Category: outdoors

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Boundary Walker

By Jerry Wilson

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

Emmett Bennett walked the streets of Rapid City five days a week for 25 years. He walked with purpose, delivering the mail. On weekends, for relaxation — and to stay in shape for Monday — Emmett and his wife Mary Ellen took a hike.

Bennett had volunteered for the army in 1940, and fought in Africa. After the war he took a job with the postal service, where he resisted all attempts to move him to inside jobs. He retired in 1970, but even before he delivered his last piece of mail, he had found a new reason to walk.

One day in 1963, Bennett reached the city limits, but kept on walking. Then he found a purpose for his exploration of the Black Hills — searching for the boundaries of 19th-century mining claims. Emmett and Mary Ellen’s children were in scouts, and Emmett took the scouts out to teach them to use a compass. While surveying an old claim in the western Hills, he stumbled across U.S. Locating Monument No. 79, and a new passion was born.

Having discovered that surveyors had marked the boundaries of the state with cottonwood, iron or granite posts at every mile a century earlier, Bennett began a trek around western South Dakota. He resolved to rediscover and map the lost and forgotten markers that encircle the entire state, except the southeast corner where the Big Sioux and Missouri Rivers provided a natural boundary.

“I have no idea what motivated him,” said his lifetime mate. “He did like to hike, and he liked to have a purpose for hiking. It was a challenge to find as many of the original surveying markers as he could, and to get from one to the next. For him to take a walk he had to have some place he wanted to go.”

Bennett began the western boundary at the southwest corner of the state, where South Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming meet, the spot where Rollin J. Reeves, guided by the stars, began his survey in 1877. Reeves marked the border to the Montana line, roughly following the 104th meridian. Every mile he planted a cottonwood post, inscribed with a mile number and the name of the state on either side. The rest of the western border, with Montana, was surveyed seven years later by Daniel G. Major.

In 1904 the line was resurveyed, the Wyoming border by Edward F. Stahle and the Montana section by Frank S. Peck. This time the boundary was marked more permanently, with 6×6-inch, 6-foot granite posts where it was possible to deliver them, or with 3-inch by 4-foot iron posts with an inscribed brass cap. Many of the granite posts were quarried in Sioux Falls, hauled as far as possible by train, and then by mule wagon to the appointed place.

Though the original wooden markers were presumably rotted away by Emmett Bennett’s time, he found most of the granite and steel replacements intact, though sometimes askew. When he found posts leaning, he occasionally took the time to set them right. Bennett’s mapping work was so much appreciated by South Dakota’s Society of Professional Land Surveyors that in 1999 they honored him for his contributions to the profession.

On some searches Mary Ellen walked with him; other times she dropped him off, then picked him up at the next crossroad a few miles up. Occasionally they lost each other, but as long as there was another boundary marker to find, Emmett kept walking. Sometimes other motorists would stop to see if Mary Ellen had a flat or needed help. “Oh, no, my husband’s just wandering out there,” she’d say. “I drop him off here and wait for him up yonder.”

Using whatever maps were available and a compass to guide his feet, Bennett walked several miles of sometimes rugged, pathless terrain a day — once a 10-mile stretch. He gauged the distance between markers with his watch, 20 minutes per mile in open country. Mary helped with research and typed up his observations. “He kept good notes, which now are scattered hither and yon,” she said.

After he found and described as many of the western border markers as he could, Bennett turned his attention to the northern boundary. He read Gordon Iseminger’s Quartzite Border, and in February 1990, Emmett and Mary Ellen went to the northwest corner of the state and started walking east along the North Dakota line toward the Missouri River. The first day’s hike took them as far as the Little Missouri River in Harding County. Many hikes later, Emmett, now 80 years old, had walked every step of the northern boundary to the big Missouri — except a forbidding five-mile buffalo pasture.

In November Emmett and Mary Ellen traveled to the southwest corner, and again Bennett headed east, this time along the Nebraska line. Except for a 30-mile stretch east of Pine Ridge, he walked the southern border to the initial surveying point on the Keya Paha River, southwest of Gregory.

In all these hundreds of miles of cross-country walking, Bennett took careful notes of the location, condition and terrain of every marker he found. His records indicate the date, the mile post number, how much of the marker was showing above the ground, and whether the post was upright, leaning so many degrees in a particular direction, or down. His field notes sometimes included an index card with a drawing of the brass cap atop the post, a map with the legal description, and notes such as “high up on the south slope of the hill” — anything that might help the next searcher find the spot.

Emmett Bennett rests by the fire tower at the top of Harney Peak on his 80th birthday.

Thirty years into his boundary walks, having traversed the borders of half the state, Bennett began in 1995 to walk the Base Line — the imaginary east-west stripe across the middle of South Dakota from Jones County, just south of his boyhood home of Ft. Pierre, through the Black Hills to the Initial Point where the Base Line meets the Black Hills Meridian on the Wyoming border. This was the original surveyor’s base line, established in 1877 by James A. Williamson, commissioner of the General Land Office, and Henry Esperson, surveyor general of Dakota Territory in Yankton. It was the starting point for surveying western South Dakota and the Black Hills.

By 1998 Bennett had completed that journey, except for a short stretch between Murdo and Kadoka. But he still had not relocated the monument which marks the intersection of the base line and the 100th meridian on the Wyoming border near the Pennington-Custer County line. On August 17 he and Mary Ellen walked west from Redbank Campground, just off Forest Service Road 117 in southwest Pennington County, seeking the point where the West River surveys began. Late in the afternoon she stopped to rest, while Emmett searched on ahead.

Darkness fell, and Emmett did not return. After a frantic night, Mary Ellen called the sheriff. Searchers finally found Emmett the second night, wandering the 6,600-foot Limestone Plateau just across the Wyoming line. disoriented and dehydrated. Apparently he had gotten turned around, and perhaps even blacked out, Mary Ellen said.

Annoyed at getting lost so near his prize, Bennett spent the next couple of weeks studying his maps, trying to figure out where he’d made a wrong turn. He made two trips to Newcastle, Wyo., looking for other possible trails. Then he set out again on the last day of September, determined to find the elusive marker.

Again, Emmett Bennett did not return. This time Mary Ellen was even more alarmed, especially when the night turned cold and rain began to fall. In the morning the Pennington County sheriff dispatched a search and rescue team. Word of the missing man spread, and for the next two days as many as 50 people combed the rugged state-line area. On the third day, a Colorado team with search dogs found Emmett Bennett’s body at the bottom of a brushy ravine in Parmlee Canyon, a quarter mile across the Wyoming line, just west of the mile post he sought.

Why Emmett Bennett ‘s passion to walk? Why the need to be out of doors, whatever the weather? Maybe his birthday has something to do with it. After all, Bennett was born on Earth Day. Or rather, Earth Day was born on Emmett Bennett’s birthday, April 22, 1970. Millions of Americans celebrated Bennett’s 60th birthday as he did, by walking — marching in demonstrations around the nation to protest pollution of Planet Earth.

Bennett celebrated the 20th Earth Day and his own 80th birthday by climbing Harney Peak, the highest point between the Big Horns and the Alps. But for those who knew him, the feat of climbing the state’s highest mountain at age 80 came as no surprise.

The truth is, that when Emmett Bennett walked, it was only because he was pacing himself. He was reining in his natural tendency to run. For not only endurance, but speed was in Emmett Bennett’s blood. From 1926-1930, he earned 12 athletic letters at Rapid City High School — in football, basketball and track. In 1929 he placed sixth in the nation in the 440-yard race in Chicago. In 1938 and 1939 he was the city tennis champion. In the early 30s he built his own canoe and paddled most of the streams of western South Dakota.

In 1953, though Emmett had only recently begun flying, he and Mary Ellen entered a cross-country lightcraft air race from Philadelphia to California. They didn’t tell their friends about the race, because they weren’t sure they could finish. They won first place in their division.

Retired from the post office in 1970, Bennett had more time to play tennis and to walk. A decade later, now in his 70s, he began to supplement these activities with Volksmarching. In three years the Bennetts walked 2,500 miles in 17 states. At 74 he rode his bicycle across Nebraska from Sidney to Papillion, a meandering 512 miles in seven days. Twice he rode across Minnesota.

