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The Cattleman’s Blizzard

Editor’s Note: On Oct. 4-5, 2013, western South Dakota was pummeled by one of the worst blizzards in the state’s history. Winter Storm Atlas was unexpected and deadly. It began as rain, but then temperatures plummeted and winds began to howl. When the clouds cleared 2 to 4 feet of snow blanketed the Black Hills and surrounding prairie. Ranchers lost cattle, horses and sheep in the tens of thousands. We toured the storm-ravaged West River Country just weeks after the blizzard. Here are stories from the men and women we found struggling to recover.

By Bernie Hunhoff

Molly Reinhold looks for survivors in the snow, following the heart-wrenching blizzard that befell West River. Photo by Rachel Reinhold

LARRY REINHOLD watched the darkening clouds while hurrying to plant a field of wheat on Thursday, Oct. 3. He could almost taste the rain. Quickly jumping off the tractor to check the planter, he nearly landed on a big prairie rattler, but the snake didn’t seem to care. Maybe it sensed that bigger trouble was looming.

Larry Reinhold called his family together for a prayer as they began the task of recovering from the blizzard.

Reinhold and his family ranch 20 miles north of Rapid City. Before sunset that Thursday, they brought their cows and calves to a windbreak below a big dam near their house and barns. Many of their mares and colts were sheltered behind a barn in another windbreak. The Reinholds raise and sell quarterhorses, and they also saddle them every summer for 400 youngsters who attend Rainbow Bible Ranch, a camp started by Larry’s parents in 1979.

Further north in Meade County, Dallas Basel was hauling hay from the fields to the yard on that fateful Thursday. He and his wife, Tammy, watched weather reports on television when he came indoors for supper. Rain was forecast, so they locked the sheep in the corral. The Basels’ cattle were about two miles away, still on summer pasture. After years of drought, rains had fallen in 2013 and the grass was still green; cows and calves were getting fat.

On that Thursday afternoon, the Cammacks were moving cattle.”They’d predicted 4 to 6 inches of snow, which you can handle. Most folks had cows 20 or 30 miles away from their home place and that wouldn’t be unusual at all in early October,” said Gary Cammack.

Like most West River ranchers, the Cammacks have many irons in their proverbial fires. Gary and his wife, Amy, bought the Stoneville General Store in 1973. Sales were just $10,000 a year but they hoped it would supplement Gary’s construction jobs. He worked on the local missile sites, the Rapid City Civic Center and een the Alaska Pipeline.

Six years later, business had multiplied 10 times, so they moved from Stoneville — a veritable ghost town, even then — to Union Center, which was only slightly bigger but happened to be on Highway 34, a main West River corridor.

Through the years, the Cammacks added a restaurant, post office, branch bank and beauty shop. But the anchor of Union Center remains the original store, now known as Cammack Ranch Supply, a destination for men and women who spend their days with horses and livestock. The store doubles as a museum; hanging on the walls are harnesses from the Fort Meade cavalary, the headmount of a steer that starred in a Marlboro commercial and fossils unearthed in the neighborhood.

Two of the Cammacks’ sons, Reed and Chris, also run businesses in the town. Reed builds wood cabinets and Chris is a world-class taxidermist.

Union Center, population 50, has a community gymnasium with basketball courts shared by six rural schools, a new fire hall and a Baptist Church landscaped with massive boulders brought from the Black Hills, 30 miles to the west. By Friday morning, Oct. 4, the churchyard looked like a Christmas card as big, wet flakes of snow began to fall.

~

LARRY REINHOLD’S wife, Robin, is a weather observer for the National Weather Service. Her moniker is Hereford 12 SW. She noticed on Friday morning that her measurements were far exceeding the local forecasts. Snow was falling at the rate of an inch an hour. At 2 p.m. on Friday, the lights flickered out in her family’s old ranch house, which was built by Larry’s grandparents in 1929. Power lines across the region were already heavy with snow, and being whipped by winds gusting to 70 miles per hour.

Tammy Basel was worried about the sheep.”Being a nervous person, I kept walking around outside on Friday. At one point it was snowing, lightning and thundering. Dallas was worried that I’d get hit by lightning.” The Basels moved a tractor out of a barn, where it was sheltered, to make room for the ewes and their lambs.

The Cammacks made their way through snowdrifts to the store, but the electricity was dead and nobody was moving on Highway 34. Chris Cammack and a friend, Ben Meyer, decided to try to drive a four-wheel tractor six miles to nearby Enning so they could mount a snow bucket on it and be ready when the storm stopped.

Cautiously, they made their way along Highway 34, both watching for a sign of the road ditch in the white-out of the storm. They arrived and were able to get the bucket mounted. But visibility was next to zero when they started back. Fortunately, they’d tracked their route by GPS so they were able to follow the same path back to Union Center without seeing the road. Driving the tractor was like piloting a plane in dense clouds and fog.

~

DALLAS AND TAMMY BASEL awoke Saturday to a 6-foot bank of snow at their ranchhouse door. But they climbed over it and walked 100 yards to the sheep corral, where they discovered that the storm was a killer.

“We don’t know any better than to ranch,” said Tammy Basel, pictured with her husband Dallas and their sheep herd after the storm. She meant that ranching is a life, not a job. Their ewes’ thick wool was washed snow white from the three-day storm.

Thirteen sheep were lying frozen in a snowbank in the corral.”It was still blizzarding hard,” Tammy remembers. Later that morning, she saw a lone cow come into the yard. If she was theirs, it had traveled 2 miles in the storm. That couldn’t be good, but the weather was too wild to begin a search.

Meanwhile, more than 100 cows showed up in little Union Center. The Cammacks had no idea where they’d come from or who they belonged to, but they herded them into a cattleyard and fed them hay. The highway remained empty of cars and trucks; the world was white and cold.

Larry and Robin Reinhold looked out their windows Saturday morning and saw a scene that looked as if a tornado had blown through. Trees were stripped of branches from the wind and heavy snow. Huge snowdrifts stretched between the house and barn.

Finally, on Saturday afternoon, the wind and snow began to subside so the Reinholds made their way through the drifts; soon they had their first inkling of the devastation. Four horses lay dead in the shelter of the corral.

The two oldest Reinhold children — Rachel, 19, and Molly, 17 — began to search beyond the yard and saw an unusual sight — a line of mule deer mixed with antelope, walking single file, making their way through the deep snow.

The dam seemed like a surly ocean. It was filled to the brim from the precipitation, and waves were beating against the eastern bank. The family’s wily Hereford herd bulls had come into the yard. One stood on the porch of a little cabin.

A Hereford bull took shelter on the porch of a cabin in the Reinholds’ yard.

Darkness came before they or hundreds of other ranch families could assess the situation. They went to bed hoping that the cows and horses that were miles away might have survived, but most had seen enough to fear the worst.

Most ranchers couldn’t tune into the evening news that dismal night because their power was off, so they didn’t hear that the National Weather Service had named the storm Atlas. In Rapid City, NWS was staffed by dedicated meteorologists who’d walked through drifts to get to their stations, even though they were on unpaid leave due to a government shutdown in Washington, D.C.

~

SMALL CHURCHES are scattered across the West River countryside. Tiny Milesville is down to just one residence, and the post office closed last year, but it still has two churches.

Roads were impassable so the pews were empty Sunday morning, Oct. 6. Ranchers climbed into the cabs of their biggest tractors and started trails through the deep snows so they could search for their stock. As the sun rose, the snow took on a blue glow because it was so heavy with preciptation. County and state highway workers began to clear the roads, and they were sickened by the number of dead cattle they were finding.

Electricity was still off, but REA linemen were immediately in the country, replacing poles and reconnecting broken wires.

The Basels and their neighbors rounded up 700 cows and began the task of sorting them by brands. Their tiny grandson was just beginning to string words together; his first phrase was”dead cow there.”

Cammack is a state legislator, one of three who represent District 29, a big swath of West River that was in the heart of the storm. His fellow district lawmakers, Dean Wink and Larry Rhoden, also ranch near the center of the storm. All three had cattle to find, but they spent time on the phones, consulting with state and county authorities about the recovery.

Words are seldom the measure of a man in rural South Dakota, especially not the quantity spoken. In hard times, a South Dakotan is likely to speak even less than normal so the three rancher/lawmakers filled a vacuum, and became spokesmen even though they had their own sorrows to sort through.

The national media was calling. The blogosphere erupted both with sympathy and stupidity.”Why didn’t they get the cattle indoors,” asked one urbanite. Comments like that were read and heard by the struggling ranchers who already were dealing with myriad emotions.

ìIt’s one of those things when if you come over the hill and you see dead cows dotted over the prairie, your first thought is it’s your responsibility to take care of those livestock,” said Cammack.”I don’t think there’s one person whose first thought was about their equity. Their first thought was that they’d failed their stewardship responsibility to those animals.”

Cammack told the New York Times and other reporters that ranchers mustn’t blame themselves.”That’s easy to say and hard to do,” he added.”There is not a producer who didn’t question himself 20 times a day.”

In the days following the storm, Gary Cammack had his own ranching disaster to deal with, but he also had responsibilities as a state legislator.

Cammack said one of the best livestock lessons he ever heard came years ago from Robert Funnel, a neighbor and the father of Tammy Basel.”I’d lost a couple head of cattle and Robert told me that one of the things that kept him in business was ëyou got to step over the dead ones and take care of the live ones.'”

At the Reinhold ranch, the parents and six children tried to keep a perspective. At one point, they stopped the search to reflect on what had happened.”We prayed that while the horses’ and cows’ paths had ended, ours must continue on,” Larry said.

