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Forbidden Culture

By Herbert T. Hoover

A give-away event at a community on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

A renaissance occurred in the 1960s on the Yankton Sioux and Rosebud reservations when tribal elders brought traditional beliefs out from underground and into open use for the first time since the 1890s. But how did the practices survive 70 years of suppression that preceded the renaissance?

I found answers to that question early in my career when I came to know Charles Kills Enemy and Joe Rockboy. Charlie and Joe didn’t know it, but they and their friends were cultural preservationists before the renaissance. Charlie grew up on the Yankton reservation with the name Jonas Chasing Crane because he was raised by his grandparents, Charles and Sarah Chasing Crane. Later he moved to the Rosebud and took the name of his father, Mark Kills Enemy. He became a ranch foreman and rode with cowboys at non-Indian rodeos — sometimes on horses and sometimes on buffalo.

He began his quest for spirituality in the hanbleceya, seeking contact with spirits. Over the years, he became an accomplished medicine man. He maintained his central lodge on the Rosebud Reservation in his old age, but his influence extended throughout the Sacred Pipe to relocated tribal members in California, Ohio and elsewhere.

Joseph Rockboy sings a peyote song during a prayer meeting in the 1970s. At that time he was the oldest member of the Native American Church.

Joe Rockboy was raised in a log cabin on the Yankton Reservation under the tutorial counsel of traditionalist”aunties” as well as his mother, a devout Episcopalian. She wanted Joe to be an Episcopal minister but during his teen years he discovered that ministers in the Episcopal Church must have a heritage of mixed-blood and Joe was a proud full-blood. He often declared himself 4/4ths Indian.

He left the Episcopal Church in 1917 and became an active participant in the Native American (Peyote) Church. Alcoholism plagued him in his early years. Women even hid vanilla extract from him in their kitchens. He rode in the 101 Wild West Show, but as a Mexican because the cast already included a sufficient number of Indians. He returned to the reservation in the 1930s, married and had a son.

On the reservation he worked on Indian New Deal projects, then drove a gravel truck to help construct the first runway on the airfield now known as Ellsworth near Rapid City. He also worked at a plant near Hanford, Wash., where the first atomic bomb was being produced.

Drinking encumbered his life until, in 1946, he nearly froze to death while under the influence. He never drank again.

Joe Rockboy worked in Chicago in the 1950s, but returned to the Yankton Reservation in the 1960s to hold a variety of jobs, including a cultural advisory position. He was an exemplary member of the Greenwood Chapter of the Native American Church and an organizer and participant in many aspects of the Indian renaissance.

Memories and stories from Charlie and Joe serve as bedrock information on the beliefs and practices that were preserved in relative isolation from 1890 to the 1960s. Lakotas and Yanktonais on their larger reservations in the United States experienced fewer obstructions to their cultural activities but on the Yankton and Rosebud reservations, traditionalists faced opposition from Christian missionaries and federal employees who believed in assimilation.

Medicine man Charles Kills Enemy prepares a wanbli (eagle) lowanpi altar for a ceremony to summon spiritual assistance for someone in need.

The Greenwood Native American Church endured in spite of efforts to suppress it from its inception. The stubborn members secured a charter from the Secretary of State in 1922 but still faced social pressure from non-Indians to abandon their native religion.

A belief system based around the Sacred Pipe encountered even more hardships. A network of dance halls became a protective environment for ancient tribal legacies. The halls should not be confused with the type in which Lawrence Welk began his band career. Drums were the norm, not accordions, and dancers didn’t do the polka.

Sketchy histories of the dance halls appear in written records around the turn of the 20th century — in isolation from both agency and mission influences. Traditionalists founded and managed the halls to nurture their legacy of dance, music, give-aways and other social practices, as well as recreational activities such as games and horse races.

Each Dance Hall Chief managed his hall from an adjacent, government-issued house. Joe Rockboy remembered the halls with great fondness when we became friends in the 1970s.”At one time we had seven dance halls,” he told me.”They was big square buildings about 36 feet by about 70 feet, I’d say. Our people put them up at their own expense. They all worked on building the halls.

“In the Thirties, some of our people had a real hard time, lost their horses and had no way to haul firewood,” he said,”so they tore most of the halls down and used the lumber for firewood, I think.”

Joe particularly remembered the Old Hay Hall northeast of Greenwood. A man named Wooden Nose was the Dance Hall Chief and drum keeper.”When there was going to be a dance, he’d go down to the agency, tell the agent that there was a dance arranged, and the agent would issue a slip that it was all right,” Joe told me.

He also attended events at the White Horse Rider Hall operated by War Chief and Brown Hall near Marty, run by Hollow Horn. White Hall was south of Marty and Fox Kit Society was near the Missouri River.

“There was another one northwest of Marty that they called Round Hall even though it was square,” he said.”That was for some of the Cat Band, and for the mixed-bloods. It was under a man with the name of Good Last Born.”

White Swan Dance Hall was located on the northwest corner of the Yankton Reservation until 1954, but tribal members moved it closer to Lake Andes before the bottom land was flooded by Fort Randall Dam.

The annual Catholic Convocation on the Yankton Indian Reservation during the 1920s attracted Indians from across historic Sioux Country.

Dances were Friday nights at White Swan. The gathering started when the drum keeper, the dance hall chief, hit the drum.”Then the one that sponsored the dance would call the crier [Ayanpaha] over and explain to him what it was about and explain to him who was the first to be recognized,” Joe said.

The first dedication went to the chief. Then the drummers honored others.”If they had a kettle of dog soup, they’d have a kettle dance and prayers were offered. The man with a stick would be the first one around that kettle. He’d burn some cedar. Four men would go out and dance while they sang that kettle song. They’d ask the man that put up the dog to explain what it was for. Probably it was to go to the singers, or maybe to someone that was to take a traditional medication.” The sacrifice of a dog and presentation of the soup represented an illness or special need.

Then dancing began in earnest. There might be a war dance, a love dance, a round dance, a penny dance or a give-away dance. Every song had meaning.”In the old days,” Joe said,”those dance groups was for the bands [ospayes] but after our people moved to the reservation the bands got all mixed up. Of course, the bands got mixed up in the old days [too]. You have to follow the woman’s side in the Indian way. If you was a Roaster and you married a woman of the Cat Band, you’d lose out on your own band and belong to hers. But even with that crossover, the bands stayed separate under their own leader, and each one had its own dances.” The Rosebud dances were generally open to everyone, while the Yankton events were often restricted to particular ospayes and tiospayes.

When Charlie was a youth on the Rosebud Reservation there was a federal policy to eliminate dancing by anyone but elders. Middle-aged tribal members could not dance, but they could watch. Youth were forbidden to even approach a dance hall.

One night, Charlie and some other youngsters watched the dancing through a window. Suddenly the lights of an automobile approached, so they fled and jumped in a car. Charlie cranked the engine and, with little experience behind a steering wheel, drove the vehicle into the darkness of an open field. The car hit a rock and rolled. He broke his wrist, but no one was badly injured.

Marriages and divorces were part of the dance hall culture. Marriages took place in solemn Sacred Pipe ceremonies or in Native American church prayer meetings. For unhappy couples divorce proceedings were simple. A woman could cast her husband’s belongings out of her tee pee or allotment house and declare in a loud voice that she no longer wanted to live with the man. He was then available to any woman who would have him.

The White Swan Dance Hall before it collapsed in the early 1980s.

A man could attend a pow wow or other gathering, go to the central drum and strike it four times, thus declaring the marriage over. There were no trumped-up charges, no lawyer fees and no court proceedings.

While missionaries and government agents discouraged and regulated dance halls, they promoted assimilation through festivities befitting their own heritage. Joe Rockboy attended Fourth of July games that lasted as long as 10 days. An annual Sioux Fair was held near Greenwood (south of present-day Wagner) in September to give Indian farmers a chance to show products from their allotments.

Shinny was a traditional game played at the fair.”Someone made a ball by rolling up a deer’s tail and covering it over with deer skin,” Joe remembered.”They’d mark off two goals about a quarter of a mile apart. They’d team up on different sides. Each person took a hickory or ash stick about 25 or 30 inches long and they went after that deerskin ball just like in a soccer game. What they was supposed to do was see which team could drive the ball over the opposite team’s goal first. Sometimes they’d play for a half a day. Then they’d rest up and go at it again after dinner. The side that put the ball over the opposing team’s goal two out of three games would win the match.”

Another game called wands and hoops involved throwing spears through a rolling hoop. A hoop man would say something to distract his opponent, such as”I’m a horse thief.” The spear thrower would counter, perhaps, with”I like to scalp horse thieves.”

Yanktons made tops out of buffalo horns by filling them with iron wood (hickory). They put deerskin thongs around them and spun them. The goal was to spin your top longer than the other players. Other games included spear throwing and a dice game using plum seeds with marks on them.

