Posted on September 6, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Man Who Saved the Buffalo

By Steve Nelson

The buffalo that roam Custer State Park today can trace their lineage to the five calves that Fred Dupree and his ranch hands captured in 1883. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

Many people have heard of Scotty Philip’s role in saving the buffalo: how the herd he built up on his central South Dakota ranch provided the seed stock for the majority of the buffalo being raised today. Not so many people know that if it hadn’t been for Frederick Dupree there might not have been any buffalo for Philip to save.

In a sense, I began this article years ago, when I first heard of Fred Dupree. I didn’t get far on my research until the funeral for Evie Nystrom, of Pierre, in 2003. Evie had originally come from Dupree’s country, the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. At lunch following the funeral, I was telling the folks sitting at my table how I had tried, without success, to locate Fred’s grave.

“That’s easy,” said Kathy Fisher, one of Evie’s young nieces.”He’s buried on our ranch.” She and her husband, Darrin, work her father’s land about 30 miles south of Eagle Butte. The cemetery where Fred and most of his family are buried is a half-mile from their home.

“We have buffalo on our ranch that are probably descendants of the Dupree herd,” chimed in Karen Hump, who with her husband, Dave, raise 300 head of buffalo on their Cheyenne River Reservation ranch. Kathy and Karen are sisters. Dave is a great-grandson of Chief Hump.

With that, this old writer’s curiosity was sparked, and I was off to Grand River country.

Frederick Dupree was born in 1818 in the village of Longueuil, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River opposite Montreal. (At various times, Frederick’s surname was spelled Dupuis, Dupree, DuPriest, Dupri and Dupree. Dupree is the spelling on his tombstone.)

As a young man he made his way to Kaskaskia, Illinois, on the Mississippi River below St. Louis. Kaskaskia was home to a large number of French-speaking settlers, like Dupree, and many of them were involved with the booming fur trade whose hub was St. Louis. Fred probably signed on as an engagee, a laborer, working on the boats and trading posts that tapped the rich fur resources of the upper Missouri basin.

Fred Dupree.

When Lewis and Clark first passed through this region in 1804 they reported herds of buffalo that stretched across the plains as far as the eye could see. In the 1840s, still, Captain Grant Marsh would tell of having to wait as long as a day while herds crossed the Missouri River in front of his steamboat. This resource, which once seemed limitless, was not. Buffalo fur was in demand back east and in Europe, and buffalo tongues were considered a delicacy. Indian and white hunters harvested animals by the hundreds of thousands, year after year, and the result was predictable.

We can place Fred Dupree at Fort Pierre in 1838, working as an engagee at the trading post owned by Pierre Choteau & Company. Although the trade in buffalo pelts would go on at the post for many years, steadily diminishing numbers of animals meant the peak was past by the time he arrived. A military survey locates Dupree trading buffalo hides at the mouth of the Cheyenne River in 1855, but he was also getting established in the region’s next big business: raising cattle.

Frederick Dupree called many places home during his ranching years, but his main camp was about 35 miles southwest of Eagle Butte, along the Cheyenne River near today’s Carlin Bridge. Frederick and his wife, Mary Ann Good Elk Woman, a Minneconjou, raised 10 children, nine of theirs and a son from her previous marriage. As each of the children married, a small log house with a dirt floor would be built next to the main house.

There were often a dozen or so tipis near the camp, housing the relatives of Mary Ann and others who happened by. Fred was a friendly, sociable sort. Visitors were always welcome at the Dupree camp, and many stayed for several days; they were given food and lodging and friendship.

Dupree spoke French, Lakota and English, sometimes all three in a single sentence. No one is sure if he could read or write, but he managed quite well regardless. At one point the Black Hills Daily Times estimated Fred’s worth at near $1 million, though it allowed this figure could be,”somewhat overstretched.”

Dupree’s generosity and wealth can be gauged from the account of his daughter’s wedding, as reported in a Pierre newspaper:”At age 17, daughter Marcella married Douglas Carlin, a non-Indian who was the issue clerk at the Cheyenne Agency. Their wedding at Cherry Creek on August 27, 1887, was a major social event at the time. The groom was either the grandson or grandnephew of a governor of Illinois Territory and a nephew of a U.S. Army colonel.”

Douglas and Marcella’s wedding was attended by hundreds of Native American and white friends of the family, including members of the Pierre City Council. Both traditional and civic rites were performed. (Marcella’s ceremonial dress can be seen in the Indian Museum of North America, at the Crazy Horse Memorial.) Fred gave the bride and groom 500 head of cattle and 50 ponies to get them started in life, and the celebration was commensurate with such a gift. For most guests the festivities lasted three days. Others lingered for a week or more, consuming two barrels of whiskey and another of wine.

Fred Dupree had been in Dakota nearly 40 years by that time. He had prospered, but Dupree had only to look at Mary Ann’s relatives to see that his affluence came with a price. In years past, the buffalo supported the plains Indians’ very existence, providing them food, clothing and shelter. With the animals fast disappearing, those who depended on them were suffering, and Dupree himself bore some measure of responsibility. His trading company and others had shipped pelts by the million, which encouraged a level of hunting that couldn’t be sustained, and his cattle roamed over the ranges that once were home to vast buffalo herds. Dupree must have realized their extinction was inevitable.

In 1883, Dupree and his ranch hands set out to capture some buffalo on the prairie. Once a small herd was located — reports vary as to the exact location, but it was probably near the Grand River — the party camped nearby. How they managed the capture is unclear. Some accounts say they grabbed the animals as they slept. Others surmise that the hunters built a corral or holding area, drove the animals into it, then cut the ones they wanted away from the rest. However it was done, five buffalo calves were caught. From that modest beginning, the Dupree buffalo”herd” grew to almost 60 head.

Unbeknownst to each other, the man who would carry Dupree’s work forward was already living in the area. James ‘Scotty’ Philip was born in Kansas, one of three brothers, the others being George, a Hays City merchant, and Alex, the foremost cattleman in that state. Scotty left his brothers for Dakota Territory in 1875, drawn by dreams of finding gold in the Black Hills. When that didn’t pan out — Philip was caught by the Army and sent on his way because the Hills were still Indian territory at that time — he started hauling freight and then scouted for General Crook before following his brother into the cattle business. By the turn of the century Philip was a bona fide cattle baron, running 20,000 head on his West River spread.

Philip’s attitude toward the buffalo, like Dupree’s, was influenced by his Lakota wife, Sally. When Frederick Dupree passed away in 1898, Philip bought his buffalo. He placed the animals on a riverside ranch, just north of Fort Pierre, where they thrived. By 1911, when Philip died suddenly, the herd numbered almost 900 animals. No buyer was willing or able to take the whole herd, so it was dispersed. Among the buyers was the state of South Dakota, which placed 36 buffalo in the newly established Custer State Park. That herd, in turn, was used to stock other parks and refuges around the country. When ranchers like Roy Houck got back into the buffalo-raising business during the 1960s, and Ted Turner followed in the 1990s, they did so with animals that descended from Philip’s herd.

Frederick Dupree’s final resting place is much the same as when he arrived. Overhead, the sky goes on forever in every direction; underfoot, the gently rolling hills are covered with a carpet of grass. And thanks to him, there are still buffalo to roam upon it as they did years ago.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2007 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Missing Amidons

By John Andrews

Editor’s Note: Sioux Falls historian Bruce Blake died in February of 2017. This story is revised from the November/December 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

High atop a bluff along busy Cliff Avenue in northern Sioux Falls stands the Pioneer Memorial, a tall quartzite obelisk built to honor the area’s first homesteaders: settlers who trickled onto the tallgrass prairie along the Big Sioux River starting in the 1850s. Visit the monument today and you can see 150 years of progress in every direction. Plumes of steam shoot incessantly from the stacks of the John Morrell meat packing plant at the base of the hill. Handsome pink quartzite buildings that comprise the state penitentiary sit to the west. Cars whiz past on Cliff and Interstate 229 just a bit farther east.

A century and a half ago this was a quiet hayfield, and no more than a few hundred people lived in Minnehaha County. It’s where Judge Joseph B. Amidon and his son Willie were working on Aug. 25, 1862 when gunshots pierced the still summer day’s air. The judge and his son were found dead nearby the next day. It was quickly deduced that Indians killed the Amidons, and they were laid to rest. But anyone wishing to pay respects will have no luck finding them in any local cemetery. The Amidons have gone missing.

Mid-afternoon light floods the sunroom at Bruce Blake’s home in the McKennan Park Historic District of Sioux Falls. Blake sits at a table paging through his new book, Twelve Thousand Years of Human History, the culmination of his decades-long passion of placing historic markers around Minnehaha County. That’s how Blake first learned about the Amidons, and became so intrigued that he’s spent nearly 25 years trying to find them.

Blake has long been interested in the history of his adopted hometown. Born in Superior, Wisconsin, he moved to Sioux Falls with his family in 1945. He earned a law degree from the University of South Dakota in 1958 and spent nearly 40 years practicing law in Sioux Falls. He joined the Minnehaha County Historical Society in 1962 and in 1988 created its historical marker program. Since then, Blake has raised over $350,000 to erect over 200 historical markers around the county.

He placed the original marker on the site of the Amidon murders in 1991. The story of their venture to Dakota and their tragic deaths came together through documents Blake obtained from Amidon descendants scattered around the country. Amidon was born in Hartford, Connecticut on Sept. 29, 1800. He married Emma Morse in Vermont on Christmas Day in the late 1820s. They had 10 children, but only four survived to adulthood.

Emma Amidon died sometime in the early 1850s, and Joseph and his two youngest children — William and Eliza — moved to St. Paul, Minn. Amidon married Mahala St. John Drake there in 1855. The Amidons moved to the fledgling village of Sioux Falls in the fall of 1858 and received an inauspicious welcome. On their first night in Dakota, the Indian warrior Inkpaduta allegedly stole two horses that Amidon had stabled in town.

Amidon worked as a stonecutter, and he built a small quartzite house for his family on the left bank of the Big Sioux River near today’s Fawick Park. When Minnehaha County was organized in 1862, the Dakota Territorial Legislature approved Gov. William Jayne’s nomination of Amidon to be a probate judge, treasurer and commissioner.

On the morning of Aug. 25, 1862, Amidon and his son William left their home to cut hay on William’s homestead claim about a mile north. Mahala packed their dinner pails since they expected to be gone all day. They gathered their cart and oxen and departed. It was the last time anyone saw them alive.

Mahala grew worried as day turned into night and the men still hadn’t returned. To help ensure the safety of settlers, the federal government had stationed a detachment of federal troops in Sioux Falls, along with men from Company A of the Dakota Cavalry. At 10 p.m. Mahala ran to the soldiers’ encampment about a quarter of a mile away and begged the men to form a search party.

The men immediately suspected an Indian attack and did not want to get caught in a night ambush. Several soldiers proceeded cautiously to the Amidon claim. When they arrived they found the oxen tied in a shed, the wagon and the empty dinner pails. They returned to headquarters and resolved to continue the search at first light.

A few soldiers accompanied Mahala home and stood guard outside through the night. Mrs. Amidon paced her floor until sunrise, when the soldiers resumed their search. Shortly after the party disappeared over the bluff, a single rider returned to tell Mahala they had found her husband and stepson lying dead in a cornfield.

It’s believed that as the Amidons worked late in the afternoon, William noticed a large flock of blackbirds in his cornfield. Armed with his shotgun, he intended to fire a few shots to scare them away. But as he approached he stumbled upon an Indian war party obscured in the corn, planning an ambush on the city during the night or at dawn. With their position discovered, the Indians shot William repeatedly with arrows. When his body was found the next morning it had nearly a dozen wounds. William had removed several arrows and placed them beside his body before he died.

Amidon noticed his son’s absence and went to find him. He entered the cornfield almost exactly where William had, but didn’t get far enough to see his son’s body before he was shot in the chest, likely with his son’s shotgun. He was found with his right hand resting inside his vest, a common position according to surviving family members.

Two witnesses reportedly heard the fatal gunshots. Lt. James Bacon of Company A was fishing in the Big Sioux River, but thought the shots were from his men hunting ducks in a nearby slough. The Amidons’ neighbor, B.C. Fowler, heard the blasts and saw the birds take flight.”I wish Willie Amidon would not send the blackbirds down into my corn,” he later recalled saying to himself.