And then they continued to look for survivors. They found live cows, buried to the neck in wet, cold snow, and they dug them out by hand and shovel. Twenty-five horses were nowhere to be found.”In our heads we knew they were probably gone,” said Rachel. But you search with your heart.

Finally, on Wednesday morning she and Molly found the last bunch. They were strung out in a long line on the prairie, a few hundred yards apart, for several miles.

It’s one thing to lose cows with numbered ear tags, said their father, but it can’t compare with losing horses named Cocoa, Sweetheart, Marigold, Okey and Rosie.

ìThey were like our best friends,” said Rachel, Rainbow Ranch’s head wrangler.”We lost 21 really good saddle horses.” One of them was Champion, a 6-year-old given to her brother Caleb for his birthday.

Rachel, the eldest of the Reinhold children, led her horse Pocokota through deep drifts as she looked for missing cows and horses. The four-day search ended with a heart-breaking discovery.

The final count was 91 horses dead, and 140 still alive. But the living horses also suffered.”They looked dazed, just like us, walking around kind of staring even weeks later,” said Larry.”Some of their bunch aren’t there. They had their buddies and they’re gone.”

One month after the storm, State Veterinarian Dustin Oedekoven reported that 13,977 cattle had been confirmed dead, along with 1,257 sheep, 287 horses and 40 bison. Some cattlemen think the losses might be twice that number, but it’s likely that a lot of ranchers won’t report their numbers unless the federal government approves a disaster relief program.

Oedekoven also said that while some of the livestock drowned in swollen creeks and dams or were simply buried in snow, many died from hypothermia. The cold rain and biting wind, followed by a two-day blizzard was three strikes.

Hypothermia eventually stresses the cardiovascular system to the breaking point. Before that happens, however, it can cause a creature — man and beast — to become confused and disoriented. That may explain why cattle and horses left shelter and drifted for miles before collapsing, usually in stride with their hind legs stretched out behind them, still pushing onward.

~

THE AFTERMATH OF the Cattleman’s Blizzard won’t be written for a long time. The impacts, both financially and psychologically, are impossible to predict.

Most of the ranchers who suffered losses are third or fourth generation stockmen, and while they’ve never experienced a deadly blizzard like 2013, they have perservered through decade-long droughts, depressed prices, diseases, floods and grass fires.”Quit” is a four-letter word they don’t know.

ìWe don’t know any better than to ranch,” said Tammy Basel, over coffee at her kitchen table six weeks after the blizzard.”I say that in the most sincere and joking way. Most of us would hardly know what to do with ourselves if we had a 40-hour, $40,000 a year job in town.”

A number of ranchers lost two-thirds of their cows, and for some that was the bulk of their net equity because many lease land from the government, from relatives or from strangers who’ve invested in cowboy country, sometimes for the hunting rights.

Everybody feels badly for the youngest ranchers who were just beginning to build a cow herd in an era of record-high prices for cows. But most ranchers can also point to a neighbor nearing retirement who doesn’t have much land and probably lacks the time or energy to start over.

ìThe effects will be felt 10 years from now and we will lose families,” said Cammack, the state legislator.”The biggest hope is with all the folks in Washington that represent us.” In the blizzard of 1996-97, when losses were far less, cattle and sheep producers received payments that covered about 65 percent of their losses.

ìThere’s only so much a bank can do with today’s regulations,” he said.”From a state perspective, there are some things we need to consider, maybe some loan guarantees or interest buydowns. If we can only help six or 10 families that’s still something.” Six or 10 families in Meade County covers a lot of territory.

The most immediate aid sprang from a Rancher’s Relief Fund organized by farm groups and the Black Hills Community Foundation. Donations neared $1 million by Thanksgiving week, and even though losses are probably 20 or 30 times that amount the generosity of strangers buoyed the spirits of the cattlemen. (The Rancher’s Relief Fund closed on May 31, 2014, having accumulated $5.4 million in donations).

Daily life was also returning to some sense of normalcy. Union Center’s basketball gymnasium reverberated in late afternoons with ball dribbling. Livestock auction barns at Faith and Philip were selling the spring calves that survived the storm, usually for more than $2 a pound — a thousand dollars a head.

The churches were open again on Sundays, and for weddings and funerals. When life turns abnormal, the normalcies are safe refuges.

Larry Reinhold, who had Bible School training before he returned to the family ranch, is a regular speaker at churches and religious gatherings. He once conducted a burial at the Piedmont Cemetery for an old neighbor who had a limestone quarry. Quoting Laura Ingalls Wilder, he reflected that the prairie has already claimed our blood so it might as well take our bones.

Reinhold recalled that particular eulogy as he talked about the October storm. Wilder was an East River farmer’s daughter, but she must have also endured some losses to so aptly describe the sentiments of the survivors of the Cattleman’s Blizzard.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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USD’s Anarchist Professor

By Dana C. Jennings

The football game was tight that October night a hundred years ago, emotions high. The University of South Dakota was on the rival’s grid, her fans outnumbered by partisans of the home team. Agitated youths from Mitchell went too far when they tore the USD colors from the hands of a cheering USD co-ed. The girl’s friends struggled to reclaim the banner, but in the skirmish that ensued, outnumbered USD students were being soundly trounced.

Professor Alexander Pell to the rescue. The usually mellow professor of math leapt into the fray, decking attackers one by one. When the brouhaha was done, according to a story in the 1902 student newspaper, the Volante, Pell emerged with bloodied face and torn shirt, but with highest esteem from his students.

Pell had earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1897, and that fall, the 40-year-old and his wife, Emma, arrived in Vermillion. He had been hired to teach math at the fledgling university on the prairie at the north edge of town.

Pell’s Vermillion friends knew that he was born in Russia, that he had fled the czarist rule of his homeland, first to Canada and then to the United States. They knew in a general way that Pell had opposed the czar. But they knew few details about his life before he arrived in America. Pell talked little about his past.

Pell quickly gravitated to the center of social life in Vermillion, playing in chess tournaments, ice skating, entertaining the football team in his home, leading pep rallies as well as academic debates, taking his turn directing chapel exercises.

Alexander and Emma Pell even took needy students into their home.

In those early days, USD counted 410 students. Pell realized there might never be enough students to fill his math classes, so he shifted to applied sciences and promoted the idea of a department of engineering, a goal he would reach in 1903. Pell was regarded as”a model teacher, an able administrator, and a kind, generous, outgoing friend to students and faculty colleagues,” wrote Von Hardesty and John D. Unruh, Jr. in a 1972 article in South Dakota History. In 1904, the year Emma died, students dedicated the Coyote yearbook to the Pells.

Pell’s popularity and his proselytizing grew the new engineering department so rapidly that within two years, the governor was complaining that there was”too much mechanical engineering [taught] at Vermillion.” By 1907 the engineering department was firmly established, with Pell as its dean. Pell’s friend, the legendary Dean Lewis Akeley, would later recall that Pell had once proclaimed that girls couldn’t make it as mathematicians, and if one did,”someone would marry her and spoil it all.” Nevertheless, in 1907, when he was twice her age, Pell married his prize former student, Anna Johnson from Akron, Iowa, whom he had tutored and promoted for graduate study.

It came as a surprise the next year when Pell resigned his full professorship — and the $1,650 salary that went with it. He and Anna moved to Chicago, where Alexander taught math and theoretical mechanics at Armour Institute of Technology, and where Anna earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, the second USD graduate to earn a terminal degree.

In 1911 Pell suffered a stroke, which two years later forced him to give up teaching. Anna was appointed assistant professor of math at Mount Holyoke, and the Pells moved to Massachusetts. Later they moved to Pennsylvania, where Anna taught at Bryn Mawr. There, in 1921, Pell died, and with him, Sergei Degaev.

Perhaps if Alexander Pell’s students at USD had known of their professor’s former life as Sergei Degaev, they might have better understood his rampage on the football field. If they had known that a”wanted” poster issued by the czar’s imperial police two decades earlier had offered 10,000 rubles for his capture, they would have been impressed. If they had known he had betrayed his comrades and shot a secret police officer in cold blood, they might have feared him.

But that was not Alexander Pell. That was Sergei Degaev. That was a different continent, a different time, far from the insulated life of Vermillion, where adoring students called him”Papa Pell.”

Sergei Degaev was born in 1857 into a Russian family fermenting with revolutionary fever. The lad grew up dreaming of derring-do to free his country from tyranny, a place where merely criticizing the czar could send one to prison for years of hard labor. At the university he studied mathematics, engineering and languages, but was attracted by anarchist politics. Nevertheless, upon graduation he was commissioned a sublieutenant in the Russian army, retiring three years later as a captain.

At some point, Degaev joined a radical group known as the Peoples’ Will, whose goal was to assassinate Czar Alexander II and establish a revolutionary government. Among the projects in which Degaev engaged was tunneling from a cheese factory under a road traveled by the czar in hopes of blowing him up when he passed. That plot failed, but in 1881 another succeeded, and the czar was dead. To the dismay of his enemies, Alexander II was replaced by his son, the even more repressive Alexander III.

In 1882 young Degaev was caught with an illegal printing press and sent to prison. In prison he came into contact with Col. George Sudeikin, inspector of the Russian secret police. It is unclear how the deal evolved, or exactly what it entailed, but perhaps Sudeikin convinced the prisoner that the hope of changing Russia depended upon cooperation between reformist elements of the secret police and the revolutionaries. Apparently an agreement was reached in which Degaev’s escape from prison would be arranged, so he could continue attacks on Sudeikin’s corrupt rivals. In return, Degaev identified comrades who might be drawn into the proposed collaboration.