Horse races were also popular.”After the Yanktons got patent-in-fee to their land and started to sell allotments, some of them went out and bought fast horses,” Joe said. He and several of his friends were top competitors in a relay race in which riders brought three horses and changed saddles as they progressed. The total purse was $150 per day, and races were often held for three straight days during county fairs.”Our expenses wasn’t much. We’d travel with dried meat that the white man calls jerky. We done all our own cooking. If you could pick up a purse here and there you’d save a couple of hundred dollars by racing in the summer and that was a lot of help in buying food and clothes for the family in the winter.”

Dance halls, Fourth of July celebrations and county agricultural fairs drew the Yankton and Rosebud people together in a time when their native culture was discouraged, and sometimes forbidden, by their non-Indian neighbors. Even the charitable give-away was banned in some areas because agents and missionaries perceived it as anti-capitalistic, and they were attempting to encourage personal ownership.

Charlie and Joe laughed when they described how forbidden practices — especially traditional marriages and divorces — continued during seven decades of enforced assimilation. Could it be that the non-Indians’ assault on traditional culture only made it more attractive?

In any case, tribal members sought creative and fun ways to preserve their ancestral beliefs and practices, keeping many of them alive and ready for re-emergence in the renaissance of the 1960s.

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

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The Victim’s Daughter

By Paul Higbee

Musty smelling and crumbling, Black Hills newspapers of April 1917 report names that confirm their age. President Woodrow Wilson calls for an all-out American effort to win the World War. Former President Teddy Roosevelt suggests sending gung-ho, mature veterans into combat. Closer to home Robert Tallent, credited by the papers as”the first white boy in the Black Hills,” dies.

Only a few Black Hills residents knew the names Martin Conheeney and Eimel Joukkuri before April 25, 1917–the date the Lead Daily Call reported a deadly encounter between the two. The night before at about 9:30, just inside the Terraville tunnel, Joukkuri shot Conheeney. Then he walked to a police station at Mill and Main in Lead, turned himself in, and was placed under arrest.

The tunnel, long gone, once ran nearly a mile through a mountain ridge and connected Lead and Terraville. It was Homestake Gold Mine property and pedestrians regularly used it. But the mine built the tunnel so a train — a little air powered tram — could haul ore into Lead. If a pedestrian met the train in the tunnel, says Lead historian Wayne Paananen, he would have to back against the wall and watch the engine and ore cars pass within a foot. So guards were instructed to keep people out of the tunnel when the train was due, especially if they appeared intoxicated.

Joukkuri was one of those Homestake guards and Conheeney an off-duty Homestake explosives expert.

“Shortly after his arrest and before being advised to remain silent regarding the circumstances of the killing,” reported the Call,”Joukkuri made a statement to Chief of Police Keffler, in which he said that immediately before the trouble, he was on duty in the entrance of the tunnel and probably 60 feet away from the roundhouse where the concrete work of the tunnel begins, when Conheeney came through from the Lead end of the tramway, on his way into the tunnel. Conheeney was under the influence of liquor…”

Conheeney’s family and friends would later fight the notion that he was drunk. But in the hours after the shooting, Joukkuri’s statement looked like a fact in the Lead Daily Call.

Joukkuri said he told Conheeney to stop, the Call continued. Conheeney”paid no attention to Joukkuri’s admonition, but proceeded on his way, and the guard followed him. They exchanged blows and grappled, both going to the ground. Joukkuri stated that Conheeney had the better of him in the encounter, and attempted to choke him; that they got to their feet and Conheeney struck him with a bottle of liquor which he carried, landing a blow on the side of the guard’s head.”

In Joukkuri’s trial it would emerge that the liquor was for Conheeney’s wife, Mary, intended for medicinal use.

Joukkuri told police he ran for help after the struggle. George Hart, watchman and boiler engineer, added that Joukkuri bolted into his boiler room off the tunnel with a bloodied head and torn clothing. Hart couldn’t make out what Joukkuri told him, he explained, because working close to Homestake’s stamp mill left him a bit deaf. But Joukkuri’s condition certainly communicated trouble. Hart and Joukkuri stepped into the tunnel, Hart going first, and they spotted Conheeney. Hart said Conheeney threw a rock their direction, then charged toward Joukkuri. Hart claimed he tried grabbing Conheeney but missed.

Joukkuri, revolver in hand, fired two shots. One, Lead police determined, missed. The other hit Conheeney in the left temple and he fell against the tunnel wall and into a sitting position, dead.

The newspaper reported all this in great detail within hours, but there was more that the public didn’t learn for a while. Conheeney was 33, married with a young son and daughter, and had another baby on the way. At Joukkuri’s trial it was established that Conheeney was taking liquor to his wife, and witnesses from the Lead saloon where he bought the spirits said he left sober. Joukkuri’s shooting of an unarmed man didn’t sit well with the jury. It convicted the guard of manslaughter and sentenced him to hard labor at the state penitentiary.

Court records and press reports referred to Joukkuri as Finnish and Conheeney as Irish (both, in fact, were immigrants) and there’s been speculation that the references implied ethnic tension between those groups. But historian Paananen says identifying residents in remarkably cosmopolitan Lead by nationality was common practice during those years, even in Homestake employee records, and in this case probably implied nothing. It’s worth noting the family that first came to Conheeney’s widow’s aid that tragic night was Finnish (the Macki family).

Jim Dunn, former Homestake employee and state legislator, has taken interest in the case for reasons revealed later in this article. He thinks the tragedy resulted simply because of”an overzealous guard and a man who stubbornly insisted he was going home as quickly as possible to his sick wife.”

The widow, Mary Conheeney, took her three children (including a daughter her husband never met) home to Ireland in 1919. She had to wait for the war’s end before it was safe to cross Atlantic waters. Her middle child, Nora, was six in 1919 and would recall a rough crossing and terrible seasickness.

Seventy-five years passed. The tram system for hauling ore through the mountain ceased operation and pedestrians had the Terraville tunnel all to themselves for several years. Eventually sections of the tunnel were filled in, or lost to the expanding Homestake open cut mine. The open cut wiped away Terraville, too.

Then in 1994 Deadwood Mayor Bruce Oberlander received a strange letter. It came addressed to the”Lord Mayor, Deadwood City,” definitely a first. It bore an Athlone, Ireland postmark, and asked about”Lead City.” The letter-writer’s last name, written in pen, was hard to make out. It appeared perhaps to be Ryan. The first name, though, was unmistakable: Nora.

Nora Conheeney Ryan was in good spirits when she returned to the Black Hills, 77 years after her father’s murder.

That’s where Jim Dunn and his wife, Betty, entered the story. The mayor’s wife, Mary Ann, knew the Dunns had traveled in Ireland. Perhaps, she thought, they’d know Athlone’s location. As it turned out Jim and Betty had stayed in an Athlone bed and breakfast and knew the owner. In a plot development that would be laughed out of any fiction piece, the Dunns called their Athlone friend. She told them Nora Ryan lived less than a mile up the road. This was Nora Conheeney Ryan, Martin and Mary’s middle child. At age 81 she had decided it was time to return to the Black Hills, and maybe arrange for a new headstone for her father’s grave.

The Dunns promised to help any way they could. It was, says Betty, the beginning of a friendship that would shortly feel like a family relationship — and would continue feeling that way over the years. On Aug. 22, 1994, Nora landed at Rapid City Regional Airport and raised her hands in triumph. Two daughters, a son-in-law, and a friend from California accompanied her.

“I shall never forget my trip to South Dakota,” Nora later wrote.”It was the most challenging and wonderful thing I ever did. With Jim’s help, finding my father’s grave was the greatest moment of my life.”

Former state legislator Jim Dunn (pictured with his wife, Betty, at Martin Conheeney’s grave) believes the tragedy resulted from “an overzealous guard and a man who stubbornly insisted he was going home to his sick wife.”

They found it in South Lead Cemetery. Nora didn’t have to arrange for a headstone. The original stood in beautiful condition.

That wasn’t all Nora found. The Dunns made phone calls and the past 75 years melted away. Hubert McGrath stopped by with a photo of his parents, John and Margaret McGrath, who were Nora’s godparents when she was baptized at Lead’s St. Patrick Catholic Church. Nora recognized the faces in the photo immediately. She brought some pictures of her own, including that of a house between Deadwood and Spearfish. It once belonged to her father’s cousin and Nora recalled spending pleasant summer days there. Jim called Spearfish historian Linfred Schuttler, who in turn pulled Jim Riggs into the search.”Jim knew right away where the house was, north and east of the Spearfish airport,” Linfred recalls.”It had been a stagecoach stop on the old Spearfish to Whitewood line.” Nora visited the home and recognized it right away as she approached–right down to the trees in the yard.

“She sure had a memory,” Betty Dunn says.”What do I remember from when I was four years old? She remembered everything — sights, smells, sounds.”

And tastes. Betty was able to fulfill a menu request that Nora associated with her Black Hills childhood: corn on the cob and watermelon.