George Trumbo, a hired man working for another Amidon neighbor, placed the bodies in his wagon and brought them to the Amidon home. According to a note in the Amidon family Bible,”They received Christian burials August 27th.”

The Amidon murders marked a turning point in the settlement of Sioux Falls. When competing land companies arrived at the falls of the Big Sioux River in 1856 to stake out the town, they were treading on land that had been home to various Indian tribes for centuries. Mound builders lived in the area between 500 and 800 A.D. Evidence of their existence lies in several burial mounds along the river and in Sherman Park.

The Lakota moved into the region during the 18th century and in 1851 they signed the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, in which they ceded all land east of the Big Sioux River. That development lured speculators from St. Paul and Dubuque, Iowa, who considered the falls a prime location for a town site, provided they stayed on the east side of the river. Settlement opened on the other side following the Yankton Treaty of 1858, which ceded land between the Big Sioux and Missouri rivers.

But not all Lakota felt bound by the treaties, and their desire to retain their homeland led to several skirmishes. Medary, one of the first settlements in Brookings County, was abandoned in June 1858 following an Indian attack. A threat to Sioux Falls that year prompted city leaders to construct a sod fort for protection. Violence escalated especially in southwestern Minnesota in the early 1860s, as the federal government’s attention turned to fighting the Civil War.

John Renville and Joseph Laframboise, longtime area fur traders, believed members of White Lodge’s band had killed the Amidons. White Lodge was under orders from Dakota Chief Little Crow to drive settlers out of the Big Sioux River valley. The day after the murders, White Lodge’s Indians reappeared on the outskirts of town and fired upon the soldiers’ encampment. A detachment pursued the band but they escaped across the prairie.

That small scuffle was the only Indian attack upon the city of Sioux Falls. But word of the Sioux Uprising underway in Minnesota finally trickled into Dakota. The news, combined with the Amidon murders, led Gov. William Jayne to issue an evacuation order for Sioux Falls. Families packed what they could and departed for Yankton. The city on the falls was abandoned.

Mahala Amidon returned to St. Paul, where she grieved her loss.”I have felt alone in my great sorrow, and it seems to me sometimes greater than I can bear,” she wrote to Amidon’s daughter Martha in October 1862.”I am almost crushed to the earth. I have nothing to live for.

ìYour father always had so much pity for the Indians and used to give them so much and feed them too, and then to have them murder him without the least provocation. It is hard to feel it is right. If he had died by sickness, and I could have had the privilege of taking care of him, and talking with him, I believe I could bear it better. Why did they kill him? His death was no benefit to them. He was one of their best friends.

ìIt was the hardest thing for me to leave your father there. I can’t bear to think he lies in that desolate place, with no friend to even visit his grave.”

The Amidon graves were apparently unmarked, and through the decades their exact location became a mystery. Sioux Falls historians believed that the Amidons were buried beneath a mound near where they died. In 1927 the Minnehaha County Historical Society marked the location with a quartzite hitching post. Charles Lacey later gave the historical society the title to the 2-acre plot of land containing the supposed burial spot.

But Bruce Blake wanted a concrete answer. In 1991 he convinced the historical society to hire renowned archeologist L. Adrien Hannus from the Augustana College Archeology Lab to excavate the site.”I took a lot of flak from local historians for digging into that mound, but I wanted to find out,” Blake says.”Some people thought it was better to be a mystery, but I wanted to prove it. Why have the locals believing in something that really is not true?”

Archeologists extracted nine soil samples, four 1-meter-square pieces of earth and cut a trench 21 feet long. It revealed only trash discarded by local farmers for nearly a century.

Blake continued the search and found an account of the murders by Sgt. Jesse Watson, a member of Company A who reportedly accompanied George Trumbo to the scene of the crime. Watson said they collected the bodies and buried them in a cemetery on North Duluth Avenue.

Blake believes the cemetery was located near the intersection of Seventh Street and Duluth Avenue, today part of the Sioux Falls Cathedral Historic District, a neighborhood of 220 homes and other buildings constructed mostly in the late 1800s. Watson reported that the Amidons were buried next to Henry Masters, leader of the provisional government established before the creation of Dakota Territory in 1861. Masters had been the first resident of Sioux Falls to die in 1859.

But the Amidons apparently did not stay in that cemetery. Sometime before 1882, Amidon’s granddaughter Chloe Selleck Rider wrote a letter to Sioux Falls postmaster A.T. Fleetwood asking about her grandfather’s gravesite. Fleetwood referred her to Josiah Phillips, a founding father of Sioux Falls and the city’s first physician. Then he told her the bodies”were removed from their former graves to the cemetery here, the expense being borne by the citizens.”

There is no date on the postmaster’s reply, but in 1881 four men buried in the city’s military cemetery adjacent to the Amidon burial site were moved to Mount Pleasant, Sioux Falls’ oldest active cemetery.”I assumed that whoever did that would also have moved the Amidons,” he says.

Blake and Hannus located the military gravesites and conducted soil testing around them in an effort to find other graves. They came up empty, and Mount Pleasant records contain no mention of the Amidons.”That’s where the trail went cold,” Blake says.

So for now the search for the Amidons has reached a dead end. After nearly 25 years of sleuthing, Blake’s passion for the subject is as strong as ever. But at age 83 his energy is waning, and he’s ready to pass the torch.

The quest remains important, says Jay Vogt, director of the South Dakota State Historical Society.”The historical contributions of individuals are typically more notably associated with places connecting to their productive lives than with their graves,” Vogt says.”An individual’s accomplishments are generally far more important than his or her death. However, if nothing remains of an individual’s life, a gravesite can mean more than a family commemoration.”

Perhaps the answer lies in a faded slip of paper in someone’s attic, a misplaced cemetery record or a bundle of correspondence boxed away in the city’s archives. But until it surfaces, South Dakotans can honor the Amidons — and the hardy homesteaders who helped tame Dakota — atop that windswept hill on the edge of Sioux Falls.

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Frontier Phantoms

By Jerry Wilson

LeBeau began as a fur trading post in 1875. When the federal government opened reservation land across the river to catle grazing, LeBeau swelled to a cattle-shipping town of 500.

When the waters of Lake Oahe recede, bits of nearly forgotten history emerge. Among the settlements and towns consigned to watery graves by Missouri River dams is the notorious town of LeBeau — the town a gunfight killed. We climb into Tom Houck’s muddy Ford pickup truck at the ranch house west of Akaska, where four generations of his family have lived, for the 4-mile pasture trip back in time.

We bounce down a well-worn trail through the Houck ranch with Tom and his wife, JoAnn, cross the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad grade through a cut, and ford Swan Creek, where killdeer and yellowlegs clatter up from the creek bed and red winged blackbirds shriek warnings from nests amongst the reeds. In the narrow skirt of brushy trees along the water, a brown thrasher sings his inimitable song to his mate.

Back up on the rolling plain, western king birds dodge for insects, and a meadowlark’s seven-note song pierces the blue from a clump of grass. Overhead, an immature bald eagle circles, chased by a red-tailed hawk. We top a hill, and Lake Oahe spreads before us, a glossy sheen. We cross from ranch to Corps of Engineers land and roll downhill toward the river.

Houck brakes the pickup to a stop well above the shore. He points to a lone elm tree near the edge.”That’s where they planned to build the school,” he says.”They got the foundation laid, but then the town began to die. They never got it built.”

We climb out and walk toward the water’s edge.”When Oahe is full, the shore is 1,618 feet above sea level, up about here,” Houck says, his arm sweeping a strip of tall, dense weeds.”Now it’s 1,580 or so, down 35 feet.” We stroll past green depressions, ringed by scattered stones.”Those are the cellar holes of homes,” he says. He points north to a cut where locomotives rounded the bend and chugged along the river shore to cattle pens.

Tom Houck stands on the sidewalk of LeBeau’s First State Bank during a year of low water on the Missouri River.

JoAnn picks her way gingerly, watching for rattlesnakes. Ahead lay remnants of main street LeBeau. Wind-driven waves lap the shore, covering, then revealing foundation stones of the First State Bank. Red bricks from the long-gone factory at Akaska are strewn about the shore. A wide concrete sidewalk slopes toward the water and disappears.

LeBeau’s disappearing act began in 1909, at the ripe old age of 34.

Antoine LeBeau, of French and Lakota parentage, opened a fur-trading post on the Missouri’s eastern bank in 1875; within a decade the frontier town grew to 200. In 1904, the government opened the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux Reservations across the river for cattle grazing, and LeBeau’s future seemed secure. Cattlemen from Texas and elsewhere moved in, and in 1906 the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad arrived to haul the cows to market. Impromptu houses grew up the hill, swelling the town to 500 people.

Those were the glory years of LeBeau, 1906 to 1909. Glory years if you mean the Hotel LeBeau was heated by steam, that there were banks, cafes, general stores, doctors and lawyers, a newspaper, even a pair of churches and an opera house. Glory years if you mean that thousands of cattle grew fat on native grass, money flowed, saloons and gamblers prospered. At its peak, the Scotland-based Matador Land and Cattle Company fattened tens of thousands of steers on half a million acres of reservation land it leased from the federal government for 3.5 cents per acre. When steers were ready to travel east, cowboys drove them into giant holding pens on the west bank of the river and ferried them across on the Scotty Phillip.

LeBeau was not the kind of town where Murdo MacKenzie wanted to live, but it had been a good place to extend his cattle empire. MacKenzie could run the Matador from his mansion in Trinidad, Colorado, but he needed a manager in South Dakota. He sent David, his son.

Like many a rich man’s son, David, or Dode his friends called him, had a talent for spending his father’s money. And he had a penchant for drink. After an all-night binge, Dode MacKenzie and a drinking buddy, Ambrose Benoist, staggered into Phil DuFran’s Angel Bar the morning of Dec. 11, 1909 and ordered drinks. Nobody knows exactly what words passed between the pair and bartender Bud Stephens, but what is known is that MacKenzie crossed the street to Knoll’s hardware, picked up a .45 Colt revolver and a handful of .38 cartridges, loaded the gun and headed back across the street to confront Stephens. The bartender pulled out his own .44 and fired point blank at Dode MacKenzie’s chest.

Cattlemen conducted business by day in LeBeau, but they could grow rowdy inside the Angel Bar, where Bud Stephens killed Dode MacKenzie.

The trial was held in March of 1910, in the county seat town of Selby. The jury consisted mostly of farmers, who spared little love for big-time cattlemen and their hard-living cowpokes. The jurors bought Stephens’ claim of self-defense and found him innocent of murder or any other crime.

Dode MacKenzie may not have been popular with the men who rode the range, but he was a cowboy, like them. They blamed LeBeau for his death. The Matador moved its operation north, a blow to the town’s economy. And in September, six months after Stephens’ acquittal, LeBeau burned down. Nobody could say how the fire began, but volunteer firemen found their hoses cut. One of the few buildings to survive was Phil DuFran’s Angel Bar.

Perhaps LeBeau could have risen from the ashes, even as its foundation stones still rise on occasion from the Missouri. But other factors intervened. Pro-sodbuster President William Howard Taft had replaced the cattlemen’s friend, Theodore Roosevelt, in the White House. Homesteaders were flooding the territory, and cheap leases of Indian land were about to end. The drought of 1910 was breathing down their necks. The Minneapolis & St. Louis train even derailed east of town.

Ellsworth LeBeau grew up on the Cheyenne River Reservation in the 1950s, and later served as president of the tribal college in Eagle Butte. He inherited the stories of his ancestor’s town, and as a child visited LeBeau before the waters rose. All that remained even then, he says, was sidewalks and foundations and the remnants of cattle pens.

“Antoine was my great, great, great something on my father’s side,” Ellsworth said. In the early days, Antoine and a brother also cut wood at Four Bears, south of the Moreau River, to supply fuel for steamboats that docked at LeBeau. They were paid in guns, ammunition and clothing, Ellsworth said. Antoine helped organize Walworth County, and held county offices for years. In old age he crossed the river one last time, and is buried on the reservation.

In the town’s early days, Indians crossed the river for LeBeau’s Fourth of July parade and celebration, Ellsworth said.”The cowboys were a pretty rowdy bunch.”