Then he decided it was time to renew his track career. At age 74 Bennett competed in a triathlon in Northfield, Minn., a 67-kilometer race consisting of 7 kilometers by canoe, 50 by bicycle, and 10 on foot. He completed the 42-mile race in under five hours, winning not only his own age division of people over 70, but beating all the 60-year-olds and even all those over 50.

Bennett (left) set new records in five of the eight Senior Olympics events he entered.

A decade later, now 85 years old, Bennett was still running. At the 1995 Senior Olympics in St. Louis, he competed in eight events, including the long jump. In five events he set new records.

So this was the Emmett Bennett who, on that late September day in 1998, set out on his last walk. Perhaps he became disoriented again. Maybe he fell, or blacked out. Or possibly he simply lay down to rest, and didn’t get up. The first chill of winter came that night, and by morning he was dead.

Walking was as natural to Emmett Bennett as breathing air. But why the attraction to boundaries for a man whose very life said movement, independence, speed? For a quarter century Bennett walked the line. To earn his bread, he traversed the same prescribed path, day after day. But for 88 years he also pushed the line, tore away at the envelope, lunged toward freedom. He was a man who defied boundaries, pushed himself to the last ounce of endurance, broke through the finish line.

Perhaps there was within him some need for the line, even if artificial or imagined, something to keep him in check, to give life order. Something epitomized by a boundary marked at regular intervals with granite posts.

Otherwise, he might not have returned. He might have simply kept on walking. Somehow, it’s comforting to know that the night Emmett Bennett died, he was across the line, beyond the boundary marker he sought.

But this is idle speculation, the rumination of one who sits at a desk wondering, one who might rather be there under the open sky with Emmett Bennett, a man who for 88 years did what he loved doing — putting one foot in front of the other, his eye on some goal up ahead, a mail box, a finish line, a six-foot granite post, the summit of the next horizon.

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The Hidewood

Deuel County’s Hidden Woods

By Bernie Hunhoff

Keith Diekman and his lab Trixie explore the oak forest where Dakota Indians hid after the Minnesota uprising.

The Hidewood Valley of Deuel County derived its name from Dakota Indians who called it the Hidden Woods.

In the summer of 1862, some of the Indians involved in bloody conflicts with white settlers in Minnesota fled across the border and hid for a time in the valley.

Some of the same slow-growing oaks that sheltered the Dakota still stand, along with their offspring, and it would still be possible to lose oneself in the thick growth that populates some of the 30-mile stretch of hills.

Deuel County lies on the east slope of the Coteau des Prairies. The highest point in the region is on a farm field east of Castlewood that overlooks the Minnesota River valley. Indians marked the site with rocks and used it to spot water. Today it is marked with a tin government sign.

Hidden among the occasional woods and grassy hills is other modern evidence of century-old stories that speak to the difficulties of life here for both man and beast.

The forest once grew so thick “you needed headlights to drive through in the daytime.” — Hidewood old-timer

Many of the stories are buried by time and grass, but some old-timers know the Hidewood and its secrets. Floyd and Gladys Haug farmed in the Hidewood country during their younger years.

Floyd grew up on a farm in the valley. When we visited him in 1999, he told us wolves still howled at night when he was a child. Not far from the old Haug family farm, buffalo rings can still be found in a pasture. The circular indentations were formed perhaps 150 years ago or more when wolves threatened buffalo herds.

“The cows would form a circle and put their calves in the center,” Floyd said. “Then as the wolves came closer, the cows would circle around and around, protecting their calves.”

The rings always turn green before the rest of the prairie in springtime, probably because the cows left manure in their excitement, and their indented path collects moisture which speeds the grass.

Not far from the buffalo rings — but on the opposite side of Interstate 29, which cuts through the Hidewood — two nearly forgotten graves lie high on a pasture hill.

Floyd discovered the graves when he rented the land in the 1950s. “I was fixing the fence on May 10 and I saw two perfect rectangles of blue flag flowers.”

Floyd Haug pulls grass away from the blue flag flowers that still mark the graves of a homesteader’s wife and daughter. The flowers had bloomed several weeks before our arrival.

He suspected that the flowers were planted to mark a grave site and when he visited the landowner, Ed Koppman, his hunch was confirmed.

From research done by the Haugs and the late Clear Lake farmer-historian Henry Wells, it seems the land was homesteaded by a Norwegian settler named Per Gustav Erikson and his wife, Ida Mary. Little else is known about the Eriksons.

Wells did discover some additional details from the register of deeds in Deuel County and other historical records. “It is a story that has no beginning and no end,” he told us. The Eriksons came from Norway, stopping first in Wisconsin.

Wells figured they came by train to Gary and probably used their savings to buy a horse and wagon to drive to their new home in Section Eight of Hidewood Township. They settled on a hill overlooking a valley. “It probably looked to them like a peninsula in their native Norway.”

In the early l880s they had a baby daughter. But during the harsh winter of 1885-86, a diphtheria outbreak struck the territory and both Ida Mary and the daughter died. Because the snow was so deep and the ground so frozen, their bodies were placed in two wooden boxes built by a neighbor.

The grieving young settler kept the rough-hewn coffins in a shed until spring, when he dug two graves just to the south of his house and buried them above the Hidewood Valley. He probably had no money for a permanent marker, but he planted blue flag flowers ≠– a cousin to the iris — in the overturned soil.

That same year, he sold his claim for $300 to Peter Dahl. Wells said nothing else is known for certain. “Did he go a few miles or did he follow the trail left by others to Oregon? I see him as a man with lowered head passing into the midst of time, ever searching for a new life.”

Blue flags bloom for a brief time in early May, and when Floyd Haug happened upon them 60 years after they were planted he was intrigued by the fact that they had survived the elements.

“They survived the Dirty Thirties when grass wouldn’t even grow,” he marveled.”They survived the badgers and the gophers and the cows that have grazed on those hills.”

The Hidewood forest ends abruptly at the edge of the flat prairie.

Now, almost 130 years later, the flowers still mark the simple grave site. Prairie grasses have infiltrated the flowers, but the blue flags still grow thick and in the obvious rectangular shape of a grave. They have outlasted many pioneer grave markers.

Only a few people now know where the Erikson graves can be found. But other gravesites in the Hidewood are even more forgotten. Some belong to Indians, and others to early settlers.

Floyd said the landscape didn’t change dramatically in his lifetime — and he knew this country as well as anyone. He was born here in 1918, and passed away in nearby Castlewood in 2010. As a youngster, he earned 50–75 cents a day for carrying the mail by horseback and sleigh in winter to neighboring farms.

Many farmsteads were once situated in the Hidewood Valley. It offered good grass, water and protection from the wind. Farms have been thinned out by weather and economics.

But some remain. One of the surviving farm families is the Diekmans, who came in 1946. Keith Diekman’s land includes some of the oak forest where Sioux Indians took refuge during the 1862 uprising.

A visit to the forest is all the research needed to understand why they came. It is a lush oasis on a nearly treeless prairie, rich with tall grass, shade, wildlife and water.

“In a winter storm, you can go down there and it will be as nice and pleasant as can be,” says Diekman. “It is a good place to winter cattle.”

Foliage from burr oak, a rarity on the Coteau des Prairies, but a dominant tree in the Hidewood forest.

Along with old burr oak trees, the forest is dense with native grasses, chokecherry bushes and ash. Diekman said areas of the forest once grew so thick that old-timers said, “you needed headlights to drive through in the daytime.”

That was the density desired by the Dakota Indians. According to Kenneth Garley’s book, The Sioux Uprising of 1862, the blood began to flow after a trivial incident in which one Indian called another a coward because he had cautioned his friends to not steal a white family’s eggs.

One misstep led to another, and before long the Indians entered a farmyard and shot five members of two families. Eventually, the conflict spread dramatically and over 450 settlers and soldiers were killed. Thirty-eight Indians were executed for their crimes.

Little is known of the party of Indians that hid out in the valley, but their presence gave the range of hills its name and a colorful history still talked about today.