When the friends he named were arrested, Degaev realized he had been had. He confessed his part to the leader of Peoples’ Will, and was ordered to atone for his sin by executing Sudeikin. Now living under the pseudonym Pavel A. Jablonskii, Degaev used the confidence he had built with his police conspirator to lure him to his apartment. He shot Sudeikin in the back. Two accomplices finished him off with crowbars.

But Dagaev was still distrusted by former comrades, who would soon expel him from Peoples’ Will as a police collaborator. Meanwhile, he was hunted by the police for the assassination, a 10,000-ruble price on his head. Dagaev’s wife, Emma, had fled to Paris, and in 1884 he managed to escape Russia and join her. From there they sailed to Canada, where he faded into obscurity, working as a stevedore and in a printing shop.

In 1886 the Degaevs turned up in St. Louis, he under his third name, Alexander Pell. He got a job as superintendent of a chemical plant, became a naturalized citizen in 1891, and began studying math. In 1895 he entered graduate study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, receiving his doctorate with honors in 1897. That fall the Pells arrived in Vermillion, where his latest life began.

Though Alexander Pell risked discovery by returning occasionally to the East Coast and even to Europe, he did take steps to cover his trail. The year after Pell left Vermillion, he and his brother arranged to have widely published the obituary of Sergei Degaev, purported to have died in New Zealand. Nevertheless, a former fellow anarchist living in New York discovered his old comrade’s new identity in 1915. Apparently respecting Degaev’s good works in later life, he decided not to expose him as a traitor, leaving him to live in peace. In the words of Von Hardesty and Unruh, Sergei Degaev,”informer, agent provocateur, killer” had become Alexander Pell,”outstanding scholar, beloved teacher, warm friend and counselor to students, loving husband.” And defender of cheerleaders, extraordinaire!

Editor’s Note: The author, Dana Jennings, was a longtime South Dakota journalist who passed away in 2009. This story is revised from the May/June 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Pitching To Bill Prunty

Editor’s Note: The South Dakota State Amateur Baseball tournament begins Wednesday at Cadwell Park in Mitchell. Perhaps because of baseball’s long history, no other sport seems to have such rich stories and legends. One of the most famous involves Bill Prunty and the home run he hit in the dark to give Claremont the state championship in 1938. But that’s not the only tale about the South Dakota baseball legend. This story is revised from an article former ballplayer Jim Wittenhagen wrote for the July/August 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

By Jim Wittenhagen

Behind every uniform or bat in the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden, there’s a story. Behind the ball Bill Prunty smacked into the darkening sky over Aberdeen one summer night in 1938, there is a legend.

The state championship game between Aberdeen and Claremont was in extra innings, the score tied 4-4. The field had no lights, and umpire Tommy Collins declared that if nobody scored, the game would be replayed the next day. The count was three balls and two strikes on the Claremont slugger. With the crack of Prunty’s bat, everybody knew the game was over, and Claremont had won. The ball wasn’t found until morning light.

Bill Prunty was known to take less orthodox routes to victory. I grew up in Carthage, where Bill later lived and started summer baseball. I was 11 or 12 and the batboy when Carthage played Ramona to see who would go to the state tournament in Watertown. When I handed Bill the bat, he told me,”If he throws a pitch inside, I’m going to get hit.” The third pitch was inside, and Bill turned sideways and the ball hit his elbow. The hit batsman won the game and we were off to the state tournament.

We played six games at state. I got $2 per game for meals, but Bill paid for them. Then Harvey Grapes hit a home run and was awarded five gallons of ice cream from the old Langenfeld Dairy. With ice cream and all that loot, I was the happiest kid in the state.

A few years later, in the 1950s, I was on a pretty good Legion team, and Bill arranged for us to play his team that had won the state tournament. I was pitching, and Bill was at bat. Of course I wanted to strike him out in the worst way, and I was throwing as hard as I could. I lost control and hurled one right at his head. It appeared to hit his bat, but he collapsed.

I ran to the batter’s box, scared to death I’d hurt him. He looked up at me with his baseball grin and said,”If my wife wasn’t in the stands I would have laid there and kicked my legs a couple of times.”

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Jesse James Was Here. We Think.


Carvel Cooley stopped in our magazine office today. He’s a great old fellow from Bon Homme County, a gentleman farmer historian.
He brought a “new” picture of Jesse James.

The James brothers have long been linked with southeast Dakota Territory and northeast Nebraska but there’s been little proof and some James historians doubt that the two had much of a connection to this part of the West.

Their most famous sighting is of course at Garretson, north of Sioux Falls, where Jesse supposedly jumped Devil’s Gulch on a stolen horse in September of 1876 as he and his brother Frank were fleeing from the Northfield, Minn., bank job. As the story goes, Frank was on the west side of the gulch and Jesse on the east. As the posse closed in on Jesse, he reportedly spurred the old nag and persuaded her to leap an 18-foot chasm.

Family stories in our part of the old territory have kept alive many other sightings. There’s hardly a 19th century barn standing that Jesse didn’t sleep in; hardly a 19th century farmhouse, for that matter, where he didn’t dine. All the stories tell of a kindly young man who caused no harm and sometimes even extended a courtesy or maybe left a horse.

Mr. Cooley says there are records showing that Jesse might have fathered a child at Santee, Neb., south of Yankton, in 1870. The child was supposedly baptized Jesse James Chase in March of 1870. He says Jesse was present at Devil’s Nest, an outlaws’ hideway about 30 miles west of Yankton on the Nebraska side of the river, in 1869, 1871 and 1876.

Mr. Cooley lives on the Bottom Road west of Springfield, across the river from Devil’s Nest. He brought us this undated picture of the James brothers, hanging out with a couple of young men from Nebraska. It is further proof that the James boys were making acquaintances in our part of the country. If you have more evidence, let us know. We’ve started a file.

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Grace Balloch’s Books

By Paul Higbee

As a high school student I used to stop by Spearfish’s Grace Balloch Memorial Library some days after class. I’d read a literature assignment, or work on a history paper, and sometimes check out a book for a report. It always ran through my mind: this is a quaint and appropriate name for a library. Grace Balloch. What kind of woman would earn the honor of a namesake library? I imagined a bespectacled lady, white hair in a bun, her clothes smelling a bit musty like vintage volumes, and whose whole world revolved around those classic books.

Which should tell you that I didn’t have any great capacity for original thinking at age 16 or 17, believed in certain stereotypes, and wasn’t driven to research the truth behind local history.

But it’s never too late to reform. Forty years later, after spending time with Grace’s handwritten letters, photos, and mementos, I’ve discovered a remarkable woman who lived a life of adventure, always certain of her own principles and high standards. She went to war at age 40. Late in life she presented Spearfish an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Grace Balloch wore lots of professional hats, but had someone asked who she was in her heart, there’s little doubt she would have answered”teacher.” There are still a handful of Spearfish people who recall her as a local college English professor and registrar long ago. In Grace’s thinking education meant more than presenting information or guiding students toward it. It also meant encouraging young people to believe themselves worthy and then helping them find necessary resources — including financial ones.

Darleen Young describes assistance her husband, Don Young, got from Grace when as a college student he was hospitalized for eight weeks with typhoid,”leaving him flat broke with a horrendous bill.” The late Evelyn Heinbaugh, one of Grace’s students and longtime publisher of Spearfish’s weekly newspaper, always admired her teacher’s knowledge, patience, sincerity and love of life.”Mrs. Balloch had courage that was self-sacrificing,” Evelyn wrote.

Born Grace Herr Franz in Pennsylvania in 1878, the future teacher graduated from Millersville State Normal School in that state. Much like the college where Grace would teach in South Dakota, Millersville’s original mission was preparing educators and it later evolved into a more diversified state university. Shortly after graduation she was running her own private school just outside Washington, D.C., in Montgomery County, Maryland. There she met Archibald Balloch, geologist and cattle buyer, and Grace’s life changed dramatically. The couple married in 1902 and decided they should relocate out West where the cattle industry flourished — St. Louis and later Chicago.

Grace worked as a librarian at the University of Chicago and taught at Bloom Township High School in Chicago Heights, where she won a reputation among students as a powerful mentor. She took special interest in pupils needing encouragement in hard times, as was the case with 16-year-old Walter Hoeppner in 1916. His mother died during surgery that year. He later recalled,”I am convinced her death was due to incompetence of the surgeon. … This was one factor that persuaded me to study medicine.” Walter had no money for higher education, but Grace helped him figure out ways to win scholarships and work his way through school at the University of Chicago and its affiliate, Rush Medical College. It’s almost certain the Ballochs paid some of his fees, as well. Walter went on to enjoy a long medical career in the Chicago area and would always consider Grace his foster mother.

As Walter wondered whether a career in medicine might be within his reach, Americans wondered whether Walter’s generation would fight in the World War then raging in Europe and other regions. In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson announced the United States would, indeed, send troops abroad. In France they would face some of the harshest conditions in wartime history, encountering poison gases fashioned into weaponry, and fighting from trenches where disease killed just as ruthlessly as German bullets.

Grace told her husband she was sailing to France to support American boys in the trenches. She knew that the YMCA needed volunteers to staff canteens and”huts” near the front lines. These were places of shelter and refreshment, yet YMCA documents make clear that it saw its mission in France as much more than respite. Soldiers needed contact with people of strong character who could help them make sense of a world where they regularly watched friends die, and where it was easy to stop believing in God and the better instincts of humanity. In late summer, 1918, Grace boarded a transport ship and finally saw the French coastline after a voyage through remarkably stormy weather. Archibald, meanwhile, was off to Virginia, where he supervised loading military equipment aboard ships.