Joukkuri’s trial records surfaced easily. The Lawrence County courthouse had just been refurbished and the city of Deadwood took possession of its historical documents. The records held a surprise. Joukkuri appealed his manslaughter conviction, claiming self-defense, and won.

“He walked away from that sentence,” says Jim Dunn.”Nora didn’t know that and it was the only sour note on her whole trip, finding out he’d been released. But she wasn’t bitter. She said, ëWhat is done is done.'”

Of course, just as Black Hills life moved along with twists and turns for 75 years, so did Nora’s life across the sea. Her mother actually planned to return and raise her children in South Dakota after the 1919 trip home. But Mary Conheeney ended up staying in Ireland where she was embraced by a loving, supportive extended family. Nora became a teacher, married fellow teacher Martin Ryan, and raised a family of six. Late in life, after her husband’s death, Nora hoped to see the Black Hills again. She no longer knew anyone there, however. Deeply religious, she told God the trip would be possible only if he designated South Dakota friends and guides. That’s what happened, and she later reflected that the trip helped her understand a sadness she carried her entire life.

Nora returned to Ireland after a week, lived another 12 years, and took special delight in Jim and Betty’s visits to Athlone. From afar she kept an eye on the Black Hills.”Everyone appreciates an honest man,” she observed when Jim won another term in the state senate. In 2001, after the mine that employed her father closed, she wrote,”Farewell Homestake — it gave us lots of headaches.” Read into that what you will, but she probably referred to the same pounding stamp mill noise that hurt George Hart’s hearing.

What most impressed Nora’s South Dakota friends was that she didn’t want to forget the Black Hills after the family tragedy, but hoped to embrace her childhood home. And it wasn’t just a gravestone, house, and corn-on-the-cob she sought, but people.

“She could imagine making those kinds of connections in Ireland, but not in the United States, because America is so very vast,” says Tina Burke, one of Nora’s daughters who flew with her to South Dakota.”When she first thought about the trip, she believed it was unlikely she could even find the grave.”

Adds Jim Dunn,”There are very few strong ties these days, even among families. People are always moving around, cutting ties. Who could ever have guessed that looking for that grave would result in the close tie we have with Nora’s family?”

It’s an ending to the tragedy that reporters couldn’t have imagined as they studied grim police and coroner reports in 1917.

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

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The Spoils and Sorrows of War

The banner that Bill and Gigi Hickey discovered in her late mother’s home is 12 feet in length and is believed to have once hung vertically at a Nazi headquarters.

Editor’s note: Our friends at the Wessington Springs True Dakotan kindly allowed us to share this story from their July 21, 2015 edition with our readers.

By Kristi Hine

While digging through her late mother’s Wessington Springs home, Gigi Hickey came across a shocking piece of World War II history. Hickey discovered a black, 105mm Howitzer canister tucked away in the dark corners of a trunk stowed in the attic of her mother, Georgia Henrichsen. What she found upon opening the canister’s lid was an unsettling prize of war that hadn’t seen the light of day for nearly 70 years.

“When I first opened the canister and saw the crumpled red fabric, an eerie feeling came over me,” Hickey recalled.”It definitely raised my heartbeat.”

During a previous examination inside the same trunk about a year after her mother’s death in 2007, Hickey discovered a billfold once used by Henrichsen’s first husband, Maurice Clifton”Pete” Henrichsen Jr. He had died during World War II, killed in Luxembourg on Jan. 16, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge. Georgia Henrichsen later married Pete’s brother, George Henrichsen, who himself had served in WWII and been a prisoner of war, and they named their only son Maurice Clifton.

More than a billfold was stored in the trunk, however. While going through the trunk a second time, several years after the first inspection, Hickey found the sinister-looking canister in its farthest corner. When she opened it up, she discovered a wad of red fabric that, when unfolded, turned out to be a 12-foot-long Nazi banner brandished with a black swastika — complete with 84 American soldiers’ signatures.

Hickey, who lives in Wayzata, Minnesota, thinks the banner once hung at a Nazi headquarters and was taken from a village liberated by members of the Cannon Company 358th Infantry in January 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge. She guesses that Pete Henrichsen’s fellow soldiers most likely ripped down the banner, which has torn corners, from where it had been hanging, signed it and sent it to his widow as a tribute to his bravery.

“I believe the banner was likely a ‘spoil of war’ from a village liberated by the 358th Infantry, an unconventional sympathy card for my mother,” Hickey said.”My guess is Pete’s Cannon Company signed the banner and sent it to his widow as a tribute to their fallen comrade.”

It probably didn’t bring the grieving widow much solace, her daughter said. Because the banner was stuffed inside the canister and hidden deep inside a trunk, Hickey thinks her mother wanted to stow it away and forget the painful piece of history.

Gigi Hickey holds the 105 mm Howitzer canister that housed the Nazi banner for nearly 70 years.

“I’m certain the soldiers intended this as an honor, but I doubt my mother felt much solace from their gift,” Hickey said.”Seeing the names of the 84 men who survived would serve only as a reminder of her deep loss. She never talked about it. I believe she stuffed the banner back into the canister where it remained unseen and in the dark for 68 years. “

Once the shock of her discovery wore off, Hickey decided to try and connect with the 84 men who signed the banner in hopes of learning more about its mysterious past. Some of the signatures included a hometown, so she began her research on the Internet, searching for death notices, obituaries or any links to the 84 names written on the banner.

To date, Hickey has not yet connected with a living World War II veteran who signed the banner but has successfully contacted the families of 11 soldiers whose signatures are on the banner. Hickey said the families have been emotional and touched when hearing the new information about their loved ones.

Hickey and her mother traveled to the American cemetery in Belgium twice to visit Pete Henrichsen’s grave. Hickey’s brother, Maurice, who lives near Atlanta, has been there three times and has driven the battle route taken by the 358th Infantry in January 1945.

Georgia Henrichsen served as a teacher, county superintendent and elementary principal in Wessington Springs for 43 years. She died May 28, 2007.

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Boss Cowman’s Own Words

By Roger Holtzmann

Ed Lemmon had several mishaps on horseback, but none that kept him out of the saddle for long.

George Edward Lemmon was 13 when he went to work for the Bear Creek Ranch in Cheyenne, Wyo. He lived in the saddle for much of the next 40 years, holding down every job in the cattle business, from trail hand to running a ranch bigger than Rhode Island. Some said he rode over every square foot of West River, and if that was an exaggeration it wasn’t by much. The son of a railroader, he became one of the most respected cattlemen of his generation.

Books have been written on his exploits — most notably, Boss Cowman by Nellie Snyder Yost — and he is referenced in every respectable history book on South Dakota and cowboy life. But a 400-page book, The West as I Lived It, tells Lemmon’s story in a refreshingly blunt and first-person style. It is nothing more or less than a collection of weekly newspaper columns the old cowboy wrote for the Belle Fourche Bee from 1932 to 1936, compiled into a book by Belle Fourche historian Phyllis Schmidt.

“Writing the stories gave him a chance to relive the many memories he had of his friends and events of the good old days,” Schmidt observed in the introduction. Schmidt, who serves as curator of the Grand River Museum, spent three years on the project. Her result is a history of cowboy life quite unlike anything else that has been published — recorded in an earthy and colorful prose that only a real, wise cowboy could achieve.

“In the cow business one is exposed to all kinds of dangers and hardships,” wrote Lemmon in one column. His life was a case in point. A horse fell on him when he was 17, crushing his right leg above the knee and landing him in bed for four months. Less than a year later, he suffered an even more serious mishap while he and another hand were training a horse.

“Tom [McCumskey] was riding a young mare…while I rode [alongside] with a rope around my 1,200 pound mount’s nose. After running about 200 yards both flew the track, which was a wagon road, each bolting outward. As we pulled them inward they clashed together with terrific force, piling Tom’s mount up to a heap and killing my mount on the spot, and crushing my partially healed leg in a similar manner as the year before, and rendering me unconscious for an hour. I was rendered a cripple for life, for besides the breaks, rheumatism set in, drawing my defective leg all out of shape.”

Lemmon and other pioneers competed in an old-timers race at a 1927 fair in McLaughlin.

Over the years he was knocked unconscious several more times and broke numerous bones, but Lemmon was nothing if not tough. When he busted his collarbone,”I took up my duties the next morning with my right arm in a sling, which necessitated roping my mounts with my left hand.” Another time his horse spooked and took an ill-advised leap, causing them to roll down a steep embankment together. When Lemmon returned to camp, his partner”noticed my next to little finger on my right hand swinging loosely and out of place. So he had one of the boys hold my right arm while he pulled it back, and really, this was the most severe punishment I ever underwent. I came near fainting, and the knuckle is still low.”

As a ranch hand, Ed Lemmon drove longhorns up from Texas for two decades, until the railroad’s spreading tentacles made such epic treks unnecessary. He passed through the rowdy cow towns of Kansas, patrolled by Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, and likely never ran afoul of either, for he avoided the trail hand’s bane, liquor. Lemmon never drank anything stronger than lemonade.