Robert Amerson, who grew up on a Hidewood valley farm in the 1930s, brought more attention to the hills recently when he published childhood memoirs called From the Hidewood. His grandfather came to Deuel County as a homesteader in 1876.

In the book, Amerson refers to the Hidewood as “an in-between country” that was too rough for quality farming and too far east for customary ranching.

He said the Hidewood farmers felt a remoteness, even from their nearest neighbors who often tilled better land and lived closer to the town and cities. But he says the families were good and honest folk.

“The Hidewood community taught me that you can trust people and expect them to help you. Out in the country, you can still assume your neighbor — or even a stranger — is a decent person, at least until proved otherwise.”

The Amersons are now gone from the valley, along with most of their neighbors. Over 9,000 people lived in Deuel County in the 1920’s but the number has been dropping ever since.

Still, improvements can be seen in the rural infrastructure. For example, a good gravel road winds its way past the Diekman farm, past abandoned barns and the gurgling Hidewood Creek that meanders through the valley. The creek eventually empties into the Big Sioux near Estelline, crossing into the southeast corner of Hamlin County.

Even though the road was constructed in 1955, it is still called The New Road by locals. The name is one more reminder of how life has a way of staying the same in the Hidewood.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 1999 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Wild and Civilized

By Bernie Hunhoff

Watching wild horses cavort on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation is like attending a soccer game without knowing the rules: the running and kicking is obvious enough but the intricacies are a mystery. However, walk among a herd of ever-moving mustangs with Karen Sussman and you soon learn that you are surrounded by a neighing civilization.

“A horse population has an education system comparable to Harvard,” says Sussman, 63, who looks more like a college professor than a guardian of a nearly lost western civilization.”Every herd has its own culture, developed from living together over eons of time if they haven’t been gathered and removed and disrupted.”

Sadly, however, disruption has been the history of wild horses in the American West. More than 60 million buffalo and two million wild horses lived here in 1850. The buffalo were nearly brought to extinction before being confined to parks and pastures; today just 23,000 wild horses and 4,000 burros still inhabit 29 million acres of public lands in 10 states west of South Dakota.

Cattle competed for grass with the horses, so some ranchers favored the cows by poisoning water holes and shooting stallions as a method of birth control. Some horses were caught and domesticated, but once the gasoline engine became popular the slaughter intensified. Pet food companies found the mustangs a cheap source of dog meat and oil companies wanted space for roads, pipelines and oil wells.

A federal law was passed in 1971 to protect the surviving herds but Sussman believes the public needs to understand the horses to preserve them. As president of the non-profit International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros — the organization credited with building support for the 1971 law — she devotes her days and nights to safeguarding not just the genetic diversity of the species but also to studying and documenting the noble mustang culture.

The daughter of a Pennsylvania coalman, Sussman grew up riding horses bareback in the woods and hill country. She became active with ISPMB in 1983 when she was married and raising a family in Arizona. Six years later she became the group’s third president. She moved ISPMB to South Dakota 12 years ago, hoping to find a home for wild horses that were being removed from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

When Karen Sussman walks through the Gila herd of Spanish horses, some eventually ease toward her for a nuzzle. Sussman names every horse on the ranch.

She kept the horses in the badlands of the Pine Ridge Reservation for two years before buying a patch of grass on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation about 90 miles northwest of Pierre. Now she has 350 horses on 680 acres of flat prairie grass with a few shade trees and waterholes. It is lush compared to the environments the horses knew in New Mexico and Arizona.

She hopes to add more land, and she wants to find homes for some horses. However, she’s not running an adoption agency; the ISPMB’s goal is to preserve the bloodlines and culture, and to research behaviors.

The horses on the Cheyenne Reservation comprise four herds — including the White Sands horses, a group from the Virginia Missile Ranch in Nevada, a wild herd that has descended from cavalry horses, and a herd descended from horses that came to America with the 16th century Spanish conquistadors. She won’t admit to favorites, but the Spanish horses (also known as the Gila herd because they came from Gila Bend, Ariz.) surely have a hold on her heart.

Sussman walks among them daily, observing behaviors as unobtrusive as a raised ear and as bold as a kicking frenzy. However, there is much less excitement and trouble when a band of wild horses has an intact social structure.”We believe that the Bureau of Land Management doesn’t understand the horses from a behavioral standpoint,” she says.”They too often destroy the band structure by separating the stallions. Then the younger studs take over and all of a sudden chaos can take over. The bachelor stallions will chase the mares, attack them and rape them. It’s the harem stallion who creates the order and respect among the band of horses, and no one challenges him until he becomes too old or too sick to perform his role.”

When a harem stallion is in control, fillies are not bred until they are four years old. The mares are respected and the bachelor stallions are well behaved.”But you can imagine what happens in a community if younger and younger stallions are allowed to take over who don’t have the education that is usually taught to them over a period of years by the harem stallions. It’s like having a school run not by professors but by sixth and seventh graders.” Fertility rates could jump from 10 to 12 percent to over 30 percent under such circumstances.

Wild horses develop a social structure, says Sussman, but “you can imagine what happens in a community of younger and younger horses are allowed to take over.” Unfortunately, herds are often separated by humans.

Sussman has better opportunities to observe wild horse behavior than almost anyone because she is with the horses daily — sometimes well past dark. And on a few occasions they’ve gone home to the ranch house with her. Last spring when a days-old colt suffered frostbite in a late snowstorm, she warmed him in the kitchen overnight.

Her respect for wild horses grows as she learns more about their culture.”The other day I watched a filly from one band in the herd,” she says.”She was in heat and the bachelors were all around her but she was just a year old so the harem stallion should have protected her, but he wasn’t paying attention so another stallion chased her down the hill to the water where a second harem stallion chased her right back over to her own harem. I was amazed to see two harem stallions tell her to go back to her own harem.”

She recently watched with a National Geographic photographer as a young bachelor stallion teased his harem stallion.”We saw him sneak in behind the harem with his head down. You could tell he was sneaking. Then he went after the harem stallion from the rear, bit him and raced off. It was interesting to see how well they can plot their actions.”

Sussman chronicles such antics in notebooks kept in the office of her small house, which sits near Highway 212 west of Lantry. A few barns and well-built corrals stretch around the yards, patrolled by several farm cats and dogs. She also keeps genetic records of every horse that arrives on the ranch with assistance from Dr. Gus Cothran, a Texas A&M equine geneticist.”We determine their DNA and their blood type to establish their historical background. It also tells us how much diversity is in the herd and the minimum number we need to maintain that genetic diversity.”

How mankind treats the wild horse reveals much about our civility.

Contrary to what one might think, wild horses suffer from less inbreeding than their domesticated cousins.”We think they have more genetic diversity than any breed of domestic horses,” Sussman says.

Caring for the horses seems like a dream for horse-lovers but it comes with a price tag for Sussman, who is constantly raising funds to pay feed bills and the other costs of running the ISPMB. The divorced mother of two adult daughters works part-time as a nurse at an Eagle Butte hospital. She invites interested people across the country to sponsor a horse for $150 or a herd for $5,000, but she’s betting the long-term success of ISPMB on tourism, and that’s why she’s in South Dakota.

“This is a state that believes in tourism and invests in it,” she says.”The state just brought a van full of tour guide operators here to see the horses and we’re hoping we will become a place where people come to see and learn about the horses. Through tourism we can educate people and they will be able to see horse herds that would not exist if they were not here in South Dakota.”

She welcomes visitors to stop for an hour or a day, and — being a horse trader — says the admission fee is negotiable. Visitors can safely walk among the wild mustangs. A curious mare will sometimes follow a stranger, easing closer and closer until she is near enough to nuzzle an outstretched hand. More often, a band of horses comes within a few yards to inspect a newcomer before racing off across the Dewey County prairie.

Sussman and the horses have been actively engaged in West River life. They participate in animal-assisted therapy programs for adults in a tribal alcoholism program. She has also provided horses and educational assistance to Sitting Bull School and Takini School.”Our goal is to have a lot of different activities that involve people and horses,” she says. Tribal elders help her with ideas.

