Posted on June 13, 2022 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Nemo Life

By Bernie Hunhoff

The view from atop Nemo Mountain, also called The Big Hill by old-timers, illustrates how the old logging town is buried in the Black Hills National Forest. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

Troy Saye was already growing weary of Las Vegas when he saw the player piano in storage at the Excalibur. He’d spent years on The Strip, building stage sets for big shows like Siegfried & Roy and King Arthur’s Tournament. But the crowds and the traffic were becoming too much for a man who’d grown up on a ranch in rural Montana, the son of a rodeo calf roper.

“Eventually Dad got too old for rodeo so he moved us to Las Vegas when I was 10,” says Saye, adding that it seems like a long time ago.”I was there 42 years one weekend!”

He was stage manager at the Stardust, and then became a fixture at the theater department of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He was working as the”head of props” at the Excalibur when he first saw the unusual old piano that had been relegated to storage. He learned that it had once been part of the dÈcor for a German-themed restaurant.

The coin-operated attraction wasn’t just another player piano with a keyboard. It featured an entire orchestra — drums, cymbals, flutes, a horn and tambourine all playing in unison and glowing in colored lights. Saye had an itch to buy it, though he had no idea for what, and the casino management didn’t know if they wanted to sell. Then, suddenly, the unusual piano was listed on an employee auction site. Saye was busy on auction day, but he quickly offered $350 and asked a friend to keep an eye on the bidding. Soon, someone upped it to $500.

“Pay whatever it takes,” Saye told his friend. Then he worried all day about whether his friend was successful, and if so, what the piano was going to cost him — and what he would do with it if he got it.

Troy and Willie Saye, proprietors of the Guest Ranch, are determined to preserve Nemo’s history. “That’s what people seem to like,” Troy says.

Long before the piano auction, Saye and his wife, Willie, had been looking for a simpler place to live. They thought it might be interesting to run a resort, and pondered lake properties in Willie’s home state of Minnesota, though Troy wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with humidity and mosquitoes. They considered resorts in several western states, but nothing felt right until they read about Nemo, a pioneer sawmill town that had been transformed in the 1940s into a guest ranch. Willie had vacationed in the Black Hills as a child, and Troy’s dad had rodeoed there in the 1950s.”My most vivid memory was when I was about 5 years old and eating a banana split by the rodeo grounds in Deadwood,” he says.

Naturally, a man of the theater believes in fate. He and Willie became the proprietors of the Nemo Guest Ranch in 2006, which means they now own some of the oldest and most rustic cabins and lodges in the West. Much of the resort was built by Homestake Mining Company, which operated a sawmill there from 1898 to 1939. Other structures predate the sawmill, including several more than 130 years old.

Today’s Brandin’ Iron restaurant, which Homestake built as its sawmill office, has a tree growing through the roof yet today. The pine is a bearing tree that is marked (note the yellow metal plate) by surveyors to establish boundaries. Because of the recent pine beetle epidemic, many bearing trees have been lost, but the Brandin’ Iron’s tree is healthy and popular with diners. The Brandin’ Iron is decorated with wagon wheel chandeliers, tables and chairs made long ago of local pine, and copies of Charlie Russell art that were painted by Native artist Tommy Brokenrope and framed with decorative rope knots.

Bladen, Rilyn and Jalyn Norton, of McCook Lake, by the bearing tree inside the Brandin’ Iron Restaurant.

Nemo’s first schoolhouse is now a spacious family cabin, and the mercantile dates to 1889.

The Sayes’ move to Nemo has not been a retreat to solitude. The town has just 42 permanent residents, but it swells with hundreds of visitors every day in the summer, and today’s guests have mostly forsaken quiet horseback rides for rumbling ATVs, which they use to roar through Forest Service mountain trails or climb to the top of nearby Nemo Mountain.

The mud-stained ATVs are great fun, though they do look out of place.”Take away the four-wheelers and the modern cars and Nemo would look like when we had it,” says Buck Troxell, whose father Frank bought most of the townsite seven years after it was abandoned by Homestake.”Dad sold 86 horses to make a cash down payment.”

The Troxells brought 26 horses from their ranch on the Pine Ridge Reservation and converted Nemo into a resort for the Black Hills’ fledgling travel industry.”We gave trail rides and we went to work on the old buildings,” Troxell remembers.”When you have a guest ranch you are a plumber, electrician, carpenter, cook and farrier — and it’s kind of hard for a cowboy to do some of that stuff. It didn’t always look so good.”

The challenge is the same for a Las Vegas stage manager. Saye spends his days fixing leaky faucets, torn screens and myriad other minor repairs required of century-old wood buildings and cabins. He also answers questions.”Visitors always ask about the history,” he says, like where did George Custer camp, or where was the actual sawmill.

“History seems to be what draws our guests,” he says.”Willie and I want to put as much history back as we can. A lot of the places that we looked at were trying to imitate history, but this is the real thing.”

Though he’s busy every day, Saye feels blessed.”I got to grow up on a ranch and I got to grow up in the city. I will take the country life anytime,” he says.”I call it the Nemo life.”

Cheryl Eggers, one of the 42 year-round residents, says she and her husband Norman moved from Rapid City for the Nemo life.”We wanted a place where our kids could play outside and explore the hills and play in a creek.”

Buck Troxell with his roping horse, Too Tightly Wound.

Eggers has grown to also love the history.”This is a town of firsts,” she says. The first Forest Service office in the nation was established here by President Grover Cleveland in 1897, followed by the nation’s first timber sale on Feb. 28, 1898.”We had the largest Hearst mercantile in the country and we were the second town to have electric lights in all the homes, thanks to Homestake’s hydroelectric plant.” (Deadwood was first.)

Custer camped at the top of the valley on a spot known as Pleasant Valley. Decades later, the sawmill grew to be the biggest in the Black Hills, and at one time the town’s population reached 500. Nemo was decimated by the 1920 flu epidemic; so many children died that the women insisted that a church be built so there was a place for proper funerals.

The same church still hosts worshippers at 10:45 every Sunday morning, and the same mercantile is still the community store, though it has changed through the years. A mounted golden eagle is perched above the woodstove. The eagle was exhibited at the restaurant for many decades, long before the Endangered Species Act took effect in 1940. Saye moved it to the store when he noticed that smoke and steam from the kitchen were damaging its feathers.

The store, built in 1889, has groceries and snacks but it also serves as the Nemo museum. Conrad Preston’s big collection of Black Hills rocks and minerals is exhibited on a row of shelves. Old photographs hang on the walls, and there’s an unusual stuffed specimen of a coyote pouring a shot of whiskey.”The poor coyote was roadkill, but we found a taxidermist who created this,” says Saye.

Across the room from the eagle and bartending coyote is the player piano, which Saye’s friend bought that day in Las Vegas for $501. All the instruments in the nickelodeon still work; together they fill the store with beautiful music. The coin mechanism malfunctions, but Troy and Willie will start it for free if you ask. That’s the Nemo life.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Serenity in the Pocket

By Steve Kinsella

The Pocket features Missouri River bottomlands and rough breaks rich with native grasses, ideal for grazing cattle.

It was often a spontaneous decision motivated by the appearance of a fall storm front out of the northwest. In many ways we were like the migrating ducks and geese we were pursuing, driven half by the elements and half by instinct.

We would load into my friend Wes’ blue 1959 Chevy surrounded by the warmest clothes we could find at the Salvation Army, including vintage World War II wool storm coats and flight pants. Being 15, Wes had a learner’s permit that allowed him to drive from dawn to dark and no further than 50 miles from our hometown of Mitchell when not accompanied by an adult — limits that we constantly pushed, often leaving just as the sun set.

Our destination was his grandfather’s ranch in a little-known place called The Pocket, a farm and ranch neighborhood which lies just west of the Missouri River’s historic Big Bend. When we arrived in the dark and trudged through the front porch of the ranch house with our shotguns and clothes — past the saddles, spurs, branding irons and wire stretchers — often his grandfather Duffy wasn’t home. But when we woke before first light, he would always be seated at the kitchen table with a cup of hot instant coffee cradled in his hands, his eyes sparkling at the commotion of the gaggle of half-crazed boys around him.

A rodeo rider in the 1940s, Duffy always told us a story or two about life in The Pocket as he made us flapjacks and eggs before we headed out into the cold to wait for the geese and ducks to rise off the river and fly for the wheat and corn fields on the hills above.

Duffy had been known not only for his ability to land on his feet nearly every time he came to the end of his saddle bronc ride, but also for his Roman racing skills; apparently, he and his neighbor Howard Hansen would each stand on two horses and race around the arena.

Wes’ grandmother had been a member of the Crow Creek Tribe and one of the tribe’s first female council members. She had led tribal delegations to Washington, D.C., many years before. His great-great-grandmother, Many Tracks, first arrived in the area in 1863.

They, like other longtime families including the Big Eagles, the Hansens, the Halls, the St. Johns and the Howes, have forged a life tied to The Pocket, a place that still has one foot anchored in the past and another in the present. It is a tight-knit community of tribal members and nonmembers who have lived side by side for generations.

The Pocket is tucked to the west of the Missouri River’s Big Bend. Illustration by Mike Reagan.

Most people drive by The Pocket without knowing it exists. Traveling east from Pierre along Highway 34, it is the expanse of land south of the road where the Missouri River disappears, only to re-emerge at Fort Thompson or De Grey. There is one main road, 316th Avenue, which horseshoes back as 319th Avenue. Within that horseshoe is a scattering of other farm paths known as Cut Across Road, Lonesome Road and Joe Creek Road. Like many interesting landscapes, The Pocket had a big beginning. A sheet of ice, half a mile thick in some places, paved its way through Canada and the northern U.S., stopping its advance roughly where the Missouri River exists today.

