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Slight of Hand

By John Andrews

Luigi Del Bianco, an Italian stone carver from New York, served as chief carver on Mount Rushmore. After years of lobbying by the Del Bianco family, Luigi was honored on Sept. 16 with his own plaque at the national monument.

Editor’s Note: Luigi Del Bianco, chief carver on Mount Rushmore, was officially honored for his work on the monument with a special ceremony and the unveiling of a plaque on Sept. 16. Here is our story about Del Bianco and his grandson Lou, who worked for years on his family’s behalf to ensure that Luigi was recognized for his important role in creating the national monument. The story is revised from our May/June 2014 issue. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

In 1985 Rex Alan Smith published The Carving of Mount Rushmore, considered by many Rushmore researchers to be the definitive account of how perhaps the greatest sculpture in the world emerged from Black Hills granite. Smith expertly details the struggles between temperamental sculptor Gutzon Borglum and the Mount Rushmore Memorial Commission, which oversaw the project. There are stories from the men who worked on the mountaintop and the boosters who navigated Mount Rushmore through its darkest days, knowing it would transform South Dakota forever.

Nowhere in the book’s 416 pages of narrative, photographs, bibliography and index will you read the name Luigi Del Bianco, a classically trained Italian artist specifically recruited by Borglum to be the monument’s chief carver from 1933 to 1940. When Del Bianco’s son Caesar and grandson Lou read Smith’s book, hoping to learn more about Luigi’s contributions to the memorial, they were astonished to find nothing.”He was really the artist who brought the faces to life,” Lou Del Bianco says.”The workers did a wonderful job roughing them out, but you need an artist to bring out the emotion in the faces, and that’s what my grandfather did.

“It’s like leaving Joe DiMaggio out of a book about the New York Yankees. It’s like he wasn’t even there.”

So the Del Bianco family embarked upon a mission to give their patriarch the recognition they believe he deserves for helping create one of the world’s most familiar monuments. Their quest has taken them to Mount Rushmore, on several trips to the Library of Congress and up the ladder of the National Park Service, seeking to change years of firmly held policies regarding how the men who made Rushmore are credited — all to little or no avail. After 25 years of lobbying, it leads to one question: Was Luigi Del Bianco just another laborer on the mountain, as his absence in the book suggests, or should he be credited as the man who brought Mount Rushmore to life?

Lou Del Bianco was 6 years old when his grandfather died of silicosis, a deadly lung disease contracted after decades of inhaling microscopic particles of silica sent airborne as he carved stone. It’s especially cruel that a man’s lifelong avocation and passion would eventually cause his death. When Luigi Del Bianco was born in tiny Meduno, Italy in 1892, it seems he was destined to carve stone. A family story says that as a boy Del Bianco made a small dog from a piece of wood. His father, also a carver, was so impressed that he sent his son to a school in Austria that offered general studies and special courses in stone carving.

Del Bianco patched a portion of Jefferson’s lip when workers encountered a dark strip of feldspar.

Del Bianco stayed in Austria as an apprentice after graduation and spent time studying classical art and architecture in Venice before immigrating to the United States. He had been born into a long line of carvers, and he had many cousins working in a quarry in Barre, Vermont. He joined them in 1909, but returned to Italy to fight with the Italian Army in World War I. Del Bianco immigrated to America permanently in 1920.

As he toiled in the Vermont quarries, he became friends with another stonecutter named Alfonso Scafa from Port Chester, New York. Scafa had cut stone for Gutzon Borglum, who had a studio in nearby Stamford, Connecticut.”You should meet Borglum,” Scafa told Del Bianco,”because you have a lot of talent.”

The two artists were introduced and forged a lifelong friendship. Del Bianco moved to Port Chester, and after meeting and marrying Scafa’s sister-in-law, Borglum offered to house the newlyweds for a year in the honeymoon cottage on his estate.

Del Bianco began a monument company in Port Chester, but he also developed a working relationship with Borglum that lasted 20 years.”They argued quite a bit, but it was part of their relationship,” Lou Del Bianco says.”They had great mutual respect for one another, and in the end they loved each other.”

The artists worked together on the Wars of America memorial, a huge bronze in Newark, New Jersey, that honors the country’s war dead. Because of Del Bianco’s well-defined Roman facial features, Borglum used him as a model for 20 of the 42 human figures depicted in the piece.

Borglum also brought Del Bianco to Georgia to work on Stone Mountain. The project on the outskirts of Atlanta was supposed to be Borglum’s crowning achievement. In 1915 the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked Borglum to carve a likeness of Gen. Robert E. Lee into the face of the granite uplift. It may have seemed an impossible notion, but the idea suited Borglum perfectly. He believed that American art should be,”built into, cut into, the crust of this earth so that those records would have to melt or by wind be worn to dust before the record could, as Lincoln said, ‘perish from the earth.'”

Del Bianco carved Lincoln’s eyes with a clever trick that Gutzon Borglum knew would give them life.

Borglum had an even grander vision for Stone Mountain, and planned an elaborate carving of Lee with a column of Confederate soldiers. Work began in 1923, but constant disagreements between Borglum and the Stone Mountain Association combined with a lack of funds led the artist to leave the project in 1925. Fortunately for Borglum — and eventually for Del Bianco — Doane Robinson had already contacted the artist about a new project in the Black Hills.

Robinson, South Dakota’s state historian, wanted something that would bring people to the Hills. He envisioned full-length likenesses of the country’s founding fathers carved into granite spires called the Needles. Robinson was aware of Borglum’s work at Stone Mountain and invited the artist to scout locations in the Black Hills.

After a few visits Borglum abandoned the idea of carving on the Needles and settled instead on the granite of Mount Rushmore. He fashioned a scale model of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and devised a method to transfer its measurements to the mountaintop. With a skeleton crew of fewer than two-dozen men, the first bits of granite were removed in October 1927.

Work progressed slowly until 1929 when Borglum hired a crew of former miners to help rough out the heads. Rex Alan Smith described what a visitor to Mount Rushmore in 1930 would have seen:”you can tell that it is supposed to be Washington, but the face is heavy-featured and lumpish and the eyes are not yet alive, nor the mouth. It appears that way to others, too, and as [Congressman] William Williamson has just noted in his diary, ‘It lacks expression. It is little more than an image in its present state. Power is lacking.'”

Borglum knew it too.”Somebody has to put life and expression into carved faces,” he said.”That’s why more good mechanics don’t turn out to be good sculptors.” He needed someone who understood the art of stone carving and could make the granite faces seem to gaze over the landscape. He thought he found the right man in Hugo Villa, another Italian sculptor who had assisted Borglum in Connecticut. But Villa soon became one of many men who resigned over wage disputes during the 14-year project.

In 1933 Borglum offered the chief carver’s job to Del Bianco.”It was something only an artist could do,” Lou Del Bianco says.”A lot of the other workers were involved in rough cutting the features, but the chief carver brought refinement of expression. There was only one chief carver on the whole work, and that was Luigi.”

Del Bianco helped transfer measurements from Gutzon Borglum’s model to the mountaintop.

Borglum was convinced Del Bianco was the man for the job.”Bianco has all of Villa’s ability plus power, honesty and dependability,” he wrote to the Mount Rushmore commission.”We could double our progress if we could have two like Bianco. Now I have decided we must keep Bianco and keep him happy. If he were working for me I would pay him eleven or twelve dollars. I want him to receive a dollar an hour. You may charge me with the difference. The help he is, the ability to understand is worth much more to the work.”

Del Bianco spent eight seasons working on Mount Rushmore. In 1935 he moved his entire family — which included wife Nicoletta and sons Silvio, Vincent and Caesar — to a cabin in Keystone with mixed results.”My grandmother did not like living out there, being uprooted from her New York family and friends,” Lou Del Bianco says.”Culturally it was a shock to her. She was always frustrated because they had no Italian ingredients for her meals. But the people were always very accommodating and thoughtful.”

The boys — especially Vincent — adapted to life in South Dakota quite well. They rode horses, swam in Battle Creek, attended a one-room school with the children of other Rushmore workers and became friends with Native Americans. For the rest of his life, Vincent proudly displayed the scar on his thumb, evidence that he had become blood brothers with an Indian boy.”He had wonderful memories of living how he supposed people had lived in pioneer days. He did not want to come back to New York.”

Nevertheless, when the 1935 season concluded, the Del Bianco family returned to New York and Luigi alone came every summer through 1940, staying at a small boarding house near the foot of Mount Rushmore. He worked on refining the Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln heads and quickly gained Borglum’s trust.”He is worth any three men I could find in America,” Borglum wrote.”He entirely out-classed everyone on the hill, and his knowledge was an embarrassment to their amateur efforts and lack of knowledge, lack of experience and lack of judgment. He is the only man besides myself who has been on the work who knows the problems and how to instantly solve them.”

Del Bianco’s problem-solving abilities were challenged when workers roughing out the Jefferson head encountered a dark strip of feldspar on the upper lip. Left untreated, millions of future visitors would get the impression that Jefferson had a cold sore. Del Bianco instructed the men to cut out the dark stone. Then he used a piece of granite from the rubble pile below the carving and shaped it to fit the space. Today the repair is hardly detectable, even to the maintenance crews that regularly inspect the heads.

Perhaps Del Bianco’s greatest contribution, and a point of pride until the day he died in 1969, was carving Lincoln’s eyes. Borglum put great thought into making Lincoln’s eyes as lifelike as possible.”Constantly sketching in a notebook whose tooled leather covers were worn by time and use, he studied the Lincoln head in the angled light of dawn, the brightness of midday, the shadows of evening,” Smith wrote.”He studied it from viewpoints in the canyon, Mount Doane, and the tramway cage. He viewed it from his studio window and, as ideas and inspirations came to him, he telephoned instructions from there to Lincoln Borglum on the mountain or even directly to carvers on the Lincoln head. Much of this time and study he devoted to Lincoln’s eyes and to the special method by which he was to give them, as well as those of Rushmore’s other figures, a lifelike quality rarely seen in sculpture.”

Del Bianco returned often to his home in Italy to visit family, including cousin Luigia Del Bianco.

Borglum’s plan was to carve each pupil several feet across and deep enough to always be shadowed. In the middle, he left a rectangular shaft of granite. Their tips catch the sunlight, and from a distance provide sparkle to Lincoln’s eyes.

Borglum relied on Del Bianco to carry out the vision.”I could only see from this far what I was doing, but the eye of Lincoln had to look just right from many miles distant,” Luigi told an interviewer in 1966.”I know every line and ridge, each small bump and all the details of that head so well.”

Borglum’s intent for Mount Rushmore was to carve the figures to the waist, but plans changed upon his death in 1941. Money was again scarce and it seemed ever more likely that the United States would enter World War II. That summer work on Rushmore stopped for good, and the 400 men who helped create it slipped into obscurity.”There was public recognition of the leaders,” Rex Alan Smith wrote.”Borglum was made a national figure because of his Rushmore work, and he knew that so long as the monument should endure, he would be immortalized as its sculptor. [Sen. Peter] Norbeck, [John] Boland, and the others also received public credit while the work was going on, and knew, as well, that their names would be indelibly written in its history. Rushmore’s workmen, on the other hand, were anonymous. The newspapers did not know their names, nor would the monument’s future viewers. They were Rushmore’s unknown soldiers, and they knew it.”

After Mount Rushmore, Luigi Del Bianco returned to Port Chester. He carved over 500 headstones that still stand in cemeteries in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. He also created art; mostly busts and human figures that today belong to his descendants and private collectors. A permanent exhibit of his work is housed in the Italian American Museum in New York’s Little Italy. He spoke rarely about working on Rushmore, and after his death his family knew few details. His only grandson and namesake first discovered the connection when he found an old Mount Rushmore brochure that belonged to Luigi.”I was such a shy kid but I wanted right away to tell my second grade class about it,” Lou Del Bianco says.”I combed through the pages looking for him and couldn’t find him. I just wanted to find his face or an image of him at the mountain, and he wasn’t there.”

As Washington’s face emerged from the mountain, observers noted that it lacked expression. “It is little more than an image in its present state,” said Congressman William Williamson. “Power is lacking.”

His grandfather’s role at Mount Rushmore was little more than a conversation starter until Lou was in his 20s and began talking to his uncle Caesar, who wanted to know more about what his father had done. That’s when they discovered Smith’s book — with its emphasis on former miners and no mention of Luigi.”That really raised a red flag with us,” Lou says.”That’s only part of the story. They had to be trained, had to be instructed. And it wasn’t only Gutzon Borglum, but my grandfather was also a main teacher of these men.”