Today, rowdy cowboys and others still view Bud Stephens’ .44 in the Walworth County Courthouse in Selby. Crumbling bricks from the short-lived town lie on mantels and stand as bookends in area homes. JoAnn Houck treasures the photographs she took of LeBeau’s remains in 1963, and again 40 years later when water was low. Across the Missouri on the Cheyenne River Reservation, cattle still graze. Birds still nest and feed and sing. But when the waters of Lake Oahe rise once more, LeBeau will recede again into the depths of memory.

Looking for Grandpa at LeBeau

By Tom Keller

My great-grandparents, Harry and Grace Keller, had stores in Egan and Flandreau around the turn of the century. Harry heard about the booming cattle-shipping town of LeBeau, and decided to start a store there.

I’d heard the stories of the long-gone town south of Mobridge since I was a kid.

When Dad had visited LeBeau in the low river year of 1952, the front step of Harry and Grace’s store was still there, with”H.E. Keller” carved in concrete.

Tom Keller found his grandfather’s name etched in the concrete of old LeBeau.

Last fall I decided to see LeBeau for myself. I got vague directions from Akaska, and met my folks on a Saturday morning. There’d been a little snow, and the last few miles of road were dirt. Half way in, my venerable Volvo hit a rock. I got out and watched oil pour from the damaged pan onto the ground. I trudged to the top of the next hill with my cell phone to arrange a tow. The folks waited in the car while I walked west, I hoped toward LeBeau.

The trail diverged into three options, and I had no idea where I was going. I reached the edge of Oahe, but found no LeBeau. No relics. No steps. No sunken town. I hiked up and down the shoreline, and finally gave it up; of course, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.

I was almost back to the disabled car when a Corps of Engineers pickup appeared on the horizon. The government man was there to protect the shore from looters. But he had already talked with my parents, and knew my intent. He’d been to LeBeau, of course, and didn’t recall the concrete steps I sought, but he volunteered to show me what was left of the town.

We found a horseshoe-shaped sidewalk, buckling from the bed of the receding lake. We found the imprint of the concrete manufacturer, but no front step of H.E. Keller’s general store. I took a few pictures, and we speculated about life in LeBeau. We had turned to go when my companion said,”Hey, what’s this?”

And there it was.

I was like a kid who’d followed a map to treasure in a secret cave. It was just a slab of century-old concrete, but it still clearly bore my grandfather’s name. I finished off my roll of film.

Back in Sioux Falls, I dropped off the film for developing. When I told the woman my name, she asked where my family was from. She was curious, because her name was Keller too.

“My dad’s family is from Huron,” I said,”but he’s an only child and his dad was an only son, so we don’t have a lot of relatives around. Where’s your family from?”

“Up by Mobridge,” she replied.

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

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Rekindling a Memory

By Paul Higbee

Writer Paul Higbee (left) toured the B-17 crash site with Harold and Greg Stone, who have used decades-old reports to pinpoint the spot on Rapid City’s east side where the bomber went down.

On a September day in 1943, a pair of 12-year-old boys set out on foot across Rapid Creek and into fields familiar to them, immediately east of Rapid City.

Although they knew Rapid Valley’s countryside, this was no routine hike. An airplane had crashed here the night before and they decided to investigate. Sure enough, the boys found smoldering remains–not big pieces of wings and fuselage but bits of debris blown across hundreds of feet. Surprised to find no one about, they picked souvenirs before encountering two military policemen who told them to leave. The MPs had been rerouting traffic along old Highway 40, which ran right through the crash site, and apparently weren’t expecting gawkers who hiked cross-country. The policemen didn’t confiscate the souvenirs and had no way of knowing they were chasing away the individual who would rekindle South Dakota’s memory of this tragedy seven decades later.

The crash, late on the evening of September 6, 1943, took the lives of all 10 Army Air Corps men aboard. They were flying a heavy four-propeller bomber, the mighty B-17 Flying Fortress, and were part of the 398th Bomb Group. Their peers in the 398th would shortly complete Rapid City Army Air Base training and make their way to England, serving under General Jimmy Doolittle in the Eighth Air Force, and pounding Nazi targets in 1944 and 1945.

The Army Air Corps quickly investigated the Rapid City crash and determined the crew had been well rested, the ground crew fully competent, and found no indication of in-flight mechanical failure. But the report noted that western South Dakota’s rugged terrain could present challenges. Rapid City, the investigators noted,”is practically surrounded by hills and the path of the airplane was over the hills located between the city and the Air Base.”

It’s likely that pilot Orville Prater, flying at night, lost sight of the base’s lights, obscured behind a ridge as he descended. Perhaps at that moment he pulled his plane up because he thought he was about to hit the ridge, or maybe he spotted radar towers on a hilltop and decided they were too close. Either way he pulled the B-17 almost straight up, went into a stall, and then dived.

“I would say he went up 200 feet before he fell off, directly right down on the nose,” witness Harry Rothermal told investigators. He added that he was the first on the scene.”I went down, parked within 500 feet of the crash. There was intense heat and bullets whizzing all around … there were no signs of life. Just total wreckage.”

Customers exiting a late movie at the Elks Theater, two and a half miles away, heard the explosion after impact.

Harold Stone, one of the boys who walked to the wreck the next day, heard nothing. He was at his family’s home on St. Joseph Street, between the Elks and accident site, when the B-17 crashed a few minutes after 11 p.m. Later, Harold’s older brother came home and reported what happened.

“That family sacrificed itself entirely for the war effort,” says Harold,”and just as much so as if he had died at Normandy.”

When Harold visited the crash site on a September morning 69 years later, he said time had stripped some details from his 1943 memories. The smell of the smoldering ruin — intense or waning? He can’t recall. His friend Chuck Coyle, the other boy to walk to the site, never forgot how each of the four propellers churned into the ground to form pits. Probably so, but Harold doesn’t remember that. And his souvenirs are long gone, perhaps tossed by his mother when he served in the Army during the Korean War.

But never faded or lost were Harold’s questions that stemmed from his 1943 visit. Who were the airmen? What went wrong? Most haunting is a question that can never be answered: What raced through the flyers’ minds, as they knew they were falling without enough altitude to pull out of the dive?

Later, as Harold discovered the degree to which Rapid City had forgotten the crash, a new question formed:”What if you were a family member, maybe a nephew or niece to one of those airmen, and you knew he died here, but you visited Rapid City and found no marker or record?” he asks.

Rapid City forgot in part because none of the flyers were local. Newspapers made only brief, passing reference to the accident — typical of coverage of such incidents in the middle of World War II, when every day brought casualty news. In fact, the crash happened during the very week that the United States and its Allies began the dramatic invasion of Italy.

By 1943 no one doubted that air power would prove central to the war’s outcome, much more so than anyone could have predicted just a few years before. The issue of Time magazine on newsstands the night of the crash optimistically noted that bombers”may decide the war before an Allied soldier sets foot on western European soil.” If that was the hope (although one that proved sadly naive) then the nation understood the need for swift preparation of military pilots and aircrews. Americans knew that training fatalities were as inevitable as combat deaths. In fact, the previous June a B-17 flew from Rapid City to a Badlands gunnery range, caught fire, and broke up in flight, killing all nine aboard. Also in June, three B-17s flying in formation over Miner County collided in flight, killing 11. Those planes had taken off from the Sioux City, Iowa, base, and the 11 fatalities make the crash the deadliest South Dakota aviation accident to this day. All totaled, there were 120 fatal B-17 accidents in the United States in 1943, claiming 789 lives. Most of the time crews were novices, working to rack up flight hours. By no means was the B-17 considered unusually dangerous. Small fighters had accident rates many times that of the B-17, but often just a single pilot was aboard when a fighter went down.

Time moved on, the war ended, and Harold grew up to fight another war. He came home to Rapid City and in 1953 started a successful furniture manufacturing enterprise, a company that evolved into Dakota Bison Furniture. At age 81, Harold is still found in the plant or on the showroom floor daily.

“I went down, parked within 500 feet of the crash. There was intense heat and bullets whizzing all around … there were no signs of life. Just total wreckage.”

The Rapid City crash wasn’t the only World War II aviation tragedy to touch Harold. In 1944, in Nebraska, his brother-in-law Earl Endres was badly burned in a B-26 accident that killed other fliers. A few years ago Harold learned that his brother-in-law’s accident was well documented online. He wondered whether a few mouse clicks would answer his questions about the Rapid City crash.

He found information, all right, but it took more than a few clicks. An initial Internet search was just the beginning of a two-year journey Harold and his son, Greg, have taken to bring the night of September 6, 1943, out of darkness.

“We learned there’s an industry called aviation archaeology,” says Greg, who runs Dakota Bison Furniture with his father.”Several years ago the government sold its old crash reports to private companies, and we started with one of those companies. I think it cost us $40 to buy the report, which was written within a week of the crash, and runs about nine pages.”

The report says the doomed B-17, Army 25226, was among several to take off that evening for night flight training. It left the runway at 8:06 with instructions to”fly locally” until midnight. But at 9:45 all planes were ordered by radio to return because of anticipated stormy weather. Apparently Army 25226 had flown a considerable distance because it wasn’t until 11:03 that it approached Rapid City from the southwest and received landing instructions. After that no further word was heard from the plane, but seven minutes after the instructions were given, says the report,”the Control Tower operator observed a brilliant flash of light which appeared to be an explosion and a crash,” a few miles distant. While bad weather was, indeed, on its way, it hadn’t hit yet and visibility was good.

The report includes photos of the crash site, almost certainly taken the same day Harold and Chuck visited. Best of all, though, is the list of names of those aboard. The airmen came to South Dakota from Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Orville Prater, the pilot, was a second lieutenant who had earned his wings just four months before at age 21. There were three other officers: copilot Walter Duma, navigator Steven Kosciow, and bombardier Bryant Grover. Everyone else’s rank was sergeant–engineer John McCarty, assistant engineer George Barton, radio operator Frank Heuser, assistant radio operator Thomas Cox, and gunners Robert Vanhatta and Paul Eisenhart.

Knowing the names after nearly seven decades represented a big step forward, although learning more about the men and perhaps even seeing photos of them proved labor intensive. A 1973 fire in St. Louis destroyed most of the individual military records Harold and Greg hoped to examine. But from the crash report they knew the fliers’ home counties. Then they contacted libraries in the county seats and asked for help finding obituaries. In most cases the librarians delivered.

For example, Harold and Greg learned copilot Duma of Cleveland was Harry and Katherine Duma’s only child.”That family sacrificed itself entirely for the war effort,” says Harold,”and just as much so as if he had died at Normandy.”

Harold and Greg also discovered that Sergeant Heuser of Chicago had a brother who learned of the crash while serving in England, and that Sergeant McCarty was older than most Army Air Corps aviators. McCarty, age 30, left behind a widow in Akron, Ohio.

Oddly enough, given Harold’s visit in 1943 and the report’s site photos, pinpointing the exact crash location has been difficult. New roads, tree belts growing and disappearing and industrial development changed Rapid Valley. Old Highway 40 is East Centre Street now, paralleling modern-day Highway 44, a stone’s throw away. With the site definitely pinpointed, Harold thinks, a nearby marker could be erected like one along Highway 34 in Miner County recalling that B-17 crash.

Harold hopes to find someone with a high quality metal detector because he believes plane fragments were buried on-site rather than hauled away. Hunting for buried plane parts would make Harold and Greg serious amateur aviation archaeologists, indeed. Still, even without that kind of search, the pair is reasonably certain they’ve found the ground where the plane hit. There’s no doubt that when they visit they’re at least standing within the debris field, thanks to an examination they did with a photo in the crash report. The black and white picture shows a line of hills and a building with a distinct, sharply slanted roof in the distance behind the debris. They found the building still standing and lined it up with the hills, but just in the nick of time. Soon after Harold and Greg got the report, the old building was torn down. The owner, of course, didn’t know its relevance to local aviation archaeology. By the time it was gone, Harold and Greg had taken their own photos matching site lines in the report’s photograph.

Speaking of photos, the librarians who found obituaries also found a few portraits of the airmen. There they are, smiling across the decades, in uniform. They knew when the photos were taken that the war might lead them to places of mortal danger in Europe, North Africa or the Pacific. Death in South Dakota would have crossed no one’s mind.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Doane’s Favorite Places

By Paul Higbee

Doane Robinson began his career in law, but eventually he became a poet, writer, publisher and state historian.

It’s an eight-minute walk in Pierre from Doane Robinson’s former home on Wynoka Street to the state capitol building, where he once had an office. Eight minutes, that is, if you walk with a sense of purpose.