Tim Cowman, South Dakota’s state geologist, says that the glacier likely had”fingers” that extended off the main sheet of ice, reaching into what had been the bed of an ancient sea that today is comprised of a thick layer of hard Pierre shale.

“The river wants to run south, but it hits a protrusion of Pierre shale and bounces back northward until it hits another outcrop where it flows south again,” Cowman says. That pinball action created the bend in the river that 18th and early 19th century explorers often called the”Grand Detour.”

The glacier also gave the land within The Pocket its geological characteristics. Along its southern, eastern and western hillsides lie boulders and rocks — some as large as kitchen appliances — that the glacier pushed along its leading edge. Between Highway 34 and those leading edges is a rich layer of sandy and heavy loam, which, along with the Missouri River’s bottomlands, makes The Pocket highly productive agriculturally. In the 1880s, after bison herds had been decimated and Native Americans had been forced onto reservations, it was reportedly where the federal government grazed the cattle it provided to tribes as beef issues.

“It’s as good as any place to farm because the land is so good,” says Dick Hansen, who traces his roots in The Pocket to 1925 when his grandfather arrived at the request of the Crow Creek Tribe and broke 20 quarters of land for them in a year, an amazing feat considering the equipment that was available at the time. Farming there for more than 50 years, Hansen adds that the land has allowed him to plant,”a little bit of everything.”

It is also home to South Dakota’s only commercial mint farm, which was established in the 1980s on the river bottoms. Visitors to The Pocket can readily detect the herb in the air when it is growing or being harvested. The high-quality essential oil the mint farm produces has been sold to companies including Colgate Palmolive for use in toothpaste, and Mars Incorporated, which owns the Wrigley Company, producers of chewing gum. Along with mint, the farm also grows white and yellow popcorn for Jolly Time.

*****

Amidst and adjacent to these highly productive farm and livestock operations lie roughly 40 homes, including 20 that make up Big Bend Community — an enclave of tribal members that was established in the 1970s. The community’s anchors include St. Catherine’s Catholic Church and the adjacent community center, cemetery and pow wow grounds. The center is used for wakes, funerals, community gatherings and bingo.

Sister Charles Palm plays the organ and tends to myriad duties at St. Catherine’s Catholic Church.

St. Catherine’s traces its origins back to the area’s first missionaries. The church was located on Missouri River bottomland nearby but was destroyed in the early 1960s after Big Bend Dam was built, and the tribe, like other tribes in South Dakota, lost thousands of fertile acres to rising waters. The current church building was moved from a location east of Stephan and includes some of the furnishings that were removed from the original church before the waters of Lake Sharpe consumed it. Also lost to the reservoir was Oscar Howe’s birthplace and childhood home where he lived until he went to the Santa Fe Indian School and studied art.

Community members are highly protective of The Pocket. That’s why they and others quickly opposed an idea to place a hazardous waste site there in the 1990s, in spite of the potential jobs it would have brought to a place with high unemployment. Today, a small billboard stands adjacent to the community, asking visitors and residents alike not to litter in order to protect”Grandmother Earth.”

Not surprisingly, The Pocket has always attracted people. Megan Ernst, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ archaeologist for the Oahe Project, says prehistoric peoples lived there as far back as 5,000 B.C. They were followed by Woodland cultures, who cultivated local plants and inhabited small hamlets on the river bottoms, and then by ancestors of the Mandan, who fashioned larger villages where they grew maize, beans and squash and hunted bison.

The Mandan villages were located on higher ground above the river and sometimes included stockades and fortified ditches for protection from invaders. Today these sites are federally protected and lie mostly hidden beneath the blowing native prairie grasses.

Ernst says that access to water and highly productive agricultural lands was as important to the early dwellers as it is to today’s residents.”The Pocket was occupied back then for the same reasons it is occupied now,” she says.

*****

Unlike the time when the people of The Pocket needed to fortify their homes, today there is a sense of neighborliness and hospitality that some longtime residents say has always been there.”Everyone seems to be there for everyone else,” one resident said.”If someone needs help, everyone will come to help them. If there’s a fire, everyone shows up to put it out.”

A campground at West Bend Recreation Area is a playground for travelers as well as people who live in The Pocket, such as Chris LaRoche, Lyndsey Parsons and their son Christopher.

That sense of community extends to strangers as well. Once, in the early 1980s while I was traveling back to Pierre from Sioux Falls, I decided to stop and see my friend Wes, who by then was living on the ranch. He wasn’t home, and as I turned around in his driveway, my car slid into an icy ditch.

With the sun starting to sink, my car low on gas and the closest ranch several miles to the north, I had no choice but to begin to walk northward, into a howling wind on a February day when the air temperature had not risen above zero, and the windchill was somewhere in the area of 40 below. Wearing a suit, topcoat, dress shoes and no hat, I put my head down and did my best to stay focused on my destination in spite of the wind and the cold. Within 30 minutes, a pickup pulled up alongside me and the driver threw open the door and commanded that I get in.

He looked at me with a sense of concern and sympathy as I tried to warm up, my body shaking so severely that it was difficult to speak. When I finally told him what had happened and explained my connection to The Pocket, he took me back to the car and wouldn’t begin to help tow it out of the ditch until he was certain that I had warmed up and would be all right, even though I assured him I was fine. As I drove back up the gravel road to Highway 34, he stayed in my rearview mirror until I reached the highway.

*****

All South Dakotans and expats have a favorite location in their home state. Spend any time on their Facebook pages and you’ll see fond references to places like Spearfish Canyon, the Needles, Lake Oahe, Palisades State Park and others. For me, it will always be The Pocket.

The author, Steve Kinsella, with his dog, Hutch, in The Pocket.

It’s not so much the place itself — although its beauty and history rival any other location in South Dakota — but the sense of place. Any time I turn off Highway 34 and drive down that long gravel road, with each passing mile the world simultaneously becomes quieter and larger. I am overtaken by a feeling of peace and calmness as my field of vision becomes dominated by a sweeping landscape with views of the vast meandering river, its dark backdrop of Pierre shale anchoring it firmly in place.

I am not alone. When you ask people who live in The Pocket what they view as its most prominent feature, they often say it is the feeling of isolation and serenity they experience living there. That feeling led the postal service to name one of the ranch roads”Lonesome Place.”

Wes Parsons, who took over the ranch after his grandfather passed away in the 1980s, making him a fifth-generation landowner in The Pocket, says that sense of serenity evokes a feeling that never goes away, even for longtime residents.

“I’ve been asked why I don’t go on vacation,” he says.”When I stand on the bluffs and look around, I feel like I am on vacation all the time.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on December 27, 2021 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Box Elder: Under the Radar

By Paul Higbee

A view from Radar Hill shows Box Elder’s expansive landscape. Ellsworth Air Force Base’s hangars are visible in the distance.

Box Elder has been called the South Dakota town that Army and Air Force bombers built. Now, as Ellsworth Air Force Base awaits what will likely be its latest bomber mission — the B-21 — a new breed of builders is also contributing to the city’s rapid growth.

Consider Rob Hrabe, co-founder and CEO of VRC Metals Systems, the high-tech company pioneering cold spray, a process that uses nitrogen or helium to accelerate metal particles in repairing everything from jet components to golf clubs. Box Elder, Hrabe finds, is an ideal setting for building a workforce that mixes retired”crusty master sergeants” and”shiny penny” new engineers from nearby South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

And there’s Daene Boomsma. He graduated from high school in Box Elder in 2000, served a military stint, then started Boom Construction of Rapid City in 2004. He’s changing Box Elder’s appearance with both housing and commercial developments.”I’m passionate about Box Elder,” he says.”I care about its growth, and how it grows.”

How Box Elder got to this point is a story unlike any other in South Dakota. The railroad first came through in 1907. It was the spot where passengers sometimes stood, stretched their legs, and collected parcels minutes before detraining at Rapid City, just west.

Then in 1937, Rapid City built a modernized airport at Box Elder, and at the same time U.S. Highway 14, though still a dirt road, was moving cars through town toward Mount Rushmore. But Box Elder’s transformation happened in 1942, during World War II. South Dakota’s congressional delegation, and Rapid City’s business and civic leaders, were successful in winning Rapid City Army Air Base where the airport had taken form five years earlier. The base’s first mission proved vital to the United States’ success in the war: training crews for the mighty, four-engine B-17 bomber, a plane deployed aggressively both in Europe and the Pacific.

Box Elder’s transformation began in 1942, when South Dakota’s Congressional delegation secured the Rapid City Army Air Base, today known as Ellsworth Air Force Base.

For all of Box Elder’s history and easy access — within hours from any point in the world for Ellsworth air crews, and right on Interstate 90 for South Dakota drivers — it’s surprising how many people can’t place the town. In the case of drivers, it’s not like Box Elder passes in the blink of an eye. It stretches from I-90 exits 61 to 67. With a population of about 10,000, the 2020 census will likely reveal it to be the state’s 12th or 13th largest city in population. It’s home to one of the state’s biggest and finest museums, the South Dakota Air and Space Museum.

So why is the town under the radar, so to speak? Many westbound travelers on I-90 think of the community simply as east Rapid City. Locals sometimes refer to the whole area as Ellsworth, or during high school football and basketball seasons as Douglas, the name of Box Elder’s public school district.