They traveled to Mount Rushmore in 1988, but found nothing in records housed at the memorial. Then they met Howard Shaff, who had recently finished his biography of Gutzon Borglum called Six Wars at a Time. Shaff directed the Del Biancos to the Library of Congress, which houses Borglum’s papers. As they dug through the folders, finding letters written by Borglum praising Luigi, they gained a clearer picture of his importance to Rushmore.”He wasn’t just the chief carver,” Lou says.”He was vital to the work. When Luigi would quit over wages, Borglum would say that all work has to stop.”

Luigi’s daughter Gloria attended Mount Rushmore’s 50th anniversary celebration in 1991 and met George Rumple, who started on the monument in 1932 and was a foreman when work ended.”He was not only a stone carver, he was a genius,” Rumple said of Del Bianco.”He was one of the top men. I think he could have taken Mr. Borglum’s place and completed the monument himself.” Now the Del Bianco family was beginning to realize how important Luigi was to the creation of Mount Rushmore. They just had to share it with the world.

Every year, roughly 2 million people stroll up the Avenue of Flags toward perhaps the greatest sculpture in the world. On the way they pass a shiny stone slab on which are etched the names of 395 people who worked on Mount Rushmore. Luigi Del Bianco’s name is in the second column, 13th from the top. It’s in accordance with National Park Service policy.

“We try to recognize all the different workers on the monument,” says Maureen McGee-Ballinger, chief of interpretation at Mount Rushmore.”Mr. Del Bianco had significant contributions, as did William Tallman and Lincoln Borglum. There were many people involved in the sculpture, and if you think about it, 90 percent of the work was done with dynamite. So the people who drilled the holes and placed the dynamite were also significant workers.”

Lou Del Bianco offers an expected and politically correct response:”I respectfully and stridently disagree with policy, and I hope to change it.” He becomes more passionate as he explains his family’s position.”My biggest argument is that you have to stop calling him a worker,” he says.”He was a classically trained artist that Borglum brought in. For the past 25 years they’ve basically said that they just don’t give one worker credit over the others. So a gentleman considered a worker who ran the elevator tram that hauled supplies to the top of the mountain is being put into the same category as my grandfather, and that to me is just not right.”

Lou Del Bianco created a one-man show about his grandfather’s time working on Mount Rushmore, which he performed at the monument during the summer of 2011.

At the same time, Del Bianco doesn’t want to give the impression that he’s trying to overshadow Borglum.”As much as I know my grandfather was a big part of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum was the vision,” he says.”He’s the reason there is a Mount Rushmore. My grandfather idolized him.”

Luigi Del Bianco still looked up to the man he called”the master” even in old age.”It was a sad, sad day when my master died,” Del Bianco said in 1966.”The world lost a great genius.”

Still, Lou Del Bianco thought he might be making headway in 2011. He works as a storyteller, creating shows for elementary school audiences around the Northeast. He wrote a one-man show about his grandfather called”In the Shadow of the Mountain” and spent a day performing it at Mount Rushmore.”There was a very palpable response from tourists and even the rangers,” he says.”They’d come up afterward and say they had no idea. They would go over to the big plaque with the workers’ names and point him out. They all promised they would talk about him more in their walking tours. I really felt like we were making some headway, but that all just shut down. The Mount Rushmore people have all been cordial and very polite to me, but they are holding fast to their policy that there’s no ‘I’ in team.”

Despite the setback, Del Bianco won’t quit because he can sense support from his grandfather.”I think he’d be thrilled,” he says.”And I think I figured that out at Mount Rushmore the day before my performance. I went to the sculptor’s studio where he worked with Borglum measuring points and talking. Borglum talked to my grandfather all the time to bounce ideas off him. All the tourists were milling around, and there’s a giant window toward the monument next to the models. I looked up at the faces and realized, ‘I’m really here. I’m going to do this show, and I’m going to bring him to life.’ And for a second I saw him up there on a scaffold, nodding his head and saying, ‘Thank you.’ I just lost it. I broke down and cried. It was a huge release of tension. I felt like I got my answer from him.”

Interest in Luigi’s story is accelerating. Lou Del Bianco wrote a screenplay that he is currently shopping and a book about Luigi is scheduled for release in 2014. Mount Rushmore’s Joe DiMaggio may finally get his due.

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A Seed on Fertile Ground

By Otto Neuhaus

W.H. Over led the search for Arikara village sites along the Missouri River during summers from 1917 to1919.

How did a Perkins County homesteader with an eighth grade education develop a scientific career and become director of the University of South Dakota Museum?

It all began when young William Henry Over found an arrowhead in his father’s field near Albion, Illinois, where he was born in 1866. Like the seeds his father planted in that field, the chipped scrap of stone would produce many crops in a lifetime of collecting and learning.

While other boys entertained themselves in more conventional ways, young Over began collecting insects, plants and artifacts. “When I was 15,” he told a USD Volante reporter in 1942, “I exhibited my first archaeology items in a small showcase in my home in southern Illinois. It was then I knew my ambition was to direct a large museum.”

As a young man, Over moved to Minnesota to engage in business. But he continued gathering artifacts, a collection he exhibited in 1901 at the American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. During these years he lectured locally on topics from potatoes to primitive man.

By 1908, Over was living in Deuel County. His interests had extended to fossils, and his growing expertise enabled him to recognize unknown snail and crab fossils, two of which were subsequently named after him: Pisidium overi and Dakotacancer overani. Soon, Over, his wife and their two sons moved west to homestead in Perkins County.

Over’s occupation now was farming, but he never stopped collecting. In 1912, he published an article entitled “Notes from Northwest South Dakota” in the journal, Curio Collectors. He began to study natural history in Perkins County, ranging from freshwater shells and fossils to colossal triceratops bones. And he described artifacts left in Perkins County by the Arikara people.

The previous year, Over had written about the hard work of breaking rocks to obtain specimens of Sphenodiscus lenticularis. The essay came into the hands of University of South Dakota Dean E.C. Perisho, who also served as the state geologist. “This article was the means of getting me to Vermillion,” Over said. The family moved to Vermillion in 1912, and Over became assistant curator of the USD Museum.

W.H. Over supervised a dig at the Arikara site near LeBeau in 1932. The village is now under Lake Oahe.

In his new position, Over became especially active in archaeology, developing his interest in the history and culture of the Native peoples of South Dakota. In 1907, he had given a talk in Clear Lake about the earliest South Dakotans, the Arikara, whom he described as semi-civilized people who used fire, made tools and pottery, and cultivated the soil, raising corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and tobacco, semi-sedentary people living a “quiet and peaceable life” in earth lodges in permanent villages.

From 1917 to 1919, Over and his associates spent two months of each summer searching for prehistoric villages along the Missouri River, finding 125 such sites. Over’s article, “The Arikara Culture in South Dakota,” provided the earliest understanding of these people. A 1931 Volante article said the USD Museum had the largest collection of Arikara artifacts in the United States, a collection that Over said, “put the Arikara Indians on the map.” By 1934, he had concluded that their earth lodges, pottery, corn and other plants indicated the Arikara had originated in the Southwest.

Two years after joining the museum, Over began gathering live animals. Committed to attracting and educating young people, he obtained three live opossums, a snowy owl and some snakes, including a diamondback rattlesnake from Texas. In 1941, the Chicago Zoological Park bought all of Over’s snakes from the university.

Throughout his long career, Over’s interests continued to expand. His writings include Amphibians and Reptiles of South Dakota, Birds of South Dakota, Fishes of South Dakota, Mammals of South Dakota, Trees and Shrubs of South Dakota, Wild Flowers of South Dakota, Archaeology in South Dakota and the Life History of Sitting Bull. He left practically no sphere of knowledge about South Dakota untouched.

In 1936, the Board of Regents and the university recognized Over’s accomplishments by granting him the honorary degree of doctor of science. After 35 years of service to the university, Over retired in 1948 at age 82. The following year the regents renamed the university museum the W.H. Over Museum.

William Henry Over died February 20, 1956, having provided an incredible amount of knowledge about South Dakota’s natural and cultural history. The seed that fell on W.H. Over had truly multiplied.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Suspects in Sturgis

By Paul Higbee

Historic Fort Meade was home to Nazi sympathizers during World War II.

A little less than a year after the United States’ entry into the Second World War, the strange soldiers of the 620th Engineer General Service Company arrived at Fort Meade, near Sturgis. On work details they wore blue fatigues, not green. Prisoners of war were typically issued blue fatigues, but no “PW” lettering adorned the 620th’s work uniforms.

These soldiers numbered between 100 and 200 most of the time. Despite that small number, writer E.J. Kahn would note after the war, the 620th claimed “the distinction of being responsible for four-fifths of the convictions under the Eighty-first Article of War recorded against the 11.5 million men who served in the army during the Second World War.”

Conviction under the Eighty-first Article is deadly serious business: it means being found guilty of aiding the enemy. Members of the 620th were American soldiers, but it didn’t come as a complete surprise when some plotted acts for the glory of the Third Reich.

“What made the company unique was that, except for its officers and a cadre of noncommissioned officers, it was filled entirely with men who were suspected of subversive activity or disloyalty,” wrote Bob Lee in his book, Fort Meade and the Black Hills.

The army had to prove nothing for a soldier to be sent to the 620th, Lee added. Suspicion sufficed.

At Fort Meade the 620th painted barracks, hauled trash, planted trees, graded a landing area for military gliders and made camouflage netting. They were issued no arms.

Like other Fort Meade military personnel, they were free to live off the post grounds. Many lived in Sturgis or Deadwood apartments and commuted to the fort five days a week. Weekends were spent enjoying the Black Hills’ amenities, and pursuing the charms of local young women, many of whom missed boyfriends sent to combat in North Africa, Europe or the Pacific.

Certainly the soldiers of the 620th enjoyed cushy wartime duty, maneuvering their way through pine forests en route to picnics in Custer State Park, rather than through land-mined jungles or sniper-protected villages. The military eventually heard criticism about that, but at the time the army found itself in a bind. Exempting from military service those men who didn’t approve of the nation’s war policy wasn’t fair, plus, doing so would offer an easy out for those hoping to avoid enlistment. At the same time, the army didn’t want these men, some of whom were vocal in their admiration of Adolf Hitler, in regions where they could pass information to the enemy or sabotage American war production. The War Department studied maps, decided Fort Meade was about as far removed from the war as a soldier could get, and formed the 620th under a confidential order in October 1942.

Most of the 620th soldiers were of German or Italian descent. Other companies were established elsewhere for soldiers suspected of sympathy for Japan. It should be noted that many men of the 620th wished the United States no harm in the war, and hoped the whole affair would simply end quickly.

Because formation of the 620th was confidential, the Black Hills public didn’t know of its makeup, although a few remarked that lots of the men spoke with accents and knew all the lyrics to German beer hall songs. “The citizens of Sturgis, had they known the 620th was filled with soldiers the army considered undesirables, would have been shocked, since they had treated these men as freely and as generously as they had the other soldiers from the fort,” Lee wrote.

Stone stables at Fort Meade housed 86 horses each. Located just east of Sturgis, the fort now stands as a National Historic Site.

Along with being shocked, the citizens of Sturgis likely would have worried the soldiers might try something rash if a militant leader joined their ranks. That leader came along in March of 1943, in the person of Dale Maple.

Maple wasn’t typical of the 620th. Maple wasn’t German or Italian. Actually, he wasn’t typical by any standard of American young men. He was, when he arrived in South Dakota, a 22-year-old graduate of Harvard, where he’d studied government and publicly expressed admiration for Hitler’s fascist regime. He attracted enough attention for his views at Harvard that Time magazine once described him as a “native U.S. Nazi.” In his hometown of San Diego, as a child, he’d seen his name in the press often as a piano prodigy. Southern California music critics predicted big things for him in concert halls.

Maple graduated from Harvard, with academic honors, in the spring of 1941. He was still on campus doing post-graduate work the next December when the United States declared war. Hours after Maple heard news of Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, he phoned the German embassy in Washington. He told an official there it looked obvious the German ambassador and his staff would shortly be expelled from Washington, and said he would like to join them when they traveled home to Germany. The embassy official told Maple no.

So Maple joined the United States Army. Had he been sent overseas, deserted and made his way into German territory, he would have had no trouble communicating his Nazi sympathies. He’d learned German and spoke it fluently. But Maple never got near the war. After training as a military radio operator at bases in North Carolina and Maryland, Maple was transferred to Fort Meade in early 1943. The army decided that the support he declared for Hitler at Harvard made him a case for the 620th.