Once up north, the cattle were fattened over winter on ranges along the Republican River, then in the Platte River country of central Nebraska. In contrast to the trail drives, a staple of Western mythology and popular entertainment, no screenwriter ever penned a script about tending”beeves” over winter, though they might have in Lemmon’s case.

Lemmon was working the Rush Creek Ranch near Sidney, Neb., when Red River Red, a grizzled veteran of the frontier,”covered with scars from both gun and knife wounds… which he displayed apparently with much glory,” showed up on foot, looking for a job. Ranch owner George Green took Red on, and the three men settled in for the winter. When they divvied up the housekeeping chores, most of the cooking duties fell to Lemmon.”I prided myself on keeping the kitchen and cooking paraphernalia in neatness, especially the drying cloths,” recalled Lemmon in the Belle Fourche Bee.

“One morning I forgot to fry [Red’s] bacon, and he rather peevishly jumped up, grabbing the slab of bacon and knife and slicing half a dozen slices of bacon,” wrote Lemmon.”He had previously slammed the skillet on the stove rather far back and when he had the bacon ready he grabbed the drying cloth instead of the dish rag with which to handle the hot receptacle. When I drew his attention to the fact that he should use the dish rag instead of the drying cloth he flared up, saying he would not be dictated to by me. Accusations flew back and forth across the breakfast table and finally our epithets became so heated we both started to draw our six-shooters.”

Whenever West River cowboys gathered for real or ceremonial purposes, Ed Lemmon (second from left) was eager to participate.

Green trumped their pistols with his Winchester rifle and defused the situation, but Red wasn’t about to let the matter drop. Later that day the three men journeyed to nearby Lodge Pole, and along the way Red told Green that he meant”to get a row going” with Lemmon and kill him. To forestall him, Green enlisted Tex Matthews,”a gunman of the first magnitude,” to have a word with Red. Matthews’ persuasive powers, and the six-gun hanging on his hip, convinced Red that his health would be best served by boarding the next train for Cheyenne. Thus the drying cloth incident, a little-known epic of the west, ended peacefully.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 brought an end to Red Cloud’s War and established the Great Sioux Reservation. In exchange for peace and renouncing claim to all lands outside said reservation, the tribes accepted a number of government promises, including a guarantee to provide”one pound of meat and one pound of flour per day” to every member who settled there. At a stroke, this created a demand for 30,000 cattle per year.

Major Seth Mabry, a Texan who earned his rank serving the Confederacy, was one of those who recognized the business opportunity. Lemmon was working for Mabry in 1877 when Mabry contracted to deliver 800 head from his Platte River spread to the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies in northern Nebraska.

For whites on the Northern Plains, this was an unsettled time, just a year after the Seventh Cavalry’s annihilation at Little Big Horn; even well settled areas were thought to be at risk, and every Indian was viewed as a threat. A rider overtook Mabry’s crew with orders to send a hundred cattle 160 miles further on to an Army encampment on the Cheyenne River; it was not a journey to be taken lightly.

Though Lemmon was just a month past his 20th birthday, the youngest of three men tasked to get the Army its beef, he was put in charge of the detail.”I can’t recall I felt… the least worried about the outcome of that expedition,” wrote Lemmon many years later. His confidence was well founded. The Army got its beef without losing a man or an animal.

The Sheidley brothers, William and George, appreciated Lemmon’s experiences working cattle on the open range and his ability to handle men. When the Kansas City buggy manufacturers decided to enter the cattle business in Dakota Territory, they hired the 23-year-old Lemmon as their foreman. Ed, as he preferred to be called, settled on the Flying V Ranch, at the confluence of French Creek and the Cheyenne River in the Badlands.

After gold was discovered in the Black Hills, within the Great Sioux Reservation’s boundaries, it was only a matter of time before the Indians lost what had been granted to them in perpetuity. The government relieved them of the great wedge of land that lay between the Cheyenne and Belle Fourche rivers in 1877. The Flying V lay just within this Black Hills cession, but no fences kept the cattle confined. During the winter months especially, cattle were allowed to drift and forage where they could, even on the surrounding, unceded Indian lands.

“We were all trespassers,” said Lemmon of himself and the stockmen whose herds grew fat on grass that belonged to others, but knowledge of the law didn’t deter him from taking advantage of the situation.

In his later years, Ed Lemmon transitioned from brash young cowboy to an elder in the town that bears his name.

As cattle from different herds drifted over winter, they inevitably mixed together. That made necessary one of the great operations of the era, the spring roundup. In late winter notices were published in stock papers about gathering points, usually the heads of streams, and in mid-May the general roundup began. Wagons from every outfit in the area were loaded with supplies and dispersed across the prairie, trailing a dozen or more cowboys. Each hand needed eight to 10 horses, for they would be riding hard, for a month or more, driving cattle that were spread over thousands of square miles to collection points.

Every roundup was an event, but for Ed Lemmon and other old-timers the spring of 1897 stood out from all others. That winter had been especially hard. Early season storms coated the prairie in glistening ice, then blizzard followed upon blizzard, burying the grass and making it impossible for cattle to graze. From northern and central South Dakota, thousands of cattle drifted south in search of feed.”There was hardly an animal left north of the Cheyenne River,” wrote Lemmon, and getting them back promised to be a monumental undertaking.

From the Nebraska state line to Fort Pierre, cowpokes drove the wayward cattle toward Peno Flat on the Bad River. George Jackson was supposed to oversee the sorting operation, but when he sized up the job ñ 45,000 cattle, 24 wagons, 500 men, 5,000 saddle horses — he asked Lemmon to take over. Though he was in charge, Lemmon didn’t leave the grueling work of separating the cattle to others. Such was not his style. He personally cut 900 animals in a single day, a record never equaled, and cemented his reputation as a cowboy’s cowboy.

Ed Lemmon was made general manager of the Sheidley Cattle Company, with an ownership stake, in 1891. As part of his new duties he made his first cattle-buying trip to Texas in the spring of that year.”I naturally thought to look the part of a wealthy cattle buyer,” he wrote,”so I borrowed a gold watch and chain from our range boss, and a handsome gold ring from one of our sympathetic boys.”

Lemmon might have lacked the accessories for his new position, but most assuredly not the attitude. On that first trip south he arranged to ship 5,000 cattle back to Belle Fourche, the nearest railhead to Sheidley’s home place on the Moreau River. He wired ahead to foreman John Currington for an outfit to meet the initial consignment, only to have the Sheidley company president, R.C. Lake, countermand the orders. Several thousand cattle were left untended for two days.

When Lemmon arrived in Rapid City on the next train and the mix-up was discovered, there were”hot words flying, to be sure.” Lake was supposed to give Lemmon cash to pay off the shipper,”and while we were jangling over the matter the train had gotten under motion,” wrote Lemmon.”I let [Lake] trot along beside the train near… 100 yards, panting like a lizard, for he was a 200-pounder and office soft. All the time he was trying to poke the roll of bills to me through the car slats. Finally he says, ëIf you want this money you better take it for I am about to drop in my tracks.’ It was not only R.C. Lake that got a bawling out but Currington. I gave them both to understand that I was running that end of the business, and never again did Mr. Lake change any of my orders in any manner.”

Another indication of Lemmon’s rising status came in the winter of 1892 when he gathered in Rapid City with other notables of the Dakota cattle business, including James”Scotty” Philip, and founded the Western South Dakota Stock Growers Association. He paid his $5 membership dues, and when the group formally organized Lemmon was elected to the executive committee, a seat he held for 23 years.”In the early days of the organization my name was often mentioned as president,” he wrote,”but as I could not address an audience, I most emphatically declined.”

Among the WSDSGA’s foremost concerns was the prevention of cattle rustling. To that end they hired a range detective, Joe Elliot, one of a notorious group of gunmen previously employed by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association to rid the Powder River area of rustlers. They undertook the task so vigorously that President Harrison was forced to declare martial law in the region and dispatch Army troops to send Elliot and company on their way.

“There is no evidence Elliot ever drew his gun in anger while working for the [WSDSGA],” wrote Bob Lee and Dick Williams in Last Grass Frontier, but the association obviously knew what they were getting when they hired him.”[Elliot] always gave the other fellow the first shot,” wrote Lemmon.”That way he always had the law on his side when he dropped him.”

In 1893 Lemmon sold his share of the Sheidley Cattle Company and went into partnership with Richard Lake and Thomas Tomb. At its peak around the turn of the century, Lake, Tomb & Lemmon employed 300 men and ranged up to 53,000 head along the Moreau and Belle Fourche rivers.