The original B-17 veterans are mostly gone now, but for decades they dropped by to recall their World War II training. Other types of Army planes flew in and out of the base then too, and WAC (Women’s Army Corps) units drilled there. But the B-17 dominated, roaring over the Black Hills and across the northern Great Plains.

There was one topic no one wanted to talk about in those years. The rate of training crashes was high everywhere during World War II. Box Elder perpetually braced itself for the worst. When a B-17 went down, usually the entire 10-man crew perished, as was the case close to town over Radar Hill, out in the Badlands, and elsewhere.

The most tragic crash didn’t involve a B-17. It happened eight years after World War II, after establishment of the U.S. Air Force made the Box Elder base part of that military branch. On March 18, 1953, base commander Brigadier General Richard Ellsworth and 22 other airmen died when their B-36 crashed in Newfoundland. Three months later, President Dwight Eisenhower flew to South Dakota to rename the base in Ellsworth’s honor.

The public was invited to honor Ellsworth and to see Eisenhower, and for many Black Hills people the drive was familiar: east of Rapid City on 14 and turn left at Box Elder. The municipal airport had moved a few miles south of Box Elder in 1950, but the Air Force built solid public relations by inviting South Dakotans onto the base regularly. There were flight demonstrations and open houses. The public saw the huge concrete Pride Hangar, the world’s largest monolithic hangar, built to house the B-36. Generally, South Dakotans believed that if the Air Force built something of that magnitude, and with the Cold War looking long-term, their base was a permanent installation.

While the Pride Hangar impressed visitors, many had difficulty thinking of anything that impressed them across the base’s fence in Box Elder. That was often true for newly stationed airmen, too.”I was assigned at Ellsworth from 1964 to’66, but I lived in Rapid City,” says Leo Coughlin.”What I remember about Box Elder were big service stations on both sides of the road as I drove through, and it seemed like they were always busy.”

More than 4,000 airmen and civilian workers are based at Ellsworth Air Force Base, including Musta Sonbol (left) and Cheung Lin.

“In most little South Dakota towns, when you drive into them you find a local cafe and you start to get the feel of the town’s personality,” says Bill Schulz, originally from Kentucky and stationed at Ellsworth a few years after Coughlin.”I think Box Elder was kind of lost that way, sitting between Ellsworth and Rapid City, with no personality of its own.”

As it has grown, Box Elder has seemingly become two cities separated by Interstate 90. North of the highway is the air base, a new city hall building, the high-tech VRC Metals company that stylishly rehabbed an old school building, and many blocks of new homes and apartment buildings. South of the highway, a more eclectic”old town” remains: horses and cattle graze in meadows, and auto repair shops — each with a tiny junkyard of classic cars and jalopies — appear to be the principal economy. Some new residential neighborhoods lie just below Radar Hill, a high spot with satellite antennas operated by the Ellsworth crews. Actually, there’s also a third face to Box Elder. The southwest corner of town is anchored by new hotels and restaurants close to a popular water park called Watiki. Lodgers and diners probably don’t even realize they are in Box Elder, though they contribute significantly to the town’s sales tax revenue and property tax base.

But long ago, the air base became Box Elder’s front porch. It started in the 1960s when Coughlin and Schulz were part of a new Ellsworth mission: Titan and Minuteman nuclear missiles were installed in underground silos across the upper Great Plains, aimed at enemy targets around the globe. Ellsworth personnel were key to the launch process, thankfully never put into action.

“Box Elder then was mostly just trailer houses,” recalls Schulz who, like Coughlin, chose to live in Rapid City.”There was a cop who would pull you over if you drove through too fast. One good thing I remember was a little Asian food market. There were a lot of airmen who had married overseas during the Vietnam years, and their wives got their food there.”

Thirty years after Coughlin and Schulz’s time, Trevor Smith completed an ROTC program at the University of Notre Dame and learned he was to be stationed at Ellsworth.”I remember this panic,” he says.”I didn’t even know where South Dakota was. I drove out there through ranch lands and was thinking, ëThere’s no one living here.'”

Although Smith soon discovered good friends and meaningful volunteer opportunities in the Black Hills, Box Elder didn’t offer any cheer when he first saw it.”Mostly I remember older trailers, and there seemed to be no center to the town,” he recalls. But just as Schulz had noted a specialty business reaching transplanted Asian people, Smith recalled that during the U.S. military’s”don’t ask, don’t tell” period, Box Elder claimed western South Dakota’s only gay bar.

Schulz, who remained in Rapid City after leaving the Air Force and taught for 28 years at Stevens High School, remembers that decades ago he and fellow airmen learned Box Elder was electing a mayor.”And we laughed and asked ourselves, ëWhat did the mayor of Box Elder actually do?'”

Quentin Goley (left) and Connor Carey are just two of the VRC Metals employees to make the jump from South Dakota Mines in Rapid City.

Living as a South Dakotan for many years has mellowed Schulz’s attitude, and today he wishes current mayor Larry Larson all the best as Box Elder likely faces population growth related to the B-21’s arrival — perhaps even soaring enrollment in schools already full. It was the Douglas School District that first brought Larson to town in 1972, and his first view was much different than that of Coughlin, Schulz and Smith.

“I had graduated from St. Cloud State in Minnesota and was looking for a teaching job,” Larson says.”There was a list of openings and one was at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. A friend suggested if I taught there, I’d probably get Air Force privileges, like being able to hop aboard flights.”

Not true, Larson quickly learned. But what he saw in Box Elder impressed him: a diverse and well-traveled student body, commitment to cutting-edge education, innovative student scheduling and accountability and a carousel school.

“I really wanted to teach in the carousel school,” Larson recalls. He accepted an elementary school grade position, loved it, and within a few years decided he wanted to run for school board — not possible as a school district employee. So he took a teaching job in Rapid City, served on the Douglas board for 36 years, then resigned from that position to run for mayor six years ago.

Topping Larson’s goals has been hiring qualified municipal employees,”people with degrees in their fields,” he says. Also, Box Elder under Larson’s watch is losing those trailer houses that colored Schulz and Smith’s initial impressions.”If you drive by on the interstate, you’ll look off and still see older mobile homes, but that’s changing,” the mayor says.”Nice housing is developing, 100 homes in 2019, plus apartment buildings.”

“It amazes me, the homes that are coming up out there,” confirms Coughlin, the 1960s airman who chiefly remembered busy service stations.

Everyone in the Black Hills, it seems, can list Air Force personnel who decided to remain in the Black Hills after leaving the service, rather than return to their home states (Coughlin is one). Only rarely, though, did they see Box Elder as an option. That’s bound to change as Boomsma and others continue building. Box Elder claims an asset that’s rapidly shrinking in some other Black Hills towns: plenty of acreage left to develop.

It’s not true, Boomsma says, that housing is happening only in anticipation of the B-21.”Our market is good, period,” he notes.”Box Elder is a hot area as a bedroom community. It will be fine even if the B-21 doesn’t come.”

Nor is it true that VRC Metals Systems is in Box Elder only because of the B-21, says company CEO Hrabe, a former B-1B pilot who chose to remain in the Black Hills instead of returning to Kansas. VRC, after all, is a home-grown company, coming out of the School of Mines and Technology business incubator. It demonstrates national and international reach with branch centers across the country, and experiments with products having nothing to do with aviation. For example, in the era of COVID-19, it is winning attention with experiments with metals that could offer self-perpetuating sanitizers.

Tracey Scott (pictured) and her husband, Bob, serve many Ellsworth airmen at Gizzi’s, their coffee shop.

What about Trevor Smith’s observation that Box Elder, when he first experienced it in 2004, had no center?

“We hear that a lot,” says Mayor Larson.”We’re working with an urban design architect and calling for community involvement to fix that.”

Plans are in the works for a new commercial district with a road properly named Main Street. South Dakota main streets typically become gathering places for festivals, music and even outdoor movie screenings. Box Elder started the tradition this summer, with food trucks and live music on Tuesday nights and movies on Fridays thanks to a big screen that the Elks Theater of Rapid City brought to town.

Though Box Elder has never promoted itself as a tourist town, the remarkable South Dakota Air and Space Museum claims a loyal following that extends far beyond the state. The museum interprets the full story of the Air Force, and stories of South Dakotans — military or civilian — who contributed to aviation. Museum galleries were closed due to the pandemic early this summer, but nonetheless cars from Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Nevada and Minnesota were parked at the big museum, which looks like an airfield of vintage planes that tell the stories of World War II, the Berlin Airlift, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East wars. Some are actual planes connected to major historical figures, including the B-25 that Eisenhower converted for his personal transport in 1944 and 1945 and the F-102 that early astronaut Gus Grissom used to keep his piloting skills sharp.

Not much is missing, although there’s no example of the B-17 — the plane that started everything at Ellsworth. Anyone who has a B-17 they’d be willing to part with will receive a warm welcome in Box Elder. Don’t worry about a few dings on the old plane. Those can be cold-sprayed away just up the street.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on August 23, 2021 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Lemmon: The Cowboy Capital

By Bernie Hunhoff

Lemmon embraces art, especially the sculptures of native son John Lopez, who created this statue of town founder Ed Lemmon.

If South Dakota built a tribute to the American cowboy, it might look like Lemmon. The little city that straddles the border of the two Dakotas has just 1,200 citizens, but it seems 10 times that size on days when there’s a rodeo or cattle auction. In fact, even on a slow day, Lemmon looks like our cowboy capital, though nobody there would use that term to describe their town because most cowboys won’t brag.