Speaking to South Dakota Magazine 57 years later, just a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, Maple recalled the 620th was quartered in barracks built for and by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s, on the west end of the fort grounds. “We received no military training as such,” he said. “Of course, there were no thoughts that we’d be part of the Okinawa invasion.”

While Maple’s well-documented remarks left no doubt why he’d been sent to Fort Meade, he said some of the others “had no idea why they were in that unit.”

Maple rented an apartment in Deadwood, found he had lots of time for reading and backroom gambling, and made some friends in Deadwood’s bars. Black Hills acquaintances recall him as tall, handsome, well mannered, soft-spoken and a remarkable piano player. He had one minor brush with the law in Deadwood when picked up for tampering with someone’s car.

The 620th liked Spearfish Canyon. In the summer of 1943 the soldiers would sometimes rent a cabin there for weekend parties where beer flowed and rousing choruses of German beer hall songs rattled the windows. The army suspected espionage might be being plotted in the cabin and bugged the place. Surveillance uncovered nothing.

But it was proven later in court that the army had good reason to worry about subversive plots. Maple and a few friends in the 620th spent time in the Black Hills, in the words of E.J. Kahn, “exploring, largely in conversation, courses of action they might take to demonstrate their disaffection — espionage, desertion, mutiny, sabotage, guerrilla warfare against the United States, and so on.”

Site of Orman Dam POW Camp north of Fort Meade near Belle Fourche.

Helping German prisoners of war escape appealed to the conspirators, but no prisoners came to Fort Meade until after they had left. The first week of December 1943, the 620th transferred to Camp Hale, Colorado, 120 miles west of Denver. On one hand, the soldiers disliked the move because everyone but married men had to live at the post. On the other hand, 200 German prisoners were also quartered there.

Imagine Hogan’s Heroes in reverse. The German POWs had a still for making schnapps, acquired a pistol and American military uniforms, and regularly got themselves out of their compound and allowed visitors in. The 620th men, in blatant violation of regulations against fraternization, won the prisoners’ confidence and friendship with gifts of candy, tobacco and whiskey. When POW Erhard Schwichtenberg said he wanted to see the American West, the 620th got him out for a couple days and drove him several hundred miles through Colorado. Nobody missed him. When Maple got a three-day leave, the only place he wanted to visit was the inside of the POW compound, where he spent the entire period, wearing a German uniform and drinking schnapps — and learning that Schwichtenberg and another prisoner named Heinrich Kikillus wanted to escape as much as Maple wanted to help them.

Maple bought a decade-old Reo sedan. On February 15, in broad daylight, he simply drove the car to a rendezvous point just off the post grounds, and Schwichtenberg and Kikillus strolled away from a work detail and climbed in. Nobody noticed for more than 24 hours that the prisoners were missing and Maple was AWOL. By the time they were missed, the trio was far south down U.S. Highway 85, in New Mexico, implementing a Black Hills plan that called for getting to Mexico first. From there the idea was to reach Argentina and secure passage by ship to Spain, and from Spain travel to Germany.

After two flat tires and an electrical problem, Maple got the car within 17 miles of Mexico. Then he ran out of gas, and the three companions hiked cross-country into Mexico by night. A Mexican border patrolman stopped them 3 miles inside Mexico on the afternoon of February 18, and turned them over to United States authorities.

At a military trial two months later at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Maple said the escape had been merely a ploy to call public attention to the injustice of companies like the 620th. Further, he claimed, he’d only pretended to be a Nazi at Harvard in hopes of winning German scholarship money to pursue post-graduate studies at the University of Berlin. Nobody bought his stories and he was convicted of desertion and aiding the enemy, and sentenced to death. Three fellow conspirators in the 620th — Paul Kissman, Theophil Leonhard and Friedrich Siering — were court-martialed and sent to prison. The German prisoners, it was noted, simply had exercised their right and duty to attempt escape.

After Maple’s death sentence was handed down, nobody in the military or federal government seemed to want to see it carried out. The secretary of war sent a memo to President Franklin Roosevelt, saying of Maple: “While he is undoubtedly legally sane and responsible for his despicable acts, under all the circumstances I am unable to escape the impression that justice does not require this young man’s life. I feel that the ends of justice will be better served by sparing his life so that he may live to see the destruction of tyranny, the triumph of the ideals against which he sought to align himself, and the final victory of the freedom he so grossly abused.”

Maple did live to see the triumph of American ideals and freedoms, and, in fact, to prosper by them. Roosevelt commuted his sentence to life in prison, and later it was reduced to 10 years at Leavenworth federal penitentiary. He proved a model prisoner and was still a young man when released in the 1950s.

ìI came back to California and got into a venture building commercial fishing boats,” he said. “I learned about insuring boats, and that led me into the marine insurance business worldwide.” He never returned to the Black Hills.

It is possible the Black Hills would have forgotten Maple and the entire 620th had it not been for E.J. Kahn’s series of articles about the company and Maple’s trial, published in 1950 in the New Yorker magazine. Suddenly people who had wondered about those soldiers’ accents and their knowledge of German beer hall songs had answers.

As for Fort Meade, the War Department declared the post surplus the same month Dale Maple went to trial, April of 1944. Fort Meade then became a Veterans Administration hospital.

“Ironically, aside from the station complement, the 620th was the last company-sized army unit stationed at Fort Meade before the post’s abandonment as a military installation,î Lee wrote. ìIt was a strange ending for a garrison that had included many of the army’s most highly regarded and decorated outfits during its long years of service.”

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Hutchinson County’s Holstein War

By Kim Wilcox

Hutchinson County “cowboys,” dignitaries and ship’s crew posed for this picture aboard the West Arrow before beginning the journey.

People in Hutchinson County still talk now and then about the Battle of the Cows that was waged over a herd of 700 milk cows bound for Germany in 1921.

The shipment of cows came about when South Dakotans of German descent became greatly concerned by reports of hardships suffered by the German people after World War I. A milk shortage was caused by the disruption of the German economy that followed defeat in the war.

On December 19, 1920, news stories from Berlin reported on the disastrous results of the loss of the 800,000 milk cows that the Germans were forced to deliver to the Allies under terms of the Versailles Treaty.

Even though anti-German sentiments remained high both in South Dakota and across the nation, many German-Americans could see no reason why they should not help their friends and relatives still living in Germany. They received permission needed from federal authorities to ship dairy cattle to Germany.

But controversy raged over whether or not Americans should be helping the Germans.

Thus, when South Dakota’s German communities announced plans to help feed the beaten Germans, some Americans questioned the patriotism of the plan. Despite threats, the German-Americans, with support of many members of surrounding communities, kept their promise of sending milk cows back to Germany.

In all, three shiploads of milk cows were sent to Germany from various parts of the U.S. According to the Freeman Courier of Sept. 15, 1976, “It is not clear exactly where the first shipment originated. The second consignment of cows, totaling 732, was apparently gathered as donations from German-American farmers in Kansas, Texas and Indiana. The third and final shipment came primarily from Hutchinson County in South Dakota.”

From small beginnings the relief movement grew. Several pastors of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church were chosen to lead the project. The American Dairy Cattle Company asked Pastor Heinrich Friedrich Wildhelm Gerike, who was in charge of two congregations of the Missouri Synod, his own at Tripp and one at Emanuel’s Creek, to supervise the work.

Another leader was Pastor Richard Tauber of the American Lutheran Church in Tripp. Local banks also assisted with the collection because, in addition to cows, money was collected to cover shipping costs and to support those who would accompany the livestock. Two bankers especially associated with the project were Oscar Brosz of Tripp and Reinhold Dewald of Freeman.

Despite protests from neighbors, German-American farmers sent 700 cows on this ship, the West Arrow. On April 13, 1921, the ship set sail on its 18-day voyage to Germany. It took both men and cattle a few days to adjust to the sea motion.

Since the cows had to be fed and milked, local youth were sent along on the journey. Volunteers from South Dakota were Herbert Bender, Theodore Weidenbach and Herbert Hintz (Scotland), William and Reinhold Dewald, Hugo Haar, Christ and Hans Kauffmann, Joe Wallmann and William Wipf (Freeman), W.E. Friedrichs (Alexandria), Hans Gottsche and Joseph A. Gross (Carpenter), Richard Isaak (Parkston), Albert Koehn (Corsica), William Mundt and Joseph Wipf (Bridgewater), John Sattler and Harold Serr (Tyndall), Jacob Schaefer (Armour), August Schmichel (Marion), William E. Voight (Avon), William Warnicke (Paullina), Henry Wettrock (Canistota), and Daniel Winter (Delmont). Original plans called for one shipment of cows by train from Scotland. At least 300 cows were held over the night of March 23, 1921. The remainder of the 700 cows in the total shipment were detained at Tripp along the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad line.

The Tripp Ledger commented on March 17, ” … shipment from Tripp will be made Wednesday, March 23. Cows should, if possible, be in Tripp the day before … about 300 cows are expected to be shipped from here and about 400 from Scotland. Besides the donation of these cows, $16,000 in money has been collected.”

On Wednesday, March 23, the 386 cows in Scotland and the 270 head in Tripp were being herded when Pastor H.F.W. Gerike was notified that trouble might be expected at Scotland. Some non-Germans had sworn that no cows would be sent to Germany and had recruited a gang. They threatened to march against the cows in order to stampede the herd and make shipment impossible.

In the meantime, F.F. Matenaers of the American Dairy Cattle Company had arrived in Scotland. Pastor Gerike led him to the mayor of Scotland to request that the sheriff send deputies to protect the herd of cows.

The mayor agreed with Pastor Gerike and promised to find deputies due to the threats made against the herd. Unfortunately, the mayor didn’t follow through with his promise and when Thursday came neither he or the sheriff were anywhere to be found.

Wednesday night, some 25 automobiles packed with men, and 30 more men on horseback, arrived at the scene and opened fire on the herd. Only four unarmed, young men were on duty to guard the cattle. Several cows were killed and wounded, mostly from being hit by cars. Most of the herd was scattered.

To round up the herd after Wednesday night’s raid, volunteers were called from the area. By Thursday afternoon, the results were two dead, one lame and 26 missing.

First reports said American Legion members and other ex-servicemen from the Scotland, Tripp and Menno areas were responsible for protesting the shipment and had planned the stampede that had taken place Wednesday night. Later, however, the Legion publicly disclaimed any responsibility, saying that if Legion members took part, they did so on their own. It should be noted that some of the men helping with the transport of the milk cows to Germany were Legion members also.

After arriving in Germany with their cargo, the South Dakota farmers who accompanied the cattle became tourists. These two, Christ Kaufmann, left, and Hans Kaufmann, even dressed the part for a photograph.

After the cows had been returned to the corral in Scotland, it was decided that they should be driven across the county line into Hutchinson County. There they were corralled on a farm one-half mile west of Kaylor. At the time, the farm was owned by August Link, who had rented it to Gustav Freitag. Once the cows arrived within his territory, Karl Schmidt, sheriff of Hutchinson County, assumed responsibility for the safety of the herd.

Schmidt deputized Lieutenant Ewald Gall of Menno and put him in charge of a large posse of farmers to protect the cows from further attack. Conflicting reports claim there were 200 to 300 farmers included in the posse.

On the night of March 24, farmers stood guard around the 330 cows, which had been corralled in a bowl-like pasture south of the Kaylor-Tripp road. Some men hid in the cemetery across the street, using the tombstones for barricades. As anticipated, about 10:30 p.m., approximately 30 cars approached, coming north from Scotland. Earlier in the evening, an unidentified call had reportedly been made to a local undertaker. The caller advised him to send an ambulance to the scene because there “soon would be a number of dead.”

When the cars reached the Freitag farm, they were unexpectedly met by Sheriff Schmidt and Lieutenant Gall, who warned them that the first man to cross the fences would be fired upon by at least 200 farmers.

According to the Scotland Journal of March 31, 1921, the attackers were again members of the American Legion. “A large number of Legionnaires from the various posts near Scotland started for Kaylor … On arriving at what was to be fighting ground, the Legionnaires found that they were outnumbered four to one in both men and guns and decided to call off the action.”

Since more trouble was anticipated the following night, when the cows were to be driven to Tripp for loading on the train, the guard was again used.

But that night, guards only had to deal with some curiosity seekers and catcalling protestors who had gathered. No one was injured. A few people from Bon Homme County were arrested and spent the night in the Tripp calaboose.

Reports on the nature of the arrests conflicted. Some even say that poison was taken from the arrested men. There is an agreement that 14 men were arrested and that all of them were implicated in the stampeding of the 300 head of cattle occurring in Scotland on Wednesday. After being taken into custody in Tripp, the 14 were searched. Four men were charged with carrying concealed weapons and were fined $5 and costs. All of the men were released.