And it is impossible to think of Doane Robinson ever moving without a sense of purpose. In the early days of South Dakota statehood he was South Dakota’s idea man, and he ranks among our most prolific writers. Usually men of letters leave behind books, and men with big ideas leave thinking that spurs others into action over time. Certainly Robinson’s legacy includes books and inspiration, but he also left South Dakota beautiful buildings at Gary, Pierre and Hisega, as well as a solid foundation for a department of state government. Oh yes … there’s also that sculpture of four presidential heads blasted from mountain granite near Keystone.

Robinson’s grandson, Will Doane Robinson, a retired teacher in Rapid City, remembers long walks along Wynoka and beyond with his grandfather in the 1930s.”A very, very nice man,” he describes him, and other neighborhood children concurred, often tagging along on walks. At the time they had no real idea of who their older friend was. Professionally Doane Robinson was a homesteader, teacher, lawyer, poet, editor and South Dakota’s first state historian. In his personal life he was a devoted family man who was widowed young. In his spare time he sometimes tinkered trying to invent a perpetual motion machine.

Born into a farm family near Sparta, Wisconsin in 1856, he was christened Jonah LeRoy Robinson. Two childhood incidents impacted the rest of his life. First, younger sister Sadie couldn’t pronounce Jonah and called him Donah, later shortened to Doane. He answered to the name the rest of his life. The second event, says great-granddaughter Vicki McLain, was much darker. Typhoid fever hit his family. No one died, but the family struggled for years to pay medical bills, keeping them in poverty for most of Doane’s childhood. Forever after, Robinson believed debt had to be avoided if at all possible.

He possessed an amazing memory, claiming he could recall incidents that happened before age 2, and maybe even before age 1. Robinson seemed strangely attuned to history-in-the-making. He remembered his parents discussing news that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the month after Robinson turned 4. His parents were Democrats and he recalled they were unimpressed with the Republican Lincoln. Later he heard talk of distant fighting as the Civil War played out, and Robinson remembered news of Lincoln’s assassination — his mother worried Democrats would take the blame. Much later Robinson decided”in some ways the truth about Lincoln had been withheld from me,” and he committed himself to reading political theory. He became a Republican but, he wrote,”will give my support to another party any minute I am convinced that the sum of happiness will be enhanced by it.”

During his teens he worked hard on the farm, was able to run the place on his own in the event of family emergencies, and he worked equally hard in school where he honed his love of words. In his early 20s he taught school, homesteaded near his brother’s place in Minnesota, and began studying law at the University of Wisconsin. All the while he fretted about Jennie Austin, a Wisconsin girl he greatly admired and found beautiful, but who was a teenager too young for him.

Robinson fell in love with a spot he saw while traveling on the Crouch railroad line. He named it Hisega, and soon build a lodge there featuring a wraparound porch. Photo by Paul Horsted

Of course, Jennie matured. She became a teacher herself. The two decided their affection was mutual in 1883, the same year Robinson got serious about finding legal work in western Minnesota or across the border in Dakota Territory. He hadn’t earned a law degree but had learned enough to feel confident he could offer quality legal services — not an unusual course of action at the time. He considered setting himself up in Ortonville, Minnesota, but didn’t like the town. Then he visited Watertown”and made up my mind I had found the place I was looking for.” He opened a Watertown law office in September of 1883.

Months later he bought one-third interest in the Watertown Daily Courier.”The law is a jealous mistress and must come before anything else in your life,” Robinson would one day counsel his son Will, an attorney. By buying into the newspaper and, in fact, becoming its editor, Robinson demonstrated an unwillingness to focus on the law alone. The result, he decided later, was failing to be”much shucks” as a lawyer.

In December of 1884, Watertown’s young lawyer and editor rode the rails to Wisconsin to marry Jennie. Then the couple came home to Dakota Territory. Son Harry was born in 1888, and Will came along in 1893. In those years Robinson learned he could supplement his family’s income nicely by selling poetry to magazines across the country. He actually attracted a national following. The Boston Herald noted that”perhaps no one of the younger poets of America has so quickly established himself in the hearts of the common people.” Robinson came to know South Dakota in part because of requests to travel from town to town and recite his verse. His dialect poetry, recreating the speech patterns of the state’s immigrants, often for humorous effect, was well received. He also toured other Midwestern states. Even after he became state historian, Robinson remained a poet, and found he could sometimes combine verse and historical interpretation. An example is this poem about W.H.H. Beadle, Civil War veteran and pioneering educator who championed South Dakota School and Public Lands for generating public education funds:

Man of vision! Man of mission,

Patriot, soldier, scholar, seer.

Man of action! Man of purpose! Duty led

in thy career.

Forward looking; self forgetting; unwaged

drudge for learning’s gain;

South Dakota reaps the harvest planted by

thy care and pain.

In 1894 he moved his young family to Gary, a railroad town in Deuel County, close to the Minnesota border. He bought the Gary Interstate newspaper.”Getting out an edition of the eight page newspaper was frequently a family affair,” son Will recalled in an excellent little biography of his father.”The press was an old Washington hand press.” Jennie positioned the newsprint in the press and Doane swung a big lever to apply pressure and make the imprint. At age 6 Harry removed the finished newspapers from the press and stacked them.

After the town of Gary lost its status as the seat of Deuel County, Robinson urged the state to locate the School for the Blind there. Today the campus is the Buffalo Ridge Resort and Business Center.

The year after the Robinsons moved to town, Gary lost county seat status to Clear Lake. But the new newspaper publisher had an idea: Why not lobby the state to build a School for the Blind on the former courthouse grounds? Robinson did some research and determined it cost South Dakota $2,000 per student, every year, to send children with visual impairments to out-of-state institutions, in the era when it was assumed students with disabilities learned best in segregated environments. Robinson’s idea won statewide support and ground was broken in 1899. Students arrived in 1900. Vicki McLain thinks perhaps there was more to her great-grandfather’s passion for the school than commerce for Gary.”When he was studying law in Wisconsin,” she says,”he temporarily lost sight, apparently because of severe eye strain. He recovered but never took eyesight for granted.”

Over the next several years the school evolved into a pretty campus a couple blocks north of Gary’s business district. Services moved to Aberdeen in 1961 and the campus fell into disrepair, but more than 40 years later Joe Kolbach completed a beautiful restoration, creating Buffalo Ridge Resort.

Even as he was publishing the Interstate and advocating for the school, Robinson nursed a pet project, one he believed in so much that he was willing to sometimes serve as an”unpaid drudge,” to borrow a phrase from his Beadle poem. The idea was a magazine, the Monthly South Dakotan, that would heavily emphasize the young state’s history. Issues were produced over a period of several years and wherever Robinson moved, the magazine went with him. The Robinsons moved to Yankton where he bought controlling interest in a morning paper, The Gazette, and then it was on to Sioux Falls where Robinson hoped to find more ad revenue for the Monthly South Dakotan. Next the family made Aberdeen its home, and Robinson published the Brown County Review.

ìHe had a thousand irons in the fire,” Will wrote. As for the Monthly South Dakotan, he added, it claimed a loyal readership willing to pay for subscriptions, but ad revenue constantly fell short. The publication folded in 1904, and by that time Robinson’s life had changed drastically. In 1901 he was selected Secretary of the new South Dakota State Historical Society, a branch of state government. Now he had the opportunity to publish articles of the sort he prepared for the Monthly South Dakotan, but at state expense. After a few years in the position his income would allow for a very comfortable lifestyle. It should have been a happy time, but in 1902 Jennie died of acute bronchitis. Who else but Robinson, with his head for historical dates, would note that Jennie died 19 years to the day after she and Doane decided they were in love?

Robinson advocated for the stately Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Pierre after World War I. It once housed the state’s history museum. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

ìOh, my dear boys,” Robinson later wrote his sons,”I can never tell you how dearly I loved your Mama, not only those nineteen years, but long before, and every moment since.” He was 45 and never remarried.

Sadie, the sister who gave him his name, moved in to help run the household. The family relocated to Pierre and Robinson arranged for construction of the home on Wynoka Street. Future governor and U.S. senator Peter Norbeck would be a neighbor on Wynoka, and became Robinson’s good friend and ally.

Robinson perhaps occasionally lost himself in work as he grieved Jennie. He helped plan the state capitol building and wrote 1905’s Brief History of South Dakota, more commonly called”the little red history book,” which for decades was the standard volume schools used to teach about South Dakota’s past. Most important, though, Robinson got the State Historical Society off to a strong start, publishing the first volumes of South Dakota Historical Collections, the biennial series of papers that most every South Dakota historian has referenced.

ìHis was the foundation we’ve built on ever since,” says Jay Vogt, current State Historical Society director.”In his time, he was much more hands-on than we’re able to be, doing most of the research and writing himself.”

Indeed, when something big developed, such as the discovery of the Verendrye plate that proved French trappers passed through the state in 1743, Robinson jumped into action and researched, wrote and edited until he had 300 pages for Historical Collections. He also gathered South Dakota newspapers and indexed them, along with government documents, and he took special interest in seeking out American Indian historical perspectives. He considered it a great honor, before his state historian years, to have interviewed Hunkpapa leader Gall, one of the victors at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

While no one ever questioned Robinson’s work ethic, he has sometimes been criticized for not being an academically trained historian.

ìBut you have to put that criticism in context,” says Vogt.”At that time, in all states, history organizations were kind of amateur clubs, made up of people who had interest and maybe connections to historical sources. Doane Robinson brought a wide range of professional experiences to his work, and he possessed great curiosity.”

For many years his office was on the capitol building’s ground floor, along with a little museum. When the legislature was in session, lawmakers knew the state’s best writer was close at hand if they struggled with a bill’s wording.

After railroad tracks spanned the Missouri River and were extended west to Rapid City in 1907, Robinson had easy access to the Black Hills for the first time. The region offered intriguing history, and it was a perfect place to relax. In 1908 Robinson arranged a camping adventure for 17 friends, relatives and Pierre colleagues. The party stepped off the Crouch Line train in a beautiful canyon west of Rapid City and pitched tents. Robinson loved making up words and announced he would call the spot Hisega, a name derived from the initials of six women in the group: Helen, Ida, Sadie, Ethel, Grace and Ada. Everyone loved the place, talked it up back in Pierre, and Robinson devised a time-share scheme. If enough people contributed $100, he would build a mountain lodge for them at Hisega. The big structure with wrap-around porches awaited visitors the next summer, and it still greets guests today.

A building of an entirely different style that stands as a Doane Robinson legacy is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, down the front steps and immediately across the street from the state capitol. Robinson pushed for the building after World War I, and it took more than a decade to raise funds and get the stately memorial finished. In addition to honoring South Dakotans who served and died in military service, the building housed the state’s history museum for many years and was usually referred to as the Robinson Museum.

Robinson dreamed of carving into Black Hills mountains. Newspapermen called the idea ridiculous, but Robinson partnered with Gutzon Borglum and history was made. Photo by S.D. Tourism

Of course, when it comes to tangible legacies, nothing tops Mount Rushmore Memorial.”My grandfather thought the Black Hills were beautiful, but that not enough people would visit just because of that,” says Will D. Robinson.”There had to be some other reason. I can show you the spot on the Needles Highway where his Model T Ford touring sedan got hot one day, and he sent my dad to bring water from a spring. When my dad got back to the car, my grandfather was looking at the Needles, thinking how they could be carved by a sculptor.”

That was 1923. Robinson talked to people who might help, especially Senator Norbeck, and sometimes took heat from South Dakota newspaper editors who considered the scheme ridiculous. But in short order internationally renowned sculptor Gutzon Borglum was on board and in 1927, as Robinson looked on, President Calvin Coolidge was present for a ceremony launching the project. Only the location wasn’t the Needles but nearby Mount Rushmore because, Robinson’s grandson understood, the Needles spires contained too much feldspar and Borglum didn’t want to alter that stunning piece of God’s handiwork.

Borglum also didn’t want to carve figures related to the American West, as Robinson proposed, but instead presidents. In Borglum, Robinson met a man whose vast vision matched his own. In another way, though, the men were polar opposites. Borglum liked to move ahead without much thought about costs, while Robinson insisted on budgetary constraint. As an executive of the original association formed to oversee Mount Rushmore’s creation, it fell to Robinson to confront the sculptor at times about spending. He was happy to pretty much leave the project in 1929, content in knowing his role as instigator had been successful. Robinson was back at the mountain on July 4, 1930, as a speaker when the Washington head was dedicated. He was 73 and had retired as State Historical Society Secretary six years earlier.