Despite the many hours she spends with humans, Sussman isn’t likely to forget that her true mission is to protect and preserve wild horses. In fact, she sees tourism, education and horse stewardship as compatible goals.”Internationally, people love wild horses. I think it’s because horses are connected to every human soul all over the world. There are very few peoples who haven’t had horses in the development of their civilization.”

For centuries the horses served mankind. Now the shoe is on the other foot. The wild horse needs man. Sussman says she’s learning more about the horses as she works to save them, but the success or failure of her effort will also tell us a lot about ourselves.

Welcome, Wild Ones

Karen Sussman’s ISPMB conservation program at Lantry gives wild horses a second refuge in western South Dakota. Since 1988, author and naturalist Dayton Hyde has run the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary south of Hot Springs where 350 unwanted horses live on 11,000 beautiful acres of pine forest, sandstone buttes and wild canyons. It is one of the largest herds of wild horses in the world.

Both the Lantry and Hot Springs programs rely greatly on visitors for income. Call (605) 964-6866 for more information on the ISPMB at Lantry. The Black Hills sanctuary can be reached at (605) 745-5955.

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

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The Island Mesa

By Mike Randall

The Island, an isolated mesa near Harding County’s Northern Cave Hills, has drawn explorers for centuries.

The empty mesas of Harding County’s Cave Hills haunt me when I’m away. So I’m glad to be back on this autumn morning just after sunrise with a cold breeze descending from the northwest, hinting at snows to come.

I’ve brought a friend, Tim Herrmann, from the Oregon Coast. We plan to find an isolated mesa that local people call”the Island.” Girdled by 60-foot cliffs and standing uniquely alone in a larger canyon, the Island has attracted people’s attention for thousands of years and its cliffs are full of ancient rock art. Supposedly, only at a single spot hidden from view can one ascend to the Island’s top via a giant staircase of tumbled boulders.

After sunrise, my car bumps along two ruts northward from the small town of Buffalo into Custer National Forest. The ragged track gradually roughens and finally we see a small sign pointing to Davis Draw. Wary of high-centering and ripping out my oil pan, I park near a stock dam on the rolling plain half a mile from the draw’s mouth. Tim and I carry long hiking sticks because we were warned in Buffalo that prairie rattlers are especially thick this year.

We hike a rutted trace toward Davis Draw, its mouth gradually widening before us in the gap between two massive, vertical cliffs. Tim breaks our silence, asking,”What’s that?” and points to the southern cliff where a lone sentinel stands. It’s a”stone Johnnie,” or large rock cairn erected long ago by a bored hunter or herder. Far above us, corrugations of cirrocumulus pale from magenta toward white as the sun climbs above Slim Buttes to our southeast. On such a morning as this, under a mackerel sky, all good things seem possible.

I first heard about the Island several years ago while working as a volunteer with Assistant State Archaeologist Mike Fosha and others at a 6,500-year-old bison kill site west of Buffalo. Mike told me about a mesa in the Northern Cave Hills that was inhabited by spirits. He caged his words humorously, but meant them:”Some day before I die I’m going to take my sleeping bag and a bottle of tequila and spend a night on top of the Island, just to see what — or who — shows up.”

While exploring The Island, Randall and Herrmann found glyphs scratched into stone by ancient hunters and gatherers.

Many long-departed human souls have trod this canyon on hundreds of thousands of mornings like this, hunting antelope, deer and buffalo, gathering plant materials, looking for shelter, casting anxious eyes northward, concerned about the coming cold. For millennia, solitary hunters rediscovered the lonely mesa that stands as an island cathedral.

As we proceed higher into Davis Draw, its sandstone heights loom high and broad beyond us. Steep talus slopes, around or over which we must pass, hide the canyon’s farthest reaches. Ash, cottonwood and oak splashed with autumn’s oranges and yellows adorn the small coulees and hidden ravines that drain the surrounding cliffs. Across the canyon, three pronghorns graze by a dry watercourse, occasionally glancing up to monitor us.

Harding County residents gave me directions to the Island but the descriptions are vague, for it stands far back in the canyon. Many red-brown cliffs precede it, reaching out deceivingly and hinting that they stand apart from the main Cave Hills butte. But after a laborious approach that gains us a better view, we see them for what they are: hoaxers that twist away into box canyons where they connect to the main Cave Hills landform. The sandstone mesas that comprise these Cave Hills stand 300 to 500 feet above the surrounding prairie. Their tables are eroded remnants of a larger strata that covered this entire region 55 or 60 million years ago during the Paleocene epoch. These vibrant scarps dramatically overlay the sober gray and brown hues of the older Hell Creek Formation, which bristles with fossilized dinosaur bones.

We squint at a massive set of escarpments far back in the canyon, perhaps a mile or more away, distances being deceiving. What seems close at hand through the crystalline air is really much farther. Tim says,”You think those cliffs are the Island?”

We can’t tell so we cross the draw to a higher slope to gain a better vantage point. We leave behind a web of cattle trails that lace the lower slopes and thrash our way noisily uphill around car-sized boulders and clumps of prickly pear, dodging still-ripening patches of sand burrs. Our noise is purposeful for we don’t wish to surprise any cranky snakes. Tim comments that we haven’t seen a single one, and I wonder aloud,”Well, we’re just day-tripping outsiders. Maybe we’ve been kidded a bit.”

Finally we reach a point high enough that we see in the distance yellow cottonwoods and green-black pines populating a small declivity that has been eroded. This partial view of the region behind the cliffs implies we are looking at our destination, the Island. Three turkey vultures circle above it on thermals rising from the land.

They nearly stumbled upon a prairie rattler sunning itself on a warm rock.

Half an hour later we find we’re wrong. We struggle up a steep talus slope toward the cliffs and realize it will take us much longer to work our way around them to a point where we can see if they are attached to the main Cave Hills mesa, so we look for a closer spot where one of us can boost the other to the cliff top and clarify the matter. Shortly, we find a low slot. I boost Tim’s foot and he hoists himself over a 6-foot ledge to the top. He finds that the mesa is part of the main, not the Island.

Tired and a bit discouraged, we stop to reconnoiter. To the south we see another prominent set of cliffs. Though we cannot be certain, it seems those vertical walls may front a mesa that stands apart from the Cave Hills. We decide to hike across the canyon and climb the talus that for millions of years has calved from those seemingly-fragile cliffs.

Half an hour later we turn the southeast corner of the cliffs and realize we’ve found our goal, our freestanding”Island.” And there beside us rises a wide rock panel that gradually fills us with a sense of wonder. Incised in rough sandstone walls are many etchings: a bison head shield, an antelope, many overlapping petroglyphs of small animals, a deer, a warrior and spear, a warrior on horseback. And beyond these are incised a set of deeply scarred, elaborate forms that look truly ancient. How old could they be, and what do they depict? We cannot tell, for a portion of that glyph has disappeared long ago, fallen into the canyon through the work of wind and weather.

We separate and search in opposite directions for a pathway to the top. After only a few minutes of exploring I find the jumble of car-sized boulders that will allow us access to the summit. Tim rejoins me and we ascend easily.

The Island is shaped like an old galleon, with massive formations of contorted, pink sandstone rising at its bow and stern. Its eroded midsection is a mat of dried grasses, littered with several gray, fallen skeletons of wind-twisted pines. We stand in silence for a time, gazing west at the far mouth of Davis Draw through which we came over two hours earlier, and at the plains beyond, toward Montana on the horizon.

We separate and explore the high sandstone features at each end, skirting the vertical cliffs that drop away on all sides. As I rejoin Tim, he suddenly glances down, pointing,”Hey, look at him.” Planted firmly in its coil, a young prairie rattler shakes its tail at us from four feet away. Some folks understandably would kill it. But Tim and I simply stand there and watch as the snake warns us for a moment, then slowly uncoils. Holding its head high, it watches us as it retreats onto a massive flat rock near the cliff’s edge 15 feet away.

Bemused, Tim says,”How’d that guy get all the way up here?”

ìIts ancestors probably came up the same way we did, though it must not have been easy,” I reply.

Suddenly, the retreating snake, still watching us, flips awkwardly, belly up, and falls sideways into a vertical rock crevice, wedging into the darkness an unknowable distance below. It may sound foolish, but I felt a sudden sense of loss. The young snake, eager to escape, watched us rather than where it was going, making a possibly fatal mistake.