Lemmon and his partners were operating on the scale of the barons of old, but the cattle business as it existed when he started was gradually passing away. In 1887 the Dawes Act effectively whittled the Great Sioux Reservation down yet again and defined western South Dakota’s Indian reservations more or less as they are today. Outside those boundaries the land was opened to homesteaders, which complicated life for the big cattle operators by pock marking the open range with small holdings. The cattle kings appealed to Congress for a measure to allow leasing of the last large tracts of unencumbered land on the Indian reservations.

Murdo MacKenzie of the Matador Cattle Company and Burton”Cap” Mossman of the Hanson Land and Cattle Company, who already controlled vast swaths of land from New Mexico to Saskatchewan, obtained leases of a half-million acres each on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Lemmon proved equally adept at working the system. With the assistance of South Dakota’s Senator Alfred Kittredge, he wrangled an invitation to the White House in 1902 to discuss leasing grass on the Standing Rock Reservation. President Theodore Roosevelt had owned a spread in North Dakota’s Badlands during the 1880s, and though he was an absentee owner, he often participated in spring roundups and fancied himself a rugged cattleman of the West. Lemmon brought the president up to date on conditions in the Dakotas, and the schmoozing paid off.

“The interview resulted in Roosevelt’s order to the Secretary of the Interior to approve my lease of 865,529 acres on the reservation,” wrote Lemmon.”I fenced it with a three-wire fence … giving me 270 miles of fence and cross fence. It was said by the National Livestock Association to be the largest pasture in the world, being larger than the state of Rhode Island.”

The town of Lemmon started the Boss Cowman Rodeo in 1971.

Lemmon returned from Washington in early May to what he called a”most pleasant” experience.”I was crossing my immense lease for the first time since it was awarded to me,” he wrote.”As I approached Leaf-On-the-Hill, which is about 12 miles northeast of the present city of McIntosh, I drove on top of the very highest pinnacle and stopped my team, stood up in my buggy, drew a long breath of fresh air and shouted to the universe that I was Lord of all. I surveyed for as far as my eyes could reach. I could not see the end of my domain … and when fenced, no man could trespass on me as had been the case on the open ranges I had just occupied.”

Since his days as manager of the Sheidley Cattle Company, Lemmon had stayed part of every winter in Chicago, where most of the cattle raised in Dakota were sold. While there he lodged at the Great Northern Hotel, and rubbed elbows with some of the city’s notables; among them was R. M. Culkins, general development director of the Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad.

CM&SP’s line from Aberdeen reached the Missouri River in 1900, and the company was looking to extend it westward. After a number of surveys, the company still couldn’t settle on a route. Culkins asked Lemmon’s advice, for he knew that country as well as any man, and the next day Lemmon returned with a government map of the Standing Rock Reservation he just happened to have along. A red pencil line marked a route from the mouth of the Grand River, present-day Mobridge, to Reeder, N.D., which incidentally skirted the Lake, Tomb & Lemmon holdings.

“As soon as I was advised that the proposed route had been found satisfactory… I got busy at once and purchased several hundred acres of land along the proposed route, the purpose being to ëcoppe’ a good town site not far from the reservation line,” wrote Lemmon.

Such was the stuff of western dreams: Lake, Tomb & Lemmon got a railroad connection close to its holdings, which helped the operation immensely, and Lemmon profited by knowing beforehand exactly where the rails would run. Last but not least, Culkins agreed to name a town on the new line after Lemmon.

Lemmon acquired nearly 1,300 acres along and near the CM&SP line with so-called railroad”script.” Scripting was a malodorous scheme engineered by Frederick Weyerhaeuser of the Santa Fe Railroad, which enabled him to exchange some of the line’s worthless land grant acres for other, more valuable homestead land in the West. When the prime timberland Weyerhaeuser wanted was all gone,”or he became ashamed to take more,” in Lemmon’s words, Weyerhaeuser sold his remaining rights.

“Every acre I scripted made good money,” wrote Lemmon. Some in north Lemmon bought for about $8 an acre, later sold for $100; a tract of 163 acres in and around the town site that was resold to the railroad brought $3,260, and Lemmon saved a corner lot for himself.

Lemmon’s first choice as a town site was about 4 miles east of present-day Lemmon, but there was a problem: it was in North Dakota, which was then a dry state.”In order to make [Lemmon] a real boom town, the saloon with its attendant evils would have to be tolerated,” he wrote. Lemmon ended up locating what he jokingly called”the new El Dorado” astride the state line, in hope that it would become the county seat for both Perkins County, S.D., and Adams County, N.D. Lemmon ended up being neither, but the town nonetheless proved”a hummer,” wrote Lemmon.”It was wide open and wild and wooly, however, not a single life was lost, though fights of all kind were frequent and furious.”

In 1908, after four decades in the cattle business, Ed Lemmon sold his interest in Lake, Tomb & Lemmon. He was 51 and ready for a second career. Lemmon founded and served as president of banks in Lemmon, Davison and Meadow, among other business ventures. When Perkins County was organized in 1909, he became one of its first commissioners; he also served as a commissioner for Adams County, N.D. How he could simultaneously be considered a legal resident of both states has not been recorded, and he didn’t explain in his newspaper columns 21 years later. Most likely no one was so impolitic as to mention it.

“Dad” Lemmon, as one and all referred to him, was a familiar figure around”his” town — familiar enough that citizens knew it was best not to be anywhere nearby when he got behind the wheel of his Model T.”He’d rev the engine up to 4,500 rpm, you could hear it all over town, then drop the clutch,” recalled one old-timer.”He went through a lot of clutches.” At some point Lemmon moved out of his house and into the Yellowstone Hotel. Each morning he would come downstairs, wind his engine to beyond its limit, back up at full speed with nary a glance behind him, make”a bootlegger turn” and cross the street to park in front of the cafe.

He drove his car like he rode his horse, according to the Lemmon town history. On the wrong side of the street. Over hills. Into gullies. His automobiles repaid the abuse by getting stuck numerous times, and on one occasion, the car ran over Lemmon while he was cranking it. The mishap broke his left shoulder blade and threw it out of place, where it remained for five months,”before I went to the Aberdeen hospital and had it broken down and silver wire stitched in place.”

In 1941, four years before Ed Lemmon passed away at the age of 88, Life magazine featured South Dakota in one of its famous photo essays. The photographer found Lemmon on Main Street, dapper in a white shirt and tie, but also ungainly, with his right leg misshapen and foot twisted inward; with the aid of his gnarled cane he managed to stay upright, but just. Lemmon was in the town he founded, among people who knew and loved him, but he wasn’t truly home. That was beyond the end of town, in the grass, endlessly shifting in the breeze.

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

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Searching for the White Mule

By Chuck Cecil

Sheriff E.E. Sherman (center) displayed whiskey-making equipment on the steps of the Union County Courthouse after a raid in the 1920s.

South Dakota jumped the gun on prohibition, passing a”dry” law more than two years before the 18th Amendment bottled up the nation’s booze business in 1920. What followed the 1917 South Dakota law and the later federal mandate uncorked a lengthy cat and mouse game. Moonshiners (the manufacturers) and bootleggers (retailers in Model As) became skilled at hiding stills and stashes from state and federal agents and the local law who worked night and day sniffing out the illegal white mule, as many called the homemade brew.

Nearly every South Dakota county and community had its covert booze operations, and most citizens with an occasional or unremitting itch for John Barleycorn knew where to find it. When the South Dakota constitution was drafted in Sioux Falls for a citizen vote in 1889, some wanted prohibition included. Fearful the emotional issue would influence the constitution vote, delegates wrote a prohibition amendment as a stand-alone ballot question.

Both the constitution and prohibition passed, and the 1890 South Dakota legislature framed a law making manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol illegal.

Five years later, citizens had a change of heart and voted prohibition out. Swinging doors were oiled, shot glasses washed, brass rails polished and the state’s often vilified saloons were back in business.

But by 1916, better-organized dry factions – the Anti-Saloon League, churches and the Women’s Christian Temperance League headed for decades by Flora Mitchell of Brookings – succeeded in getting another vote that hoisted South Dakotans back up on the prohibition wagon. After considering a state-run liquor business in which state liquor agents would keep names and amounts purchased, legislative reason prevailed. Liquids sold as beverages could have zero percent alcohol. The edict was christened the”bone-dry” law.

In 1917, Gov. Peter Norbeck signed a law creating the office of State Sheriff to more vigorously enforce federal prohibition laws. Lawmakers appropriated $3,000 to fund the effort.

To enforce the law, the legislature created the Office of State Sheriff. Later, the 18th Amendment was passed and federal agents were assigned to the state. Even with these units, law enforcement could hardly keep up with the growing number of stills whose operators were merrily churning out and hiding liquor of varying quantity and quality.

Stills steamed away in caves, isolated shacks, cornfields, timber stands, sandy river islands and on isolated farms. Stashes of booze were found in post holes, automobile spare tires, souped-up cars, straw stacks, potato piles, seeder boxes, and even hollow cemetery grave markers.