In the 1930s Robinson had more time for his walks and young friends on Wynoka Street, and he kept writing. Unlike Borglum and Norbeck, he lived long enough to see Mount Rushmore in its final form. He also saw his son Will become head of the State Historical Society in 1946. Doane Robinson lived a few weeks past his 90th birthday and his grandson recalls his mind and memories were as sharp as ever toward the end. He had witnessed America’s evolution from Abraham Lincoln to the atomic age. No one observed South Dakota’s first half century more intently.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Spirit Behind a Tragedy

By Paul Higbee

Rapid City High School’s 1968 varsity basketball cheerleaders were (from left) Terry Blanton, Shirley Landstrom, Jan Glaze, Kay McNutt, Gail Flohr and Diana McCluskey. All died in a plane crash while returning from the boys State A basketball tournament in Sioux Falls.

If your school lost an entire cheerleading squad in an accident, what could you possibly say when reporters call for comments?

It might be tempting to keep the conversation broad and philosophical, focusing on that thin line between life and death, how tomorrow is promised to no one, and what might have been. Understandably, there was plenty of talk like that as Rapid City mourned six cheerleaders after a long-ago St. Patrick’s Day plane crash.

But the girls’ high school principal took a different tack and kept his remarks down to earth, emphasizing a particular skill the young women developed collectively.”They were the kind who would keep a crowd in line,” Donald Varcoe told the Rapid City Journal just hours after the crash,”the kind who would quiet down booing at a ball game.”

Cheerleading was why the girls were aboard the plane in the first place. By telling the public that cheerleading was more than showy fun, and that these six knew it and lived up to their responsibility, Varcoe paid a beautiful tribute. Who knows? Maybe his remark was the first spark that eventually led to the Spirit of Six Award, honoring those girls and presented to one outstanding cheerleading squad at each of South Dakota’s state high school basketball championship tournaments.

The crash happened in 1968, a vastly different time in Rapid City and the nation. There was just one public high school in Rapid then, close to downtown (the building houses the Rapid City Performing Arts Center today). The crash site was Rapid City Municipal Airport, and it had no firefighting units of its own — a fact that provoked considerable community angst after the accident, although no one believed firefighters immediately at hand could have saved lives in this case.

In 1968 no American was basking in naÃve contentment, or believing that death spared the young. It was the terrible year of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, violent race riots, and a steady stream of coffins from Vietnam. In fact for Lead High School, the other West River school along with Rapid City to qualify for the boys’ State A basketball tournament in Sioux Falls that year, the scheduling couldn’t have been worse. On the tournament’s second day Lead would pause for the funeral mass of 22-year-old James Lien, killed by enemy fire while on river patrol in Vietnam.

On Tuesday, March 12, Rapid City High School students were dismissed from afternoon classes to attend a noisy pre-tournament pep rally. Cobbler basketball players were introduced, drama students performed a Bonnie and Clyde skit, and the basketball cheerleaders took charge with lively yells and well-rehearsed choreography. There were three seniors and three juniors on the cheerleading squad.

Seniors included Shirley Landstrom, Kay McNutt, and squad captain Jan Glaze. Kay possessed a real talent for vocal music. Jan, eldest of five Glaze sisters, was reigning Cobbler homecoming queen and planned to attend the University of Wyoming in the fall. Shirley was active in vocal music, and her dad, Ivan Landstrom, was a Rapid City businessman whose ventures included aviation. He had offered to fly the girls to Sioux Falls and back.

Terry Blanton, Gail Flohr and Diana McCluskey were the juniors. Terry sang in All State Chorus and wore a seemingly perpetual smile. Diana was involved in student government, ski club and, away from school, Jobs Daughters. Gail, the only cheerleader not born in Rapid City, was a Florida native who moved to the Black Hills at age 13. With her warm personality, Gail made friends and fit in immediately.

Wednesday the cheerleaders boarded the twin-engine Beechcraft 18 plane that Ivan Landstrom would pilot. Other passengers were Shirley’s mom, Mary Landstrom, and cheerleader advisor and chaperone Dorothy Lloyd.

They arrived safely in Sioux Falls, and the next day the Cobblers played Miller in the tournament’s opening session, with a big crowd of 8,000 watching. The game was a rematch of sorts, because the same teams met to open the 1967 tournament. Rapid City won then, but in 1968 Miller’s hot-shooting Al Nissen quieted Cobbler fans by scoring 34 points en route to a 59-51 win. Just like that, Rapid City was knocked from the championship bracket.

The Cobblers bounced back the next day, defeating Vermillion 61-53. Saturday afternoon they won by the same score, this time over Aberdeen Roncalli to clinch fifth place. With Rapid City playing early instead of Saturday night, Jan Glaze was free to travel the short distance to Lennox, where her cousin Linda Steever was getting married.

At the wedding reception Jan’s aunt, Mavis Steever, invited Jan to spend Saturday night in Lennox. Then she could travel home by car with her parents Sunday.

“But she said no,” Mavis recalled recently.”She said with the basketball season over, this trip would be the last time the six girls would be together as cheerleaders.”

Meanwhile, back in Sioux Falls, Brookings upset favored Sioux Falls Lincoln in the title game, 69-57. Brookings juniors Jim Kortan and Tom Osterberg were hailed as the game’s heroes, with Kortan scoring 11 points in the last eight minutes and Osterberg sinking 10 free throws without a miss. For a few hours it seemed that Kortan, Osterberg, and Senator Robert Kennedy were the big South Dakota newsmakers that weekend; Kennedy announced his presidential bid that Saturday, and pundits wondered how he might fare in the state’s Democratic primary 11 weeks down the road.

Sunday morning in Sioux Falls Ivan Landstrom filed his flight plan, gathered his eight passengers, and soared west. The weather in Rapid City was unseasonably warm, 68 degrees. Predicted rain showers never materialized. A steady wind of 20 miles an hour blew at the airport, with occasional stronger gusts. A little before 11 a.m., Landstrom made routine radio contact with the airport tower. He was cleared for landing and approached the runway at 11:12. Short of the runway, the plane was slammed by a crosswind gust. Its right wing shot upward and luggage in the cargo hold shifted. With its weight suddenly unbalanced the aircraft didn’t recover from the gust. The left wing hit the ground. The plane cartwheeled and two onlookers dashed to help but saw no movement through the craft’s windows. Less than 10 seconds after impact the plane burst into flames, and intense heat drove the would-be rescuers back. A grass fire ignited. Whipped by the wind, the fire burned a mile-long strip.

Rapid City businessman Ivan Landstrom volunteered to fly the varsity cheerleaders to Sioux Falls. They gathered for a photo before leaving Rapid City. The nine passengers were (from left) Shirley Landstrom, Kay McNutt, Terry Blanton, Jan Glaze, Mary Landstrom, Gail Flohr, Dorothy Lloyd (squad advisor), Diana McCluskey and Ivan Landstrom.

Within a minute of receiving calls, Rapid City and Ellsworth Air Force Base firefighters were in motion. It took the Rapid City crew 14 minutes to arrive, and the Ellsworth crew 17 minutes.

Sketchy crash news spread quickly, mainly reported by Rapid City broadcasters. Many Black Hills basketball fans, driving home from the tournament, remembered hearing on their car radios that a plane was down, or being told by fellow travelers when they stopped for lunch or gas. Though no one knew who the victims were for a while, lots of people pieced together information and correctly surmised the plane had something to do with Rapid City High School and the tournament. A rumor circulated that members of the basketball team were aboard. Finally, in late afternoon, Pennington County Coroner George Behrens released the list of nine names.

The deaths of six of its young women left Rapid City reeling, and equally stunning was the loss of Ivan and Mary Landstrom, builders of one of South Dakota’s great business enterprises. Ivan, a native of Sweden, immigrated to Minnesota as a young boy. He met Mary there and the couple moved to Rapid City in 1943 to open Landstrom’s Jewelry and to manufacture Landstrom’s Black Hills Gold Jewelry. As an owner, additionally, of a Rapid City aviation service, Ivan had flown as a pilot for 22 years, logging more than 10,000 hours. He and Mary left behind two adult daughters.

If there’s a victim who’s been somewhat forgotten, it’s advisor Dorothy Lloyd. As Rapid Citians knew in 1968, Dorothy was a thoroughly professional and highly respected educator who had taught English at Rapid City High School for 21 years. Born Dorothy Goodhope in Viborg, she graduated from Yankton College and then continued her education at the University of California. She taught in that state and back in South Dakota at Parker, Piedmont and Spearfish before joining the Rapid City faculty. Friends remembered her as a dedicated bridge player. Dorothy had been widowed three years before the crash and was survived by an adult son and four grandsons.

As a 60-year-old cheerleading advisor, Dorothy was maybe a little old fashioned, recalled Dottie Crawford Olson, Cobbler cheerleader in 1967 with Jan Glaze and Shirley Landstrom.”I remember our skirts couldn’t be higher than an inch above our knees,” Dottie said.”But we got along well with her and she was always fair.” By 1968 Dottie was a freshman at South Dakota State, where she heard the news.

Well into Sunday night law enforcement officers asked young people to please keep moving as they caravanned, car after car, hoping to pay tribute at the accident site. The Rapid City Journal reported the only debris not charred black were pieces of fire-resistant pom-poms, Cobbler red and white.

It was the era before in-school grief counseling. Pam Schlimgen Roeber, a Rapid City junior then who knew the six girls, recalled coming to school after the crash and hearing barely a word spoken about it. A substitute teacher showed up in Dorothy Lloyd’s classroom, which had always been decorated with photos of cheerleading squads Dorothy advised over the years. Pam found it odd that all the photos had been immediately removed.

The Thursday after the crash, South Dakotans from all walks of life filed into the high school’s auditorium for a memorial service honoring all victims. In fact, there were two identical services so that all hoping to attend could do so. Included were delegations of students and teachers from several other schools. The nine who died had attended five different Rapid City churches, and pastors from each of those churches led a portion of the memorial service.

Earl Butz, First Methodist Church pastor, spoke directly to high school students present. He told them no one can lead another person’s life. But, he said,”Some of you will have the responsibility to fill the positions they have held, and undertake the tasks they were doing. Do it well. Bring fruition to the work they have begun.”

To memorialize the cheerleaders far beyond the 1960s, members of the state’s Sheriffs and Police Officers Association were soon discussing a cheerleading award (the organization today is the South Dakota Peace Officers Association). The award would honor one cheerleading squad who mirrored the Rapid City girls’ dedication and positive influence at future state basketball tournaments. The first Spirit of Six Award trophy was presented in 1970, but not on the tournament floor. A few years later the South Dakota High School Activities Association decided the award would be announced very publicly at state tournaments. Today the award remains a presentation of the South Dakota Peace Officers Association, and trophies go to cheerleaders at both boys’ and girls’ tournaments, classes AA, A and B.

Vyonne Glaze, Jan’s mother, said the award felt like a good way to honor the girls four decades ago, and that it continues to feel that way today.

Rapid City High School evolved into Central High School and moved to a new building. A stone memorial near the gym, created by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, pays tribute to the cheerleaders and their advisor, although that doesn’t mean all Central students understand what happened.”But I think most kids who are in activities know,” said Dottie Olson, the 1967 cheerleader captain who worked for several years as a secretary in the school. Central, she noted, won the Spirit of Six trophy in 2010 at both the boys’ and girls’ state tournament and that boosted awareness.

Every spring, all South Dakotans are reminded, however briefly, of the victims of that tragic crash 50 years ago. But their memories are never far away for those who knew and loved them.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Judging a Junk Man

By Bernie Hunhoff

Photos courtesy of the Grant County Review

Emil Tucholke, Milbank’s junk man, sold postcards featuring this professional portrait taken by local photographer Milton Fischer to supplement his second-hand business.

Ted Rathjen was Yankton’s junk man. His white, two-story house near Broadway Avenue in the center of town was surrounded by rusting bicycle frames, old appliances, yesterday’s automobiles, worn furniture, abandoned toys and just about everything else that was once sold as”new” in the downtown stores. Rathjen was a tiny, smiling man who hobbled about on crutches because his legs were crippled from a childhood injury.