Tim shakes his head.”Somebody’s gonna wonder why he’s late for dinner.”

We glance around to make sure no other members of the same family are present, then take a seat. We pull out water bottles, trail mix, apples. A zephyr of refreshingly cool air brings the pungent scent of sage and pine pitch, and melodic hints of distant birdsong. Across the canyon on the main Cave Hills mesa’s twisted cliffs lie remnants of the same pink sandstone that stands near us. It’s so eroded and contorted by great pressures and stresses over so many eons that only an imperturbably patient God could have witnessed it, a God who loves a story in a slowly unfolding world.

After a while, Tim and I slowly gather our stuff. We look around a last time, not wanting to leave this wild cathedral. A sudden breeze of cooler air reminds me that another autumn soon will end, and this Island mesa will fall into silent stillness. Cold winds will drift snow across this empty height, hiss against these cliffs, fill the snake’s crevice. And who will be there to see it? The snow will sift into badger holes and coulees, settle on the talus slopes and fallen boulders. It will silence the rattling wheatgrass, greasewood and phlox, and smother the bleached bones of the dead.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is revised from the September/October 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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The Missouri: A Strong Brown God?

Editor’s Note — We’re mucking our way through one of the worst Missouri River floods in state history. The duration of the 2011 flooding has not been experienced before. Wide parts of the floodplain have now been inundated for seven weeks. Still, old-timers are comparing this year’s disaster to 1952, when the river experienced a “spring rise” in April that caused a frenzy of rescue efforts somewhat like we’ve experienced this year. A number of years ago, Nadine Mickelson wrote this article for South Dakota Magazine on the ’52 flood.

Pan aerial view of the 1952 flood at Pierre.

By Nadine Mickelson

“There was a crack, a resounding crash, a tumultuous roar, volume still building, at last adding a gush of water.” The Chamberlain newspaper reporter described the event beautifully.

But it was not the opening orchestration of a symphony, and it was not always music to the ears. It was the mystical spring ritual of the mighty Missouri River. Ice flew high as she sighed, stretched, and flung wide her arms.

She never freed herself from her icy winter girdle in the same manner, nor did she do it mildly. It depended on early spring runoff and the feeding from upstream tributaries. Mo’s frivolous frolics happened in 1947, 1948 and 1952. My research began in 1986 with the death of my mother, and I found pictures I had taken as a girl in 1948.

On March 29, 1947 Bismarck recorded a nighttime high water level of 21.8 feet with solid ice another 11 miles south. Garrison residents were moving back to higher ground. By Tuesday, April 1, 1947, Pierre patrolmen W.H. Walker and Fire Marshall Carl Jensen said,”Rats in Pierre had been flooded out by the rapid rise in the river. City police officers caught up on their target practice Monday afternoon with light caliber shot before rats entered any buildings or homes.”

In April 1951, fed by the Bad River that bulged with a two foot melting of snow from a late March blizzard, Mo peaked 10 feet over flood level in Pierre. Sometimes called Old Misery, her spring tantrums are recorded as far back as 1832. That was when Congress first set out to tame her.

This great river rampaged the plains long before South Dakota gained statehood.

Mo’s headwaters at Three Forks, Montana ramble over 2,000 miles to join the Mississippi near Hartford, Illinois. She’s second longest only to the Mississippi by a mere 32 miles. I’ve always wondered if the 2,000-mile figure includes her meandering U-turns and S-curves?

One of Mo’s past recorded free-runs that began changing the face of the land came in 1881. Another historical facelift caused by Big Muddy was in 1867, when she formed the meandering”S” that joined her to the Big Sioux River.

These deceptive channel jogs stirred by undercurrents and eddies could have been the beginning of land disputes between Nebraska and South Dakota. Every time Ms. Mo changed her mind, she also changed her curves.

Through the years, she altered her traditional shores, her deep channels, and left islands, sandbars, and sediment or quicksand. Malicious or mischievous? Or waiting for an unsuspecting animal or traveler? Who can say? Once while walking on her drought uncovered bottom sand, we found buffalo bones and jawbones she claimed many years ago.

I’ve used”she” haven’t I? Well, I guess I’m safe in using the feminine gender without being sexist. You could challenge me, but I’d tell you I grew up with Mo. No one has ever totally understood a woman or Mo.

Sandbagging kept water from flooding into the Pierre National Bank and other downtown businesses.

Every clever descriptive phrase from jubilant spring freedom, frivolous frolic, devious damage, vengeful ruins, or deadly devastation could describe a scorned woman or Mo in springtime. If in Mo’s youth PMS had already been identified, it could have read”MoPMS” for her”Spring Syndrome.” Farmers were thankful it came but once a year.

Magnus”Mac” Ekeren, while in the service in his early 20s, remembered water up to the grain elevator in Mission Hill. When he was 11 back in the 1940’s, he’d find carp in the ditches and throw them out into the road.

James Novak, who regularly manned the bridge lift at Yankton, remembers the water nearly reaching the Charles Gurney Hotel in Yankton in March 1947. Jim also recorded flood level at 10.13 feet at 12:30 p.m. on April 7, 1952. He spent many years watching and keeping people aware of Mo’s annual flooding.

On April 10, 1952, dozens of families from Pierre to Yankton were evacuated from their property. Pierre firefighters had an additional scare. A petroleum tank came loose from its mooring and floated toward the city. The danger included an outboard motor fire, coupled with a car fire uptown. It shook Pierre’s remaining residents. Virtually all of Pierre’s downtown businesses were surrounded by water.

On Good Friday, April 1952, Ted Blakey of Yankton was driving a tractor on Highway 50 from what used to be the Yankton city dump. He had a picture taken under the Coca Cola sign that toted the slogan”The Pause That Refreshes!” Two hours later the road was under water. On Easter Sunday, Ted and Stan Brunick went with a boat and motor down the middle of the highway to rescue their seed potatoes out of a flooded cellar.

Mo’s progress was watched every spring as she”pipped” from her icy shell from Montana to Illinois. Every farmer from either shore called warnings to neighbors down stream. From gentle thawing birth, tempting teens, right up to a malevolent maturity, every spring with a vengeance of purpose she headed on her trip to the far off sea.

Few rivers or streams ever accomplished as many rebirths as Mo. She celebrated a birth annually until dams harnessed her energy. I’d wait expectantly for that special time every year. Native South Dakotans will understand when I say I could feel it, sense it, and even smell it. The premonition defied exact dates. I learned it from my father.

“Let’s get in the car and go to Chamberlain,” dad would announce. You knew it was time to see the river. Adrenaline ran high and danger lurked. From birth, you didn’t trust the river.

Wise men had already moved their livestock to higher grazing and machinery further inland. The bottomlands were empty. It was fine by them to wait to farm until after Mo was through playing. Precaution came from common sense and experience. We respected the river. No one built too close to the river for fear of arousing her anger.

Depending on each spring and planting progress, the next trip would be to Yankton to see where she would crest next. Some years the history lesson varied with a trip to Lake Andes where friends lived.

The last major flood on the Missouri occurred in 1952. Boats became the best method of transportation.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh said this about rivers:”Rivers are perhaps the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air. Mountain ranges dwarf to anthills; seas lose their horizons. But rivers stretch out serenely ahead as far as the eye can reach. Rivers are seen in their true stature.”

I cannot cross the interstate at Chamberlain without looking to see if I can identify where American Island lies. It’s like an eternal goodbye wave to that island lying in its watery resting place. If the water ever recedes, I wonder if the island will reappear?

Old American Island is gone, but the river has given us some of our state’s greatest sport areas and tourist resorts. Though tamed by the dams, she still takes her toll of life when an unwary fisherman or boater forgets to respect her power, currents or snags.

And Mo keeps everyone in turmoil with her claim on wildlife, like the least tern and piping plover. Mo lies placid and calm as government officials, state citizens and industries rage in disputes. Court decisions seem to solve nothing, as she appears to slumber with a smile of glib conceit.