We tried to get Paul Huffman to speak philosophically on Lemmon’s prominence in the beef world, but the 77-year-old cowboy politely and plainly responded,”It’s big cattle country. It’s as simple as that.”

Huffman runs Lemmon Livestock, an auction barn that holds sales every Wednesday, and also on Thursdays during the fall and winter”cattle run,” when ranchers bring bawling spring calves to market. A big sale attracts hundreds of buyers and sellers and up to 6,000 head of cattle. Ranchers sip coffee and enjoy hot beef sandwiches — with homemade gravy and real mashed potatoes — in a restaurant at the auction barn before gathering on bleachers for the auction. Millions of pounds of beef change hands at a busy winter sale, and enough money to make a Chicago banker blush, though in Lemmon a stranger from the city would be hard-pressed to know the buyers from the sellers. Seven-figure transactions transpire in minutes, with nothing more noticeable than a nod or the raise of a finger.

Cattle outnumber people 4 to 1 in South Dakota, making beef the biggest single sector of the state’s economy. However, in Perkins County, where Lemmon is the largest city, there are 37 cattle for every man, woman and child. Seventy-eight percent of the land is grass. The federal farm census indicates that cow and calf sales total about $70 million a year in the county of just 2,400 residents.

“We especially have a lot of natural grasslands to the south and west,” says Huffman. Most of the ranch land is privately owned, but the region also includes the Grand River National Grasslands, a 154,000-acre native prairie. A hundred ranchers have allotments that permit them to graze from 50 to 300 head of cattle — some in community pastures that operate like the open range that existed until 1902.

Stuart and Lisa Schmidt say fossils and ancient geology are popular at the Grand River Museum.

Lemmon was founded in 1907 by a cowboy who was instrumental in the transition from the open range to today’s fenced prairie. Ed”Boss Cowman” Lemmon started as a ranch hand in Wyoming at age 13. Soon he was a trail boss, herding longhorns from Texas to fatten on the rich grasses of the Northern Plains. He was a founder of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association in 1902 and a leader of the beef industry when he discovered that a rail line was about to be built that would straddle the state border. He quickly bought land for a townsite, hoping he could make his new town the county seat for both Perkins County in South Dakota and Adams County in North Dakota.

Though he didn’t win either courthouse, Lemmon did get his town. Railroad officials named it after the cowboy, and he lived there until the day he died in 1945. Old-timers remember him today. Stories about his exploits are legendary, and several books about his life are for sale at the Grand River Museum, where an exhibit chronicles the life of a man the townspeople called Dad Lemmon.

The museum is a good reflection of how the cattle industry shapes Lemmon. The Schmidt family homesteaded in the Grand River Valley in 1910, contemporaries of Dad Lemmon.”Our grandchildren are sixth generation on the ranch,” says Stuart Schmidt.”My folks started the museum after many years of finding dinosaur fossils.”

Thinking the fossils and other local artifacts might be a way for the town to draw tourists, Stuart’s parents Ed and Phyllis Schmidt began to collect historical and geological items.”We moved into a downtown location in 1998 but we knew we needed more room and we wanted a highway location,” says Phyllis.”We soon bought an old machine shop that was empty for a long time. It was a mess. People thought we were crazy,” she laughed.

If so, their friends and neighbors like crazy: the Schmidts’ efforts attracted many supporters, including the Wheelers and Beelers — two other pioneer families who are very philanthropic in Perkins County, though that’s not a word that cowboys would use. Four years ago, the nonprofit museum moved into a new addition with ample space for exhibits, fossils and cast specimens from the dinosaur age.

Native American culture and history is also documented, and Stuart notes that new information continues to show up, including a hand-drawn map of how to fence the reservation that was sketched by Dad Lemmon. The map was discovered at the Wisconsin State Historical Society when Nathan Sanderson was researching and writing Controlled Recklessness, the latest book about the pioneer cattleman.

The museum has exhibits on major Hunkpapa leaders, including Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face, Gall and Thunder Hawk. It also has a timeline for Creation Science. The entryway features a life-size sculpture of a grizzly bear attacking mountain man Hugh Glass, an epic survival story of the American West that took place in 1823 in the Grand River Valley south of town. After the story was retold in the blockbuster movie The Revenant, Lemmon promoters started a Hugh Glass Rendezvous that has gained popularity every year.

The town’s signature attraction, since the 1930s, is the Petrified Wood Park, a funky collection of petrified wood, fossils, stones and other geological wonders, some mortared together in the shape of trees and spires. Rounded stones known as cannonballs, collected largely from the nearby Cannonball River Valley, are a big part of the park.

The Grand River Museum features a display paying tribute to Ed Lemmon, aka “Boss Cowman.”

But not even petrified art can upstage cowboys and cattle as Lemmon’s top attraction.”Let’s face it, this town has been a cattle town since the start,” says Dave Johnson, the economic development director.”Ranching is our foundation. Everybody feels it when cattle prices go up or down, whether or not they own cattle themselves.”

Johnson says the cow culture goes beyond dollars and cents; it impacts the arts, literature, recreation and education. The local high school mascots are Cowboys and Cowgirls. Rodeo is bigger than football and some local athletes have done well on the rodeo circuit, including Stuart and Lisa Schmidt’s son, Chuck, who is a champion saddle bronc rider.

Lisa’s brother, John Lopez, is a nationally acclaimed metal sculptor. Several of his sculptures are found in town, including the museum’s Hugh Glass piece; a cowboy aboard a bucking horse, by the front door of the high school; and a representation of Dad Lemmon on a horse that stands in a little plaza downtown. Lopez has opened a studio and gallery known as the Kokomo Inn next to the plaza, one of several recent civic additions and improvements — many of them either assisted or spearheaded by Dave Johnson’s organization, the Lemmon Area Charitable and Economic Development.

Johnson worked as a commercial photographer in Dallas and Chicago before coming home. One of his first challenges was the Palace Theater, a dilapidated movie house where he ran the reels as a teenager. The community supported his efforts to digitize the projector system, renovate the interior and reopen the theater for movies, live concerts and other events.

When the State Extension Department held its annual Energize Conference in Lemmon last summer, Johnson gathered some of the town’s newest business men and women in the theater for a panel discussion. He began by explaining that even he is sometimes amazed at how much a little city can accomplish. He credited a creative culture and a community spirit.”The trend for a lot of these little places in the 1980s and 1990s was just to become a bedroom town to a bigger city but Lemmon never had that option because we are too far away from a bigger town,” he said. The only alternative was to maintain a high quality of life despite the smaller population. Encouraging museums, art, restaurants, theater, entrepreneurship and music seemed daunting, but it’s probably not any more difficult than fencing the prairie or building a petrified park.

Jack and Kim Anderson operate Midwest Rodeo Entries, which handles reservations for the South Dakota Rodeo Association, as well as The Current Connection, a computer and office supply store.

Johnson told the Energize attendees, who came from equally small communities across South Dakota, that he learned an important lesson from participating in big projects:”It’s about doing what’s right — it’s never about the money.”

Lemmon’s success stories include a new housing neighborhood and the downtown plaza known as Boss Cowman Square. The community has also supported several new businesses, including a hotel, grocery store, butcher shop, photography studio and a boutique with sequin-lined denim jackets for cowgirls. They coexist with old Lemmon standbys like Wheeler Manufacturing, a family enterprise that employs more than 100 jewelry-makers.

Romancin’ the Range, the new boutique, shares space with a flower store and coffee shop. The owner is Kate Westphal, a young nurse who grew up on a nearby ranch and moved away to Bismarck, North Dakota.”I thought I was never coming back,” she says,”but I started to miss home. Nobody greeted me or asked how Dad’s sheep were doing or how my mom was feeling. Now, if my car breaks down I have 10 people to call, where in the city I had no one. I also realized there were opportunities for growth.” She works as an R.N. at the local nursing home, manages the boutique and makes leather jewelry.

The Current Connection is another Lemmon success. Jack and Kim Anderson started the computer and office supply store 15 years ago. When the local Ben Franklin store closed, they added school supplies. Jack, who grew up locally and rode bulls in high school and college, recognized that the rodeo industry wasn’t taking advantage of technology. He developed software and started a company called Midwest Rodeo Entries, which handles reservations for the South Dakota Rodeo Association, the Colorado Rodeo Association and the Indian National Finals Rodeo.

“Jack wanted to stay active in the rodeo industry, but not ride bulls,” Kim says.”This was a way for him to do that.” He also created summer jobs for teachers and students, who staff the phones.”It saves cowboys and cowgirls a lot of time,” says Kim,”and it gets them to the right place at the right time.”

The town’s new LemmonMade Butcher Shop was started by Carl and Kylee Kimmerle, who came from Utah two years ago to live on land homesteaded by Kylee’s great-grandfather. The shop quickly gained a reputation for beef jerky, breakfast sausage and other specialties. The Kimmerles hope to eventually raise and process their own cattle and hogs, but for now the new business and three young children occupy most of their time.

The downtown area has also been bolstered by the Beeler Center.”It was put up about a dozen years ago because of the success of the Boss Cowman Rodeo,” Johnson says.”Every year, we would rent a tent for the rodeo and someone had the good idea that it might make sense to just build a building.” Ever since, the town has hosted more weddings than 1,200 people would ever propose.”Lots of times, the bride and groom are not from here but they know they can stay in the hotel and there are plenty of restaurants so it’s just a good place to get married.”