On Saturday, approximately 700 cows were loaded aboard 26 rail cars en route to Sioux City. Attempting to stop the train, Legionnaires once again entered the picture, admittedly taking all measures to intercept the shipment.

They first tried to make an appeal to Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, but it was denied because the Internal Revenue Service had already issued an authorization for the export.

The next attempt was to obtain a court injunction to prevent the cattle from leaving Sioux City. When this failed the Legion men said they would appeal directly to President Harding.

The shipment continued on to Chicago, and finally Baltimore. The train passed, at double speed, through places where threats had been made. The train crew and the boys in charge of the cows were prepared for any situation.

The train made it with success to Baltimore. Upon its arrival, the American Legion made one last formal protest while the cows were loaded on board the West Arrow and headed for Germany.

The cattle were put in stalls with their tail end against the outside walls. The milkers had to crawl through the mess the cows left in order to get to the teats. Sometimes they couldn’t distinguish the milker from the milked for all the filth that covered them.

Reinhold Dewald later expressed his feelings about the trip to Europe. “As you know, the cattle were finally loaded. Practically all of us had pistols in our pockets to hold the howling wolves of Scotland bay. We were glad when the train finally got under way, even if we were threatened with reprisal if this should happen. On the freight train things did not go smoothly, especially with the meals. The noon meal often wasn’t served until 3 o’clock and supper in the morning.

“In Baltimore we, together with the cattle, were locked into the stockyards. The place actually thought of itself as a hotel … Yes, it even had ‘HOTEL’ printed across the top in large letters, but it still resembled a barn more than anything else. And the chickens … They certainly weren’t fried according to mother’s recipe … only one got sick and two departed for the dear hereafter.

“It has been stated that when you’re on the ocean, everything goes well as long as your stomach functions properly. Some of the men experienced this malfunction the first day of their voyage on the West Arrow. The ship was a freighter, not designed to accommodate either man or beast.

“On April 13, the ship finally set sail … after laying around Baltimore for nine days, we were glad to be on the move again. The beds had been very hard, otherwise we might have been content to lay around there till now.

“The weather was beautiful except for those who couldn’t hold up their heads anymore … Then one day and one night there blew a mighty storm. Waves washed over the ship and shook it so hard that some of the boys were thrown from their bunks.

“Before evening, winds and waves abated … Joy turned to despair when a heavy fog embraced the ship and everything else in the vicinity. The steamer’s horn shrieked so boisterously … that even the most dedicated church sleeper was kept awake and alert the whole night through.

“After 18 days we finally arrived in Germany. In Bremenhafen we had to wait till the tide rose and then we slowly proceeded up the Wesser River through locks where Germans on both sides greeted us. We greeted them with milk, of which we had a goodly supply on hand.”

No doubt, some of Germany’s dairy herd today has the bloodlines of the Holstein cows that came from Hutchinson County in 1921.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the July/August 1992 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Firmly Planted in South Dakota

By Helen Hansen Loen

Niels Hansen traveled to Russia, China and other distant nations in search of fruits, flowers and agricultural plants adaptable to the South Dakota climate and soil.

For some South Dakotans, the name Niels Ebbesen Hansen is associated with alfalfa. Others recall that he introduced hardy fruits for their orchards. Some, noting his association with another plant breeder of renown, may remember him as”The Burbank of the Plains.” His contributions to the field of horticulture have been mentioned in magazines and newspapers for over 70 years. Writers delight in recounting his adventurous trips to the steppes of a Russia still ruled by the czar. Others refer to his forays into China, where bandits roved the countryside. To me he was grandpa.

These extraordinary adventures came at the turn of the 20th century, when Niels Hansen became the first plant explorer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His mission was to find plants that would grow in South Dakota and surrounding states. Plants brought from the eastern half of the country struggled to find sustenance in a semiarid land with cold winters. Hansen proposed the radical idea that South Dakota could grow virtually any plant if it were crossed with hardy strains of foreign plants. He spent his life as a horticulture professor at South Dakota State University proving that theory.

But there was more to the man than his adventures or his desire to introduce plants that would grow in what he fondly referred to as”my American Siberia.” A man of science, Niels was also a man of quiet Christian faith. He once told a group of students at a chapel meeting,”I felt I was doing the Lord’s work.”

Hansen was also a man of poetry. He once told a visitor that he arrived early to work so he could write a few lines of poetry each morning.”It helps get my thinking started,” he said. He often submitted poems to Pasque Petals, the magazine published by the state Poetry Society. His love of poetry endures in the stanzas of the SDSU song,”The Yellow and Blue,” which he wrote. Students saw him marching across campus with a tall, lanky music professor named Francis Haynes, beating out the rhythm of the song and lyrics. To some, they looked like Ichabod Crane and a shorter friend.

The fine arts were especially dear to Niels Hansen, and he supported them any way he could. Rain or shine, he walked his grandchildren to whatever cultural events were offered at the college. He introduced the Scandinavian tradition of the Maypole, a mainstay of the campus May Day celebration for many years.

An immigrant to America, Hansen was proud of his Danish roots and of the family that contributed so much to his character. He was named for a grandfather who had received the highest civilian award from the king for 50 years of service. Niels’ father served in the army and also received a medal from the king. His cousin was a member of the king’s cabinet during the German occupation. When he traveled abroad, Niels visited aunts, uncles and cousins.

Hansen attributed his love of art to his father, Andreas, a fresco painter and a loving, supportive figure in the son’s life. The fond letters they exchanged over the years showed how important that relationship was to both of them.

As important as foreign travels were to his professional life, his most important trip was taken in 1897 — important not because of the prized alfalfa he discovered, but because it was on this trip that he wrote a letter proposing marriage to the woman he had been courting for six years.

The romance began when he was an assistant professor of horticulture at Iowa Agricultural College, now Iowa State University. While at Ames, Hansen spotted a teenager, Emma Pammel, who had come to attend the college and to live with her brother Louis, head of the botany department. Rules about dating students were strictly enforced, but even if they had been more lenient, Emma wanted nothing to do with the son of an immigrant painter. The family still has Niels’ invitation to Emma to attend a college event. She returned the invitation with the written comment,”No! No! No!”

Hansen built South Dakota State University’s horticulture department, but he also dabbled in poetry and writing. He composed the lyrics to “The Yellow and Blue,” one of SDSU’s school songs.

Niels’ courtship efforts were aided by his friend George Washington Carver, a student at Ames who later gained national renown for his teaching and his work with peanuts and other plants at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Louis Pammel had befriended this ambitious son of a former slave, admiring his desire for education.

Being black, Carver was not allowed to live in a dormitory, so Pammel arranged for him to live in the basement of the botany building. As their friendship flourished, Carver spent many evenings with the Pammel family. Also a classmate of Emma, he had access to the family that Hansen could only hope for. Seeing Hansen despondent over the lack of progress in his pursuit of Emma, Carver would ask with a broad smile,”Would you like me to take some roses from the greenhouse to Miss Pammel tonight?”

After he left Ames to become the professor of forestry and horticulture at the college in Brookings, Hansen persisted in this courtship.”Of course I think more of you than of ‘a mere friend’ — a thousand times more,” he wrote to Emma.”How can I help it? You have known that my sentiments are more than friendly for a long time. I know I tried very hard for a long time to forget you but could not make the slightest progress in so doing.”

“When he sees something of value he knows it, and when he goes after a thing, he gets it,” Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson once said about Hansen. Such was his pursuit of Emma, whom he adoringly called”My White Lily.”

After six years and many letters, Emma, who had been pursuing a career in teaching, finally succumbed to Niels’ entreaties. They were married in the fall of 1898. They were considered a handsome couple, she a fashionable, vivacious wife who entered into faculty life with gusto, he proudly escorting her to faculty balls, where they became known for their elegant dancing.

Six years later their idyllic marriage ended. Emma was stricken with appendicitis when she was six months pregnant with their third child. In those days there was no local doctor who would operate on a woman in this condition, so Hansen frantically wired to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. A doctor agreed to come, but was held up in a blizzard, and arrived too late. Emma’s appendix burst, and peritonitis set in. She lingered five days before dying in mid-December, 1904.

Heartsick with grief, Hansen now found himself unable to care for the two small children, Eva, 5, and Carl, not quite 2. The Pammel grandparents took the children into their home in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Hansen was now without wife or children. This sorry state existed for three years, until he married Emma’s sister, Dora, who had been helping to care for the children.

After Emma’s death, Hansen made two more trips to Siberia for the Department of Agriculture, the last in 1908. Then he and the department parted company. He had overspent his budget, and department staff persuaded Secretary Wilson to drop Hansen from the roster of plant explorers.

Hansen may not have been surprised. His relationships within the bureaucracy had been difficult from the start. He had been hired by and reported directly to Wilson, a friend from his Iowa days. Some staff members resented his position as a favored employee. The situation was likely exacerbated when the secretary praised him publicly:”I have 1,200 men under me, but none who knows how to work like Hansen. There is only one Hansen.”

Hansen may have failed in Washington politics, but he could be persuasive with the South Dakota Legislature. He stood before the farmers of the legislature and pleaded his case for more research funds. Three times they granted him money for different projects. They provided funds for the first commercial-size greenhouse on state property. They sent him to Siberia for more alfalfa, and they were persuaded to fund a trip to China to find hardy pears.”You can always appeal to a man’s stomach,” Hansen joked.

Hansen, pictured with his wife Dora, remained active until shortly before his death in 1950.

The State Fair at Huron was also important to Hansen. He would fill the Horticulture Hall with flowers, fruits and agricultural products from the experimental farms and orchards across the state, an opportunity to show farmers the variety of plants they could grow in South Dakota. One year he displayed over 500 kinds of gladioli. He always enjoyed talking to farmers about their problems.

Reporters delighted in interviewing Hansen, because he had a delightful self-deprecating manner. They could count on some witticism or quote. Interviewed in retirement, he told one reporter that he had to keep working to prevent”ossification of the coco.”

One year at the State Fair he showed his impish sense of humor when he set up a small pond in the center of the Horticultural Hall, purporting to contain”invisible fish.” Many an onlooker peered into the pool trying to spot them. Those who knew Hansen were not surprised at this harmless bit of tomfoolery.

He once remarked,”I can recommend overland travel by troika as a sure anti-fat cure. But I can also say that after a 700-mile ride I have never cared about sleigh riding.” Another time he humorously commented,”Riding hundreds of miles in a springless wagon is good for indigestion, if you can stay in the wagon. It settles your food.”

A visitor once suggested,”I suppose you could even breed a square pea that would stay on your knife!”

“As a matter of fact, I found a three-cornered pea once in Asia that might turn the trick,” Hansen shot back.”Some day I may get to work on that.” Praised for a new red-fleshed apple, Hansen remarked,”It’s like a candied apple without the cinnamon. We may be able to breed that into it later.”

After Hansen’s death, the Brookings Register observed in an editorial:”Those who have commented upon his traits of character and temperament have all missed one thing, and that was his sense of humor. He could illuminate his tale with sly and subtle humor which made his discussion of even highly technical matters interesting to the untrained.”

It was on the many foreign trips that Hansen proved his courage. Once, far from civilization on the steppes of Russia, a peasant guide tried to rob him. Hansen quickly showed the guide the special permit he carried with the seal of the czar attached. The guide recognized the seal and realized Hansen was under the protection of the emperor. He crossed himself, knelt in submission, and promised to fulfill his duties.

Another trip took him through a region of northern China where bandits roamed. He later told his family the grisly story of how the road into one village was lined with the heads of bandits impaled on spikes as a warning to would-be marauders.”But I kept on with the pear work,” he commented casually.

Hansen gave lectures on anything from Russian agriculture to the propagation of roses. Sometimes he strayed from his major field and rendered opinions on topics such as”The Sublimation of the Libido,” or the atom bomb. He could easily fill a hall because his speeches, given in a soft voice that retained a slight Danish accent, were amusing and insightful. But those who heard him speak might have been surprised to learn that he had overcome a speech impediment with elocution lessons and diligent practice.

Hansen enjoyed the movies, and rarely missed the offerings of the theaters in downtown Brookings, the Fad and The State. He had a preferred seat in the theaters, which the ushers faithfully set aside for him, sometimes asking people to move if they sat in”Professor Hansen’s seat.” He regularly took his grandchildren to Sunday matinees, then to Fenn’s ice cream store.

Those who sat behind Professor Hansen witnessed his passionate involvement with a movie. In one, the hero was alone in a desert without water, struggling through the sand, obviously dying from thirst. Hansen kept muttering,”Cut the cactus! Cut the cactus!” Not surprisingly, the hero finally found the cactus that contained water and saved his life.