Grace later recalled her time in the war zone.”It was easy to keep the boys’ morale up during the fighting. They knew what they wanted, what they were fighting for, and that the sooner it was over they could return home. But after the war the let-down was terrific.” The Armistice ending combat was signed Nov. 11, 1918, but soldiers soon learned there was plenty of mop-up work for them in Europe.

Grace’s happiest day in France came in 1919 when she reunited with her foster son, Walter, a soldier serving as a medic. She came to love France and its people and even opened a bank account there, certain she and Archibald would return to visit.

Did Grace and other YMCA volunteers make a difference in France? Back home, some Americans scoffed at the program. But today, in Spearfish, yellowed letters that Grace kept the rest of her life attest that for some soldiers her presence was perhaps life changing.

“I sure am proud to have two friends such as you and Miss LeRoy, and being with you is when I feel my best,” wrote soldier Tom Johnson from a post at a French stone quarry, three days before Christmas, 1918.”I assure you I will try and return your many good traits.”

Grace spent that Christmas at a military hospital, writing letters from wounded soldiers to loved ones in the States. Reminding soldiers to write home, it seems, was something she repeated like a mantra.

She kept a copy of this poem by an anonymous soldier who, among other things, appreciated those reminders to write:

When he wants to write a letter

(And you know that he had better)

To his mother, or his father, or the girl,

Or he’s feeling sort of lonely

And the thing he craves is only

An oasis in the racket and the whirl

Or he yearns for conversation

Or the glad exhilaration

Of a dish of ice-cream or piece of custard pie,

He will hurry helter-skelter

To the YMCA shelter

Hereinafter to be spoken as the”Y.”

By spring Grace had completed her YMCA work and applied to work a few months more in France, helping noted historian Ray Stannard Baker document the war. A close friend of Woodrow Wilson, Baker had been the President’s eyes and ears in wartime France and his press secretary when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Grace was selected as part of Baker’s team, and there’s no doubt that their extensive work contributed to Baker winning the Pulitzer Prize for an eight-volume biography of President Wilson.

Finally it was time for Grace to return to America, and the soldiers she trained to write letters continued writing her for years. But their letters found Grace not in Chicago, but the Black Hills. Photos dated 1920 show Grace and Archibald with horses on a ranch near Custer. At the same time Archibald was helping build the first roads through Custer State Park. In 1923 Grace taught summer English classes at Spearfish Normal School (today’s Black Hills State University) and was offered a full time position that fall. Spearfish would be the Ballochs’ home for the rest of their lives.

They never made that trip to France. Archibald died in 1934. Five years after that another world war engulfed Europe. In 1940 Grace learned of Paris falling to the Nazis. They even seized the French bank where she had deposited $150 during World War I in hopes of returning. She told a reporter that most French citizens valued freedom and their own form of government and would”gladly die for their cause. It is horrible that a few ambitious traitors and blood-thirsty dictators can bring so much misery and destruction to the backbone of the French nation.”

Grace was in no condition to participate overseas in the new war. She learned she was terminally ill at age 63, and she set her sights on solving a local problem. Spearfish, her adopted hometown, had no public library and Grace decided to nudge the community towards developing one. Not that Spearfish was anti-book. It claimed a history of literary clubs, book exchange groups, and a short-lived Works Progress Administration library service in the 1930s. But as a college community Spearfish could sometimes sit back and let its state-supported school provide certain services, rather than funding those services itself. Black Hills State was happy to let Spearfish citizens use its library, especially after they helped re-stock it following a 1925 fire. Sometimes the college even loaned books to a Main Street store for checkout.

In Grace’s mind that was a far cry from a public library, and she said she would donate her personal collection of 1,500 volumes. Grace wrote in her will:”To the City of Spearfish, to be used as a nucleus for a city library, I give and bequeath all my books, and I request that a committee be appointed by the Mayor of the City of Spearfish to take charge of this bequest.” The will further left the Balloch home on Main Street to Grace’s sister, Anna, and after Anna’s death the property would go to the city for constructing a library building.

Grace died in November 1944, happy to know that France had been liberated from the Nazis. Certainly she understood that her gift to Spearfish would be somewhat difficult for city leaders, who had no space for her books and no budget for operations. Initially the city council declined the donation. But as was true for Grace everywhere, she had touched Spearfish lives profoundly and left behind loyal friends. In 1945 voters overwhelmingly demanded that city funds be directed toward a library to be called Grace Balloch Memorial.

It’s hard to imagine a more modest library than the first version to bear Grace’s name. It was a 10-foot by 30-foot room in Tom and Margaret Cutter’s Spearfish Hotel. In 1962 the books were carted up the block to rooms in the Sullivan Insurance building. There was no room for expansion or programming, but library patrons knew better days were coming. The city had acquired Grace’s home site after her sister’s death in 1959, and readers who kept a library book a few days too long at least had the satisfaction of knowing all fines went into a construction fund.

A sparkling new library opened in June 1971. Presiding at the building dedication was Mayor Don Young, the man Grace helped back to his feet as he recovered from typhoid 35 years earlier. Certainly those who attended the dedication believed the building would serve many generations. But Spearfish’s population boomed the next two decades and the library’s collection kept pace with that growth, outstripping the space. In 1996 the library moved a fourth time into the ground floor of Spearfish’s new municipal services building, a beautifully designed structure that is certainly beyond anything even the well-traveled Grace Balloch could have imagined.

Amber Wilde, library director since 2008, notes that Walter Hoeppner’s family still makes an annual contribution to the library fund. She is impressed by the wide range of Spearfish area residents making use of the library regularly. There are story times for children, programming for adults, and of course computer access to information centers around the globe. There are more than 71,000 books, audiobooks, tapes, and other items catalogued.

Readers can still find some of Grace’s own 1,500 volumes on the shelves, identifiable by her personal bookplate. It depicts a child, looking at a bookshelf, as if awaiting someone’s help in selecting something to read.

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

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The Woman Behind the Mountain

Editor’s Note: All of South Dakota was saddened to hear of the death of Ruth Ziolkowski, who passed away May 21, 2014, in Rapid City at age 87. She first arrived in South Dakota in 1948 to help sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski begin his monumental carving of Crazy Horse. The two were married in 1950. After Korczak’s death in 1982, Ruth steadily guided work on the mountain. She will be missed, but her legacy will live at the mountain forever. This story originally appeared in our May/June 1995 issue.

By Paul Higbee

Ruth Ziolkowski has emerged from the shadows of her late husband, Korczak, to become one of South Dakota’s best-known and busiest women. She supervises the world’s largest sculpture, 563 feet high and 641 feet long. Yet, she presides over the project and a large family with a gentleness that belies her toughness.

I drove to Custer recently to meet Ruth and learn about her work. Although it was a raw spring day, I first went to Thunderhead Mountain to see the carving. There were more mountain goats than carvers on the rocks. Crewmembers were warming themselves in an equipment building and passing around a new Weekly Reader that described their work.

Articles like that have become commonplace. Korczak’s sculptural design became well known to South Dakotans, and many Americans, long before any features were discernible on the granite outcrop. Crazy Horse sits astride a great horse, and he points to the southeast where his people’s dead lie. The design is increasingly recognizable worldwide as a mighty statement about the strength, pride and historical tribulations of American Indians.

Journalists from everywhere document the crew’s progress (the day before my visit, a French TV team wrapped up a shoot). For years it was standard practice to photograph the mountain with a model of the finished sculpture in the foreground. But not anymore. The mountain carving has begun speaking for itself.

The crew went back to its tasks, one of which was preparing to blast a pie-shaped section of rock from Crazy Horse’s left jaw. A few feet from there, from a point on the rock that will be cut away to shape the outstretched arm, the face’s appearance is startling. No longer is it a generic mask, but a Lakota face with cheekbones, strong nose, and furrowed brow. The head is cocked slightly to the left; Ziolkowski noted that people usually tilt their heads when they point.

Just this spring it was announced the 87-foot face will be completed by June 3, 1998. That will be the 50th anniversary of the date when Ziolkowski set the first blast on the mountain, in front of an audience that included five Battle of the Little Bighorn survivors. The completion will put the project nearly two years ahead of its goal of finishing the face by the turn of the century, attributable largely to recent mild winters. Work this past winter progressed, too, on Crazy Horse’s chest, the right side of his head, and on the horse’s mane.

I caught up with Ruth Ziolkowski a couple hours later in her home below the mountain. Between fixing lunch and taking phone calls, she recalled her husband’s first years here.

“He knew right away how big the carving would be in physical terms, but the job in human terms he didn’ t know until he had worked on the mountain for awhile,” she said. “Can you imagine starting to work on that mountain by yourself? Building steps up there, carrying up all the equipment on your back? Most anybody would have quit, but he didn’t.”

Ruth described herself as the project’s “chairman of the board, but I do the dishes, too.”

Self-effacing humor and a gentle manner mark Ruth’s interaction with the public and her workers, long-time acquaintances say. But make no mistake, they quickly add — she is in charge.

“When Korczak died in 1982, Ruth was an unknown quantity to the public,” said Robb DeWall, the project’s communications director. “Some people wondered what would happen to the sculpture, though people who knew Ruth were completely confident she’d continue her husband’s work. But the public didn’t know her then, and we didn’t know the skills of the children.”