We may think we’ve tamed the river, but those mercurial waters have an indomitable spirit of their own, just watching and waiting to prove Mo’s power over man’s superficial control of a river’s true power.

The Pick-Sloan plan began the taming of the”shrewd” river by permanently flooding 500,000 acres of farmland and forest, resulting in crop losses of over $79 million per year. Dams forced Mo to give up her fretful, aimless life and become a more productive adult. From figures compiled in 1982 annually from all six dams combined, she produced in peak years, 2,098,250 kilowatts of power serving Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, where she feeds into the Mississippi south of Hartford, Illinois.

T. S. Eliot, in The Dry Salvages, who lived by the Mississippi River as a boy, wrote,”I do not know much about gods, but I think that the Mississippi River is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed, and intractable.” I think the Missouri is a god of deceit, calm, mysterious, and unpredictable. It has always filled me with awe, distrust, and icy respect.

How much of her debt has Mo paid back? Even the plight of the plover may be peanuts compared to early wildlife, mankind and history lying hidden in the havoc she wreaked in her youth. I wonder if those downstream clamoring for her services would trade places if they’d suffered through those youthful, thoughtless destructions?

I found no positive proof in my research, but after references to destruction of buildings, roads, trails and even forts, that she may have meddled in the eventual move of the territorial capital upstream to Pierre in hopes of tamer, safer springs. Has Mo written history of her own?

Most years she lies calm and peaceful, and we bask in her pleasures, recreational activities, tourism, camping and other benefits. But I caution you. My father said,”Always give water your greatest respect. The muddier it is, and the faster it’s flowing, the farther I want to be from it.”

I grew up and grew old along with Mo. I learned.”Never turn your back on the Missouri.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1993 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Exploring Gilley’s Grove

History and unique plants highlight this Brookings County treasure

By John Andrews

Untouched by the plow, Gilley’s Grove in northeastern Brookings County slows researchers to see what the ecosystem looked like before homesteaders arrived.

Brookings County is farm country, but when South Dakota Magazine visited Clarence Simmons’ land northeast of White in 2008, we discovered a thick forest with history as interesting as the unique and valuable plants that grow there.

Gilley’s Grove is a natural oddity, say researchers at South Dakota State University in Brookings.”It is quite a unique area in terms of botanical diversity,” says botanist Gary Larson.”In the under story, you have a lot of species that are typical of dense, hardwood forest that we would find in central and eastern Minnesota. For South Dakota, that habitat is very restricted. We find a number of wildflowers there that aren’t found in other places.”

Gilley’s Grove is the largest wooded coulee south of Sica Hollow in Roberts County. In their book Grassland Plants of South Dakota and the Northern Great Plains, Larson and James Johnson, a former range science professor at SDSU, classify the strip of land in which Gilley’s Grove lies as tall grass prairie, an agriculturally fertile area that has largely been converted to cropland. Eons ago, glaciers eroded the steep-sided ravine on the eastern side of the Coteau des Prairies and left an unusual landscape.

“It’s a dry prairie region. It’s very hilly,” says Craig Novotny, an ecologist who has written about the grove.”There’s usually grass in the ravines of the hills, but in this particular area the forest still remains. There are probably 100-plus species of native plants out there, and a lot of those plants are valuable.”

They allow researchers to see what the prairie looked like centuries ago. There’s bur oak, green ash, and basswood, a rare tree in the area that Native Americans used to make rope. The grove contains exotic plants usually found in more eastern locales and rarely in South Dakota. There is blue cohosh, an herb monitored by the state as a rare species. Visitors in spring easily spot the Dutchman’s britches. The white flowers that resemble pants turned upside down are unmistakable.

The grove also boasts bloodroot, another spring flowering plant with delicate white flowers and toxic red sap that was once used to make dye. Jack-in-the-Pulpit is a well-known woodland species with a spike that pokes out of a pulpit-shaped spathe. The plant is sometimes confused with poison ivy because its three leaflets look similar.

The grove’s steep sideslopes have never seen a plow, so unique native plants still grow. Amid the bluestem and cordgrass is rough gayfeather, which sprouts purple, globular flowers in late summer. Another is prairie smoke, sometimes called torch flower or old man’s whiskers. It develops a wispy, pinkish red flower that looks like a puff of smoke.

People around White and nearby Hendricks, Minn., remember the grove as a high school hangout, but artifacts show its rich history goes back centuries. A French fur trapper working for the Hudson Bay Company and Indians lived in the grove before settlers arrived. For years a ring of large rocks 40 feet in diameter remained on the north edge, not far from an Indian burial mound. A dispute between Indians and the trapper in the early 1860s brought the U.S. Cavalry, which built fortifications in the grove. Old ammunition and entrenchments survived for decades.

“There’s the hanging tree,” Simmons said, pointing out an old, dead cottonwood that seemed out of place among the tall, lush oaks. In the late 1800s a local teenager was the victim of frontier justice. He was hanged in the grove for stealing a horse. Jesse James, a far more prominent outlaw, supposedly used the grove’s thick cover to hide from a posse after his gang’s unsuccessful bank robbery in Northfield, Minn., in 1876.

Gilley’s Grove is named for A.C. Gilley, who owned the land during the 1930s. Before that it was called Warren’s Woods, for owner Washington Warren, and Day’s Timber for George Day, who became the first settler in the grove when he arrived around 1870. About that time a log cabin made from the grove’s native oak trees was built, either by Day or the trapper. It has been restored and now stands in White. Other families called the grove home as well, but an old barn and chicken coop are the only buildings left.

Simmons and seven other men bought the 560 acres surrounding Gilley’s Grove primarily for hunting, but they often spend summer weekends picnicking and riding horses through the thick oak trees. As more people hear about the grove, Simmons gets calls asking for tours.”I’ve taken a lot of people out here who did not know this type of thing existed in eastern South Dakota,” Simmons says.

He’ll give tours any time, but spring is best to experience the grove’s uniqueness and diversity.”You have to go there during the growing season just to appreciate the extent of it and how different it is,” says Larson, the SDSU botanist.”You just wouldn’t guess you were in South Dakota.”

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the May/June 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Working Dogs

Children are fewer and hired hands are hard to find, but a South Dakota rancher can always depend on a stockdog.

By Bernie Hunhoff

Caitlin Kettler and a border collie called Jack bring the cows into the yard of the Kettler ranch near Blunt.


Caitlin Kettler rounds up the cows at her family’s Blunt ranch without a horse or even a holler. All she needs is Jack, the Kettler family’s rambunctious but obedient border collie.”Away to me,” she says, and Jack circles counterclockwise.”Come by,” she says and he changes direction.

“There,” she says, stopping him in his tracks.”Look back,” she continues, and he turns his head to see that he forgot a cow. He happily scampers after it.

Nobody knows just how many South Dakota farms use dogs to guide their cattle and sheep, but the number is growing.”It will surprise you how many border collies are on farms and ranches,” says Pete Carmichael, a Timber Lake rancher who raises, trains and shows stockdogs.

Carmichael says there’s a difference between a good ranch dog and a trained stockdog.”A ranch dog knows your habits and where your fences are and what you’re going to do. But take him away from home and he won’t know what to do as well.”

Cattle dogs are more popular than sheep dogs, probably because cattle are more common than sheep in South Dakota.”Probably nine out of 10 calls I get are for people wanting cattle dogs,” he says.”They say I can’t hire help and the kids are grown up and the old lady gets mad at me when she tries to help.”

Border collies are the most popular breed of working dogs both in South Dakota and elsewhere because they are so intelligent and trainable. Retrievers, corgis, mastiffs and even mutts are also used but the best dogs in field trials generally come from lines that have been refined for years — some for centuries — through selective breeding.

A dog’s herding ability stems from genetic behavior shared with wolves and coyotes. Though centuries of domestication and selective breeding have diminished the killing instinct, the desire to circle and gather a target is strong in border collies and some other breeds.

“They are the predator,” Carmichael says.”The prey is a chicken or a cow or a horse, regardless of how big an animal they’re working. They originated from wolves and wolves worked in packs. There is always an alpha, so that’s the reason you’ve got to approach them right. They have to know that you’re the alpha — so you don’t let them run loose or do other things that let them forget who’s in charge.”