Hansen remained active until a year before he died. In his 84th year, he began to fail. The once sturdy body that had taken him across the windswept steppes of Russia and on many treks across the prairies, now was slowed by inflammation of the heart. In his last few weeks of life, he could recognize only his son Carl. His thoughts wandered back in time. Once he became extremely agitated, shouting,”Where are the keys to the apples? Where are the keys to the apples?”

Carl knew exactly what concerned his father. He was referring to his keys — the research notes on the many cross-pollinations he had made. When Carl reassured him they were safe, his father became calm.

Finally, in 1950, Niels Hansen’s infirmities required hospital care. One evening his grandson, David Gilkerson, and his wife came to visit. They found him curled up asleep on the hospital bed. On the bedside table, a stranger had left a tribute to Hansen’s life — a single pear. It was as though the visitor had said,”See, Professor Hansen. This is what I grew on one of your trees. Thanks for all you have done.”

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

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The Man Who Played Christ

By Paul Higbee

Josef Meier brought his Passion Play to Spearfish in 1938.

So overpowering are the accomplishments of the man who played Jesus Christ that it’s sometimes hard to remember the individual behind them.

Popes honored Josef Meier three times for the religious inspiration he brought to millions. Meier was the Cal Ripken of theatre, his record 8,000 performances of a theatrical role unmatched in American stage history. And he was the very image of the immigrant who comes to the United States with very little, lives every day in celebration of American freedoms, and in so doing builds not only a livelihood but also an institution.

He did all this based in Spearfish, where in 1938 he transplanted an Old World passion play, a drama recounting Christ’s last seven days on Earth. It can be added to Meier’s accomplishments that he pioneered Black Hills tourism, putting his play in a town with no railroad. Tourism was still the domain of railroads in the 1930s, but Josef Meier correctly guessed that would change.

Of course, Meier’s mystique is enhanced by the fact that most photos show him costumed as Christ, the role he played 8,000 times for a total audience of 9 million people. But digging through Spearfish files one uncovers other pictures, such as Meier dressed in work clothes and a western hat, his beloved horses and dogs at his side.

A year after Meier’s death in 1999 at age 94, interviews with his family, friends and Passion Play actors revealed an individual every bit as remarkable as his honors and records, though he always downplayed those, explaining that the Passion Play’s message was important, not its numbers and awards.

One longtime Spearfish friend said, somewhat sheepishly, “I find I can’t talk about Josef Meier without quoting him, because he was such an articulate man. And I can’t quote him without imitating that wonderful German accent of his. So I imitate him, but with the utmost respect.”

Charlotte Carver, first South Dakota Arts Council executive director, recalled Meier as “a gallant gentleman. He possessed a true continental charm.”

Indeed he did, and a knack for winning lifelong friendships. At one point the Meiers’ Christmas card list numbered 6,000, He especially liked friends who held up their end of lively discussions about most anything: politics, the South Dakota cattle industry, the arts, the best spots in the Black Hills to find deer during hunting season.

Plenty of Spearfish people also recall Meier as a tough negotiator, who knew his play made a huge economic impact in Spearfish (it brought 4.5 million visitors to town during his lifetime) and who expected the community to help promote it and maintain quality roads to the amphitheater. At the same time, he’d do most anything to help the town move forward. He established scholarships at Black Hills State University, served on Spearfish’s first hospital board, sacrificed some of his own property to make certain Interstate 90 got routed to town, and contributed time to civic projects through the Lions Club and Knights of Columbus. Meier never saw Spearfish until age 33, and then his play kept him away for months almost every year. But there could be no doubt where he considered home.

Nine million people saw Josef Meier portray Christ in the Passion Play.

It was a home far from his native Lunen, Germany. Born in 1904, one of nine children, Meier gained an academic knowledge of the English language in school. He was a serious student who considered a career in medicine, loved competitive swimming and developed a deep appreciation for literature, music and theatre arts.

”I’m not sure if he was serious about a medical career by the time he was a young man or not,” said his daughter, Johanna. “At any rate, whatever his other interests might have been, his love of the theatre took over.”

So much so that at age 27 he boarded a ship bound for New York, part of a troupe that would stage the 700-year-old Lunen Passion Play, in German, to American audiences. Their idea was to play cities with large German immigrant populations. The players found some appreciative audiences in 1932, but Meier quickly saw that a better plan would be to translate the play into English. After doing so, he based the play in Chicago and began hiring American actors as the original cast drifted back across the Atlantic. He eventually toured to more than 600 cities across the United States and Canada.

On the road during the Depression, the cast sometimes outnumbered the audience. Seldom-used auditoriums often required hours of maintenance before scenery and lights could be rigged. The cast traveled by rail; once their poorly heated car sat through a cold Oklahoma night, waiting to be picked up by a freight train. That misadventure sent one actor to the hospital with pneumonia, and prompted Meier to buy a fleet of trucks and cars.

Josef and Clare Meier toured 600-plus cities and towns.

“I found that good actors are often not good drivers,” Meier said years later. “But we never had an accident that resulted in serious injury.”

In the early years, Meier once told The Saturday Evening Post, “I worried over so many things. I worked hard all day on the play, and then sat up half the night struggling with letters and other paper work. It seemed a hopeless struggle, until one night in the middle of the play as I spoke the lines to Judas, ‘Do you not worry about the tomorrow.’ It struck me that it was about time I took my own advice. I worked just as hard afterward, but I haven’t worried since.”

Things improved further after Chicago actress Clare Hume joined the cast. She and Meier were married a year later. She took over costuming responsibilities and played Mary, Christ’s mother.

Clare Meier recalled when the Passion Play came to Sioux Falls in late 1937. Among performances there was a memorable one at the state penitentiary, where the cast dressed in cramped prison cells. Sioux Falls businessman Leo Craig met the Meiers and learned that Josef one day hoped to find an outdoor venue for the production. Craig suggested the Black Hills, where he owned a cabin. Meier had already investigated possible sites, including the Ozarks, where the scenery was beautiful but the mosquitoes thick. He liked a Santa Barbara amphitheater, but not the ocean fogs that would surely cancel performances.

The play came to Spearfish in late summer of 1938 for a few performances at the college auditorium. Before Meier and his company left town, the Lunen Passion Play’s name had been changed to the Black Hills Passion Play. Spearfish photographer Joe Fassbender shot publicity photos, and builder Martin Thompson said he’d have an amphitheater constructed to Meier’s design specifications by the next summer. Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum welcomed Meier to the Hills, and the Borglums and Meiers became close friends.

Spearfish banker Walter Dickey topped Josef Meier’s list of people who made the Passion Play a South Dakota success. When the cast moved into its amphitheater for its opening performance June 18, 1939, it was the talk of the Hills. According to the Spearfish newspaper, 27 dates that summer drew 35,000 people. But in 1940, with most residents having seen the production and Black Hills tourism still in its infancy, attendance fell sharply. A local Passion Play corporation, which had built the amphitheater and was responsible for its upkeep, folded. Josef Meier personally assumed the corporation’s debts, and Dickey told him he could repay a bank loan as he was able.

Keeping the production afloat wasn’t Meier’s only interest in those years. Johanna is certain that Spearfish’s western setting was a reason her father settled there.

Meier relaxing with two of his many dogs.

“He grew up loving stories of the American West, and suddenly he had an opportunity to live here and have horses and livestock,” she said. “He acquired a ranch, and he was much more than a gentleman rancher. I remember driving across the state with him, buying bulls, and he spent long days calving, vaccinating, and doing everything else a rancher does.”

Meierís ranch stood out because of its camels, which he used in the play. He learned that two-humped Bactrians from cool regions of Asia weathered South Dakota winters well.

Had the Passion Play failed, would Josef Meier have been content as a South Dakota rancher?

“He loved everything about ranching, but I’m not sure he could have done only that,” said Johanna. “He had a charisma that needed a public outlet.”

During the Second World War, Meier’s public outlet became national in scope. Wartime travel restrictions shut down Black Hills tourism almost completely, but South Dakota’s congressional delegation helped Meier secure fuel for far-reaching national tours. In 1942, the Black Hills Passion Play ranked as the second largest box office draw among road shows in the nation. Some cast members spent the summer of 1943 growing victory gardens in Spearfish before embarking on a tour that saw sellout crowds in Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Time wrote that the Black Hills actors had scored “a solid, urban success.” Performances resumed in Spearfish in 1948, and the production, now nationally known, attracted 50,000 people for the first time in 1952. By 1966, attendance had grown to 100,000.

Meier spent a lot of time during those years supervising amphitheater improvements, transforming it into one of the best equipped in the world, a theater which accommodated 6,000 in stadium-style seats. As he made his rounds, a dog or two usually accompanied him. (He once owned seven Great Danes and nine dachshunds; he was a soft touch for strays of any breed). While most Black Hills people knew him as a leader in local tourism, few knew he held the same reputation in central Florida, where another amphitheater went up in 1952 for annual winter and Easter season performances. Meier beat Walt Disney to central Florida by nearly 20 years.

Just because he staged the play thousands of times didn’t mean he let it coast. He constantly reminded actors playing Jewish priests and scribes to think of their characters not as villains, as in some passion plays, but as educated religious leaders who feared their people would be punished by the Romans if Jesus proved too popular. Harold Rogers, one of the original actors who came to Spearfish in 1938 and who later became the play’s general manager, recalled many nights when he and Meier sat in the amphitheater after performances, talking about problems audiences didn’t see, but which rankled Meier.

Gov. Harlan Bushfield, center, met Josef Meier and Potato Creek Johnny in the early 1940s.

His interest in the arts extended far beyond his own production, said Charlotte Carver. “He sat on the first South Dakota Arts Council, about 1970. I was executive director and he was a tremendous asset. At the same time, Charlton Heston was on the National Endowment for the Arts board. I told people I worked with Moses in Washington, D.C., and Jesus in South Dakota. You can’t do any better than that.”

Meier was an arts council asset because, just as he saw problems in his play no one else saw, he also saw opportunities no one else saw. And he envisioned charitable auctions for the arts that others didn’t, and could bring them to fruition. For example, in the early 1950s, he met world-renowned opera singer Marjorie Lawrence in Chicago. Her career had been interrupted by polio, but she got back to the stage and Meier saw her perform. Like so many others, Lawrence was captivated by that charisma and continental charm, and before long she was in Spearfish, performing the first of two amphitheater benefits for young South Dakota polio patients.

Late in his career, so many plaques and lifetime achievement trophies came Meier’s way that the family lost count at about a hundred. One that meant a great deal was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, West Germany’s highest civilian honor. West Germany paid tribute to a South Dakota actor and rancher for two reasons ó because he helped keep a piece of German heritage alive in the New World, and because after the Second World War he helped rebuild a Lunen church that had been shelled.

However busy Meier might have been during the war, taking one of America’s biggest road shows from city to city, he never let Germany slip from his mind. In a eulogy, nephew Heinz Meier remembered treasured wartime packages that came to German family members from South Dakota containing Spam, chocolate, colorful American neckties, shoes, and even concealed contraband cigarettes and coffee.

Josef Meier turned the Passion Play over to Johanna and her husband, Guido Della Vecchia, in 1991. He and Clare traveled, splitting each year between Spearfish and a lake home in Florida. In South Dakota, he drove to the ranch outside Spearfish regularly, and there was also time to catch up on some reading ó his taste ranging from political history to German classics to Zane Grey westerns.

Thirteen months after Meier’s death, the first Passion Play performances of 2000 were staged on the road, in a Hamilton, Ontario coliseum. Once again the production that is Josef Meier’s legacy proved its staying power, drawing capacity audiences and winning critical acclaim. “It’s spoken with elegance and certainty by a commanding company of actors,” a Hamilton Spectator reviewer wrote, ” … taking us away from mundane daily concerns.”

Backstage between matinee and evening performances ó an environment of costume trunks and electrical cables and penned camels that Meier knew well ó the cast gathered around a table of sandwiches. Seven of the performers once worked for Josef Meier. During their meal, they shared memories: Meier’s precise direction, his love of experimentation with special effects, his disdain for laziness or complacency.

No one spoke more poignantly than Charles Haas, a Florida actor portraying Christ. “He sparked something in me that made me a better person,” Haas said. He is forever grateful for Meier’s guidance when he was in his 20s, playing the disciple John. In the middle of the Spearfish season, Haas’ parents were killed in a car crash.

“Mr. Meier told me life is movement,” Haas said, “that you have to keep your thoughts going and your body active through difficult times, and live in the present. Regardless of tragedies and obstacles, he believed we all have a responsibility to use whatever gifts and talents we’ve been given.”