The town’s six restaurants include Benny’s, just across the street from the Beeler Center. Matt Johnson (David’s nephew), who recently purchased the long-established eatery, says it’s a challenge to run a steakhouse when most of your customers are ranchers who raise some of the world’s best beef.

“You gotta start with the good stuff,” he laughs. His most popular menu item is called the Steak Sandwich, but again that’s cowboy modesty: the”sandwich” is a delicious sirloin coulotte.

Chislic is also popular at Benny’s, but Johnson doesn’t use lamb, like restaurants in Hutchinson County, where Germans-from-Russia first brought chislic to the Dakotas. He grills cubes of –you guessed it — beef sirloin ball tip.

That seems appropriate, however, in a city corralled by cowboys.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Beauty That is Hermosa

By Paul Higbee

Barrel racer Autumn Garcia exercises her horse, Bee, at the arena in Hermosa.

Hermosa is Spanish for beauty, a fancy name for a working man’s town of 400 people on the eastern slope of the Black Hills where the most noticeable architectural feature is the county fairgrounds.

The town was named by railroaders who loved the mountain views to the west, as well as grassland vistas to the south, east and north. Those natural charms haven’t faded in the 134 years since the naming, and the town has developed a richness of character that now befits its name.

The natural setting has been barely compromised by commercialization and urbanization. Strip malls, office suites, corporate fast-food stops and the busy streets that connect them are 15 miles north in Rapid City, where Hermosans go to shop and where most teenagers attend high school. Hermosa’s modest business district — most of it stretching along U.S. Highway 79 — only adds to the town’s personality.

One of the Black Hills’ best-loved pizzerias is Lintz Brothers, started by Brian and Kristy Lintz in the Mount Rushmore Telephone Company building. They perfected a special crust recipe that came from Charlie Decker, an old family friend.

When the business was just beginning, a telephone work crew came to eat.”We’re hungry,” said the crew leader.”Fix us anything!”

An ornamental garden at the Hermosa Arts and History Association honors Doug Hesnard, a community booster who died in 2012.

Taking that as a challenge, Lintz concocted a hearty pizza with Canadian bacon, sausage, pineapple, sauerkraut and jalapenos. He called it the Flaming German Samoan, and it quickly became a customer favorite. Other standards are the Oriental Texas Tornado and the Big Fat Greek Pizza.”We like to show people that there’s more to pizza than just pepperoni,” he says.

The pizzeria and phone company shop burned in 2015, but a new building was soon constructed for both at the juncture of Highways 79 and 36.”Today we pull 65 percent of our business out of Rapid City,” says Lintz.”It’s a nice drive on a four-lane highway and we’ve become a destination restaurant.”

Despite its close proximity to the Black Hills and Rapid City, Hermosa is not a touristy town. Still, it’s a place where you can visit any summer evening for a pizza dinner and a show because just a mile from Lintz’s is Roy’s Drive-in, which features the world’s largest movie screen. Two of them, actually.

Roy Reitenbaugh of Hot Springs started the theater in 2012, just as the movie industry was going digital. The 15-acre project became an $800,000 investment. Today, he and his daughter Correna show movies seven nights a week throughout the summer. Three hundred cars can park in front of each 80-foot digital screen.

“There used to be three outdoor theaters in Rapid City,” Reitenbaugh says.”Now there are none. We were going to put ours there but they didn’t want us. Hermosa welcomed us with open arms.”

Reitenbaugh says movie-watchers like his small-town setting.”It’s really strange, but we get people from all over. Last summer, in five days I met people from France, Finland, England, Australia and Canada.”

Hermosa has always attracted interesting and entertaining people. The musical Bower family came in the 1880s, settling near Battle Creek. Their pioneer story was told in a 1968 Disney movie titled The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. Gutzon Borglum and his wife Mary moved onto a Hermosa area ranch while Gutzon blasted Mount Rushmore National Memorial from central Black Hills granite in the 1920s and’30s.

The town still gets notable guests and residents. Successful rodeo cowboys like steer wrestler Todd Suhn, roper Jess Tierney and pick-up man Tyler Robertson have Hermosa addresses. Robertson, who was nominated as one of the PRCA’s top pick-up men in 2019, was among a group of ranchers who gave beef to the Hermosa school this year to promote the concept of local foods.

Linda Hasselstrom, one of the West’s best-known rancher/writers, lives on the family ranch south of town, where she hosts writing retreats. Hermosa is also home to Rick Mills, a historian, author and director of the South Dakota State Railroad Museum in nearby Hill City.

The Hermosa Arts and History Association’s brand exhibit features the heart-reverse-heart marking belonging to Linda Hasselstrom and her family.

Mills says that in addition to naming Hermosa, the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad made a decision that saved the town decades later. As the company built its rails north from Nebraska in 1885 and 1886, it decided its line would benefit by a bit more elevation over the spot where a stagecoach station sat near Battle Creek. Hermosa was platted a mile from the stagecoach stop.”That saved us twice during floods of 1972 and 2007,” Mills says.”There was never a grain elevator here, but the railroad moved a lot of beef cattle to market.”

It also moved ore — not the Black Hills’ famous gold ore, but tin from Hermosa area mines. The same year that locomotives first steamed into Hermosa, a school welcomed its first children. Today the town’s K-8 elementary school provides a small-town style of education that appeals to many parents.

Mills credits his Hermosa schooling for stoking his interest in Black Hills history. For example, in the 1970s, he and classmates rode bicycles 4 miles into the countryside to visit the Council Oak, a tree (still very much alive) that marks the site of a peace council between the Lakota people and the Utes.

A former elementary school house is still helping kids — and adults — understand local history, even though the structure was condemned 94 years ago. The big, two-story building replaced an 1886 school in 1889, served students for 27 years, then began frightening teachers and parents because of a structural problem. The building and its bell tower sometimes swayed so that the bell rang spontaneously, according to a presentation by Linda Hasselstrom in 2019, based on research by Geraldine Hesnard Evans. That prompted condemnation in 1926, but the local Masons bought the building, moved it and secured it structurally. As Hermosa’s Masonic Lodge, the transformed school hosted Masons and Eastern Star meetings, community dances and other functions. When the Masons moved into a modern hall immediately next door in 2000, the Hermosa Arts and History Association stepped in to once again transform the old school building and rebrand it as a museum, arts venue and community events center.

The history and arts group’s acronym, HAHA, hints that much of what it does is just for fun, and that there’s room for occasional levity in history. Development of the museum is ongoing but there are already items in place, including”brand boards” with brands from area ranches burned into them, and artifacts representing the Bower Family Band.

Rick Mills, South Dakota’s premier railroad historian, credits his passion for all things trains to his Hermosa upbringing.

Open range cowboys who trailed cattle to the Hermosa railhead in the 1890s were key players in building the American beef industry. In 1919, with the opening of Custer State Park (a 72,000-acre wilderness that surpasses many national parks in natural splendor and outdoor recreation) Hermosa became something of an eastern gateway to the Black Hills. In fact, in 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge made the park their summer retreat for three months, they traveled into Hermosa on Sunday mornings to attend church. That same building, today the United Church of Christ, stands just a block from the HAHA building.

Hermosa played a role in Cold War history in the early 1960s, with the installation of a Titan missile silo 5 miles south of town. Ellsworth Air Force Base crews staffed it. Today, the missiles and soldiers are gone but it’s easy to find the site because Missile Road is more nicely paved than most country roads in Custer County.

Nineteenth-century weaponry can be found at Highland Park Cemetery on the west edge of town. Two cannons that stood on the Dry Tortugas — an archipelago of small islands several sea miles west of Key West, Florida — now point toward Hermosa. The Dry Tortugas were ideal for housing dangerous criminals, including Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was accused of aiding President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Apparently, the cannons were positioned within view of Mudd’s cell. In 1901 the federal government gifted the cannons to Hermosa’s William Stanley, a Union Civil War veteran. Stanley was highly regarded for organizing posts of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternity of former Civil War soldiers, across South Dakota.

Highland Park Cemetery is aptly named; the gravestones sit on a rise that offers a wide vista of the Black Hills’ front range. It is the final resting place for 23 Civil War veterans, Union and Confederate alike. That surprises people because the war was fought a decade before white settlement in the Black Hills. The veterans’ graves are testimony to how many ex-soldiers were motivated to escape the blood-stained East and South for the cattle trails, gold fields and homesteads of the West.

There’s a quieter form of history, significant in its own right, that Linda Hasselstrom wants to see archived at the HAHA museum. In town, and on far-flung ranches and farms, many people kept journals that documented daily life — weather, wildfires, agricultural yields, and family joys and heartaches.”We’re finding people we had no idea might be journaling were doing so for years,” she says.”Many were women, and it’s good to gain those points of view.”

A historic tree called the Council Oak grows in a ditch along Highway 40 west of Hermosa. The tree, estimated to be 400 years old, was a gathering place for Native American tribes.

Mills believes a pride in local heritage has served Hermosa well. He points to the town’s 1986 centennial celebration that brought about HAHA, and says the event spurred regional attention about what makes Hermosa unique. It’s probably no coincidence that the centennial marked the approximate beginning of young families moving in — enough to trigger a school enrollment boom. Lintz, the pizzeria owner, says it’s possible that continued population growth could even lead to a new high school.

His family has ranched and run businesses in the area for 120 years.”There’s a strong sense of community here, and the people that move in here seem to appreciate that,” he says.”It’s nice to see the growth, and yet we’ve maintained the feeling of a small town.”