In his older years, he just poked his head out from a second story window and advised customers on where they might find what they needed. Schwinn rims were piled beneath the big elm tree. Garden tools were hanging on the picket fence by the road. Toys were in the front of the house by the mailbox.

He suggested a price, and it was usually so low that any negotiation seemed silly. He charged nickels and dimes to kids who needed bike parts, and dollars to adults for the same merchandise. If he was upstairs, he asked visitors to leave the payment in a coffee can on the porch. Ted crossed the highway once or twice a day to have coffee at Sunshine Grocery Store. He fed the store’s penny bucking-horse for kids and always had a smile and a story for the regulars on the stools. Most of the town fathers had bought bike parts or toys from him when they were young, so nobody made a serious attempt to clean up his property until the late 1980s, after his death.

Every town had a junk man. And there were altercations, as with all professions that involve money and territory. One of the most serious situations involved Shorty Miller, a bearded old man who lived in Canton’s town dump by the Big Sioux River until he was 94 years old.

When he died at the South Dakota Human Services Center in Yankton, a local editor memorialized him as”a hermit, river rat, friend of the beaver and blue jay, dump caretaker emeritus, figure familiar, colorful storyteller, character extraordinaire.”

He was also lucky to have reached such a ripe age. In the 1980s some young men tried to infringe on his territory. An argument ensued, and Shorty was shot in the arm and shoulder. He later admitted to also firing a gun.”I got four rifle shots off, just to scare’em,” he later said. While there were some discrepancies between the two parties’ stories, the sheriff said the dispute”evidently arose over a longtime feud over scavenging rights” at the city dump.

Despite his brush with the law, Miller was known as a friendly hermit who delighted in entertaining visitors with stories about the Big Sioux River. He was a contemporary of another Lincoln County hermit known as Rattlesnake Bill. In his obituary, the editor quoted an acquaintance who said Miller”was a gentle and likeable old guy and when he of- fered you a cut of left-over beaver meat it was hard to say no.”

Ted Rathjen sold old bike parts, appliances and other oddball items at his home along Broadway Avenue in Yankton.

But none of the aforementioned junk men could hold a discarded candelabra to Grant County’s Emil Tucholke, who took on city hall, won a moral victory, and nearly parlayed that into a political career.

After considering a career in the ministry, Emil bought two small pieces of land west of town along Whetstone Creek. Then he began to collect odds and ends from the citizenry.

Rev. Jack Garvey grew up in Milbank, the son of the postmaster in the 1940s. He remembers Emil as one of his hometown’s most colorful characters.”He was more than just a junk collector,” says Garvey, a Catholic priest.”He had a 1902 Cadillac that he loved to drive in parades. He had a horse-drawn carriage that he would use to travel up and down the alleys, picking up junk before there was any garbage collection. He grew strawberries on a floating raft in the creek. He would bring them into the post office and give them to dad.”

Garvey also remembers that Emil gave his dad a piece of pottery.”It was an old Greek urn of some sort, just a piece of junk I’m sure. But that thing sat on Dad’s desk and I always imagined it was worth millions.”

As Emil’s outdoor inventory grew in size, it spilled over from his land onto a weedy lot owned by the county. Some of the very people who had made contributions to the collection now began to complain, so the county commissioners filed a lawsuit to force him out. Surely they figured that they could evict him without much trouble, but they were wrong. Emil wasn’t about to abandon his domain. After some legal wrangling, a court date was set and the bearded junk man showed up in the courtroom wearing a hangman’s rope around his neck.

Emil acted as his own attorney, and his wit and ready answers seemed to delight Judge Van Buren Perry. The junk man was especially adept at cross-examination. He asked a public official whether he had ever visited the property. The official denied being there until Emil reminded him that he’d visited just the previous Sunday.

“Did you ever buy anything from me?” Emil asked.

“No,” said the official.

“I guess that’s right,” Emil countered.”You just took that stove part without paying me.”

Emil carefully examined all of the state’s exhibits, made numerous motions and objections and invited the judge to recess the proceedings long enough to tour the junkyard. When they returned to court, the judge was carrying a beautiful antique china bowl — a gift for his wife from Emil.

Milbank’s famous junk man lived in a covered wagon that he hitched to his horses and rode in local parades.

Phyllis Justice, the longtime editor and publisher of the Grant County Review, covered the trial.”Over the years, he had built up a huge collection of what some would call junk, but to him it was treasure,” she wrote years later for an anniversary issue of the paper.”Actually, he had preserved some valuable materials, including his prize 1902 Cadillac and covered wagon. In a way he performed a free trash service for residents and restaurants. He fed his team of horses the food thrown out by the restaurants.”

The prosecutor accused Emil of maintaining an”unsightly nuisance area.” Emil countered that the covered wagon, which his horses pulled in local parades, served as his dwelling and an old outhouse was his kitchen and cook shack. He said he was growing strawberries on a raft and feeding beaver.

Justice said that Judge Perry eventually rendered a Solomon-like verdict. In his long opinion, he noted that even though the county commissioners regarded the place as an unsightly garbage dump, there were other ways to describe Emil’s property.”Many years have taught him that some can live on what others waste, and that articles discarded by some have utility and value for others … He has assembled these articles upon his lots … as neatly as his strength and character of material permitted. His stock of merchandise probably amounts to more than a hundred tons, gross, and would probably assay as much as Homestake ore, which runs about $8.00 a ton, I believe.

“Upon these lots we observe an enormous quantity of firewood, the concentration of which no doubt eases the minds of citizens who are apprehensive under the activities of John L. Lewis and the high price of oil. This wood would heat the whole of Milbank for a considerable period,” the judge continued.”There are fruit and pickle jars in sufficient quantities, if used, to tide Milbank over a crop failure or two. Furniture from all periods, some of it repairable, some containing walnut and other woods coveted by tinkers and some only firewood, is piled here and there.

Tucholke scavenged surplus foods like stale bread and rolls and shared them with his horses and chickens.

“Machinery of all kinds abound. A laundry is dickering for a large churn, which he salvaged from a creamery. Horse-drawn vehicles such as sleighs, carts, surreys and wagons are there, to say nothing of a priceless 1902 Cadillac which runs and which Christopher [locals often referred to Emil as Christopher Columbus] sometimes drives in parades to the astonishment and delight of all.”

Judge Perry was especially respectful of Emil’s independence.”The defendant, disdaining pensions, supports himself and pays taxes on his lots by selling stuff from this stock,” wrote the judge.”Numerous citizens testified that they were able to buy from him much-wanted items otherwise unobtainable. His business is lawful and useful, if a bit unsightly in some respects. It is unique and has some elements of fascination. There is a beaver dam in the creek, with live beavers. To them and to his horses and chickens the defendant feeds stale bread, which he also eats and which the bakeries are glad to get rid of. On a sizeable raft in the beaver pond the defendant raises by hydroponic methods a considerable quantity of strawberries in season.”

In an opinion he clearly enjoyed authoring, the judge also complimented Emil on his”insulated prairie schooner,” his flock of poultry and even his”magnificent beard.” He concluded that the defendant”lives the life of Riley, enjoys himself, supports himself, salvages a good deal of useable material and conserves it so that many people are able to purchase needed items at a saving or which are not elsewhere obtainable.”

But, concluded the judge,”law is law. The lot belongs to the county and the county commissioners have the say-so about it.” In a cunning twist, he granted the county permission to remove Emil’s possessions but he cautioned that any such disposition must be accomplished”tenderly, carefully and with the complete approval of Mr. Tucholke and to see that not the least bit of damage results to [the collection].”

The result was a victory for Emil.”In other words, he allowed Emil to stay on the land since there was no way the county could meet the requirements,” Justice said.”He gave the county its pound of flesh but only if there was no letting of Emil’s blood.”

Emil tried to parlay the ruling into elective office. He ran for state representative in 1952 as an independent. His motto was simple and poetic:”The world is full of corruption and evil — but keep cool and vote for Emil.”

In a full-page advertisement in Justice’s paper, he published Judge Perry’s ruling and then noted,”I handled the case mentioned below without a lawyer. Seems this should be a fair recommendation for any candidate … “

The eccentric junk man tallied 1,496 votes — a respectable showing but not enough to win a seat among the bland, suit-and-tie crowd in Pierre. Instead, he returned to his business of finding and selling used goods. Now somewhat of a local hero, he became even more popular in local parades. He put a new canvas on his covered wagon for the territorial centennial in 1961. Milbank photographer Milton Fischer took a picture of Emil in an old fur coat and the Grant County Review printed it on glossy postcards that he sold to supplement his second-hand business. He enjoyed hawking them for”a dime apiece or two for a quarter.” When he was no longer permitted to drive, he traded his car for a tractor and used it to collect junk.

In the end, he died alone in April of 1962. His body was found near the railroad tracks that ran by his junkyard. If he hadn’t befriended the local newspaper publisher he might be forgotten. But Justice included a lengthy article on the junk man in the 125th anniversary paper for Milbank.

Like his cohorts in other towns, Emil practiced conservation before most of us understood the concept of recycling. Such men had an aversion to waste and an appreciation for frugality, two traits quite rare today. The junk man saw a need and filled it, and that’s as American as his 1902 Cadillac.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Dark Tower

By Jeremy Wild

The remains of Delmont’s Cold War-era watch tower stood on Main Street long after the threat had passed.

When school ended in Delmont that May, we made so much noise tearing down the stairs that Mr. Raymus, the superintendent, gave us his legendary scowl. It didn’t concern my buddies because they wouldn’t face him again until September, but I worried because he had a fine eye for ringleaders like me. He belonged to my father’s church and he had already passed on more than one comment to the Reverend. Summer, however, meant we could put school aside for a while.

Each morning we got on our bikes with the other boys, heading out in a long line, swinging back and forth on the streets like the tail of a kite. One of us would take the lead and we all got into line, heading past the newspaper office where Mr. Goehring was at the linotype, past Misterek’s Hardware and Appliance, Judge Sharpe’s law office, the Delmont State Bank and Matt Loos’ Grocery, and then we swept into the neighborhoods and past Mr. Frasch’s home to see if the apples were coming on yet. Then we rode out into the county past cornfields and creeks and fluffy cottonwood trees, resting awhile in one of the pastures and sat under shade trees, chewing on grass and talking. Later we went to Ray Devine’s drugstore for fudge bars and popsicles, or comic books at 10 cents apiece.

There was always something to do. Somewhere men would be building or remodeling or shingling a house, or digging ditches for a new water line, or putting in a septic tank, and we would stop and squat and watch them. Then one summer morning, not long after the Korean War began, we saw them building the tower.

We came back into town on our bikes that morning and were heading for the drugstore when we noticed all these men, and pickups and tools, and big beams and planks piled on the lawn by the firehouse. Some of the men were wearing American Legion hats. They were placing the beams into postholes filled with fresh concrete, just a few feet from the city jail. Mr. Rolck, the postmaster, was there, and I asked him what was going on.”Well, boys, we’re building a tower here, and we’ll have a cabin on top,” he said.”Here in South Dakota we’re on the flyways of more than geese. If the Rooskies ever come over on their way to Omaha and the Strategic Air Command, we’ll spot’em and get on the phone.”

The whole town watched the tower go up, day by day. The men kept up a fierce pace, the tower rising section by section. After a week they began to build stairs to the cabin, and then the cabin was finished on top. The tower was at least 70 feet high, the tallest thing in Delmont except for the grain elevators and the steeple on our father’s church.

When we biked by each day we saw a man up in the cabin, silhouetted against the sky, watching with binoculars. The men took shifts for several weeks, but then one afternoon no one was up there; the cabin was empty. Why weren’t they keeping watch?

In the days to follow the cabin was frequently empty, until finally no one was watching. We talked about this a lot. We also asked ourselves why the men had never been up in the tower at night. Wouldn’t the Russians come over in the night? If our men had been up there at night, could they have heard anything?

We had seen pictures in schoolbooks and in Life magazine of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why was no one watching the flyway?

It was time for a commando raid on the tower to see for ourselves what had gone wrong. We could handle a raid on the tower because of our war games down at Perman’s Creek, a lovely, cool place south of Delmont with tall cottonwoods and grasses. One day we would fight the Japanese, another day the Germans, and then the North Koreans. We were armed with every weapon the GIs had except tanks, and suffered many wounds and fatalities, but we were always brave, and we always won.