That is the spirit that built the Black Hills Passion Play.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Lonely Place at Ideal

By Leroy Iseminger

The Koenig family (from left: Martha, Anna, Martin, Heinrich and Bertha), was photographed before abandoning their homestead for Minnesota.

Heinrich Gustav Koenig was serving his ninth year as pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church, a rural German congregation south of Canova. His salary of $500 per year was supplemented with beef, pork, eggs, garden produce and oats from his congregants.

The Koenigs fording the White River before arriving at their homestead.

Heinrich and his family had food and shelter but he worried he couldn’t save enough to buy a home after his retirement. Then he read that homesteads would be distributed by lottery through the 1887 Dawes Act, which opened much of the Rosebud Reservation for white settlement. He traveled to Gregory in 1909 to register along with future president Harry S. Truman and thousands of others. Hoards of hungry men, excited horses, yipping dogs and a jangle of harnesses contributed to the pandemonium on the day of the drawing. Harry Truman drew a blank, but Heinrich won 160 acres in Tripp County near Ideal, and a new beginning for his family.

He resigned from the Canova parish, and he and his wife and four of their five children — son Martin and daughters Hulda, Frieda and Bertha — embarked on their great adventure in the spring of 1910. Gustav, their oldest son, remained behind as a farmhand near Canova. He would rejoin the family after the fall farm work was done.

The Koenigs loaded their livestock and the family’s possessions aboard an immigrant train that took them as far as Kennebec. After reloading their possessions onto a wagon, they struck off across the prairie to the homestead site, about 40 miles southwest. Along the way they would see nothing but prairie. Eventually, the Koenigs came to the White River, which had to be forded in order to reach the staked-out land 3 miles beyond. It was spring and most of the pasque flowers had already bloomed. Prairie chickens boomed their spring mating call and strutted on their dancing grounds.

The Koenigs built a 12-by-14-foot claim shack on a knoll overlooking their future 80-acre field. Pastor Koenig dug a root cellar adjacent to the house. The family began work so quickly they didn’t have time to determine the vagaries of soil and climate, the cycles of the seasons, and finicky violent moods of the sky.

Prairie neighbors gather in a procession to carry the caskets to the grave.

They broke the sod and planted a garden that included hollyhock seeds, Harrison Rose bushes and rhubarb roots that Martha had brought from Canova. Pastor Koenig also transplanted three ash trees on the west side of their home.

They hauled water from the White River, flowing out of the Badlands, but it was not suitable for human use. Fortunately there was a spring in a nearby ravine and rainwater was also caught and saved. After the crops were planted, Heinrich began constructing a dam 300 yards northwest of the house. A heavy rain the following summer filled the dam’s reservoir. Martha could now irrigate her yellow Harrison Rose bushes, rhubarb and hollyhocks. There was water for the rest of the garden. No longer would the family have to bathe in dirty water.

Pioneer children created their own entertainment and fun. The three oldest children constructed a raft made with lumber left over from the house and small granary. On the morning of July 24, 1911, Gustav and Frieda launched the raft. Hulda, Bertha and Martin played on the bank of the dam. It is not known how the raft capsized. Gustav and Frieda did not know how to swim. Hulda heard their screams and plunged in to save them. Tragically, all three children drowned.

The gravestone provided by Koenig’s old church.

Martin, then 8 years old, ran barefoot a mile south to tell neighbor Elof Lanz. Daughter Bertha ran southeast to alert neighbor George Leats. Soon several neighbors arrived at the Koenig homestead. The three bodies were retrieved, laid in the shade of the homestead shack and covered with blankets. The July heat was overbearing and augmented the communal grief. Mrs. L.F. Heller, a neighbor, reported that no one slept that night. A neighbor with a fast team and wagon headed for Gregory, 40 miles away, to get three caskets. Mother Martha wanted white ones for the girls and a dark one for her son. The neighbor brought back what was available, one white and two dark caskets.

Neighbors arrived early on the morning of July 25, 1911. The children’s bodies were washed and dressed with clean clothes. Three graves were dug southwest of the house. Then neighbors formed a procession from the house to the gravesite. A collection was later taken for a grave marker when Heinrich’s Immanuel congregation back at Canova heard of the tragedy. A stone was selected and the names and birthdates of the three children were cut into the stone. Written in German at the bottom of the stone are the words: all three died on July 24, 1911.

The rest of 1911 wore on with a sameness that Martha had never known. Every time she left the house, her eyes focused on the mound of dirt over her children’s graves. She could not stop the tears, nor did she want to. Prairie isolation added to her struggle. No one else spoke her native language of Switzerland. Her neighbors spoke Scot, Dane and some Norwegian. She believed, or perhaps she hoped, that her husband would realize that living there would be difficult and questionable. It was not true that rains follow the plow.

She longed for Iowa and Minnesota, but when Maria Martha Zurcher married on January 3, 1894, she made a promise to submit to her husband and obey him (und ihm gehorchen). God would expect her to keep that promise. She no longer found solace in caring for her Harrison Roses or the garden. Heinrich could not console her. Even the birth of their sixth child, Anna, would not bring back her smile.

Steel cattle gates now protect what remains of the children’s grave.

Martha became increasingly determined to leave the prairie, even if it meant breaking a wedding vow and disobeying her husband. Her husband sensed the seriousness of her resolve and made inquiries to church officials. A few weeks later he received a letter of call to become the pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Aiken, Minnesota. He dispersed their possessions, the livestock, wagon and other implements to neighbors and they moved to his new parish in 1913.

The Koenigs would move once more to Hector, Minnesota, where Heinrich served as pastor from 1918 to 1926. Martha developed cancer and died in 1922. She had never returned to South Dakota. Because of failing health, Heinrich resigned his parish in 1926 and lived out the rest of his life in the homes of his children. He died in 1952.

Willa Cather writes of the prairie being in the process of reclaiming itself. The only evidence today of the tragedy in 1911 is a fence made of steel cattle gates around the gravesite and a broken gravestone. The scars made by Heinrich’s Sulky plow with its single 14-inch plowshare are gone. The dam that Heinrich built is filling with silt. Prairie grasses will finally overtake the place, a blessed part of the cycle of forgetting.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Fort Sisseton Kid

By John M. Hilpert

Without help from Robert Perry, Fort Sisseton may have been reduced to a pile of rubble overgrown with weeds. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

In 1862, simmering tensions between the Santee Dakota and white settlers boiled into open conflict along the Minnesota River in south-central Minnesota. Known to history as the Sioux Uprising, the war ran its course in a little over five bloody weeks. About 500 settlers were killed during the fighting; at the very least 20 Indians died, along with another 38 who were hanged in the conflict’s aftermath.

In the wake of it all, white determination to prevent a reoccurrence of those events led President Abraham Lincoln to authorize construction of a chain of military forts stretching from Minnesota north into Dakota Territory. Soldiers sited one of these in what is now northeastern South Dakota, at the head of the region known as the Coteau des Prairie, and named it Fort Wadsworth.

Completed in 1864, the outpost was later renamed Fort Sisseton, a moniker it carried until the army abandoned it in 1889. Twenty-seven men served as post commander during that span, and nine military units occupied the station.

But the fort’s staunchest defender, the Fort Sisseton Kid, was neither a commander nor a member of any of those units. He couldn’t have been. He wasn’t born until 27 years after the post closed.

Robert J. Perry, who would later be called The Fort Sisseton Kid, first saw the abandoned frontier outpost as a child in the late I 920s. He remembers traveling with his father the 70 or so miles east to the fort from their home in Aberdeen. History was a family passion, and Judge Van Buren Perry took every opportunity to point out places of historical interest to his young son.

Because of his efforts to save the outpost in northeastern South Dakota, Robert Perry earned the nickname “The Fort Sisseton Kid.”

Perry remembers well that trip to Fort Sisseton. “There was a hunting party from Chicago,” he says. “Some guy from London had shot a lot of ducks, or maybe somebody else had shot them for him, Lord only knows. But he was thrilled and buying drinks. I got licorice and nothing else!”

After the U.S. Army abandoned Fort Sisseton, ownership was transferred to the state of South Dakota. (At closure, the post consisted of 22 brick, stone, frame and log buildings, settled on a military reservation of 82,112 acres.) The National Guard used the facility briefly, but by the second decade of the 1900s it was leased out for agricultural and hunting purposes. Through the 1920s, when Perry first visited, the leaseholder was Colonel William D. Boyce, owner of the Chicago Tribune and founder of the Boy Scouts of America.

Though Perry was on the grounds several times in the 1930s, years when the Works Project Administration (WPA) restored many of the fort’s tumbledown buildings, his role as defender of the post began in earnest in 1953. That’s when he moved to Britton, 18 miles northwest of Fort Sisseton, to become the local manager for Northwestern Bell Telephone.

“We had a line out there at the fort,” Perry says, “so I went and checked it.” When Perry arrived, there was a No Trespassing sign on the gate, but over he climbed anyway. “The leaseholder rode up on his horse and he shouted, ‘You don’t read very well!’ I yelled back, ‘You see that telephone truck there? I’m going in to inspect my line.”

What the young telephone manager saw shocked him. “The guy who was leasing the fort for $75 per year wasn’t supposed to be using the buildings,” Perry says. But the hospital building, one of the main structures, was filled with sheep, and the other buildings were also being misused. “So we got into a fast argument,” he says, “because I don’t mind tangling with anybody.”

By the time this scrap and its aftermath had passed, Perry and a friend from Britton maneuvered the lease from the state for themselves. When the former tenant complained that they had no livestock, Perry replied, “We’ve got 175 head of deer grazing out there, and we’re expecting some antelope,” claiming the wild animals as his herd to justify the contract for agricultural usage.

Barely 20 years after thousands of man-hours and many federal dollars had been spent at Fort Sisseton by the WPA restoration project — including, inexplicably, coating all the building interiors with pink paint — what Perry found in the 1950s was disheartening. A historical treasure was crumbling, and no one seemed willing to do anything about it.

No one but Robert J. Perry, a firm believer in public service. While serving as telephone manager in Frederick during the 1940s, Perry raised the money for new fire equipment, set up a rescue unit and established a mutual fire aid association. In 1951, he saved the life of a young boy following an accident and earned a company citation for his quick action.

“If a town is not a better place for my having lived in it,” Perry says simply, “then I’m not worth very much, am I?”

But even Perry’s service ethic had its limits. In 1959, when his fellow citizens in Britton tried to draft him to run for mayor, he flatly declined. “That’s where I draw the line,” he told a reporter. “I wouldn’t get mixed up in politics for anything.”

The barn is one of many buildings saved through Perry’s efforts. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

What makes that quotation so ironic is that Perry played politics like a master to create the future for Fort Sisseton that he had in mind. First he convinced his fellow members of the Britton Lion’s Club that this was a project worthy of their attention. (Perry was president of the local chapter.) Then he worked to build support from the larger community and began correspondence with South Dakota’s governor, Joe Foss.

“I left a number of petitions with your secretary on Tuesday,” he wrote in 1958. “These petitions asked that Fort Sisseton be made a state park. You can see by the number of names that the people of this area are very concerned.” He also invited the governor to speak to the Britton Lion’s Club.

Joe Foss understood politics, as well. He wrote back saying he had spoken to the Game, Fish & Parks Commission about Fort Sisseton, and turned the petitions over to the South Dakota Legislature. He even promised to visit Britton, and Perry recalls those days fondly. “Joe (Foss) was a good guy,” he says. “He listened to what I had to say.”

Things moved quickly after Perry and the Lion’s Club got the governor’s attention. Foss spoke on April 23, 1958, at Britton ‘s Masonic Temple, and at the end of May a legislative subcommittee on the future of Fort Sisseton scheduled a public hearing for June 2.

There was just one glitch. “The subcommittee wanted to meet in Pierre, but I didn’t want to meet there,” says Perry. “I wanted them out at the fort.”

Those planning the meeting objected that the outpost had no suitable facilities — no heat, no lights, no furniture, or anything else. Standing firm, Perry was able to sway the decision on the meeting location, but he had only from Monday to Wednesday to make acceptable arrangements.

“It was a good thing I was the telephone manager,” he remembers, “because I got on the phone and called a lot of people. At the time, I was the head of the county search and rescue squad, and I had a big generator. So I knew I had lights. It was also big enough if we needed heat. I called the Veterans’ Club and got tables and chairs.”