Seven of Ruth and Korczak’s 10 grown children are part of the Crazy Horse project. On this day three — Mark, Anne, and Monique — stopped in for lunch, along with the 10-year-old granddaughter, Heidi. Around the table, with the potatoes and corned beef, was passed a Weekly Reader, and someone mentioned that the mountain came up on Carmen Sandiego, the TV geography show, the day before. Then the table talk drifted to a discussion of the type of crane needed for completing the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, under construction next to the house.

Everyone has his or her own area of responsibility. Mark oversees forest management on the 1,200 acre Crazy Horse site and builds roads. Anne is director of the acclaimed Indian Museum of North America here, and is in charge of the gift shops that feature Native American products. Monique, who is winning recognition as a sculptor in her own right, is the Crazy Horse pointer, meaning she takes precise measurements from points on her father’s model and calculates how much rock must be removed from corresponding points on the mountain. Other siblings direct services for 1.3 million visitors annually, work on the mountain, and perform daily behind-the-scenes duties.

“I’m lucky,” Ruth told me. “My children are working with me. Every one of them went off and did something else for awhile, but seven came back here. We’ve all grown in our jobs.”

Korczak was nearly 40 when he began Crazy Horse, and early on he drew up plans for continuing the work after his lifetime.

“Leave it to Korczak to look to the future,” said Ruth. “He would have been a great chess player, always planning a couple moves ahead.”

But when you’re sculpting a mountain, even detailed plans don’t mean you simply check off completed tasks and move on to the next. “There’s a lot to learn as you go, and that’s the challenge, the fun,” Ruth said. “For everything you finish, about three more jobs come along.”

There are always decisions to make about how much revenue should go into the sculpture, and how much should support visitor services. The project is also committed to a scholarship program that’s the forerunner to a university and medical center Korczak envisioned here. Since 1978, 800 Native American students have benefitted.

For the past few years Crazy Horse has worked with an annual budget of a bit more than $1 million, mostly raised by admissions to the grounds and concessions. The Grass Roots Club, with members who support Crazy Horse with $25 dues each year, contributed $133,000 in 1994.

Even occasional revenue windfalls mean hard choices, though. Additional money might allow for more mountain carvers. But more workers mean more equipment, and that equipment will need maintenance in the future; where that maintenance money will come from has to be considered now.

By far the most difficult decision Ruth has made was when she determined, in 1987, to make Crazy Horse’s head the focus of work, rather than the horse’s head. It was the right call, gaining the project greater credibility as the facial features emerged. Fewer and fewer comments are heard along the lines of one that CBS newsman Charles Kuralt heard in Rapid City several years ago. A rental car clerk told Kuralt that Korczak Ziolkowski was perpetrating a scam, living well off admissions, and blasting a little rock now and then for effect (Kuralt didn’t buy it, and ended up staying several days with the Ziolkowskis that trip and reporting on the carving’s development several times over the years).

Confront people who said Crazy Horse was a scam a few years ago, and they’ll say that thinking was understandable if you compared Mount Rushmore’s progress to Crazy Horse’s. Rushmore, even with chronic funding problems and crew layoffs, was brought to its present state in 14 years. The Crazy Horse folks, after four decades, could claim more than eight million tons had been blasted away, but could point to nothing resembling a chief on a horse. Crazy Horse supporters, in the early years, were quick to respond that work on Thunderhead Mountain was a privately funded, one-man show, while Rushmore had taken federal funding which supported over 300 carvers during its creation. And then there’s the size. The four Rushmore heads combined could fit into the area planned for Crazy Horse’s head.

“Korczak never liked those comparisons, because that’s not what this carving is about, and it’s not what Mount Rushmore is about,” Ruth said. She added Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum was among three personal heroes Korczak claimed, along with Michelangelo and da Vinci.

Her husband, Ruth said, knew it would have been easier to sculpt a mountain away from the object of comparison (Rushmore is 17 miles up the highway) but that was never a possibility because the Black Hills were Crazy Horse’s native land.

In 1939 Korczak worked part of a season as a Rushmore carver. Also that year, his marble Paderewski: Study of an Immortal won first prize for sculpture at the New York World’s Fair. That publicity, combined with the fact that Korczak knew something of mountain carving because of Rushmore, led Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear to approach him about Crazy Horse.

About the same time a teenage girl showed up at Korczak’s West Hartford, Connecticut home hoping to get an autograph from movie star Richard Bennett, who was visiting. The girl was Ruth (then Ruth Ross) and she would volunteer to help Korczak as he sculpted a Noah Webster statue in Connecticut a couple years later. As a college student she would come to South Dakota with a group to assist with the very first work at Crazy Horse in 1947.

“Back in those first years here, he never said if the sculpture is completed,” Ruth recalled. “It was when the sculpture is completed. So people around him, and visitors, talked that way, too. That was the power of his personality.”

Ruth and Korczak were married in 1950. In a way, Ruth also found herself married to the mountain and surrounding Hills. She receives many invitations, but has no desire to leave home even for brief trips. And the Black Hills are home; she hasn’t been back to her native Connecticut since 1962.

“I like being surrounded by evergreens year-round,” she said. “Besides, like Korczak always said, wait and eventually everyone you’d ever want to meet will come here.”

It proved a prophetic statement. Artists, politicians, reservation school kids, and vacationers from around the globe all make the trek to Crazy Horse. Ruth doesn’t get up on the mountain often. “I told Korczak I’d keep Crazy Horse together as an organization, but I can’t carve a mountain,” she said. “So when I go up, it’s just to see. I’m not about to tell anyone where to drill, or blast, or anything else.”

She has, she said, complete confidence in her children who work on Thunderhead Mountain and in the crew. And her thoughts when she visits?

“It’s absolutely amazing to see, but I’m like Korczak,” she said. “There’s never been a time I didn’t think it would happen.î

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The Judge

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: Sigurd Anderson’s rise from a young Norwegian immigrant who couldn’t speak English to governor of South Dakota is inspirational. We interviewed Anderson at home in Webster in 1988, two years before he passed away.

Whenever the Anderson family went to Canton for supplies, young Sig had two favorite haunts: the corner drug store, where he read everything but prescription labels, and the Lincoln County courthouse, where he sat enchanted by verbal battles between country lawyers.

That love of the English language might seem surprising, since he was born in Norway in 1904 and came to South Dakota at the age of 3 with his parents. He couldn’t speak a word of English when he started country school. Even though there were many other Norwegians in the area, it seemed that he and brother George were singled out for teasing because they dressed differently. And even though they quickly learned English, the words came out with a distinctive Scandinavian brogue.

“One song I listened to a lot,” he laughs today, was, “Oh, the Norwegians and the Dutch, They Don’t Amount to Much.”

Little did the other kids know that their quiet, immigrant classmate would become South Dakota’s 19th governor.

Despite some teasing, and an occasional walk home across the cornfield to avoid confrontations, the Anderson boys adjusted. Their father, Karl, loved life in America and took his children to local political debates, where Sig received more exposure to fine oratory. He still remembers a Non-Partisan League debate in Canton where Gov. Peter Norbeck and Tom Ayres heated up the stage.

Eventually, his dress and speech became Americanized, and by the time he graduated from Canton Lutheran Normal School he was awarded a scholarship in debate from State College in Brookings. Scarlet fever cut his first college try short. After a stint as a hired hand on a farm, followed by a year as a country school teacher at Bancroft, he enrolled at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion where he became a good scholar, top debater and student council member.

He graduated with honors in 1931 and got a teaching job at Rapid City. But when school funds were embezzled by a local official, jeopardizing teacher salaries, he moved across the state to Webster and began a lifelong affair with Day County.

Sig returned to USD in 1935 to get a law degree. When he graduated, his goal was to return to Webster and establish a law practice. But he kept getting interrupted. First it was World War II, where he served as a legal officer in the Navy. Then, upon his return to Webster, he was persuaded to run for Attorney General. That followed two terms as governor, 10 years as a Federal Trade Commissioner, and eight years as a circuit court judge. Between almost every career change, he returned to Webster to try to get that law practice going.

Considering his love for Webster, it was not surprising that when he finally retired in 1975, he chose to stay right there, in the modest, two story white-frame house that he’s called home for many years.

He still keeps a second story office downtown — a place to stack his books and occasionally hang his hat. But mostly, the office has been a great excuse to put on his trademark suit and tie and walk down Main Street, where everyone greets him as either “governor” or “judge” or just “Sig.” This is his town. You get the feeling that they might even like to rename it for their graying favorite son. Andersonville? Sigtown?

But it won’t happen. Sig would be the first to object. He’d note that there would be too great an expense involved in redoing the road signs, maps and directories, not to mention the poor business people who would need to toss out all their Webster stationary and envelopes.

The county commissioners did name a room in the courthouse after him. Located adjacent to the county museum, it will be a showplace for some of the former governor’s photographs and memorabilia.

Until recently, he has enjoyed excellent health in retirement. However, at 84 years of age, he had a setback last winter and we visited him at the Day County Hospital, where we found him chipper and anxious to get back downtown. You can’t practice law from a hospital bed.

About all you can do in a hospital is tell stories, and that’s what he did.

He relishes the early days in politics. Soon after graduating from law school, he ran for State’s Attorney in Day County. Although the county is traditionally Republican, it had temporarily swayed to the Democratic side of the ballot due to Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Sam Buhler, a legendary political leader in northeastern South Dakota, was GOP county chairman. He rallied the Republicans by holding over 40 events in country schoolhouses throughout the county.