Carmichael’s admiration for a good dog is obvious.”They’ll amaze you sometimes at how smart they are and the things they can do,” he says.”Stealth isn’t necessary but it’s part of the predator’s thing. And they can move stock with their eyes a lot of times, especially sheep. A sheep can only look at them so long before it gets fidgety.”

Training a young dog is a lot like raising a child.”You want to keep them happy,” he says.”If you put too much pressure on a young dog and they get so they’re not having fun, then you better back off a little bit.

He says training a young dog is a lot like raising a child.”You want to keep them happy,” he says.”If you put too much pressure on a young dog and they get so they’re not having fun, then you better back off a little bit. I start them on sheep and let them have their fun. Do that a few times and man they know that’s the most fun they’re going to have today. Overwork them and they’ll lose that enthusiasm.”

Carmichael, lanky and soft-spoken by nature, advocates a gentle approach.”The dogs don’t understand words but they understand tone, so we use a gentle voice. That’s the trouble with some people, they are way too loud for them.”

Some trainers prefer to use a whistle with their dogs, he says.”If you get a little upset they might pick it up in the tone of your voice, but they won’t pick it up on the whistle.”

Competitive stockdog trials are serious business.”The sheep trials are pretty much professionals who wouldn’t know one end of a sheep from another,” grins Carmichael, who both enters and judges at the events.”For the most part they are living in a fantasy world. The cattle dog trials are still pretty much cowboys but that will probably change and they’ll be beating us cattlemen out.” Dogs are tested at trials on how smoothly and quickly they move sheep or cattle through a pattern of obstacles.

Some dogs can compete with both sheep and cattle, but not all can handle cows.”Some lines of dogs aren’t strong enough to work cattle,” Carmichael says.”It takes a stronger dog with more guts. A lot of the imported dogs that come from Great Britain are sheep dogs and they are bred to handle sheep without being rough. You put those dogs on cattle and the old cow thinks ‘sshhh … you’re nothing to me.’ You need a dog that will stand its ground because if the dog gives ground the cow learns right quick.”

Trials are open to all breeds but border collies dominate in competitions, just as they do in the real world. The result has been a steady increase in the value of a good dog. The very best may bring $5,000.”The other chapter to that story,” says Carmichael,”is that if a dog isn’t for sale you can’t buy him. It’s like trying to buy that grandson of mine.”

The Timber Lake cowboy does raise litters to sell but he’s fussy about where the dogs go.”A guy might give you $3,500 and take him back to the ranch and not treat him right. He might let him ride in the back of the pickup truck and he falls out, or he lets him in with some bulls where he gets hurt. So if I have a good one I’m going to question the guy and see if he’s going to take care of him when he’s using him and when he’s not using him.” Carmichael hosts clinics on how to treat and train dogs to work with stock.

Show dogs are vastly outnumbered by real work dogs in South Dakota, and they’re to be found anywhere in the state. The Kettlers of rural Blunt train and sell border collies. They also use them daily for farm chores and Caitlin and her sisters show them in 4-H. Their dad, Murray, a Fort Pierre veterinarian, enters the dogs in trials.

Scott Jepsen and his family raise sheep near Vermillion with an old dog called Maggie. Jepsen says Maggie is especially useful when he must drive a tractor through a gate, a challenging task for one person because a savvy sheep or cow is quick to bolt.”They seem to know when the gate is open and when you can’t get there in time,” he says. Maggie stands at the opening, daring the sheep to escape, as Scott stays on the tractor and completes his chores.

Maggie needs expensive medication to treat congestive heart failure but the Jepsens consider her a bargain at any price. Scott’s wife, Jeanne, used to haul fat lambs to the Sioux Falls Stockyards, and took along Maggie to help unload. Maggie would jump into the trailer and nip the first lamb, who would depart with the rest following like the proverbial sheep in a dream. However, a stockyards crew knows from experience that sheep seldom unload so easily. Duly impressed, one of the crew asked if he could buy Maggie.

“I suppose you could,” said Mrs. Jepsen.”But then my husband would have to get out of the sheep business.”

EDITOR’S NOTE ñ This story is revised from the July/Aug 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Nine Mile Lake

Shaped by glaciers. Rounded by time. Preserved by the people of Marshall County.

Story and photography by James E. Johnson

Nine Mile Lake’s unique shoreline inspired James Johnson‘s photography and other visual projects.

As an artist I was smitten with the Marshall County topography of high hills surrounding secluded Nine Mile Lake when I arrived in the valley many years ago.

At first glance, the 282-acre lake seems untouched by civilization. But its calming landscape has a history of utopian development based on a concept of keeping the area as green as possible. That goal was ahead of its time in the 1960s, when a group of investors developed building covenants that are in place today.

Still, that’s not too much to ask for a lake whose history can be traced back 20,000 years, when glaciers pressed today’s topography. Huge chunks of ice were left behind as the glacier retreated. The ice slowly melted, slumping the land and leaving large round holes that became northeast South Dakota’s glacial lakes. There are more than 62 such lakes in Marshall County alone.

French explorers came in the early 1800s and called the rolling ocean of grass and wildflowers”prairie,” meaning meadow. Joseph Nicollet coined the term”coteau des prairies,” which is still used today.

Nine Mile Lake was named in territorial days because of its distance from Fort Sisseton, where soldiers were stationed to protect settlers. Other nearby waters are called Two Mile Lake, Four Mile Lake and Six Mile Lake. The names aren’t fancy, romantic or quaint, but their practicality fits the local culture.

The place has become my perennial source of inspiration — my wellspring.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the May/June 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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The Old Swimming Hole

Warm water and rare plants make Cascade Falls a unique place to take a dip.

Story by Katie Hunhoff
Photography by Stephen Gassman

Artesian springs fill Cascade Creek with constantly warm and clear water. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

Today most swimming holes are concrete squares with colorful umbrellas and rows of plastic chairs. But South Dakota still has some natural places and one of the best is 8 miles south of Hot Springs at Cascade Falls, where murmuring falls, lush foliage and warm turquoise-colored pools create a movie-like atmosphere in the middle of Fall River County.

The clean, clear water of the falls originates about two miles upstream at Cascade Springs, where a series of six artesian springs feed ever-warm, 67-degree water into Cascade Creek. The water’s temperature creates thick vegetation around the springs, creek and falls. Rare plants are found there, including a fern, prairie gentian and orchid that are nonexistent in the rest of South Dakota.

Cascade Falls is the only place along the creek recommended for swimming.”The water isn’t too fast and you can find different depths of water,” explains Cindy Reed, who lives with her husband Marc Lamphere in an old building that was the Allen Bank in the town of Cascade.”People feel safe about their kids being there. It has the added nuance of being a historical public swimming hole for well over one hundred years.”

Early settlers at Cascade hoped their village would become a popular destination for warm mineral baths and spas, but leaders of nearby Hot Springs plotted Cascade’s demise by directing traffic away from the town. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

Cascade was founded in the 1880s between Cascade Springs and the falls. Town fathers hoped it would become a thriving spa destination due to the confluence of the warm mineral water and a railroad through the Hills. By the turn of the century, Cascade had 50 businesses, a post office and 400 residents. Fred Evans, an ambitious businessman who owned much of the land around Hot Springs, put a quick end to Cascade’s growth, along with the economic crash which eliminated a lot of the town’s financial support. Evans was determined that Hot Springs would have the only mineral spa in the Hills, and he even went to the expense of paying a stage coach driver to not stop at Cascade.”The age of the stage passed, the railroad went in to Hot Springs and Cascade withered and died,” wrote journalist Jerry Wilson after a visit to the valley.

J.G. and J.H. Keith, husband and wife, were founders of Cascade who remained there decades after everyone else had given up and left town. The Keiths owned much of the land around the former town and their heirs eventually donated Cascade Falls and Springs to the Forest Service, believing them to be so special they should be shared with the public.