Hiding the bottled booze was a challenge. Interestingly, post hole digging tools made cool, camouflaged repositories slightly larger than the round alcohol bottles, and post holes could be sunk in the least likely of places, like chicken houses. Weedy road culverts were handy. The augers of idle threshing machines made passable liquor cabinets.

Another clever hiding place was discovered in Brookings County. The county road grader operator discovered more than a dozen one gallon jugs of booze buried up to their corked necks among roadside weeds near Bruce. Opposite each buried bottle, a piece of white cloth was tied to the fence as a subtle marker.

Newspapers were splashed with stories of still or stash discoveries. In 1923, Meade County Deputy Sheriff Fred Westgate said illegal stills were so prevalent in West River country”one can hardly put his foot down without stepping on one.”

A Sisseton farmer sold his powerful homemade”medication” at a rheumatism clinic he founded. A remarkable number of Roberts County men were soon afflicted and sought treatment until the law intervened.

By the 1930s Hank Kempel of Sioux Falls had brought together a group of young toughs to distribute illegal booze trucked in from Al Capone’s Chicago monopoly, and local police were soon dealing with what they called”the Kempel Gang.”

Verne Miller was a Beadle County sheriff who turned to bootlegging and organized crime.

Dempster Mayor John DeWall cracked a wry smile in 1931 and appointed a committee to review applications from the five different bootleggers active in Hamlin County for a local distribution franchise. Committee members played along, but wanted samples.

The annual reports of the state sheriff show the extent of the problem. The 1923-24 report cites the arrest of 178 still operators. Concurrently, federal agents, county sheriffs and U.S. marshals were also barging in and breaking up bubbling sites.

After state deputy sheriffs raided the Schwenk farm in Yankton County on Dec. 7, 1921, two trucks hauled away a plethora of beer making gear, including”three testers, 800 quart cans of canned malt, 100 gallons of malt in barrels, twelve quarts Primo, nine cases hops, two bales of hops, three dozen packages of hops, twenty-one capping machines, one can sealer, one box hose holders, two gross cans, seven dozen packages gelatin, 800 pounds of bottle caps, fifteen packages of labels, 78 packages of rubber stoppers, two boxes of siphon hose and 100 pounds of shot.” The pellets were used to help clean particularly dirty beer bottles for reuse.

Later that year at a farm in Hutchinson County, officers arrested L. T. Kleinsasser, W. T. Warne and Peter Hofer, and seized one stove and feed cooker, two sacks of bottles, 300 gallons of mash, one sack of rye, one cooler coil, six barrels, one milk can, one bushel basket and more. Firearms, knives and brass knuckles were often found among the moonshiners’ assets. In a 1923 raid near Sisseton, the outraged moonshiner hurled a barbed fish spear at an officer, but missed.

As agents became more proficient at finding stills, moonshiners became more adroit at hiding them. Near Elk Point in late 1924, agents found a 10-by-40-foot cave in a cornfield covered with boards and dirt. The dugout held a 100-gallon capacity still to process 40 awaiting barrels of fermenting mash. Agents also found a six-burner kerosene stove, supplies of sugar, rye and yeast, and an impressive inside water well.

To enter a suspected moonshine cave near the town appropriately named Rumford in Fall River County in 1931, agents climbed down a ladder inside a well and squeezed through a wall opening where they found a 100-gallon still.

Law officers often posed for news photographers with firearms and liquor confiscated in raids. This 1918 photo was taken in Brookings.

More squalid still locations were hidden under hog houses, barn stalls and manure piles. At the Hamandberg farm north of Harrisburg agents found a trap door under a resting cow in a barn stall leading to an underground still. Caves under hog pens were particularly filthy. The dripping effluent percolating from above mixed with the mash, but these”mixed drinks,” did not deter sales. Another common secret ingredient was poison caused by lead from corrosive evaporation coils.

Agents often found mash with drowned mice, bugs and birds floating on top. And in some cases officers had to shoo chickens off mash barrel roosts, but most moonshiners didn’t operate this way. They considered their product among the finest available, such as the alcohol made the old-world way by Adolph Schelske of Parkston. His daughter Leona Pietz describes her father’s still in a book, Memories of a Bootlegger’s Daughter. Leona’s daily chore was to carefully stir the fermenting, bubbling mash.

The used mash from Schelske’s barrels was discarded through a pipe draining to a nearby stream where, Pietz wrote, the mash attracted and nourished happy fish that were later caught and eaten.

Moonshiner Bert Miller of Hill City was described as a”master distiller” by Carl West, the Minneapolis Prohibition Enforcement Department’s chief chemist in 1924. Moonshiners Miller and Schelske were just two of many South Dakotans who sought to perfect their brew.

As prohibition nationally and eventually in South Dakota was ending, federal and state agents raided two”super stills,” one in northern Clay County and another west of Sioux Falls. Both expertly engineered, leading officials to suspect Al Capone’s operation in Chicago may have provided financing.

The coming of the automobile was a bootlegger’s dream, expanding his territory and his carrying capacity. The largest auto liquor cargo ever found in South Dakota was on July 11, 1932, west of Huron. Officers counted 228 one-gallon tins of booze in Bernard”Bud” Bruns’ re-vamped 1932 Buick five-passenger coupe. They also confiscated his .45 caliber pistol and two glass jars filled with roofing nails to throw out and disable police cars during a chase.

Violence was a by-product of the business. Flandreau bootlegger Ira Dawson shot it out with two deputies in White, a small Brookings County town, in May of 1928. Dawson died en route to the Brookings Hospital. At the Chrisman farm near Redfield, bootlegger Chrisman ambushed and killed two agents.

Most state and federal agents were straight arrows, but bad apples did succumb to the lure of payoff money. Verne Miller, a personable, handsome World War I hero from White Lake, became Beadle County Sheriff in 1920, but soon turned south and became a hired killer for eastern mobsters. His killings put him on the FBI’s most wanted list, but his underworld enemies found him first.

Edward Senn was a newspaperman and a crusader for prohibition in South Dakota.

The superstar of dry agents in South Dakota was Edward L. Senn, the crusading Deadwood Daily Telegram newspaper editor-publisher who became federal prohibition administrator in 1925 and served until national prohibition ended in 1933. He was tireless and often led raids by agents the press called”Senn’s Raiders.”

Senn’s heart must have been broken when national prohibition ended in 1933. South Dakota and its bone-dry law continued for nearly two more years, much to the chagrin of wets.

The state became an island in a sea of sloshing liquor in surrounding states. Calling a special legislative session to end the bone dry law was made more complicated because Governor Tom Berry feared a just-passed gross income tax vote might crop up in a special session along with the prohibition question.

The wets finally won out in April of 1935, and the state’s journey astride the white mule was over.

Editor’s Note: Chuck Cecil is a longtime South Dakota author and newspaperman. These stories are condensed from his book Astride the White Mule, the only book ever written about the state’s prohibition years. The 200 pp. softcover is available for $15, plus $3 shipping/taxes, from Books, P.O. Box 608, Volga, S.D. 57071. This article is revised from the July/August 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Toast to Charlie Collins

By Bob Karolevitz

If South Dakota Irishmen are looking for someone to toast this St. Patrick’s Day, they might consider Charlie Collins, the most irrepressible wearer of the green ever to swing an editorial shillelagh in the territory.

Sioux Indians and Britishers are excused from the party, though, because Collins certainly would never qualify as their most lovable character. Charlie, you understand, was a newspaperman and an unmitigated promoter who wouldn’t have won any prize for veracity or humility. He could stretch the truth like a giant rubber band; and pure, unadulterated blarney was his stock in trade.

He claimed to have established 113 newspapers throughout the West. Not true! He bragged that he had begun the first daily in every territory in the Union except Montana. Not true! What he did do, however, was launch a flamboyant campaign to open the Black Hills to gold miners — Indian treaties be damned! — and as a result he was largely responsible for the heated jurisdictional problem which has nagged Congress, tribal leaders and private citizens ever since.

Born in Ireland in the mid-1830s, Collins gave his age as 35 in 1870 when he appeared in Sioux City as the new owner of the Weekly Times. A natural tub-thumper, he couldn’t wait to tell the world that the Iowa river port on the fringe of Dakota Territory was the ideal outfitting point for the argonauts and other adventurers whom he stirred up with his unrelenting publicity — true or otherwise.

When Father Pierre Jean DeSmet passed through Sioux City in 1871, Collins interviewed him, and the peripatetic priest confirmed the promoter’s belief that the Black Hills would be America’s next great bonanzaland.

With unbounded energy and glowing editorials, he championed the cause of invasion of the treaty forbidden land.

Early in 1872 he organized the Black Hills Mining and Exploring Association of Sioux City with himself as president. It was to become the sponsor of the historic Collins-Russell Expedition (also known as the Gordon Expedition) of 1874, which sneaked into the Hills and established the Gordon Stockade near present-day Custer. Annie Tallent, the first white woman to enter the region, was in the party of 28 — but Charlie Collins stayed safely behind to stir up more gold fever in the columns of the Times.

