened letter. He was Shirley’s brother.

Buck also delved into the past of John Bear King. Buried at Black Hills National Cemetery, he was a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who served as a World War II code talker. She was struck by a historic irony.”John Bear King was able to use his native language of Lakota to pass on messages and information from their reconnaissance missions that the Japanese were unable to decode,” Buck says.”At one time the United States government tried to wipe out the Native American languages, then in World War II they were using it to their advantage, and it became a crucial part of communication.”

Another BHSU student, Katie Haigh, researched 19th century veterans whom no one alive remembers, relying primarily on newspaper archives. She studied the stories of two Medal of Honor recipients laid to rest at Fort Meade National Cemetery. Albert Knaak was a long-serving ordnance sergeant when he died at the fort in 1897, and it appears he never told anyone in South Dakota that he won the prestigious medal for actions in Arizona Territory. His grave marker made no mention of the honor, and the fact was buried with him for 79 years, until a study during the United States Bicentennial revealed the truth. Abram Brant was all set to receive his Medal of Honor at Fort Meade in 1878, two years after he risked his life carrying water for fellow soldiers at Little Bighorn. The night before the ceremony, apparently while engaged in drunken tomfoolery, he accidentally shot himself and died.

Less dramatic but just as significant, Kirk says, are stories that explain why men or women entered a certain branch of the service, where their enlistment took them, what brought them back to South Dakota and how their experiences shaped their post-military careers. About 25 students are conducting research, and what they discover will be made public in online documents and as part of materials prepared for school use.

Whether inspirational, ironic or profoundly sad, the soldiers’ stories add power to the already poignant sight of white markers gleaming under wide Dakota skies in five national cemeteries.

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.