His Democratic opponent was a friend and former roommate, Lyman Melby. Both were nervously anticipating the early returns on election night. Finally, word came that the Oak Gulch precinct totals had arrived at the courthouse. Melby and Anderson and other candidates ran to the auditor’s office, where it was announced that for State’s Attorney, the results were: Anderson, 29; Melby, 29.

Oak Gulch didn’t launch his political career, but the other precincts gave him a victory. He was re-elected two years later, and before serving the second term he was appointed Assistant Attorney General in Pierre. Then, after four years of service as a legal officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to Webster. Friends urged him to run for Attorney General. War veterans make good candidates, they explained, and he even had experience in the office.

Again postponing plans to get that Webster law practice established, he entered his name as a candidate.

Sig’s four years in the attorney general’s office were highlighted by a “Stamp Out Crime” program that was popular everywhere except, perhaps, in Deadwood, where main street entrepreneurs occasionally forgot that the Black Hills were not located in Nevada.

“We burned up a lot of slot machines in our day,” he says. “And we prosecuted a lot of people.”

He remembers a day when law officers carted an especially ornate and fine-crafted roulette wheel out of Deadwood tavern and lined it up with other gambling devices to be burned. A lady proprietor, appreciative of the craftsmanship, pleaded with Anderson to spare the game of chance. “That lady stood there and cried as they burned up the machine,” he says.

If he were in office today, he says, he would be strongly opposed to the new lottery program. “I really think we don’t need gambling as a source of revenue in South Dakota.”

As Attorney General, it was Anderson’s responsibility to witness South Dakota’s only state execution when convicted murderer George Sitts was led to an electric chair in the Sioux Falls penitentiary on April 8, 1947. “It was a rainy night, dripping outside, just the way the book said it should be,” recalls Anderson. “I walked in and there was Sitts. My, what a muscular fellow. He had been a stunt man in a circus. I said, ‘George, how are you.’ He said, ‘Not so bad, under the circumstances.’ We shook hands.”

Anderson said officers then put a hood over Sitts’s head and led him into the execution room, where he was strapped to the chair. The warden asked the prisoner if he wished to make a statement before they proceeded. “Warden,” said Sitts, “this is the first time the police have helped me out of jail.”

Then, recalls Anderson, there was a “Swish! Swash! Smell!!! And it was over.” Sitts was pronounced dead.

Sig calls it “the big one.” Of all his elections, nothing compares with the 1950 battle for the governorship. Again, both parties wanted qualified war veterans. The GOP contest became a five-way race, with Sig and war hero Joe Foss eventually rising to the top.

Foss was a World War II flying ace, a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor who downed 26 enemy planes. He campaigned by plane around the state, a tactic that not only speeded his travels but also was a constant reminder of his achievements.

“Every time a plane flew over, a little kid would say, ‘Hey, that’s Joe Foss up there,'” laughs Anderson. “No one had any battleships for Anderson.”

Sig campaigned hard. He and his wife, Vivian, left Pierre each day after work in their Chevrolet coupe, grabbing only a few Hershey bars for nourishment, and traveled from town to town. People liked the gentlemanly, soft-spoken Attorney General. And he was a natural campaigner. He had a command of the language, knew the issues and hardly ever forgot a name.

Most people felt that none of the five candidates would get the required 35 percent majority, and that a nominee would be selected at the state Republican convention. But Anderson narrowly crossed that threshold, and became the nominee.

His Democratic opponent in the fall was Joe Robbie, a young attorney who went on to become owner of the Miami Dolphins. As a Democrat, Robbie was the immediate underdog. Voter registrations then favored the GOP by a three to one margin. Republican gatherings drew much larger crowds, and Robbie was desperate to get his message out. He started an innovative attack of challenging Sig to a debate at almost every stop. He even brought along a chair for his “absent” foe. He’d tell his audience, “That chair is for Sigurd Anderson. He refuses to debate me.”

Anderson, now a skilled orator, was anxious to debate Robbie. But any such idea was vetoed by friends and supporters. “Are you cray? Ignore him!” they told Anderson.

The strategy worked. Using his lowkey, friendly style of campaigning, he won the election by 55,000 votes. Two years later, he was re-elected by a plurality of 203,102 votes.

The boy who couldn’t speak English when he started school was governor of South Dakota.

Though in years since it has become a cliche, Sig really did treat state government like a business. When the U.S. Air Force loaned him a plane to drop hay bales to starving cattle after a blizzard, Sig went along and helped push the bales out. Then he returned to Pierre and insisted on paying for use of the aircraft. “I believe that you pay your own way,” he said. “We tried our level best to pay off the federal government.”

Air Force personnel couldn’t understand that logic, and didn’t know how to accept the payment or where to put the money.

When you are governor of South Dakota, he said, people call you for just about any problem. After one heavy snowstorm, a Pierre area rancher called to complain that the county hadn’t yet plowed his road.

“But it’s absolutely, without question, the most challenging job you can have. It is the greatest thing next to being president of the United States,” said Sig.

His views melded well with the rest of South Dakota. “I didn’t believe in sin. I was pretty slow on drinking and gambling legislation.”

That didn’t make him a naysayer, however. He was an avid backer of building the dams on the Missouri River and worked to conciliate ranchers who would be losing land. He still remembers being at a hearing in Washington, D.C., when a prominent South Dakota rancher walked in with a stone and told the congressmen, “This is what they want to irrigate!”

He said there were also concerns about Indian burial grounds and many people were worried that the dams might break, causing even worse flooding than the river valley suffered without the project.

Of all the programs he worked on as governor, he cites the dams as the most important for South Dakota. Ranking a close second, however, is the fact that he stayed within a budget. “Spending within your means, that’s an old Scandinavian trait. You always payoff your debts.”

As governor, he retired the Rural Credit bonds owed by the state, created the Legislative Research Council, expanded the care of the mentally ill, accelerated the highway construction program, and terminated a 3 percent sales tax after it raised enough to pay World War II vets a soldiers’ bonus. Not many states were rolling back taxes in those days of growth, and the South Dakota governor made headlines in the Wall Street Journal that day.

His happiest day of being governor, however, had nothing to do with taxes or dams or roads. It was Jan. 11, 1954, when he and Vivian had a baby girl, Kristin Karen. She was only the second child born to a governor while in office.

Kristin is now editor of the Brookings Daily Register, and friends say Sig’s house is stacked with copies of that publication. “I don’t want to brag, but she is one of the best writers around,” he says with a grin.

Upon completion of his governorship, Sig returned to Webster, hoping to get that law practice established at last, with an eye on maybe running for Congress. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the Federal Trade Commission and he and his family moved to Washington, D.C., without campaigning.

Sig held the FTC post for 10 years. He enjoyed the challenge of investigating anti-trust activities and laughs at how slow the process could be. “It took us years and years to get them to strike ‘liver’ off Carter’s Little Liver Pills and make them call it what it is … and we bad 300 or 400 lawyers under us!”

The Andersons promptly headed west to Webster when his second term was up. He made two other tries at elective office. In 1962, while still at the FTC, be sought the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate after Francis Case died in office. He lost the nomination to Joe Bottum at a long convention, and Bottum ultimately lost to George McGovern.

Sig also sought the GOP nomination for governor in 1964, but lost to Nils Boe. At last, maybe he could really practice law. He was just getting started when Boe appointed him judge of the Fifth Judicial Circuit. At least that position allowed him to stay in Webster. He retired from the judgeship in 1975, and since then he has enjoyed retirement.

He has that law office near Main Street. And when his health allows, he’s downtown every day. But be hasn’t run any advertisements. Fact is, he says, “Webster always had plenty of good attorneys.”

Editor’s Note: This story is edited from the May/June 1988 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Presidential Summer

By Roger Holtzmann

THEY CALLED HIM “The Man Who Hates Everything,” and no one ever did more to deserve their reputation. H.L. Mencken, writer, social critic and professional deflator popular during the 1920s, made a living lambasting ministers, doctors, Southerners, teachers, his fellow newspaperman and just about everyone else in the country. So when he took aim at President Calvin Coolidge no one was likely very surprised at what came from his toxic typewriter. “Coolidge’s chief feat,” wrote Mencken, “was to sleep more than any other president.” Not only was he lazy, but the President’s perpetually dour expression seemed to indicate he had been “weaned on a pickle.”

People expected that from Mencken. But it was difficult to find anybody who had really good things to say about President Coolidge. “In appearance he was stupendously null,” remembered one of his neighbors, “as if he was lacking in red corpuscles.” Shy, lacking in social graces, almost totally devoid of wit — Coolidge was all of those, and less. To the people at large he was Silent Cal, a stern, no nonsense Vermont Yankee who spoke as if he expected to live 100 years, but feared he had mistakenly been given only enough words to last half that long. Among the nation’s opinion makers he was considered an incredible dullard, if not a fool. He was popular with the business community, but that was chiefly for his stolid determination not to do anything that might rock the economy; he was a chief executive, said one congressman “who raised inertia almost to the level of a way of life.” But it fell to Dorothy Parker’s acid tongue to deliver the unkindest cut of all. In 1933, when she was informed that the ex-president was dead, her response was, “How do they know?”

Obvious though his shortcomings might be, he was still the President of the United States. Which meant newspapers took note of whatever he was doing and wherever he was doing it. And that gave some people from South Dakota an idea. Looking for a way to publicize the Black Hills nationally, Sen. Peter Norbeck and a number of others hit upon the idea of inviting President Coolidge for a visit. And by a fortuitous combination of circumstances, Silent Cal accepted.