If you go

Cascade Falls Picnic Grounds is 8 miles south of Hot Springs on Highway 71. The area got a makeover recently by the U.S. Forest Service. There is a small parking lot, restrooms and a picnic area. An established trail and steep stairway connects the parking lot to the falls. The area is ideal for swimming or picnicking, but watch for poison ivy on the banks of the creek.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the July/Aug 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Becoming a Birder

South Dakota’s varied landscapes — the river valleys, mountains, badlands and glacial lakes — are a bird-watcher’s paradise.

By Rebecca Johnson

Rebecca Johnson looks for a Pacific loon on Wall Lake just west of Sioux Falls.

“Is this a practical joke?” I thought, staring intently through my binoculars. Doug Chapman, a veteran birdwatcher and my guide for the day, had stopped the car to point out a snipe near the road. Broken cornstalks and mud clumps were all I could see. I began to feel uneasy. Was this some type of hazing initiation for Sioux Falls Bird Club newcomers? I had heard of snipe hunting — the silliness of sending someone on an impossible task — but didn’t know anything about the bird.

Do snipes even exist? What color are they? How big? Am I being played for a sucker? A big sucker? Doubts like those fly through a novice’s mind when faced with a car-full of veteran birdwatchers who can tell a field sparrow from a song sparrow at 50 yards.

My companions were obviously waiting for me to remark on the invisible snipe. I adjusted my binoculars. With great relief I spotted two mud-colored birds poking their long slender bills into the dirt. And then I saw 30 more. Later I learned that snipe hunting is named after this bird that is difficult to shoot because of its erratic flight pattern.

Once I saw the snipe, I felt officially initiated into the world of birding — the fastest growing hobby in the United States. Sixty million people in the country now call themselves birders.

Why the popularity?”It’s a hobby that people can be involved in at nearly every level,” says K.C. Jensen, associate professor in South Dakota State University’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences,”whether it is just watching birds out of their feeders at home or on trips to exotic places.” Jensen noted it is a great sport for those with handicaps and the elderly, but people of all ages and athletic abilities find excitement in spotting a rare bird.

South Dakota is a bird-watcher’s paradise because of our varied landscapes. Some species like the prairie river valleys, especially the muddy Missouri’s bordering forests. Others frequent our western mountains and badlands, and migratory waterfowl flock to the Glacial Lakes in the northeast. Favorite spots include Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge near Martin in southwest South Dakota and Sand Lake Refuge in the northeast, but grebes, loons, pelicans and hundreds of other species — including the very rare whooping crane — might be seen anywhere.

So, how does one get started in the sport?”All you need is a pair of binoculars and a bird guide book,” says Jensen.”You can get a very good pair of binoculars for $100 or less and a really good bird guide will cost you $15 to $20.”

Kingbirds are at home on the open prairie. Photo by Chad Coppess/ S.D. Tourism.

Jensen also suggested that new birders find an experienced veteran to show him or her the ropes, so I called the Sioux Falls Bird Club and was invited to one of their monthly outings in the fall of 2010, which are open to the public. That’s how I met Chapman, and how I saw my first snipe.

We met on a cold, windy day at the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Outdoor Campus. I was armed with my husband’s hunting binoculars and a bird guide from the public library. We made introductions, split into small groups and then formed a caravan of cars. I was assigned to Chapman’s car along with Inez Orthmeyer and Mick Zerr — all of Sioux Falls. Chapman and Zerr have been interested in birds since childhood, but Orthmeyer considers herself a newbie.”I did a little of it when my son became a biologist but didn’t join the bird club until about 10 years ago, so I’m still a novice,” Orthmeyer said. Ten years and still a novice — what was I getting myself into?

Our first stop was to investigate a tip Zerr had received about a summer tanager frequenting a feeder at a suburban home. Chapman drove down Louise Avenue chatting about driving safety while bird watching. He briefly lost his train of thought when he spotted a bird flying over the mall parking lot.”What kind of a gull is that?” he exclaimed, slightly swerving to look.

We arrived at the home on the northwest side of town, parked and waited.”Bird watching takes patience,” says Chapman.”Sometimes it’s finely rewarded and sometimes unrewarded.”

We watched finches, sparrows and a woodpecker appear with little fanfare. I began to yawn. After about 30 minutes, the summer tanager’s arrival caused much excitement. The female songbird with green and orange under parts skittered from suet to seed feeders. The enthusiasm was contagious, and I wondered what made this bird so special.

“Some people travel and some don’t,” says Chapman.”Birds do the same thing in the fall.” The summer tanager is more prevalent in the southern and eastern United States and normally winters in Mexico. Its usual diet of bees and wasps is rarely available in winter, so the feeder was a godsend. When the tanager flitted away, we headed for the prairie pothole region west of Sioux Falls.

Our four-hour trip stretched to six hours as we birders got lost in the enjoyment of our hobby. We didn’t even stop for lunch as my car mates identified numerous birds, many I hadn’t heard of. A partial list included the juvenile red-tailed hawk, the northern shrike, the rusty blackbird, the Pacific loon and greater scaup.

My next outing came in December. Cold weather and a busy schedule had prevented me from putting some of my new knowledge to use. But then a very rare bird — a Ross’s gull — was spotted just a few miles from my home in Yankton, and I was inspired to give it a try.

My husband and I bundled up and drove west of town. As we neared Lake Yankton we realized not only did we have no idea what we were looking for, we’d also left the bird guide on our coffee table. But my experience with the experts gave me enough confidence to think I would recognize it. And my husband, Jeremy, thought he knew what a Ross’s gull looked like.”I think I saw it once. It had one of those things under its bill.” A little vague, but we kept heading toward the dam.

We needn’t have worried. Several cars came into view as we rounded an area east of Gavins Point Dam, some with large scopes set up beside them. I later learned that over 200 people had made a trip to Yankton to see the Ross’s gull.

We were lucky enough to meet Mark Brogie, the rare bird’s original spotter. On November 26, 2010, Brogie, a physics teacher from Creighton, Nebraska, was looking at the many white gulls converged on the icy water on Lake Yankton. The Ross stood out from the others because of its pinkish color and red legs. The bird has never been seen in South Dakota — in fact, it is unusual to see one below the Arctic Circle.

We enjoyed viewing the gull through Brogie’s spotting scope and visiting with Malcolm Swan, a cartographer who had flown from St. Louis to videotape the bird in flight. We talked to a man who had driven seven hours. People had traveled great distances to see a bird that was practically in my backyard.

Since then I’ve learned to look for birds I can easily identify, or take notes in order to identify them later. I’ve also found the South Dakota Birds listserv helpful (join by emailing sd-birds-subscribe@yahoogroups.com). Birders from across the state email each other about birds they’ve spotted and the location. Ricky D. Olson from Fort Pierre ends each message with”Sharing is half the fun of birding.” The excitement is infectious and the community aspect of birding is an unexpected benefit. I had envisioned bird watching as a lonely sport, with khaki dressed birders peering through the brush, waiting in solitary silence for birds to appear.

But it’s far from a lonely sport. In my short time in the birding world I’ve made several friends. Besides the teacher and cartographer, I’ve met a former chef, marathon runner, meteorologist, banker and bagpipe player — people with diverse talents and interests happy to share their love of birds and the South Dakota outdoors with a novice who now knows a snipe from a sparrow.


Getting Started

The equipment is simple — binoculars, clothing to fit the temperature, spiral notebook and a bird guide. If you want to watch from your window, South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks offers a free guide, Backyard Birds of South Dakota. Request one at gfp.sd.gov.

And when to watch? Birding enthusiasts insist there’s no bad time but some situations are better than others. Early morning is ideal because birds searching for food after fasting through the night are easier to spot.

Transitional seasons bring a new spectrum of birds.”Spring and fall — that’s when birds are coming and going,” says Jerry Stanford, birder and freelance writer from Sioux Falls. Changes in temperature or wind fronts may spark migration or stop a bird in its tracks.”Anything that disrupts a pattern of flight,” he says. Stanford’s monthly columns appear in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader and other papers. He recommends beginning with an experienced birder. Groups like the Northern Hills Bird Club (www.nhbirdclub.org) and Sioux Falls Bird Club (www.leifericson.org/sfbc) list field trip schedules on the web. You can also find tips by subscribing to the South Dakota Ornithologists’ Union’s listserv. Join by emailing sd-birds-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the March/April 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.