Hermosa is not for everyone; it’s a town for those who love the idea of seeing their kids immersed in nature regularly, signed up for 4-H and learning to ride and rope at the big arena just east of the railroad tracks on the Custer County Fairgrounds. Hermosa seems to suit South Dakotans who want to be close to urban amenities, and perhaps even the business and career opportunities, of Rapid City but who also like to escape the claustrophobia of highways, high-rises and even high mountains.

Gates swing two ways. Hermosa is not only a gateway to the Black Hills, but also to South Dakota’s wide-open spaces.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on December 14, 2020 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

A Town Every 10 Miles

By Bernie Hunhoff

Trains still stop in McLaughlin, the largest town in Corson County, because the South Dakota Wheat Growers’ grain elevator ships wheat, corn and soybeans by rail.

McLaughlin’s cafe has a tribute to a local trucker who raised an amazing racehorse. The local sheriff, who lives at McIntosh, is famous for feeding 6,000 starving buffalo. The Merkels operate a new hotel in Watauga, pop. 29, just east of a tiny restaurant with brands burned on the walls.

South Dakota might have too many small towns, but which one would you close? Each has its own character and characters, and the 90-mile stretch of Highway 12 through Corson County — where there is or was a town every 8 or 10 miles — is classic.

“If it wouldn’t have been for the railroad, there wouldn’t be any towns,” says Ed Schock, a county commissioner who lives in McLaughlin, where he often helps his wife Sharon at the city library.”The steam engines needed to be filled with water every 10 miles or so, so that’s why we have so many little towns.”

Today, a dozen trains a day still string their way across a route that was created in 1909 and 1910, hugging the North Dakota/South Dakota border on the western half of Corson County. The steel rails parallel Highway 12 and pass through old towns planned by the railroaders.

McIntosh, the county seat, is named for two brothers who helped build the tracks. But most of the town names have roots in the region’s Native American heritage; in the Lakota language, Mahto (today a ghost town) means bear and Watauga means foaming water. Two-thirds of the county’s 4,100 residents are members of the Standing Rock Reservation, where many families trace their lineage to the great Sitting Bull who was killed there in 1890.

The towns of Walker and Morristown were named for cattle kings. McLaughlin got its name from a powerful Indian agent who was instrumental in developing the region. Geography was behind the naming of Keldron (someone’s spelling of cauldron) because a circle of hills and rounded buttes resembling a massive kettle surround the little village.

Corson County’s spacious grass prairies are beautifully punctuated by gentle buttes and hills shaped by glaciers a mere 20,000 or so years ago. They include Twin Buttes, Clay Butte, Hump Butte and Mud Butte. Black Horse Butte near the Grand River derives its name from a wild black stallion that led a band of mares before settlers arrived. Skull Butte, south of Morristown near the Moreau River, was the site of a bloody battle between the Sioux and the Crow; according to legend, 10 skulls rested on the white sandstone for years after the fight.

“Driving over this rolling countryside has reminded many travelers of floating over an ocean of grass,” wrote Hermosa author Linda Hasselstrom in her travel book, Roadside History of South Dakota. “The region’s buttes stand like lighthouses. Occasionally the highway drops abruptly into a valley with a stream, green grass and scampering wildlife … towns and homes seem unimportant in this place of sky touching earth.”

Yet there are towns and homes and people well spaced in a county that, geographically, is South Dakota’s fifth largest. The people are as varied and interesting as the buttes and river valleys.

Terri Baumeister (right) and her daughter, Megan, live in McIntosh, where citizens often enjoy Sunday morning brunches in the new City Hall. Baumeister, like many rural people, wears several hats: she is a deputy sheriff and the city finance officer.

Keith Gall, sheriff for 25 years, has the easy-natured disposition of a Chamber of Commerce executive despite a host of challenges over the past few years. He and three deputies patrol the 2,500-square-mile county. They write three warning tickets for every actual traffic ticket (statistics like that are kept in a book in the courthouse hallway). They deal with everything from deer-car collisions to pet problems and a meth crisis.”Our problems were 95 percent alcohol related up to a few years ago and now it’s 90 percent drug related,” he says.

A few years ago, Sheriff Gall garnered national headlines when he and his deputies led an effort to feed 6,000 starving buffalo on the big Wilder ranch near McLaughlin.”We spent $60,000 on hay just the first week,” he recalls. He took charge of the animals for nearly three months, and saved most of them.

Another year someone abandoned 14 Chihuahuas. The lawmen spent days trying to trap the little dogs so Pets & Stuff in nearby Mobridge could find homes for them.”I’ve been bitten several times,” said Sheriff Gall, still smiling.

His good nature was sorely tested in 2006 when a young Texan named Dwight Crigger came to town with a grain combining crew and stayed to work as the Corson County Weed and Pest Supervisor. Crigger and the sheriff became friends when the Texan joined the volunteer fire department and ambulance service and became active in the community of McIntosh.

The sheriff found it odd when a county shop building burned down in late 2005, and he was greatly distressed when the county’s historic wood-frame courthouse went up in flames in April 2006. Suspicions arose when Crigger’s whereabouts became an issue, and after a 46-day investigation, the sheriff had to arrest his young friend for arson.

Fire, the enemy of many small towns, also destroyed the town’s city hall in 2010 and a popular bar and restaurant in 2014. But both the city hall and courthouse have been rebuilt. Motorists driving Highway 12 on a Sunday morning can get a taste of local flavor by stopping at the McIntosh City Hall, where school groups or community clubs almost always host a breakfast and lunch to raise funds for some local project.

Schock, the county commissioner and local historian, says Corson County has other interesting places for adventurous visitors to explore. He recommends an old church at Kenel with an unusual pulpit carved of local cottonwood. Sitting Bull’s home site, where he was killed in 1890, lies west of McLaughlin and the great chief’s grave is on the eastern edge of the county overlooking the Missouri River. The Lakota holy man was initially buried near Fort Yates, North Dakota. Relatives felt the burial site was not properly tended and tried legal means to return the remains to South Dakota. When all else failed, a group of Mobridge civic leaders and tribal members sneaked into North Dakota on a dark and snowy night in 1953. They dug up the rotted wood coffin, collected the bones and reburied them at the present location. Then they added 20 tons of concrete atop a new vault to discourage North Dakotans from planning a retaliatory raid.

Schock says the towns of McLaughlin and McIntosh once were bitter rivals, but today’s sparse population seems to have ameliorated the competition.”If you aren’t agriculture-minded, you don’t have much of a chance to make a living here today,” he says.”And it’s tough if you are in agriculture, too.”

Brenda Carroll reopened a cafe in Watauga that had housed a museum famous for a collection of cowboy memorabilia.

A once-fierce rivalry between the McLaughlin High School Midgets and the McIntosh Tigers has diminished, and now the Midgets have succumbed to political correctness. The moniker dated to 1916 when nearby Wakpala had a tall basketball team and McLaughlin had some”smaller Roosian boys,” as the legend goes. The editor of the local paper referred to his team as the Midgets and it stuck until last year, when the local school board bent to pressure from the Little People of America to find a new mascot. They settled on the Mustangs.

McLaughlin never won a basketball championship, but Ed Walker says it had one of the state’s top swimming teams for decades. Walker, a McLaughlin native who came home to teach and ended up as mayor for 25 years, helped lead an effort to build an indoor/outdoor pool that was the envy of towns throughout the region.”Our little town of 600 competed against Sioux Falls and Rapid City,” he says.”We had some good swimmers.”

Walker says the town also became one of the first to bury all of its electrical lines. That happened after he spearheaded an effort to sever McLaughlin’s ties with a big utility and organize the city’s own municipal electric department.”It took us six votes to get that done. They called us the city of elections, but we got it passed. Then we found it was cheaper to go underground than overhead, so we were the first to do that and we lowered the rates to boot.”

Today Walker and his wife, Sharon, live in a farmhouse standing between Highway 12 and the railroad tracks.”I grew up here and we watched the trains go through day and night,” Sharon says.”In the hard times the bums would come and ask Mom for a sandwich or an apple. Dad gave the railroad a 99-year lease to expand the track on our property because it was good for McLaughlin. There were a lot of good railroad jobs in the early years.”

Her family, the Howes, and many others located their farms near the railroad tracks because the engineers were willing to stop and load livestock onto the cars.”Then the farmers could ride for free with the cattle to Sioux City or Chicago,” Sharon recalls.

Though railroad jobs are rare today, and trains hardly slow as they pass through the towns, new developments still surprise people along the old highway and tracks. At Watauga, farmers Gary and Eleanor Merkel built a new hotel in the town of two dozen people. Guests at their spacious Dakota Countryside Inn can enjoy breakfast and coffee in the kitchen, play a game of billiards and enjoy a hunting-lodge atmosphere. Just down the highway, Brenda Carroll has re-opened a tiny landmark cafe that was closed for four years. Her diners enjoy rodeo pictures, brands burned on the walls and a $5.50 steak.

Nine miles west of Watauga is another stop, Morristown, with a much larger restaurant known as Fast Eddie’s. A big American flag hangs on the west wall and, of course, local ranchers’ brands are burned on a wood wall near the door.

If today we had the opportunity to plan towns along Highway 12 and the railroad tracks, we might decide that one would be enough. But, like the people inhabiting them, each has its own West River charm. Which one would you not want?

This story is revised from the July/August 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on August 19, 2019 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Entertainers of Milbank

By Rich Jensen and Bernie Hunhoff

Linda Junker Buri (left) and Bridget Jensen are enjoying a revitalized Main Street in Milbank.