Jim and I and my best friend, Gerald, were chosen to raid the tower. We sneaked up to it one night, as it was getting dark. We thought we might be seen going up the stairs, even crouched over and quiet as we were, because people were still walking home from shopping uptown. But not one looked up to see us against the twilight. My brother was the biggest and strongest so he began to push up on the trap door of the cabin, and soon we were inside. When we were sure no one had seen us, we shined our Scout flashlights on the walls and ceiling.

There they were, on posters, the black silhouettes of Russian fighter planes and bombers, named and numbered. I reached for the phone and lifted the receiver. It was dead, disconnected. We looked out the tower windows at the treetops below us, soft and bushy, glowing in the lights of Main Street. We saw things as we had never seen them before. Then we sat down in silence, waiting for Main Street to empty out before we left the tower, barely seeing the others’ outlines in the darkness. We knew what the Russian planes carried in their swollen bellies.

Editor’s Note: Author Jeremy Wild taught English and English composition for many years at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. This story is revised from the January/February 2007 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Mr. Bullock Goes To Washington

By Roger Holtzmann

Seth Bullock’s chance meeting with Theodore Roosevelt was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Roosevelt’s passing. Bullock (front row, just left of the man in the gray suit) was a member of Roosevelt’s so-called “Tennis Cabinet,” a group of close friends and informal advisors who were received at the White House on March 1, 1909, the last day of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Seth Bullock arrived in Deadwood on August 1, 1876, the day before Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok in the Nuttall & Mann Saloon. With so much excitement in the air, it’s not likely anybody paid much attention to him as he parked his wagon on the muddy main”street” and commenced auctioning off the goods he’d brought with him from Montana Territory. Bullock family lore has it that he sold a large number of chamber pots, which means Deadwood took a small step forward from its uncivilized, mining camp ways that day.

Above and beyond that contribution, no one man did more than Seth Bullock to hurry Deadwood along on its fitful journey toward respectability. He was appointed Lawrence County’s first sheriff in 1877, and by doing a credible job in a volatile time he gave the Northern Hills its first taste of law and order.

Bullock’s more important contributions to Deadwood’s long-term prospects were as a businessman and civic leader. The Star and Bullock Hardware Store, operated with his partner Sol Star, was a fixture on Main Street. Bullock also recognized that Deadwood would need to diversify its economy if it expected to survive once the gold rush was over. He invested his own money in the cause, not always with favorable results, and was”the loudest and most persistent” advocate for a Board of Trade, the equivalent of a modern economic development committee, wrote David Wolff in Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman.

Bullock and Star invested beyond the city limits as well. They acquired 160 acres along False Bottom Creek with the intention of establishing a dairy farm. When that didn’t pan out they moved farther north, purchasing land at the confluence of the Belle Fourche and Redwater rivers, where they established the S&B Ranch. In time that investment paid off in an entirely unexpected way, and sent Mr. Bullock to Washington.

Seth Bullock (left) and Theodore Roosevelt met on the banks of the Belle Fourche River.

Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly, often bed-ridden child who spent his adult years making up for lost time. His quest for vigorous, manly adventure led him, in 1883, to try buffalo hunting in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. He was so taken with what he found he decided to buy a ranch in the region, and the very next year it became more than an investment. Disillusioned with politics, and in the wake of great personal tragedy — his mother and his wife died on the same day — Roosevelt told friends he was going to retire in Dakota.

Roosevelt’s Elk Horn ranch, on the Little Missouri River north of Medora in today’s North Dakota, was a bust financially, but he gained far more than he lost in Dakota. He embraced the West’s rugged ways, and cowboys as kindred spirits, and in so doing rediscovered himself. Before long he was back in public office, this time as sheriff of Billings County.

“As he grew older, Bullock liked to recount tales of the old days, and in particular, he enjoyed stories that drew Roosevelt into the narrative,” wrote Wolff. As Bullock remembered it, he and Teddy met about that time, while each was separately tracking the same trio of horse thieves. This story is in most accounts of Bullock’s life.

Roosevelt told a less colorful tale to his son Kermit. After resuming public life back east, Roosevelt was appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission. He returned to North Dakota and the Badlands on commission business in 1892; his next stop was to be the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Roosevelt chose to mix business with pleasure — his notion of pleasure, anyway — and make that leg of his journey on horseback, by way of Deadwood, which took him across Seth Bullock’s place.

“When Roosevelt and his companions crossed the Belle Fourche River, they encountered a cautious Bullock,” wrote Wolff.”As Roosevelt admitted, his party looked out of place, ‘exactly like an outfit of tinhorn gamblers.’ Once they exchanged introductions Bullock became much more cordial, and … this simple meeting initiated what would become a lifelong friendship between Roosevelt and Bullock.”

There was more than friendship on Bullock’s part, according to Kermit.”Seth Bullock was a hero-worshiper, and father was his great hero,” he recalled. Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most strident voices calling for war with Spain over Cuba, and when it came to pass in 1898 he rushed to volunteer. Bullock soon followed suit.

Melvin Grigsby, South Dakota’s attorney general, was commissioned as a colonel and placed in command of the Third Cavalry Regiment, which was slated for service in Cuba. Grigsby recruited Bullock to command Troop A, and Bullock in turn signed up 84 volunteers, mostly miners and cowboys. They left the Hills in high spirits, confident that they would make short work of the Spanish, and wherever their train stopped on the journey east,”people cheered, bands played, and food appeared,” wrote Wolff.

Which all went for naught. Roosevelt and his Rough Riders earned lasting fame in Cuba; Troop A, meanwhile, was still training in Georgia when the war ended. Bullock and his men were sorely disappointed by this turn of events, but his service did earn him nationwide publicity,”as a man of the frontier, a no nonsense pioneer,” wrote Wolff. It also cemented his bond with Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was named vice-president on the ticket with William McKinley in 1900, largely on the basis of his wartime reputation, he asked Bullock to accompany him on a campaign swing through the Dakotas and Montana.

Roosevelt loathed the largely ceremonial office of vice-president, but fate soon relieved him of the burden. An assassin’s bullet cut William McKinley down in 1901, and Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the”bully pulpit,” as he famously characterized the presidency. He liked the job so well he ran on his own in 1904, and when he won, Seth Bullock had a corker of an idea: round up a posse of real western cowboys, head for the nation’s capital and ride in his good friend Teddy’s inaugural parade.

Bullock (front row, seventh from left), Tom Mix (front row, third from right), Fred Wilson (middle row, far right) and the rest of Bullock’s Brigade rode in the inaugural parade and showed the folks in Washington what real live westerners looked like.

Bullock’s Brigade, as they came to be known,”are not dime novel heroes or stage robbers,” wrote Bullock in his newspaper account of their trip.”They are cowboys, and as such are the real article, and the reason they [went to Washington] is because this was the first inauguration of a man who knows them.”

Fred and Charlie Wilson, ranchers from Harding County, were among the 60 men Bullock invited on the grand adventure.”They also picked up a few people along the way,” says Fred’s grandson, Fred Wilson, of Belle Fourche.”One of them was Tom Mix, before he got famous for making movies. He got to talking to them [during their stop in Chicago] and he decided to join up.” Mix had also volunteered for service during the Spanish-American War, and like Bullock, he never made it overseas before the guns were silenced.

Fred Wilson the elder wrote an entertaining account of the Washington trip in the 1950s. Curtis H. Satzinger, the long-time printer for the Belle Fourche Daily Post and Weekly Bee, kept a copy which his daughter, Rita (Satzinger) Edwards, found while going through his papers after Curtis’ death.

“There was a large crowd to see us off [from Deadwood],” wrote Wilson. A delegation of Wyoming cowboys joined the group in Edgemont,”and to say they were a lively bunch would be putting it mildly.” Some of their fellow passengers, a group of”Eastern ladies” in particular, were afraid to go into the dining car when the rough hewn cowboys were around, but before long they were charmed by the Westerners’ banjo and guitar serenades.

Bullock and company were given a tour of the city when they stopped in Chicago, and a large, raucous throng greeted them upon their arrival in Washington on March 2. Their horses had been shipped in advance, and the cowboys were disappointed to discover that their animals were in”pretty tough shape” after the long journey east. That couldn’t be helped, so they saddled up and set off toward the Washington Monument for some exercise and a little shockingly cruel”fun.”

“A large crowd followed us out there, many negroes among them, and we had great fun roping them as they ran from one side to the other,” wrote Wilson.”One negro … took exception to the fun we were having. He came out of the crowd … [but] we never knew what he intended for just then Jim Dahlman, of Crawford, Neb., who later became the mayor of Omaha, dropped a rope over his head and pulled him to the ground.”

Such were the times that no one chastised Bullock’s boys, or even remarked upon this behavior. Quite the contrary, wrote Wilson. Everywhere they went in Washington they heard,”‘You boys are alright. The president has vouched for you.'”

President Roosevelt visited the booming cow town of Edgemont in 1903 and addressed the crowd from a bandstand that still stands in the city park today.

Inaugural day dawned bright and clear. Roosevelt delivered his address, then took his place at the parade’s head. More than three hours passed before Bullock and company got their chance to promenade, by which time,”interest in the parade had perceptibly begun to wane,” according to a newspaper account.”It was thoroughly awakened, however, by the arrival of the Cowboys, who made only a pretense of keeping in line and flirted with every pretty girl who would look at them twice.”

This was the first time back east for many of the cowboys, but they sure knew what city folk wanted to see.”Lassoes hung from the pummels of their saddles and pearl ebony six-shooters stuck out aggressively from holsters suspended from their belts,” reported the newspaper, and at their head rode the quintessential westerner,”Captain Seth Bullock, who sat his horse as if he was in an easy chair, with his long moustache twisted by the wind and his left arm resting akimbo on his hip.”

“We were given a great ovation … from building after building and stand after stand as we rode up [Pennsylvania] Avenue, until we finally came in sight of the presidential stand,” Wilson recalled.”And there was Teddy, leaning out over the railing, and as we passed he shouted, ‘You’re alright, boys! I’ll see you later!'”

Roosevelt received the brigade at a White House luncheon later in the week. He introduced the boys to his family and conducted them on a tour, which ended in the State Dining Room.”‘Boys, I’ve got to bid you good-bye as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee has been waiting to see me,'” said Teddy after an hour.”‘But I want to assure you, I have had many delegations in the White House, but none more welcome.'”

Bullock and the cowboys apparently worked all the wildness out of their systems before they reached Washington.”Compared with the noise made by the plug-hat-and-boiled-shirt political clubs, the cowboy brigade was Quakerish and decorous,” wrote Bullock. The astonished manager of their hotel agreed, saying they behaved,”like a Sunday School Teachers Convention compared to some of the other delegations entertained by him.”

Cowboys can only be good for so long, however. Some of them had to sell their horses in Washington,”so they would have enough money to get home,” wrote Bullock.”[Others] wanted a little cash to blow in New York, where they were going to stop before they started back to the range.”

After Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919, Seth Bullock erected a memorial to his hero on Sheep Mountain in Deadwood. For Wilson and the other cowboys, the monument paid tribute to a man they admired and served as a reminder of what was”the greatest event of our lives,” he concluded.”Many of the boys have crossed over the Great Divide, but there are those of us whose thoughts go back to those eventful days when we helped one of the greatest of our presidents, and took part in the greatest and grandest and most spectacular inauguration in history.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

John Morrell’s Bloody Friday

By Scott Stoel

In this artist’s rendition, worker fought worker during the 1935 labor strike at the John Morrell Plant in Sioux Falls.

On an overcast July morning in 1935, 200 non-union men marched in line, four abreast up Weber Avenue in Sioux Falls. It was the first day of the year’s second labor strike at John Morrell & Company Packing Plant. The goal of the march was to break through union picket lines staged at the plant gate. Each man was armed with an oak club. Each was determined to return to work.

At the plant gate pickets were in position, armed less uniformly than the non-union men with canes, baseball bats, broom handles and rocks. The John Morrell plant, a huge dark block of a building, loomed over the picketers. Rail cars, halted by the strikers, sat idle on the tracks west of the street. The strikers stood ready to keep anyone from entering the plant as a part of their protest.

As the phalanx of non-union men marched up the dusty road and over the rise where the railroad tracks ran, Sam Twedell, the union business leader, was asked by a reporter, “What are you going to do, Sam?”

Twedell scratched his head and said, “I dunno.” Then he walked forward, alone, to meet the advancing column.