In the days before air conditioning, summer reminded residents of Washington, D.C., that their city had been built on a swamp. It was usually hot, muggy and uncomfortable. Everyone who could left town for as much of the season as possible. Coolidge, whose bronchitis was aggravated by these conditions, suffered more than most. In 1925 he had escaped to the Massachusetts shore; the following year found him in New York’s Adirondack Mountains; for the summer of 1927 he resolved to vacation somewhere “west of the Allegheny’s and east of the Rockies.”

That was South Dakota’s signal to launch an all-out offensive aimed at convincing Coolidge to choose the Black Hills. The state Legislature passed a resolution formally inviting the president on Jan. 7, 1927, and in the words of Rex Alan Smith, ”they spared no adjectives when drafting it, and indulged in no false modesty.” There was mention of lofty peaks, magnificent forests, sparkling streams and an “ideal” climate, of course, but also, “splendid fishing, golf, polo and tennis.” To tie it all up neatly the Legislature sought to assure Coolidge that the stories of gunslingers and ladies of the evening were all in the Black Hills’ past. “The population in and about the mountains,” they declared, “is intelligent and moral.”

When Sen. Norbeck delivered the invitation, Coolidge was suitably impressed, resulting in one of the few instances of wit recorded during his administration. “Senator,” he observed dryly, “I can’t tell whether this is a chapter from Revelations or Mohammed’s idea of the seventh heaven.” True to his nature, though, the president said nothing further that day.

His frustrating silence continued for two months. In the spring, one of South Dakota’s two congressmen, William Williamson, met with the president to present the state’s case yet again.

“How are the flies and mosquitoes out there?” Coolidge asked.

“In the mountains proper, few or none,” replied Williamson.

“That’s good,” said Coolidge. “Last place I went they nearly pestered me to death.”

It seems the Legislature should have dispensed with all that chatter about scenery in their invitation and concentrated on the insects. Another advantage that they neglected to mention was the relative lack of people in the Hills. Coolidge had been annoyed on other trips by crowds who gathered to gawk at him. He was pleased that Rapid City, population 8,000 and the only town of any size in the area, was a considerable train and automobile ride from where he was going to be staying.

Before the final decision was made, Coolidge dispatched Colonel Edward Starling, head of the White House Secret Service detail, to inspect the facilities. Starling left the state after two days without a clue as to what he thought of the place, and once again the White House was silent.

For the next month there were almost daily news stories speculating on whether or not the president was actually coming. There wasn’t a word from Washington until May 27, when Colonel Starling and several assistants arrived unannounced at the Rapid City train station. Later that day every major newspaper in the state received a telegram from Sen. Norbeck’s office; in their next editions, using type generally reserved for a declaration of war or the seventh game of the World Series, the headlines blared, “President Coolidge To Arrive June 16!”

Preparations for the president’s visit had started long before anyone knew if he was even coming for sure. Now that it was confirmed, things went into high gear. Coolidge’s home while in South Dakota was to be the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park. The president and his wife would stay in the Governor’s Suite, which was a bedroom and private sitting room, with a bathroom down the hall. A new coat of paint was applied inside and out, and a sawmill on the grounds was moved two miles over the hill so as not to spoil the presidential view. Extra lines were strung to handle the increased telephone traffic, the lodge was primped and swept one last time, and everyone hoped that nothing had been forgotten. Colonel Starling pronounced himself satisfied.

Coolidge traveled with his wife Grace, staff members, Secret Service agents, three dozen or so newspaper reporters, the first family’s two collies, Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, and Mrs. Coolidge’s pet raccoon, Rebecca, who lived in a wicker basket. As the train passed into the state at Elkton, the party was joined by Sen. Norbeck and as many other local notables as could wrangle an invitation. An elderly gentleman, not part of the official delegation, climbed aboard in Lake Preston to pay his respects and the train pulled out of the station before anyone noticed.

After yet another formal reception in Pierre with Gov. Bulow and friends, the Coolidges arrived at Rapid City late in the afternoon. The local National Guard band played “Hail to the Chief,” probably the first and only time it ever rendered that particular tune, while artillery on the Box Elder firing range thundered a 21-gun salute. There was a dance at the Alfalfa Palace that evening, but Cal and Grace had a quiet supper of elk steak at the lodge and then retired.

Early the next morning Coolidge prepared to set out for his summer office in Rapid City. Some South Dakotans who hoped to establish the Black Hills as a fishing haven intercepted him, and they had made their plans well. Though the president was reluctant at first they convinced him to try his luck in Squaw Creek. Wearing a suit and straw boater, no angler in history ever looked the part less, or had a better chance to catch fish. His hosts did everything but throw the trout in his basket for him.

About a mile above and below the lodge park officials had installed fishnets across the creek. Into this pen they had dumped more than 2,000 trout from the state fish hatchery in Spearfish. These were not small fry, either. They were “tired old breeding trout … (that) the hatchery had been planning to gel rid of anyway,” wrote Rex Alan Smith. “Years of lazy living on ground liver and horsemeat had left them fat and flabby. But they were big, fearless and eminently catchable.”

Gov. Bulow, who was in on the plan from the very beginning, would pay for his sins. He and his wife were invited to the lodge for supper one evening and the main course was trout, which, the president proudly explained, he had caught in the creek. “(From) the first bite I took,” Bulow recalled, “I could taste the liver and horsemeat on which that trout had lived for years ….” President Coolidge did not seem to mind, though, and the fishing was a good part of why his planned three-week vacation in South Dakota ended up lasting three months.

There was one other person in the Hills that summer who was scheming to use the president’s presence for his own purposes, and that was Gutzon Borglum. Rushmore’s sculptor was well aware of how the publicity surrounding a presidential visit could help his project; it might even push Coolidge to endorse the idea of appropriating federal funds for the carving, which Borglum hoped would free him from his perpetual need to raise money.

Borglum decided to hold a dedication ceremony on Aug. 10. He had already dedicated the mountain in 1925, but Borglum never let logic get in the way of a good time. It was typical of him that he scheduled the event before asking the guest of honor to attend. It probably did not occur to him that the President of the United States might have something to do other than attend a Borglum event. He was not even deterred by the fact that Coolidge had repeatedly let it be known he did not wish to make any formal public appearances while on vacation.

Borglum’s opening shot was dramatic, romantic, slightly foolish, dangerous and couldnít have been more ill-timed. He hired Clyde Ice, the famous barnstorming pilot from Spearfish, to fly him over the lodge at low altitude; at the appropriate moment Borglum pitched a large flower wreath from the open cockpit onto the lawn. “Greetings from Mount Rushmore to Mount Coolidge!” announced the card that accompanied this sky borne bouquet.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the ideal time. President Coolidge had summoned General Leonard Wood, governor-general of the Philippines, to South Dakota for consultations. At the very moment Borglum came roaring overhead the general and his commander-in- chief were seated on the verandah discussing the possibility that an insurrection could flare up in the islands. History has not recorded Coolidge’s reaction, though it is unlikely the strait-laced president appreciated being bombed with flowers during an important meeting.

Coolidge eventually consented to attend the dedication ceremony. The last mile up to Rushmore at the time was little more than a muddy trail, and on the day of the ceremony one of the autos became impossibly stuck, blocking the way. President Coolidge was forced to use alternate transportation, and so, wearing a business suit, a 10-gallon cowboy hat and fringed, white leather gloves, he arrived for the ceremony on horseback. The assembled citizens loved it, as did their president.

Silent Cal and Grace left town a month later, with rather less ceremony than when they arrived. As it turned out, the single biggest news of the summer turned out to be something Coolidge decided not to do. Around 30 newspaper reporters comprised the White House press corps, and by Aug. 2 they were frankly bored with Rapid City. When Coolidge invited them all into his office, their curiosity was aroused. As soon as they were all present Coolidge handed each of them a slip of paper, on which was typed a single line. “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty-eight.” For a moment the group was shocked into silence. No one in the entire country had expected such an announcement. Finally someone asked the President of the United States if he had anything else to add.

“No,” he replied. And having said that, he left.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1996 issue of† South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Music Man

Composer and Aberdeen native John Cacavas died Tuesday, Jan. 28 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., at age 83. During his long career in Hollywood, Cacavas scored more than 400 one-hour TV shows (including Kojak and Hawaii Five-O), 50 television movies and 15 feature films, but he got his start in the Hub City. He is survived by his wife Bonnie, also an Aberdeen native, and three daughters.

A memorial service was held in California, but local donations for the John Cacavas Memorial may be made in his honor to the Aberdeen Public School Foundation, 1224 Third St., Aberdeen, SD 57401.

In 2003, Cacavas wrote a short memoir for South Dakota Magazine. Here is his story in his own words.

MUSIC. THAT’S WHAT I DO. Compose, orchestrate, conduct and produce it. All kinds. It all began in Aberdeen in the early’40s. My hometown was musically rich with junior and high school bands, orchestras and choirs, plus the various musical organizations from Northern State College. There was a civic orchestra, a municipal band, a Shriner’s Band and about seven dance orchestras, not to mention church choirs, concerts from visiting organizations and artists and private music lessons galore.

The first phase of my musical career was a disaster. Like a lot of 11-year-olds, I took piano lessons on Saturday mornings. I was so ungifted on the keyboard that I flunked my first year and had to go to summer piano school. Regular summer school, OK, but summer piano school? It was very embarrassing, not only to me, but also to my folks. They thought maybe they were raising a real dummy. After all, there was some talent in my family. My mom played piano by ear (black keys only), and my dad was a great dancer, performing Greek dances and jitterbug routines.