Milbank long ago distinguished itself with baseball, cheese, granite and a big-winged flour mill. But why stop there?

Now the Grant County town’s old shopping district has blossomed in an age when retailers nationwide are closing their doors. It’s a pleasant surprise to everyone, akin to discovering that your grandfather has some special and useful talent; who knows where it might lead but it sure feels good today.

The retailing renaissance is happening within a three-block downtown district, sandwiched on the east by a shady, old residential district and several historic churches. The 80-foot tall stainless steel milk tanks of Valley Queen Cheese are just west of Main Street. To the south stand the stately Grant County Courthouse and a towering statue of a Civil War soldier.

Other than that old bronze soldier, few people have a better perspective on Milbank’s downtown resurgence than Linda Junker Buri, who started a women’s clothing store called Linda’s in 1975 when malls were the rage. She credits the turn-around to architecture, travelers on Highway 212, visitors to nearby Big Stone Lake and hometown marketing. Once a customer comes in the door, there’s still the matter of giving them what they want.”People want service, service, service. So you must know your customers’ needs,” she says.

Buri also believes fresh attention to the city’s old architecture is making a difference. She credits that in large part to Mark Leddy, a local businessman who has overseen the restoration of several business buildings.”He has a real vision for bringing the buildings back to their original design and appearance.”

Milbank’s downtown area features a Mexican restaurant, a movie theater, a coffee shop and eatery, a cheese shop with antique dairy displays and cow bells, a furniture shop specializing in creative repurposing, a design studio with a vintage radio booth for local podcasts, a clothing store that plans local photo shoots and a book store that throws birthday parties and”book-tastings.” Main Street is as entertaining as it’s ever been.

Years ago, a big sign hung over the street with the words”You’ll Like Milbank.” It was taken down for some reason and is now stored in the basement of the cheese shop. Local business owners think it might be appropriate to rehang it soon because the city of 3,500 seems ready to deliver on the slogan’s promise.

Milbank has a history of standing apart, beginning in 1880 when it was founded as a railroad stop. Within months, the new town went to war with Big Stone City over the coveted title of county seat. After skirmishes that included shotguns, pitchforks and lawyers, Milbank won and built an impressive three-story courthouse in 1915 that has been beautifully maintained for a century.

A flour mill with four big blades, built in 1884 by an Englishman named Henry Holland, has become the town’s symbol. The city also has the distinction of being the birthplace of American Legion baseball, which began at a state Legion convention in Milbank when members voted to sponsor a national tournament. Today more than 80,000 youth play Legion ball, and half of the players in the Major Leagues are alums.

Milbank’s biggest food adventure came in 1929 when two Swiss-born Wisconsin cheese makers came to town and started a plant that now employs more than 220 people and buys milk from dairy farmers throughout the region.

The 1920s also brought the development of quarries, where granite deposits — some thought to be 15 miles deep — lie west of town. Mining the ancient deposits remains a multi-million dollar mainstay of the local economy.

So who knows where today’s Main Street renaissance will lead? Nobody could have imagined that the cheese factory, the quarries or the flour mill would be around in the 21st century. Can a new style of entertainment retail (some call it retail-tainment) also grow into something big?

Milbank storeowners are as intrigued as anyone with their role as entrepreneurial contrarians to national trends.”My husband and I have a lot of conversations about Amazon and online sellers,” notes Amy Thue, co-proprietor with her sister, Sara, of a books and gifts store called Whimsy.”It seems that people once wanted two-day shipping, and then they wanted overnight shipping. Now the pace is so fast that they don’t want to wait at all. They want it now,” she says. That means heading to the nearest store.

“I can’t say I ever imagined being in retail on Main Street,” Thue says.”You are doing odds and ends and somewhere along the way it all comes together. So here we are, with our own little piece of Main Street.”

Here are some of the interesting people and places in today’s Milbank.

THE CHEESEMAKERS

Kerry Fish (left) and Stephanie Pillatzki teach old-time cheese-making.

Grant and Brookings counties have more dairy cows than anywhere else in South Dakota because Wisconsin cheesemaker Alfred Gonzenbach drove through town in October of 1928 on his way to Montana, where he and his partner Alfred Nef hoped to find a site for a new plant.

Learning of his intentions, Milbank leaders gave Gonzenbach a tour of the town and the nearby dairy farms. They offered a deal on an empty brick water plant, and Gonzenbach never bothered to go west to Montana. By the following March they were doing business as Valley Queen Cheese Factory in Milbank. Today, Gonzenbach and Nef descendants, along with 270 employees, produce 140 million pounds of cheese a year. Nearly all their milk comes from dairy farms within 60 miles of town.

Most of the cheese is sold in 700-pound blocks to other food companies. Valley Queen has long sold family-size blocks to local people at the main office but the receptionist sometimes became too busy selling cheese to answer the phones, so the company has now opened a retail store called The Cheese Shop, adding to the momentum of Milbank’s Main Street resurgence.

“The Nefs and Gonzenbachs want to maintain the Swiss heritage and the local traditions,” says Kerry Fish, who manages the store. Swiss cowbells, antique cheese-making memorabilia and photos from the factory’s pioneer days are displayed in the store, but it isn’t all about Valley Queen. They also sell candies, pretzels and other products made by other South Dakota companies — even cheeses made by a competitor in the little town of Dimock.

A BEDROCK INDUSTRY

Workers have been mining granite from Grant County for over 100 years. The reddish brown stone crystallized more than 2 billion years ago.

I’m at Dakota Granite, standing at the bottom of a 180-foot deep quarry. They take the stone out in 3-by-6-foot slabs called loaves, lifting them with quarter-inch steel cables banded by rings encrusted with diamonds.

Once on the surface, the loaves are sliced by giant circular saws, some with blades more than 11 feet in diameter. Forty-foot long polishing machines run around the clock.

Computerization has arrived at the quarry but some tasks are better done by hand. Artisans work with hammers and chisels to shape the stone. Pat Raffety, the plant manager and part-time mayor of nearby Milbank, says his craftsmen spend two years or more mastering the skills.

Most of Dakota Granite’s products are used for countertops and memorial stones, but granite from the area has also been used on the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C., the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York and Toyota’s Tokyo offices. It also forms the first floor of the state capitol in Pierre.

— Rich Jensen

NOW AND THEN

Did you ever see a”sandwich board” store sign made from a baby crib? That’s just one of many novelties at Milbank’s Now and Then Store.”I hate to see furniture taken to the landfill,” laments the creative proprietor Carol Geisinger.”I cringe when I hear the word ëdump.’ If something has already lasted 50 or 60 years or more, it’s probably sturdy enough to be around another 50 or 60 years if you can just find a new purpose for it.”

Themed parties are business as usual for Sara Snaza (left) and Amy Thue.

WHIMSY ON MAIN

Want a better Milbank? Then build it yourself. That was the message of Jason Roberts, a national advocate of urban development, when he visited Grant County a few years ago. Amy Thue and Sara Snaza, sisters and both former school librarians, took it literally and started Whimsy, a fun-filled shop that sells books, toys, crafts, gifts and home dÈcor. They organize kids’ themed birthday parties for busy moms, and book readings for children. They started Whimsy in another location before buying an old jewelry shop (safe and all) for $35,000; their husbands helped them remodel it into a stylish store that exemplifies Milbank’s embracement of retail-tainment.

URBAN THREADS

Lindsey Keller taught first graders and ran her clothing store, Urban Threads, part-time before taking the business plunge and opening full-time in an historic building on Main Street. She features women’s clothing and some lines for men and youth. As one of many female entrepreneurs in town, she’s quick to note that the spouses are often full partners. Her farmer-husband can run the cash register and the tagging gun.”Tyler even went to market with me in Chicago and he picked out some of the men’s shirts,” she says.”I could not do this without him.”

Craig and Sarah Weinberg bring creativity, energy and three children (Edward, Calvin and Penelope) to Main Street.

VPD STUDIO

Sarah Weinberg and her husband, Craig, came to Grant County from Oregon to care for her aging grandparents.”We never thought it would be a permanent situation,” says Craig.”But the community was fantastic. We got a house in town and then we got a building on Main Street.” He runs a photography and design studio, and she holds art classes. Both have immersed themselves in local culture. Sarah started a”Milbank Rocks” program, helping kids paint rocks and hide them as surprises around town. Craig worked with local high school students to produce a video titled”Why Milbank: Telling the Stories of Our Communities.” He also built a sound studio for podcasting and is now encouraging college students to talk of their relationships with their hometown. He and a friend also produce The David Allen Show, a series of political podcasts.

MUSCLE CARS

Not all of Milbank’s interesting businesses are downtown. Jim Gesswein’s car dealership is on Highway 15, on the south edge of the city. He’s been selling cars since the early 1960s, and in the last 25 years he’s become a collector and seller of America’s favorite”muscle cars,” family-size sports cars with big V-8 engines. Gesswein likes vehicles from the ’60s and ’70s, and he likes the people who like such cars even more.”I sold a ’64 Imperial to a couple from Sweden who came out, picked it up and drove it to the Black Hills before they went back. I still hear from them every couple weeks.”

— Rich Jensen

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Dusty Trail

By John Andrews

Bear Butte is a nearly constant presence while traveling the Fort Meade National Backcountry Byway, a 5-mile winding gravel path in Meade County.

South Dakota has thousands of miles of gravel roads, but perhaps none so packed with history and nature as the stretch known as the Fort Meade National Backcountry Byway.