And that began the most violent labor battle in South Dakota history. The conflict wasn’t labor versus management. It was workers against each other. The day became known as “Bloody Friday.”

In 1935, the John Morrell and Co. Packing Plant was on the edge of a growing Sioux Falls. With few windows in the building, people rarely saw what was going on inside. Between those thick concrete walls, thousands of animals were slaughtered, processed, wrapped and shipped to markets every day.

In the 1930s, Morrell played an even larger part of the Sioux Falls economy than it does today. In a city of about 35,000 the company employed over 1,700 people. It was by far the largest employer and the only major industry in the city. The economic health of Sioux Falls relied on the plant.

The 1930s was the decade of the Great Depression. Nationally, nearly one-third of the work force was unemployed. Crop and livestock prices sat at all-time lows. At the Morrell plant, wages dropped steadily as did the quality of working conditions.

Labor movements were at a standstill. Harsh economic times did not create a fertile landscape for unions to sell their philosophy of worker’s rights. The paramount problem of the time was not poor working conditions or shoddy treatment. It was a lack of jobs

In June of 1933, unions got the boost they needed when Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Section 7(a) gave labor the right to form unions for the purpose of collective bargaining without interference from their employers. With this opportunity, Morrell plant employees formed Sioux Falls Local 304 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butchers of North America on Oct. 4, 1933. At a meeting of a dozen or so workers, the first man to join the union was Samuel Twedell. He would become an energetic leader of the union and the organization’s business agent.

Twedell was dedicated to the cause of labor. In nearly all of Local 304’s disputes at Morrell, he was the main motivator and moral center of the movement. He wanted his union to succeed.

It didn’t take long for management to move to crush the infant union. In March of 1935 the company laid off 108 workers, many pro-union.

Local 304 responded to the layoffs by offering to cut the guaranteed workweek from 32 to 28 hours. In addition to that offer, the union complained people were being dismissed without regard to seniority. Some who were let go had been there since the plant opened in 1909.

After management refused to spread the work by lowering the guaranteed hours, Twedell declared the company was trying to break the union, saying the layoff targeted some of the most prominent union members. The 600 members of the union voted to strike.

On a cold Saturday, March 9, at 10 a.m., 700 Morrell workers sat down and refused to work or leave. Workers left the carcasses of 200 swine and 35 cattle on the slaughter lines. They stood passively on the railroad tracks, halting the movement of cars of meat. By noon they had shut down the entire plant.

As the day wore on, wives of the strikers passed cigarettes, dice and playing cards through the fence. Many spent the day chatting at the fence around the plant or dozing on dining room tables, while others listened to a fellow worker play the accordion.

The strike was intended to achieve its goal quickly. Twedell chose the sit-down strike as a way to show a firm front. He thought it would last only 20 to 30 minutes, but it lasted through the rest of the day and into the night.

At 9 p.m., Gov. Tom Berry, a New Deal Democrat and rancher from Belvidere, declared martial law at the request of Minnehaha County Sheriff Melvin L. Sells and mobilized the National Guard to take control of the situation. No violence had erupted at the plant, but state law allowed him to call up troops to prevent property from being destroyed. Plant officials were not worried about the building itself. They were more concerned about meat spoiling as it waited to be loaded and shipped.

Major Eugene L. Foster led 150 guardsmen to surround the plant at 2 a.m. His troops were armed with revolvers, machine guns and tear gas, and ready to eject the strikers by force. It was the first time in state history National Guard troops were called to intervene in a labor dispute.

As guardsmen were about to arrive, Gov. Berry called and asked the strikers to leave the building peacefully. Twedell said the strikers would leave the building once martial law was lifted. At 4 a.m., the Guard withdrew and an hour later they left the building singing and shouting. Picket lines were set up immediately.

On Monday, several hundred employees who wanted to work went to the mayor’s office and asked that the streets be cleared so they could get to the plant safely. City Attorney Hugh S. Gamble, acting for Mayor Adolf Graff who was out of town, said he would have the streets open, but he refused the workers’ request for a parade through downtown, which he feared would ignite violence.

Later in the week, Gov. Berry called out the National Guard again saying the pickets were disrupting traffic and preventing others from working.

The strike lasted three days. The settlement called for the dismissal of Twedell and 28 other union leaders. As a part of the agreement, employees would hold a vote on seniority rights and would submit the proposal for approval to management. The union agreed to the dismissal of the 29, counting on the National Labor Relations Board to hear the case and demand their reinstatement.

In April, the Labor Board ruled that the men must be allowed to return to the plant. Morrell management rejected the decision, appealing to officials in Washington D.C. However, on May 27 the Supreme Court made the argument moot when they declared the NIRA unconstitutional.

During its heyday, Local 304 claimed 100 percent membership with about 3,200 plant employees.

The union ignored the court’s decision. On June 8, Local 304 demanded reinstatement of the blacklisted workers, insisted they receive back pay and requested the union’s seniority plan be adopted immediately. When their demands were not met, the union again decided to strike. Thursday night, July 18, a picket line was set up. The strike was to last two years.

The first full day of the strike was became known as “Bloody Friday.” Early that morning, about 200 non-union employees, mostly foremen at the plant, assembled at the Cataract Hotel. They were members of the Company Association, a group union leaders contended was set up by management so the company could say workers had the right to organize.

This organization had a philosophy much different than the union. In a time of depression when jobs were rare, who was the union to prevent men from working? They were determined to cross the picket line with force and return to work.

Forming a line four abreast, the association marched across the Eighth Street bridge and turned up Weber Avenue toward Morrell. Each man received an oak club from a delivery truck parked near the intersection. The marchers continued up the street to meet the picketers.

As the mass of men advanced toward the picket line, Twedell began to walk toward them, hoping to talk them into respecting the picket lines. The association would have none of it and closed around him as he neared the group. One man with a pipe in his hand yelled, “Let me take him!” He swung the pipe, striking Twedell on the back of the head.

Association men rushed the picket line, and a melee ensued. Blows flew wildly in all directions and screams of rage filled the air. One man was caught squarely on the skull with a club. The noise was described by a spectator as a rung bell.

Non-union men surged through the picket line and about 60 of them made it into the plant grounds. The rest of the men engaged the picketers in over 100 individual fights.

Sitting on rail cars above the brawl, reporters and youth watched the action like it was a football game. “God what a fight!” one young boy screamed. “Kill the scabs!”

At one point in the battle, two union men were actually pounding each other. They each had so much blood running down their faces they couldn’t see who they were fighting.

The rest of the association men didn’t make it to the plant. Strikers reformed their lines and began pelting their enemies with broken bricks from a nearby pile.

In the middle of the fight stood one lone policeman. M.W. Parsons was a corpulent officer who the year before was held at bay by a gunman while Security National Bank was robbed by thieves identified as John Dillinger’s gang. He had as much luck quelling the riot as he did stopping that robbery.

On the fringe of the brawl, City Street Superintendent Walt Keith was watching the action when a man near him was struck with a cane. The frenzied attacker, who was bent on continuing his rampage, raised his cane to hit Keith. As he brought his weapon down, Keith ducked and sent a right hand into his attacker’s face. The man dropped to the ground.

“I’m not in on this,” Keith said calmly as he helped his assailant, who was spitting out a few recently detached teeth, to his feet. “But if you try to get me in on it, I guess I’ll have to protect myself.”

Harry Clauson, foreman of the local dock office, and H.S. Thomas, an assistant foreman, attempted to ram their way through the picket line with a car, but the picketers stopped them, smashed the car’s window glass, dragged the men out and severely beat them.

J.P. McCoy, a union representative from Chicago, was spotted by some of the foremen who had made it into the plant. They rushed out, knocked him senseless with a club and dragged him into the plant. He was held in the basement under the orders of Herman Veenker, plant superintendent.

“We didn’t dare turn him loose because the men were howling for him outside the building,” Veenker said. “They would have torn him to pieces.”

Veenker later turned McCoy over to the police. The union representative was placed in protective custody.

In all, 54 men, 13 union and 41 non-union, were hospitalized with injuries ranging from minor cuts to fractures and deep lacerations. Men stood in the street with blood dripping down their faces and soaking their shirts. Twedell, who had been on the receiving end of many blows, was seen talking to his wife, his entire head covered in blood.

Later that day, Twedell decided to allow workers into the plant as long as they were actual employees and not strike breakers.

Unlike the March strike, the National Guard was not called out. Although Gov. Berry had threatened to declare martial law again if any violence erupted, on this occasion the Guard would be called out only if local authorities lost control. Sheriff Sells, who had requested state troops for the previous strike, told reporters, “The governor said the task of maintaining law and order was solely in the hands of the local police and sheriff’s office.”

For the next few weeks, the strike wore on with occasional small skirmishes. Verbal abuse was hurled at workers and women on the picket lines would stab workers with hatpins as they entered plant grounds. Strikers held up a sign with a dead rat hanging from the top labeled, “Here’s what you guys are that want to work for Morrell.” Another sign had a drawing of a yellow rat.

Not every exchange was filled with animosity. Arthur “Mike” Bailey, one of the men who made it through the picket lines on Bloody Friday, was pictured in the Argus Leader after the fight with trails of blood running down the side of his head. Bailey was allowed to pass through picket lines unscathed. “Hello Mike,” one striker said, “I saw your picture in the paper the other day. Go on in Mike, you sure can take it.”

Many employees slept at the plant to avoid confrontation with the picketers. The plant held recreational activities for them, including horseshoes and softball games. Kegs of beer were hauled in. Morale in the plant was high but production remained far below normal with only 475 people working.

After the initial days of the strike both sides took on a no-compromise position. About two weeks later, management offered to hire everyone back. A later offer said management would recognize the union and set up an office to hear employee complaints. However, neither offer included rehiring the 29 union officials, so each was rejected.

As time went on the original show of solidarity deteriorated as workers slowly began to return to their jobs. Most had families and children to feed, and the grim reality of the Depression kept them from remaining on strike indefinitely. For those the plant refused to hire back there were relief programs, but most found jobs.

But the union held on, organizing an American Federation of Labor boycott of Morrell products, which was especially effective on the West Coast.

After two years the strike came to an end. But when the settlement came, a plant that was fully manned by non-union workers and in full operation tainted the unionís accomplishment. Morrell conceded to the union’s demand to hire back the 29 leaders as positions opened. The settlement was described as a victory for neither side.

In the long run, it was the foundation labor needed. It gave workers a forum to vent their frustrations to management without dreading the consequences. It created the atmosphere needed for open communication so the company and its labor force could work together. Perhaps the greatest lasting effect of the strike was management never questioned the issue of seniority rights again.

For other workers in other industries, the strike set an example to follow. Twedell and his union stalwarts showed what could be accomplished with determination and dedication to a cause. Workers around the state, such as the Teamsters, followed Local 304’s lead and worked to organize labor associations.

The violence of Bloody Friday probably wasn’t necessary for the eventual victory of the union, but the incident most clearly distilled into a single moment the raw emotion of desperation felt by men and women who were victims of circumstances beyond control.

The struggle of labor in the 1930s was a three-way battle: union against non-union against management. All sides, especially the workers, felt helpless and cornered. In that situation many felt the only option was to lash out.

After the strike was settled, the union made a special effort to smooth things over with their former rivals. A bill was posted around the plant which said, “NOTICE TO ALL MORRELL EMPLOYEES: The strike is over! Let us forget our animosity. Forget the past and organize for the future. We are on friendly terms with the Morrell Company and will do our part to keep this friendship.”

Today, Morrell is still an important part of the Sioux Falls economy. In the 1990s, the state showed its commitment to the plant by offering a $10 million incentive plan, which included renovating buildings and updating equipment.

Local 304 now claims over 2,000 members. The union in its heyday claimed 100 percent membership with about 3,200 workers employed at the plant. It doesn’t have that same strength anymore.

The last strike at the plant, a sympathy strike for the workers at the Sioux City plant, lasted five months, ending in November of 1987. A Rapid City court declared the strike illegal.

Strikes and picket lines, once considered labor’s most effective albeit last-ditch weapon, are hopefully a thing of the past at Morrell. At one time, strikes were defining moments in the relationship of management and labor. Today negotiation is the rule.

Local 304 still remembers that overcast day in 1935. A painting of a birds-eye view of the brawl on “Bloody Friday” hangs in the lobby of the union office in Sioux Falls as a reminder of the conviction of their predecessors and of how things can get out of control.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the January/February 1995 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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