Meanwhile, unknown to many of his readers, the Irish schemer had another even more grandiose dream. He was an avid member of the Fenian Society, the organization of militant Sons of St. Pat pledged to restore the freedom of Ireland and to bedevil the British wherever and whenever possible.

He envisioned the establishment of an Irish colony on the Missouri across from the mouth of the White River (not far from today’s Chamberlain.) As he told fellow Fenians at a convention in St. Louis, the settlement would become the headquarters for a patriotic army of Irishmen that would invade Canada when the appropriate opportunity came.

In the meantime, Brule City could also be a key part of the Sioux City route to the Hills where miners would switch from steamboats to wagons for the final overland leg of their journey to riches. (Collins just happened to control a major share of the best building lots in the proposed town.)

History tells us, of course, that the wild Irishman’s pipedream to drive the hated British out of the continent was never realized. On the other hand, his persistent efforts to open the Black Hills eventually paid off. Even though the Army removed the”sooners” at the Gordon stockade, he and other boomers kept the pressure on until the military and the federal government simply gave up and permitted the tidal wave of incursion to begin.

Collins himself didn’t immediately join the Gold Rush of ’76. Instead he went to the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that year with a plan for escorting European visitors on a tour, which included Sioux City, Brule City and the Black Hills. No doubt he also was hoping for lots of Irish recruits in the process.

That was another idea that fell through, though, and Collins returned to the Midwest, acquired another printing outfit (he had sold the Times before he went East) and followed the crowd to Deadwood Gulch where he established the Black Hills Champion at Central City.

Inveterate promoter that he was, he soon came out with The History and Directory of the Black Hills, the first book published in the gold country. Strangely, though, the opening of the Dakota El Dorado seemed to come as an anti-climax for him. Could it have been that the challenge meant more to him than the realization?

After brief appearances in Sturgis and Bison, he turned again to his ultimate dream in Brule City. With renewed fervor, he left the Hills and announced plans for the publication of the Brule City Times. In typical fashion, Collins issued an advance prospectus, proclaiming that the Times would begin with a million copies in its first issue — the largest paper in the United States or Europe!

How he proposed to achieve such a volume production with the limited and generally crude equipment of the era apparently was known only to the garrulous publisher himself. The same was true of the 125,000 firm subscription orders he purported to have in hand.

Needless to say, his gigantic bubble finally burst. The Times, with a limited circulation, existed only briefly. The Irish Army never materialized, and Collins set off for California, where it is said that he made a fortune in real estate ventures before fading into the cobwebs of history.

As it turned out, Charlie Collins doesn’t exactly go down in the history books as one of South Dakota’s greatest citizens. But — sure and begorra! — when the Irishmen among us raise their glasses this March 17, his memory might just be a good excuse for an extra tipple or two.

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

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The Disappearance of Fred Fyle

By Roger Wiltz

Two thousand dollars was a small fortune in 1924. But when Dr. Fred Fyle of Geddes disappeared, his family and friends eagerly offered that sum for his return. After all, what’s a doctor worth to a small town? Thousands of circulars with Fyle’s photograph were sent to every corner of the country and radio stations broadcast news of the search from coast to coast.

Dr. Fyle was a Canadian who graduated from the University of Toronto School of Medicine in 1907 at age 36. He had practiced in Ontario for a year when he met a stranger on a train who encouraged him to start a clinic in South Dakota.

He took the advice seriously and visited several South Dakota towns. Immediately attracted to Geddes and its people, he purchased a home there to convert into a hospital. His new practice opened Oct. 29, 1909 and was an immediate success. Soon he needed more space and converted the Padley Hotel into the Charles Mix County Hospital. Before long even the hotel became too small.

In 1917 Fyle built the hospital he needed, a three-story brick building with a full dining room in the basement, said to be the most beautiful dining room in the state. The new hospital had 24 patient rooms and three operating rooms. He took on a partner named H.E. Allen and together they operated the biggest hospital in the area. Despite the new hospital’s size, they were soon planning a 20-room addition and a new nursing school.

Dr. Fyle settled easily into life in South Dakota. Soon after moving to Geddes, he became a prominent and well-liked citizen. In 1909 he married Emma Belle Gallagher at the Congregation church parsonage. She was the eldest daughter of Dr. Gallagher, the Congregational minister. The doctor was on the city council and belonged to several area organizations.

He earned enough money to buy small parcels of land, including a summer cottage at nearby Lake Andes where he entertained guests who swam and fished in the pristine lake with its white sand bottom. He often would allow youth groups to use the cottage. A sister and brother followed him from Canada, and they both helped him manage his business affairs.

Fyle worked tirelessly for his community and he prided himself on making late night house calls in any weather. He lived in the hospital so he could be on call whenever he was needed. His devotion gained him admirers and made him vital to his community.

Then, one December evening in 1923, Dr. Fyle did not return home. His family wasn’t too concerned. Maybe he’d stopped at the lake cottage. Maybe he was visiting friends. But he didn’t return the following day; and days turned into weeks.

The doctor was last seen in Sioux City on Dec. 11.
 He left for home around 4 p.m. after consulting doctors in Sioux City about an ear case. The weather and
roads were clear when he left in his Model T Ford coupe for the 140-mile trip to Geddes.

Yankton, the largest town between Sioux City and Geddes, would have been a logical place for the doctor to refuel and have supper. Dr. Fyle was large in stature and not easy to forget, but no proprietors recalled the doctor when shown a photo.

Winter ended and the grass turned green. On May 1, 1924, two local farm boys, Joe and Edward Cap, were fishing in Marne Creek about five miles northwest of Yankton. At the junction of Marne Creek and the Sunshine Highway, a major gravel road that led from Yankton to Utica and on to Scotland, the brothers saw something that looked like the roof of an automobile about two feet beneath the water’s surface. They mentioned it to their father, Joe, at supper that night.

The boys’ discovery didn’t impress Joe Cap, Sr. If it was a car, it wouldn’t be the first time an auto sank into Marne Creek. A flash flood the previous September had destroyed the approach. The washout measured 10 feet deep and 15 to 20 feet across.

After Sunday dinner on May 4, Joe Cap called his brother, John.”The boys mentioned what might be a car in the creek. Let’s go have a look.” Upon examination, the adults agreed; a coupe’s roof sat just below the waterline. The men floated a stout log over the roof, and one of them crawled onto it while the other secured it from the bank. After punching a hole through the fabric roof, the man on the log reached in and felt the remains of a human body. He removed a hat from the head of the victim and crawled back to the bank.

Authorities soon pulled the coupe out of the water and found a badly decomposed body, hands clutching the broken steering wheel. The vehicle’s license plate number confirmed that the auto belonged to the doctor from Geddes. The young Cap brothers received a $2,000 reward from Fyle’s family.

Dr. Fyle’s wristwatch had stopped at 9 p.m., recording the exact time that Geddes lost its much-loved physician and friend.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Milbank’s Newspaper Family

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: Clarence and Phyllis Justice were going strong as publishers of the Grant County Review in Milbank when we visited the newspaper in 2008. At the time, the paper had been in their family’s hands for almost 100 years. Not long after this story appeared, both Phyllis and Clarence developed health problems. They sold the Review to Debbie Hemmer and Holli Seehafer in October of 2013. Phyllis died in November 2013 and Clarence followed in October 2014. They will long be remembered as one of South Dakota’s pioneer publishing families.

Lucky is the town with a newspaper owned and edited by a spunky journalist who knows the community’s history and secrets, and even its very soul. By that standard, Milbank won the lottery when Bill Dolan bought the weekly Grant County Review in February of 1911.

He married Christine Olson a year later, and they had a daughter, Phyllis. Clarence Justice joined the family in 1955 when he married Phyllis. Christine’s sister, Victoria Olson, was also involved in the paper from 1915 to 1990, selling ads, gathering news, setting type and keeping books.

That’s basically the history of The Review to this date. The family has been in charge for the last 97 years. Portraits of both Bill and Phyllis hang in the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame on the South Dakota State University campus in Brookings.

Bill Dolan was a young St. Thomas College graduate — a staunch Democrat and Catholic — when he arrived in Milbank from St. Paul, Minn. He couldn’t have known the tough competition he would face in a predominately Republican and Protestant community with competing newspapers.

At times, three newspapers fought over readership, advertising and printing. Milbank didn’t become a one-paper town until 1991, when the Herald Advance ceased publication. The Review and the Herald Advance had been lively competitors for over 100 years.”When it was gone, it was like playing tennis without a partner,” Phyllis says.”It took us a long time to adjust.”

“My dad had many other interests, and he might have sold the paper somewhere along the way, but my mother was really devoted to it, and neither she nor I would hear of selling,” says Phyllis.”When mother was on her deathbed at age 101 she asked me, ‘We still have the paper, don’t we?'”