The North Barracks now houses a visitors center and replicas of the frontier soldiers’ accommodations. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

“We met in the little library building at the fort, and after all my phone calls, it was chock full.” Many notables were in attendance, including two state legislators from Britton, Sen. Arthur Jones and Rep. Elden Arnold, the community’s mayor and the presidents of nearly every organization in all the surrounding towns. Jones and Arnold led the testimony with statements of support.

Then Perry took the floor. He recalled for the subcommittee the thousands of signatures on petitions, and reported that informal registers at the fort had recorded visitors to the site from 46 states. “Few historical spots between the Great Lakes and the Rockies can compare,” he bragged.

After hearing Perry out and a tour of the structures and grounds, the subcommittee voted to recommend, “that the area at Fort Sisseton including all buildings located both inside and outside the moat be established as a state park.” Further, they recommended that a full-time caretaker be located at the site.

In early 1959 the South Dakota Legislature turned those recommendations into law. There was a different governor by then, Ralph Herseth, and Perry wasn’t about to let the issue die on the new chief executive ‘s desk. “Now that both the House and the Senate have passed House Bill 677, it looks like our dream is at last in your hands,” he wrote to Herseth. “We hope that you, as governor, are willing to sign the bill making Fort Sisseton into a state park.”

“We are at present planning a brochure on Fort Sisseton State Park in which we would like to have a letter from you,” he went on, subtly playing his trump card. “We should be able to attract additional tourists to South Dakota and our historic Lake Region.”

Herseth signed the bill and sent a letter for the brochure in which he announced the creation of the new Fort Sisseton State Park. In his message, the governor also commended the efforts of the Britton Lion’s Club and other public-spirited individuals, “to preserve for posterity this dramatic reminder of a colorful era in the history of Dakota Territory.” When the state park was dedicated on July 26, 1959, Gov. Herseth was the main speaker, with Robert J. Perry as master of ceremonies.

Re-enactors demonstrate the firing of Civil War-era cannons during Fort Sisseton’s annual summer celebration. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

Among the others present on that dedication day was Max Cooper, Sunday editor for the Aberdeen American News. From then on Cooper regularly used his column, ìJottings from the Dakotas,” to promote events and celebrations at the new state park, which helped immeasurably in getting it established.

Cooper and Perry became close friends, with the latter making regular appearances in Cooper’s column. At first the writer referred to Perry as “Mr. Telephone,” but soon he began writing about a mysterious fellow known only by the sobriquet, “The Fort Sisseton Kid.”

“The Fort Sisseton Kid, who just naturally hates to think about anyone’s telephone going unused, rang me up last week to tell me what he had on his mind,” Cooper wrote on one occasion. “(He) mentions that I might want to go along on this trail ride. He has heard that I recently have run 100 miles and he says I can go either as a rider or as a horse — take my choice.”

Beneath the bantering humor laid a respect for what each had done to make the state park a success. “The accomplishments of Max are many,” Perry wrote when Cooper later left the newspaper. “Without his stories and pictures, I feel that the old Fort Sisseton would still be a pile of rubble, overgrown with weeds.”

Having accomplished such a lofty goal, Perry was not about to rest contentedly on his laurels. During the 1960s he convinced yet another South Dakota governor, Archie Gubbrud, that the historic outpost deserved attention. The governor sent prisoners from the state penitentiary to the fort to work on restoration projects, often under the supervision of Perry himself.

With only shovels and chutes, Perry and his crew filled an entire basement — 9 feet deep by 148 feet long — with gravel brought by the truckload from a nearby pit, thus preventing the walls of the officers’ quarters from collapsing. Perry cut a deal with the pit owner for 25 cents per truckload, because, as he recalls, “We could get that kind of money.”

Gubbrud also visited the fort at Perry’s invitation. It was a hot day, and the governor got filthy from dust flying through open car windows as he drove the dirt and gravel road leading to the state park. Never one to miss an opportunity, Perry planted the seed of an idea when the governor complained that he didn’t look presentable. Not long after, Gov. Gubbrud arranged funding to resurface and oil the road.

The story of Fort Sisseton can now be found in the preserved-for-posterity buildings of the outpost itself. But the story of Fort Sisseton State Park can be found in the scrapbooks that Perry, The Fort Sisseton Kid, donated to the park.

Along with various documents and photographs, there are letters to and from the powerful in South Dakota’s last half-century: U.S. Senators Karl Mundt, Joe Bottum and George McGovern, U.S. Representative Ben Reifel, several governors, and even U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. They are tangible signs of the effort Perry put forth to make the park a reality, and a testament to the political skills of a fellow who, “wouldn’t get mixed up in politics for anything.”

Editorís Note: John M. Hilpert served six years as president of Northern State University in Aberdeen. He is currently president of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. This story is revised from the September/October 1998 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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John Banvard’s Brush with Success

By Ried Holien

John Banvard in an 1849 portrait.

When John Banvard died in Watertown in 1891, newspapers throughout America and Europe ran his obituary, though it was hardly the kind of attention the town fathers might welcome. Most of the media wondered how it came to pass that one of the 19th century’s wealthiest and most renowned artists could die penniless in an American frontier town.

John Banvard achieved international success by fulfilling a boyhood dream of creating the largest painting ever. That might not seem like much of an accomplishment, but when completed, his Mississippi Panorama stood 12 feet high and stretched 3 miles in length. Known to the world as The Three Mile Painting or Banvard’s Grand Panorama of the Mississippi, Banvard’s canvas depicted nearly 3,000 miles of riverbank, from the mouth of the Yellowstone River on the upper Missouri all the way to New Orleans.

In marking his passing, the Watertown paper printed that Banvard was, “one of the greatest men the world ever saw, and by his genius and skill has made himself so famous that his name will go down in history as such.”

That prophecy proved less than accurate; as a matter of fact, Banvard’s name is scarcely known today. How his boyhood dream transformed his life from rags to riches is a great American success story. How the man fell back to rags is a story all his own.

John Banvard was the youngest of 11 children, born Nov. 15, 1815, to a prosperous immigrant family in New York City. It was the family’s custom to read literature aloud at the dinner table; while still in his highchair, Banvard could recite lengthy poems.

His father died in 1831. On top of that tragedy, his father’s business partner absconded with all the family assets. When the destitute family headed to Boston to live with the eldest son, Banvard headed west to seek his fortune.

Only 15 at the time, he found work at a Louisville drug store, but that didn’t last long. Banvard was fired after his boss discovered him entertaining his fellow workers by drawing caricatures of their employer on the store walls.

Deciding there was a lesson for him in that experience, Banvard started traveling the Mississippi River system seeking jobs as an itinerant artist. He painted portraits, decorated public buildings, and for a short time worked as a scene painter on the first Mississippi Showboat. The last especially taught him skills that would be indispensable for his later work. He learned a quick brush stroke, how to work from sketches and painting on a grand scale.

Banvard claimed the colossal panorama idea came to him on his first trip down the river. Later, writing about himself in the third person for a promotional pamphlet, Banvard described his experience. “The boy resolved within himself to be an Artist, that he might paint the beauties and sublimities of his native land … His grand object was to produce the largest painting in the world.”

Another story lists patriotism as Banvard’s motivation. In 1840 he read a foreign critic who wrote, “America has not the artists commensurate with the grandeur and extent of her scenery.” Loyally, Banvard resolved to prove the critic wrong.

The truth probably was that Banvard recognized the panorama’s growing popularity, and knew his skills matched such painting. So he bought himself a skiff, some paper and pencils and floated downstream with the strong Mississippi current, sketching all the while.

Banvard brought his panorama to England, where he shared it with Queen Victoria and her royal entourage.

“He would be weeks together without speaking to a human being, having no other company than his rifle, which furnished him with his meat,” said one account of his journey. “Several nights he was compelled to creep from under his skiff, where he slept, and sit all night on a log and breast the pelting storm. The sun the while was so intensely hot, that his skin became so burned that it peeled off the backs of his hands and from his face. His eyes became inflamed by such constant and extraordinary effort.”

Needing room to accomplish what he had in mind, Banvard started painting in a Louisville warehouse. In order to view his enormous creation, Banvard invented a mechanical device consisting of two tall cylinders attached to either end of the canvas. By hand-cranking these cylinders, the panorama scrolled from one side to the other. To prevent wear, the canvas was not unwound between performances, meaning a customer could sail down river at one performance and head north against the current at the next show.

Banvard’s machine used an upper track system that prevented sagging and kept the top tight. This device was such an improvement over existing technology that Scientific American devoted a lengthy article to describing its function.

Upon completing his work, Banvard rented a hall and advertised the unveiling. But nobody showed up. Undaunted, he passed out free tickets along Louisville’s docks to the next evening’s show. Steamboat crews and dock workers marveled at the panorama’s accuracy, and they spread the word in every saloon along the river. The Great Three Mile Painting was showing to full houses by the end of the week.

After a profitable run in Louisville, Banvard headed to Boston. There, after 15 years apart, he was reunited with his family. His homecoming was made all the sweeter when Bostonians flocked to see the show.

Panoramas were the television documentaries, epic cinemas, travelogues and National Geographic specials of their day. That explained the city’s enthusiasm for Banvard, according to Dr. John Hanners, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the artist. “The New Englanders’ scarcity of knowledge about the West gave such knowledge as there was a peculiar appeal, and Banvard … was hailed as a contributor to the artistic, educational and scientific knowledge of the age.”

So genuine was Banvard’s painting that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote descriptively of sailing down the Mississippi in his epic poem “Evangeline” without ever seeing the river. He gleaned all the information needed by attending Banvard’s show.

At certain times Banvard admitted school groups in free, which gave the panorama educational and family appeal. Others who never attended mass entertainments started filling Banvard’s hall.

In Boston, Banvard perfected his onstage delivery, narrating on stage as the panorama passed behind him. He lectured on science, explained each scene, and told amusing anecdotes. One critic wrote, “Take the artist from the painting, and you take away one of the principle attractions.”

An illustration from the Dec. 16, 1848 issue of Scientific American explained Banvard’s scrolling machine.

Unreeling the panorama required two hours. Banvard often expanded shows to three hours or longer depending upon audience reaction. One performance stopped completely when a St. Louis businessman jumped up and shouted, “That’s my store! Hallo there, captain! Stop the boat! I want to go ashore and see my wife and family!” The merchant later admitted he believed, at that instant, he was sailing through St. Louis.

As an added attraction, Banvard composed waltzes that a pianist played during shows. His first accompanist was a Boston merchant’s daughter named Elizabeth Goodnow. On May 17, 1848, the two were married.

Money poured in. Every night’s revenue was placed in a specially designed strong box and protected by security guards. Banks refused to take time counting the money, and accepted the strong box by weight only.

After a performance before the largest audience in Boston theatrical history, Banvard left for New York City. The Three Mile Painting received an equally enthusiastic response there. Unfortunately, Banvard noticed that the constant scrolling had created cracks in the paint. So, he painted another panorama ó a near identical copy.

Banvard then sailed for England, where British audiences adored his colorful American stories told in his strange accent. While there Banvard also befriended London’s elite, including Charles Dickens. In April 1849, he gave a command performance for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. He considered it the highlight of his career.

Even the normally staid London Times heaped adulation on the visiting American: “Mr. Banvard has done more to elevate the taste for Fine Arts than any single artist since the discovery of painting and much praise is due him.”

By this time, Banvard was probably the richest artist who ever lived, and his success spawned hundreds of imitators. Rivals infiltrated art students into shows to have them sketch the panorama. Later, they painted copies from these drawings. Several other London halls advertised the original Mississippi Panorama, but without modern copyright laws, Banvard could do little to defend his work.

Banvard left England in 1850 to travel through Egypt and the Holy Land. From his sketches he completed two more panoramas. One imitated sailing up and down the Nile, while his second depicted the Holy Land on a canvas over 1,000 feet long and 48 feet high. Both were profitable, but neither matched Banvard’s original success.

A homesick Elizabeth persuaded Banvard to return to New York in 1852. He built a mansion on Long Island, and called it Glenada, after his daughter Ada.

Banvard started a museum on Broadway that featured his panoramas and legitimate theater, writing many of the plays himself. Unfortunately, this venture proved disastrous.

Unlike the panorama’s economic simplicity, the museum required that he deal with hundreds of employees, lawyers and business partners, and Banvard was unequal to the task. Throughout the 1870s, he failed at several other entertainment endeavors. Finally, he lost everything in the Panic of 1877. Creditors seized Glenada and auctioned off his possessions.

His fortune gone, Banvard again headed West. In 1880, he moved in with his eldest son, Eugene, a Watertown lawyer.

Banvard remained active in Watertown by writing. He wrote one of the state’s first books, on how to learn shorthand in a week. He became South Dakota’s first published poet in 1885 with “Tradition of the Temple,” one of over 1,700 poems he composed in his lifetime.