When they told me I didn’t have to take lessons any more, I was relieved. Now I could play baseball with Bob Keeler’s South Side team.

But one Sunday afternoon when I was 13, my life changed forever. I went to the Capital Theater and saw a movie called”Stage Door Canteen.” Many of the nation’s big-name bands were in it — Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Guy Lombardo and others. I immediately decided that I wanted to be a saxophone player. My dad, citing my failure as a pianist, was not excited about participating in another fleeting interest. But eventually, with great reluctance, he bought me a used alto sax at Gallet’s jewelry store on south Main.

I taught myself to play the sax, and a couple of months later, as a seventh-grader at Simmons, I joined the junior high band. I had found my dream.

A year later I started my own six-piece band, and played my first professional engagement. Where? At the Moccasin recreation center for my own 14th birthday party. My mom hired me. I think my folks paid us $5 each. We knew only six songs, but it was a start.

When I was a sophomore at Central High, I had a falling out with the school’s band director. He did not approve of my being a professional, so I left the high school band. Even though I had started and was leading a terrific 16-member school dance band,”The Golden Blues,” it was not a hard decision.

We had 11 players in my new band, and we were not too bad. Life on the road appealed to me more than playing and freezing at high school football games. Besides, now I was getting paid to play. My parents backed me all the way. They bought me musical arrangements, a public address system, music stands and spotlights. Even a car and trailer.

I gradually began making musical arrangements for my band. My first efforts were not so hot, but gradually I became more proficient at the art.

While still in junior high, I had worked at our family restaurant, The Virginian, on south Main. I worked as a waiter — and later as a chef — from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekends and seven days a week during vacations. For that I got $11 a week.

One day I got a call from a local bandleader, Bill Klitz. He had an 11-piece band with a four-man sax section, and one of his sax players was ill. Could I take his place? You bet! The job was at Tacoma Park, a few miles northeast of Aberdeen. They picked me up, I played the job and I was a big hit. They even let me play a few jazz solos!

Afterwards the musicians lined up for their pay. For playing three hours and having the best time of my life, I got $14! I got home about 2 a.m. and woke my parents. I told them about my evening with the band and how much I’d been paid. My dad looked at me for a moment, and said,”I think it’s time for you to leave the restaurant business.” And I did.

My band played all the local venues, the Roof Garden (no longer there), private parties at the Alonzo Ward Hotel, the Country Club and Wylie Park, even in towns up to 200 miles away.

After high school I attended Northern State College for two years. My band prospered, and we grew in demand. I then transferred to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., where I began writing songs for campus shows, and my life-long passion for serious music flowered.

From there I got drafted and became a music arranger for the United States Army Band in Washington, D.C. It was a great time, and I learned an awful lot. There were a few South Dakota guys in the band, and we had mini-South Dakota reunions with some fellows in a nearby Air Force Band.

After my discharge I moved to New York. I had succeeded in getting some of my works published, so I felt I was on my way. I pounded pavements, wrote jingles and songs and became a freelancer for many publishers. My first song to connect,”Over and Over,” was recorded by Guy Lombardo. He played it on the”Ed Sullivan Show.”

By this time I realized there were thousands of sax players, but not many arrangers and composers. I decided that a wonderful phase of my life was over. I sold my sax one month to pay the rent.

In New York I continued to get my school music published, did a lot of arranging and even became the second conductor at CBS, a great step upwards.

During this time I was courting an Aberdeen girl, Bonnie Becker, whose parents owned the Harbor Cafe in Aberdeen. After much persuasion, cajoling and threats, she married me. As a psychiatric social worker, she had the regular job and I was the freelancer who also did the cooking. It was a great arrangement, and one of the smartest moves of my life. After 44 years together and three wonderful kids, that ain’t bad!

Bonnie went on to become a lyric writer. After all, why not keep it in the family? After our daughters were grown, they too wrote many lyrics for publication. Bonnie also began writing cookbooks, and for the last few years has been a crisis response counselor.

After visiting another Aberdeen lad, Charles Buttz and his wife Terri, in Darien, Conn., one weekend, we decided to move there. It was a small New England town and looked like a fine place to bring up kids. I became director of publications and later acting manager of Chappell & Co., Inc., then and probably now the world’s largest music publishing house. That position and a short tenure at Bourn Music as an arranger were the only full-time jobs I ever had. Not counting my career in The Virginian, of course.

We went to London to record my first album, which turned into a love affair with that city for Bonnie and me. I still do a lot of recording in London, so we have an apartment in the city and manage to spend about three months there each year.

In 1973, Hollywood called, and we’ve been here ever since. During those three decades, I scored hundreds of movies, TV shows and albums.

I don’t think any of this good fortune would have happened without my upbringing in South Dakota. I learned real values and had the opportunity to pursue my musical dream. It was a happy and golden time.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2003 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Stranded in Quinn

By John M. Thorson


It was right before the blizzard of 1949 when I began my trip back to school after Christmas break. At the time I was a graduate student in Logan, Utah visiting my parents in Crooks for the holidays. I started my trip back to Logan in a convertible stuffed with seven people. The weather was cloudy and wintry, but there was no doubt we were facing a major winter storm. Eventually, the ground blizzard combined with the darkness slowed us to a crawl.

After about an hour we drove to a nearby ranch house hoping to warm up. The rancher’s wife told us that we were only about a mile from town so we started out again. I rode with my head out the window telling the driver where to turn because the car’s heater couldn’t keep up with the ice forming on the windshield.

Later a large cattle truck passed, giving us hope that we could go on, but it turned into the tiny town of Quinn and we followed it in.

On the edge of town there was a small six-unit motel. Usually closed in the winter, the owner opened it up to accommodate stranded travelers. The motel was already full so we were sent to the cafe where there were more refugees from the storm like us.

Many local families took in those who were stranded. Jackson Good, one of the seven in the convertible, and I, being single, were sent to the school dormitory, where we could stay for $2 a night. The first night we stayed in a warm room right off the kitchen. The remaining nights we were in the boys’ room, a cavernous place with several beds. The caretakers had a fire going for us in the evening, but no extra wood was to be seen so we pushed one bed as close to the stove as we dared and piled on a lot of quilts. The fire was always out by morning so we would get up and get to the cafe as quickly as possible.

The next three mornings the wind was relentless and the temperature was well below zero. It’s a good thing we never heard of wind chill or we would have never ventured outside. Drifts six to eight feet tall were common. One truck, stuck crossways in the street, was almost covered with snow. The cafÈ, which stayed open throughout the storm, became a center of activity for locals and the stranded alike. Coffee was always available and there were always a few people around.

The local people went out of their way to make life tolerable for their guests. The cafe opened charge accounts for us and the bank cashed checks with few questions asked. As I had left most of my money in Logan, Jackson cashed a check and loaned me $20, on which I managed to get by.

Like the cafe, the saloon next door didn’t close. A poker game started Sunday night and was still going six days later. If you bellied up to the bar you could get “soaked” without taking a drink. Snow was blowing into the attic, melting and dripping through a seam directly above the bar. Each day the ceiling hung a little lower from the moisture damage.

One night a larger group of people gathered at the cafe and people showed off their talents by lamp light. A local man played tunes on the saw. One Colorado man strummed his guitar and a West Virginian showed us how to clog dance. Community singing drowned out the storm and lifted our spirits a little.

Our outlook improved on Thursday when the wind shifted from the south. Frazzled nerves began to heal. Some highly motivated people set out on foot along the railroad tracks for Wall, six miles to the west. Late in the day they returned with news that we were a lot better off than those stranded in Wall. Some travelers had spent most of their time on a bus.

One of the residents asked for help finding his father-in-law, who had left town late Sunday night heading for his ranch several miles north. After days spent indoors, some of us thought this would be a great way to get out and do something. We loaded his Mercury with shovels and headed north.

We shoveled snow, pushed the car through and drove full-speed into drifts. Hours later we were four miles north of town and the road was still drifted across as high as the fences. Getting back to town was easier, but it took us until after dark. We all felt good about helping with the search, but we did not find the man’s father-in-law. I never did hear if he was ever located.

Friday was a bad day. Nerves which had healed frazzled again because the snowplows had still failed to arrive. One carload of people tried to leave. We watched them attempt to drive to the highway but they got stuck three feet into the first drift they encountered.

Saturday the plow from the east met up with the plow from the west at a big drift just outside of town. We were free to leave. After profusely thanking the good people of Quinn and settling our debts, we joined the caravan going west. Slowly we made our way to Rapid City. The plows had not been able to open the road through some of the road cuts so they plowed trails through the fields. When we detoured through the fields we realized our six-day inconvenience was nothing compared to the devastating losses suffered by ranchers. Some of the thousands of cattle killed by the storm littered the fields, many on their backs with their feet sticking straight up.

We who were Utah-bound stayed in Rapid City because the wind closed the roads through the Hills again. The storm that brought all the snow to South Dakota made the entire trip to Logan difficult, but we eventually arrived.

A couple years later I visited Quinn and stopped at the cafe. A list of people stranded in Quinn was on the wall. The owner said several people had either stopped in or written.

Since Interstate 90 was built, Quinn is just a name on an exit sign to most people, but not to those of us who were stranded there in 1949. In March of 1994, my wife and I left the highway to visit Quinn. As to be expected, many changes were evident. The motel, cafe, saloon and dormitory were gone. The water tower was all I recognized.

Memories of an unforgettable six days are all that remain.

Editor’s Note: John M. Thorson was living in Colorado Springs, Colorado when he shared this wintry memory in our Jan/Feb 1995 issue. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 1-800-456-5117.