Phyllis says both of her parents chose to spend money for needed printing equipment rather than for their own use.”No matter how little advertising dad had, he never cut back on news coverage,” she says.”Even in the Depression years he always put out a newsy paper, and he never failed to include a generous number of editorials. He was determined to make Milbank a better community.”

Though he often worked 80-hour weeks, he still found time to promote community and political projects and to enjoy hunting and fishing in the Glacial Lakes. For 12 years as a Democrat on the five-member state Board of Regents, he was instrumental in shaping the future of South Dakota’s public universities. On one occasion, press day at The Review was delayed while he helped to settle a student strike at Northern Normal and Industrial School (now Northern State University) in Aberdeen. Phyllis returned to Milbank in July of 1946 to join her father in the family enterprise and succeeded him as editor and publisher when he died in 1957. A journalism graduate of the University of Minnesota, she had worked at the Minneapolis Tribune, the Minneapolis Star Journal and the Mankato Free Press. She had also served as an assistant club director for the USO in the Seattle area during World War II, and later as public relations director for the National Catholic Community Service in Washington, D.C. No matter where she was working, she always furnished her dad with a weekly column that she’d started while in college.

When many readers couldn’t afford subscriptions in the 1930s and early 1940s, Phyllis’ dad continued to mail newspapers to them. After the hard times ended, he decided it was time to make everyone a paying customer again, so he sent Phyllis and her Aunt Victoria as collectors — door to door and farm to farm. Victoria and Phyllis would start out early in the morning after the week’s paper had been printed and mailed. They packed a thermos of coffee and lunch, and headed down country roads in an old Dodge, with the subscription list in the back seat.

Some subscribers hadn’t paid for a dozen years. On a good day, however, Victoria and Phyllis would go home with more than $100. They risked dog bites, and several times they were ordered to”get off the premises and never to send that dirty Democrat rag to them again.”

For a special issue commemorating the paper’s 125th anniversary in 2005, Phyllis wrote about her family’s involvement, but she also heralded the non-family staff, several of whom had been with the paper for over 50 years. And she explained how she met her husband and assistant publisher.

“Finding a capable printer who was willing to live in a small town was very difficult,” she wrote.”In 1952, dad placed a help wanted ad in the Minneapolis Tribune. Little did he suspect that he would get a call from a printer in Miller who was a regular reader of the Minneapolis paper. Dad was so impressed with the caller that he asked him to report for work on Monday.”

She recalled that her dad put down the phone and told her he’d hired a printer who had experience on dailies and weeklies in several states.

“What is his name?” Phyllis asked.

“Oh, I forgot to ask him,” her father replied.”But he is coming.”

Phyllis doubted the printer would show, but the following Monday a tall, slender young man was at work in the office when she arrived. She became Mrs. Clarence Dolan Justice just three years later, and the two have worked together ever since. By any standard, they are the First Couple of South Dakota newspapering.

In the 2005 anniversary issue, Phyllis, Clarence and the entire Review staff invited readers to a cake and ice cream open house with a full page advertisement that read,”It hasn’t always been a piece of cake, but it has been a labor of love.”

Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Protestants, Catholics, agnostics and others showed up to celebrate.

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

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A Depression Christmas

By Florence Lang

It was Christmas time on the farm during the Depression in South Dakota. The harsh wind swept across the plains and entered the cracks around the windows and doors in our house. The hot days of summer were a faded memory. Our crops were meager at best, but we always produced a bumper crop of children. The number of kids in the small house grew with each passing year until it hovered at 10, by far the best crop during those bleak years.

The week before Christmas held lots of excitement in our household and local community. There was the annual program put on by children at the small country school. As with most child-headed projects, the results were often mixed and surprising each year — anything could happen and generally did. We sang traditional carols while our mother played the old pump organ, which had been home to mice during the summer. In its old age not every key produced sound — and the sounds it did happen to produce were of questionable quality — but it served the school well and was a wonderful way to drown out off-key interpretations of “Jingle Bells” from the children. My mother played the organ with gusto, but it often required my brother lying on the floor and pushing the pedals when she became tired.

A second program followed at the country church, again with questionable talent. Everyone learned the speaking parts in case Joseph or the wise men came down with the flu or the measles, a common occurrence in that day. Santa was always played by one of the local men, no doubt chosen by drawing straws due to the moth-eaten dusty suit they were required to wear. Santa always came bearing candy for the children, which was greatly anticipated.

Memories of Christmas Eve at home began with a huge kettle of oyster stew sitting on the back of the wood stove. This was an extra extravagance that we could ill afford, but a beloved uncle in Washington, D.C., provided the feast by sending $5 for the oysters. How we savored the taste.

The tree had definitely seen better days, as every other branch was missing. It seemed to plead to be put out of its misery. Our rings of green and red paper chains covered the bare parts. One year we attempted to string popcorn but failed miserably because the popcorn was consumed before it had even the notion of being put onto a string. Trees at that time were simpler. No tangled lights were visible because electricity had yet to arrive. Still, the tree stood as a symbol of the joy and merriment of the season.

What presents could be found under the dilapidated tree? Warm clothing was high on the list: a pair of long brown stockings, warm mittens, heavy plaid shirts and long scarves. One child received a photograph album in which she cut and pasted pictures from the Montgomery Ward catalogue because the camera did not work. A local grocer provided a small rubber doll that two girls shared. A Tom Sawyer book and an oversized book of Bible stories were read and reread during the long winter months. But the last and always the best gift was a game to be shared by all. Monopoly was one of our favorites. Eventually the board was in two pieces from overuse, the houses and hotels were in short supply, and you had to know where Park Place was located. No stockings were hung by the fireplace — probably because we were wearing them, and there was no fireplace on which to hang them.

Yes, we were poor. There was not an abundance of gifts under the tree, but we had two loving, hard-working parents, lots of playmates, enough food, good health and kind neighbors. What more does one need at Christmas?

Florence Nachtigal Lang grew up on a farm near Platte. She attended South Dakota State University and taught school in Bristol and Parkston. She and her husband have homes in Byron, Minnesota, and Fort Myers, Florida.

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The Mammoth Man

By Jerry Wilson

Editor’s Note: Volunteers have come and gone in the Mammoth Site’s 40 years of operation, but Larry Agenbroad was always there. He became the site’s principal investigator shortly after the first tusk was unearthed in 1974 until his death on Friday, Oct. 31 in Hot Springs. Though the bones had been there for millions of years, Dr. Agenbroad helped open a new and unique window to prehistoric history that South Dakotans and countless visitors from around the world have enjoyed. A memorial service is scheduled for Nov. 15 at 10 a.m., at the Mueller Civic Center in Hot Springs. A version of this story appeared in the May/June 2005 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

It was just another plateau on the western rim of Hot Springs gulch, a great place for new homes, with a fabulous view. But when a bulldozer blade scraped the edge off a massive tusk in 1974, Philip and Elenora Anderson called Dr. Larry Agenbroad, then a professor at Chadron State College in Nebraska. Initial investigation indicated that the tusk belonged to a long-extinct mammoth. The Andersons stopped the bulldozers and gave scientists three years to explore the site. Today the Hot Springs Mammoth Site is regarded as the world’s premier place to see and learn about the extinct giants of the elephant world.

“When we began in 1975, we had a roaring budget of $500,” Agenbroad said.”One day we uncovered a big skull. That night a full moon came up over Battle Mountain and moonlight shined through the eye sockets, and I haven’t looked back.”

The skeletons of coyotes, wolves, camels, llamas and a short-faced bear‚Ä® have all been dug from the sinkhole too, but the creature that gave the place its name was an animal so big that its name means huge. Bones lie at least 67 feet deep, so there are many more years of excavation ahead. So far the Mammoth Site has yielded 61 mammoths, the biggest creatures since the dinosaurs. There is literally no other place like this on Earth.

The Andersons and the scientists decided to leave everything they dug up on site. In many cases, one skeleton lies atop another, and the upper bones have been displaced to get at what lies below. But where possible, the bones lie”in situ,” locked in the sandstone that formed around them after they died 26 millennia ago, the last of a species 2 million years old.

Agenbroad said pelvic measurements taken in 1989 indicated that all but one of the mammoths are males, and other tests indicate most were between 12 and 29 years old; in mammoth years, they were”teenybopper males,” he said, ostracized from the herd, and as teenagers sometimes do, they got into trouble; they ventured into the sinkhole to feast on vegetation surrounding the thermal pool. The shale around the edges was”slick as snot on a glass doorknob,” and the giant creatures could not climb out. Most likely they died in spring, Agenbroad said, when they had two choices: sweep the snow off the grass with their tusks, or take easy pickings by the pool.”Having raised teenage boys, I know teenagers are allergic to snow shovels,” he said,”so they took the latter.” He thinks the animals fell in over a period of about 750 years, maybe one each decade or so.

The sinkhole is covered by a 23,000-square-foot laminated beam building. Excavators can work anytime, and the paleontological dig is open to visitors, regardless of weather or time of year.