Banvard’s great-grandson, John Banvard, visited the family home in Watertown in 1981.

That same year, Banvard targeted his muse to a political cause. Under his pseudonym, Peter Pallette, Banvard penned a poetic plea to spare the life of Native American activist Christopher Riel.

Some neighbors became offended at their local celebrity choosing unpopular causes. They produced another poem, supposedly written by Riel himself. In it the activist pleads for death to avoid having to read more bad verse. The “Riel Reply” appeared in the Watertown Daily Courier on Aug. 17, 1885:

For Pallette comes with Banvard’s muse

to fend me in such verse

That I in haste the gallows choose

the poetry’s far worse!

Banvard later learned his neighbors wrote the fake reply, but despite this unpleasant incident, the family thrived in Watertown. Eugene’s business prospered, while his father cultivated friendships with town leaders, including Governor Arthur Mellette.

Banvard supervised construction on Watertown’s first armory, a building of some local importance. “With the state’s National Guard based near Lake Kampeska, (the armory project) proved quite a responsibility,” says Joanita Kant Monteith, director of the Kampeska Heritage Museum. The presence of Civil War veterans and an active ladies’ auxiliary in the area added even more visibility to the project.

Banvard also gave public lectures on such things as how to read hieroglyphics, which he claimed he had learned to decipher while in Egypt. His lectures always drew good attendance.

His greatest project in Watertown was a grand attempt to regain his fortune with another panorama. The Burning of Columbia depicted the South Carolina capital’s destruction by General Sherman’s troops in the Civil War.

According to Doane Robinson, longtime secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society, this last panorama exhibited Banvard’s great showmanship. “Painted canvasses, ropes, windlasses, kerosene lamps, shutters, and revolving drums were his accessories,” Robinson recalled. “Marching battalions, dashing cavalry, roaring cannon, blazing buildings, the rattle of musketry, and the din of battle were the products, resulting in a final spectacle realistic beyond belief.”

Banvard, then 71, ran everything himself. Years later, Robinson put the performance into context. “I have read of the millions expended in the production of a single modern movie,” he said, “but when I remember what John Banvard accomplished in a spectacular illusion in Watertown, Dakota Territory, more than fifty years ago for an outlay of ten dollars, I am rather ashamed of Hollywood.”

The public loved The Burning of Columbia. The young territory simply lacked the population base to make it the success Banvard wanted. With his family fearing for his health, Banvard finally retired from the stage for good.

In 1889, Elizabeth died; a bereft Banvard followed on May 16, 1891, and was buried at Watertown’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

Soon after the funeral, Eugene ran into financial difficulties and the family left town without notice. Creditors once again auctioned off the Banvard family possessions.

No Banvard ancestor lives in the Watertown area today. But in 1981, John Banvard of Bolger, Texas, visited Watertown, searching out information on his once famous great-grandfather. The grandson didn’t hold his ancestor’s artistic ability in high regard, though. “We have three or four of his paintings,” he said, “and frankly, they’re so bad we wouldn’t put them up on the wall.”

Critics have long debated John Banvard’s artistic merit. Dr. Hanners disagrees with even judging it as art; he says the shows were more theatrical. Banvard himself said he didn’t, “exhibit the painting as a work of art, but as a correct representation of the country it portrays.” The public, not Banvard himself, thrust the title “artist” upon him.

Joanita Kant Monteith believes Banvard should be remembered as an excellent example of American ingenuity, “a showman the caliber of P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill. They took great American shows to Europe.”

In a way, John Banvard’s legacy suffered from his own success. By blending moving pictures with words and music, Banvard laid the groundwork for a new art form: the cinema. When the public embraced motion pictures, they forgot what came before.

In 1943, the navy commissioned a Liberty Ship called the USS Banvard. Banvard’s daughter, Edith, christened the ship. During the dedication he was proclaimed, “The first motion picture producer.” During its three years of service, the USS Banvard encountered several mishaps. Like the Banvard family possessions, the government sold the ship as scrap.

The fate of the Three Mile Painting remains a mystery. One grandchild remembers playing on it as a child. In 1948, Edith Banvard said, “As to what became of the panorama which my father painted, I cannot say with any certainty. I always understood that part of it was used for scenery in the Watertown opera house.”

Local legend says Banvard’s Grand Panorama was shredded for use as insulation in local houses. If thatís true, then the largest painting in the world, like its creator, still resides in South Dakota.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the September/October 1997 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Lady Leatherheads of Madison

By Roger Holtzmann

A football game at Eastern following World War II seemed impossible until the women decided to have one of their own. Back Row: Mary Pardy, Beverly Coombs, Marlys Bower, Doris Treloar, Muriel Tupper, Joyce Rave, Nancy Baughman, Susie Lowry. Middle Row: Anna Ruth Lang, Dorothy Carper, Phyllis Linafelter, Ruth Hart, Joyce Walters, Beverly Rubin, Barbara Stearns, Captain. Front Row: Donna Haley, Laurel Caldwell, Dona Keiner, Jeanette Johnson, Carol Weber, Elaine Norris, Captain, Janis Holsworth, Pauline Grytness. Photo courtesy of Barbara Stearns Turner

Rosie the Riveter was everywhere during World War II, flexing her biceps, representing the women who were proving they could weld and grind and rivet as well as the men who had been called away to the front lines. Rosie’s real life sisters changed a lot of attitudes about what”the delicate flower of womanhood” could do, not in the least their own, and that empowering message was not lost on the young ladies of Eastern State Teachers School in Madison.

Like many colleges, Eastern felt obliged to give up some campus activities during the war years. Among these were the annual homecoming celebration and most intercollegiate sports, including football, which would have been next to impossible in any case because so many of the region’s young men were overseas or away doing war-related work.

Victory had been achieved in Europe and the Pacific by September of 1945, and the entire country was eager to resume their interrupted lives. Homecoming was again on the schedule at Eastern, but the traditional football game seemed out of the question: just three men enrolled for the fall term that year. Where could 11 Trojans be found to don the blue and gold?

Enter the women of Eastern.”A bunch of us were sitting around after gym class and we thought, if we’re going to have homecoming, we’ve got to have a football game,” says Susie Lowry, who was a freshman in 1945. None of them had ever heard of women playing football before, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do it.”We decided we should have a game of our own.”

Susie, who now lives in Globe, Arizona, was the daughter of V.A. Lowry, Eastern’s president from 1933 to 1962 — a state college residency second only to I.D. Weeks’ tenure as head of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. V.A. took the unprecedented notion of women playing football, not to mention his daughter playing football, more or less in stride. Daisy Lowry might have objected more strenuously, as any mother might, if she harbored any hope of changing her daughter’s mind.

“My mom saw this coming,” says Susie with a laugh.”She tried to make me a lady but it never really worked out.”

Barb (Stearns) Turner, a freshman enrolled in commercial courses, was another woman ready and willing to strap on a leather helmet. Barb, whose home is in Brookings, was the best natural athlete among the women at Eastern, according to Pauline (Grytness) Lunde, one of her teammates.

There was a lot of clowning around. A few of us fell down, just to make it look good, but it wasn’t really rough or anything.

“That might be stretching it a bit,” says Turner modestly. If nothing else, she at least qualified as one of the most experienced women when it came to rough and tumble. Her training began early, at home where she learned to hold her own with five brothers, and continued through school as she played pick-up football in vacant lots around Madison. Turner also played intramural sports,”but we didn’t have opportunities (or intercollegiate competition) like the girls of today,” she says with an understandable touch of envy.

Lining up with such eager athletes were a bunch of ladies on a lark.”Football was the last thing some of the girls would have thought about. Unless they were interested in a boy, of course,” says Lunde, of Rapid City.”But when you’re 18 and unattached, you make your own fun.”

Which was also a case of making a virtue of necessity, according to Turner.”Gas was rationed. Tires were rationed. We couldn’t just get in the car and go like they can today. We had to make our own fun.”

Robert C. Nelles, another freshman at Eastern that year, was on the committee in charge of organizing homecoming. The very idea of women playing football”was enough to curl your teeth,” he wrote in an account of the game for the History of Lake County, but the committee nonetheless gave its stamp of approval.

“Football Game To Be Played By Debs,” announced the Madison Daily Leader, which doubtless led to a few fussbudgets around town muttering about what that campus crowd would think of next, and how the younger generation was going to hell in a hand basket. They were a silent minority, however.

“Nobody had a real problem with girls playing each other in football,” says Turner.”Boys playing girls … now that might have caused a stir.”

So it was game on in Madison!

Miss Leota Van Ornum, the college’s physical education teacher, agreed to serve as coach. There was a high school on Eastern’s campus where students training to be teachers did their practice teaching. Robert Ormseth, who coached the school’s football team, promised to lend her a hand.

There were two groups of Eastern coeds at the time: those who lived at their homes in Madison while attending classes on campus, and those from surrounding small towns who lived in the dorm. They were as distinct as oil and water, so the 23 girls who wanted to play quite naturally divided into two teams, Townies and Dormies.

“What’s a nicer word than rivals?” wonders Lunde when asked how the two groups related to one another. Though the game was played in good fun, in other words, it would be safe to say that the spirit of competition was not entirely absent.

Uniforms presented a minor problem, and not for the reasons that might come to mind first. After five years in storage, apparently without mothballs, the college’s jerseys were rife with holes and most of the pads were literally coming apart at the seams. Enough serviceable uniforms were eventually scrounged from the on-campus high school and Madison Central; with a nip here and a tuck there, the Dormies in gold and Townies in blue were ready to take the field when Homecoming Day arrived.

Football was the last thing some of the girls would have thought about. Unless they were interested in a boy, of course.

“A fairly large group of spectators showed great interest and enthusiasm during the game,” according to The Eastern, the campus newspaper. Friends and family and alumni had to be well represented for that to be so because the 23 players constituted almost half of Eastern’s enrollment that term. Robert Nelles and Paul Tommeraasen, two of the three male students, had been pressed into service as game officials; the third was married, and he had to baby-sit. That left precious few student bodies to fill the stands — which dimmed the women’s enthusiasm and sense of fun not at all.

“We tried to be almost real, with huddles and all that,” says Lowry.”There was a lot of clowning around. A few of us fell down, just to make it look good, but it wasn’t really rough or anything.”

Pauline Lunde remembers that she and some others went to the homecoming tea that night with bandages on,”which was kind of funny because it was supposed to be this formal affair,” but a few skinned knees and grass burns weren’t enough to assuage the disappointment of at least one young lady. Joyce (Rave) Evans was one of a number of players who had never even seen a football game before; she later recalled that the game wasn’t as hazardous as she’d been led to expect after all the bother of getting fitted out in a helmet and pads.”Football didn’t impress us farm girls much,” she told a reporter when the two teams held a reunion in 2001.

The neophyte gridders proved more adept at defense than offense, holding each other scoreless until the game’s final minute. Doris Treloar of the Dormies finally broke through and scored a touchdown, which was immediately answered by Nancy Baughman of the Townies. A.E. Swan, the college librarian who was serving as the referee, considered that an opportune moment to end the contest on an amiable note. Either that or he was tired and wanted to go home, as a rumor later alleged.

Nelles claimed that a large number of broken nails contributed to getting the game called early, and we could dismiss this as a frivolous tale told by men, a mere stereotype, if not for the halftime show. There were no rousing, locker room exhortations to win one for the Gipper for these women. They had more important things to do: namely, to stay on the field and touch up their rouge and face powder before the amused spectators.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! If only they’d chosen to do something entertaining, to poke a little fun at themselves, the Daily Leader might not have dubbed them”The Powderpuff and Rouge Elevens,” and the demeaning, now-common term”Powderpuff Football” might never have been heard.

As football games go, Eastern’s homecoming contest wasn’t quite the stuff of legend. That doesn’t mean the women didn’t make a little history. This was the era of great football nicknames, like Michigan’s four-sport phenom Elroy”Crazy Legs” Hirsch and Illinois’ legendary runner Harold”The Galloping Ghost” Grange. An epic nickname was likewise born that day in Madison: Pauline”Swivel Hips” Lunde, so christened by her husband Bud.”I think it’s kind of cute, don’t you?” says Pauline’s daughter Holly, a moment after letting slip the family secret.”I just think it’s great they played the game. It’s just so hard to imagine my mom ever playing football!”

On a grander stage, Madison’s Lady Leatherheads can make a credible case they were the first women to ever play an organized football game. Not that any of them seem terribly interested in making such a claim. They seem quite content with the shared memory of a crisp October day when they were young and brimming with life and able to make their own fun.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.