The 5 miles of winding gravel known locally as the Old Stone Road begins at Exit 34 along Interstate 90 and ends at the grounds of old Fort Meade, a military post on the outskirts of Sturgis and in the shadow of Bear Butte that remained active from 1878 to 1944. Army engineers had called for a fort on the outskirts of the Hills for 20 years because they feared an Indian war would likely break out in the prairies below Bear Butte. But the government didn’t act until gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874. White settlers flooded into the Black Hills even though the land was set aside exclusively for Indian tribes under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The army needed to protect gold seekers and the settlements quickly popping up around the Hills, and so Fort Meade grew near the convergence of heavily traveled trails leading from Bismarck, Pierre and Sidney, Nebraska.

The remains of the Seventh Cavalry reorganized at Fort Meade following its devastating defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Over the years, the fort was also home to the 4th Cavalry, the African-American 25th Infantry (whose men were called Buffalo Soldiers) and earned a place in American history for helping turn”The Star-Spangled Banner” into the national anthem.

All of those stories are chronicled in the Fort Meade Museum, which was our reward after spending an afternoon exploring the backcountry byway. We started our journey at Exit 34. The beginning of the byway is clearly marked for motorists heading west from Rapid City, but you’ll know you’ve come to the right spot when you see the meticulous rows of gleaming white headstones within the Black Hills National Cemetery. More than 21,000 veterans of every conflict since World War I and their family members have been buried there since the cemetery opened in 1948.

On the opposite side of the interstate stands the quaint VFW Memorial Chapel. The tiny church isn’t officially part of the national cemetery, but families occasionally stop for a quiet moment of reflection. Inside, there are four short pews and an altar with Bibles and hymnals.

Curley Grimes was buried where he fell.

Though the byway is steeped in military history, the next two stops on the route allow visitors to explore nature and the earlier lawless days of the Black Hills. Just up the road from the chapel is a well-worn walking path that leads to the grave of William”Curley” Grimes, one of the most notorious criminals to work the Hills. Grimes was suspected of robbing a post office and had been arrested by lawmen W.H. Llewellyn and Boone May in February of 1880. As they were transporting him to jail in Deadwood, Grimes reportedly asked to have his handcuffs removed because the winter chill was freezing his hands. The lawmen obliged, but then Grimes spurred his horse northward. Llewellyn and May opened fire and Grimes fell dead, just over the boundary of the Fort Meade military reservation.

Llewellyn and May rode to Fort Meade and reported the killing to its commander, Col. Samuel Sturgis. He sent a detail to bury Grimes where he had fallen. Today a single tree stands over Grimes’ gravestone, which lists his death date as 1879, even though most accounts place his murder in early 1880. The stone is inscribed with a haunting verse:”buried with his head down / just as he fell / the whispering pines / will never tell.”

Llewellyn and May were tried for Grimes’ murder in August of 1880, but they were acquitted. And Grimes has obviously not been forgotten. On the day we visited, two fresh bouquets of flowers, one white and the other purple, decorated his final resting place.

Across the road from the Grimes gravesite stood a lone tent along Alkali Creek, a bubbling brook that begins about 3 miles to the southwest and flows 30 miles east through Meade County before emptying into the Belle Fourche River. A nature trail begins at the creek and winds just more than half a mile through the lush vegetation of the creek valley, stands of tall ponderosa pines and mixed-grass prairie.

A marker along the Alkali Creek Trail.

The Alkali Creek Nature Trail is a favorite for families because there are few steep inclines and kids enjoy finding the 10 numbered posts found along the path. Each post corresponds to a story about the flora and fauna found in the area. Parents can grab a brochure at the trailhead and read at each post. We had no problem finding the first three posts in a heavily wooded portion of the trail. But at post 3 the path passed through a gate and entered a vast prairie of chest-high grasses. The path became narrower, almost like an off-road biking trail. We trained our eyes on the ground, ever vigilant for rattlesnakes, and before we knew it we had arrived at post 6.

Further up the creek lies an expanse of land where several hundred Ute Indians camped in the fall of 1906. The Utes were upset at their treatment on the Uintah Reservation in Utah. Much of their land had been allotted and portions of their reservation were opened to white settlement. They decided to live somewhere without such white encroachment and chose the sparsely settled Northern Plains.

About 400 of them left Utah and traveled through Colorado, Wyoming and into Montana before being intercepted by federal troops, including a detachment from Fort Meade. They brought the Utes to Belle Fourche, where a future meeting was arranged with President Theodore Roosevelt in which they could air their grievances. After that, the Utes were taken to a campsite along Alkali Creek, about 2 miles from Fort Meade.

A count in January 1907 showed 371 Utes living in the Alkali Creek camp. Their meeting with President Roosevelt also took place that month. The two sides agreed to create a new home for the Utes on land leased on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

The Utes began their arduous 150-mile march in June. About a month later, they arrived at their new home near the confluence of Thunder Butte Creek and the Moreau River. Unfortunately the arrangement did not last long. As part of the agreement, President Roosevelt and the Secretary of the Interior required members of the tribe to seek jobs and send their children to boarding schools, which they did not want to do. False reports of a planned uprising led to the gathering of several hundred army troops on the Cheyenne River Reservation. The Utes remained at their Thunder Butte campsite through the winter, but in the summer of 1908 they returned to Utah.

The byway includes other wide-open spaces. In one such sea of grass, ruts made by wagons traversing the oft-travelled trail between Sidney, Nebraska and Deadwood are still visible about 40 yards from the road. A little farther, visitors see the rocky remains of two cavalry jumps. And in a little valley below the road stands a long stone building constructed in 1940 to replace a wooden structure that housed targets used for practice. Terracing in front of the building marks the firing lines.

The remains of an old cavalry jump. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

The Old Fort Meade Cemetery, which also lies along the byway, is one of the only post cemeteries that remain intact. A folder inside a small visitors shelter contains a list of all 235 soldiers, wives, children and others buried there since 1878. They include two Medal of Honor winners and several soldiers from the African-American 25th Infantry.

One of the men, Corporal Ross Hallon, died as a result of vigilante justice in August of 1885. Hallon was reportedly seeing and abusing a woman from Sturgis named Minnie Lewis. She sought treatment from Dr. H.P. Lynch and told him about the source of her injuries. Lynch encouraged her to report the violent Hallon to his commanders at Fort Meade. Lewis told Hallon she would do just that if the beatings continued. Hallon, upset by what he saw as interference from the doctor, went to Lynch’s drugstore in Sturgis and shot him.

Hallon was arrested for Lynch’s murder the next day and was jailed in Sturgis. A couple of nights later, a mob of armed men broke Hallon out of jail. He was hanging from a tree west of town the next morning.

The byway passes the site of Camp Fechner, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp during the 1930s, just before it meets Highway 34 and the grounds of old Fort Meade. Though the U.S. Army deactivated Fort Meade in 1944, it remains a training institute for the 196th regiment of the South Dakota National Guard and the site of a Veterans Administration hospital. Drive the perimeter of the old parade grounds and you’ll see hospital staff walking from building to building and soldiers driving around the compound.

Many of Fort Meade’s original buildings and houses remain, including the post headquarters, which now houses the Old Fort Meade Museum. Inside we found John Tesnow, a minister and volunteer museum director.”We preserve 66 years of military history here,” he says soon after we walk in the door, in what sounds like a standard introduction for tourists. But after a few minutes of conversation, he talks about some of the fort’s more intriguing stories, including the suspicious court martial of Major Marcus Reno.

Reno was the senior surviving officer of the Seventh Cavalry after its defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His actions during the battle raised questions, but a formal inquiry in Chicago in 1879 found no grounds for court martial and offered no criticisms of his battle decisions.

Still, his reputation was clouded when he relocated to Fort Meade. The commanding officer, Colonel Samuel Sturgis, had lost his son at the Little Bighorn and clearly laid part of the blame on Reno. During his time at Fort Meade, Reno was known as a gambler and heavy drinker. Soon, he faced a court martial for public drunkenness and fighting with another officer.

Fort Meade is known for its role in elevating Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner.” The museum houses many artifacts of importance to the fort’s history and the West.

While under arrest, Reno was allowed to walk the grounds for exercise. One night, as he passed the Sturgis home, he noticed the commander’s daughter, Ella, sitting by a window. Reno had become infatuated with Ella Sturgis, and could not resist the temptation to approach the house and tap on the window. He frightened both Ella and her mother, who summoned Col. Sturgis from his bedroom. Reno fled, but Sturgis had the charge of window peeping added to the list of grievances against Reno. He was convicted and dismissed from the service on April 1, 1880.

Reno spent the next nine years trying to clear his name, but he died in 1889. In 1967, a military review board re-examined the case and cleared Reno of any wrongdoing. His remains were disinterred from a cemetery in Washington, D.C. and buried at the Custer National Cemetery on the Little Bighorn battlefield.”I think he got the shaft,” Tesnow tells us.

A more uplifting legacy of Fort Meade is how”The Star-Spangled Banner” became our national anthem. In 1892, post commander Caleb Carlton sought a song that could be played at parades and concerts and at the end of every day. His wife suggested Francis Scott Key’s song, which became part of daily life at Fort Meade.

Gov. Charles Sheldon took note of the custom when he visited Fort Meade in the mid-1890s. Carlton later wrote that not long after that, he spoke to Secretary of War Daniel Lamont, who ordered the song played during retreat at every Army post in the country. Congress officially declared it the national anthem in 1931.

There’s much more to see at the Fort Meade Museum, including Poker Alice’s cavalry hat (Ã¬I’m skeptical,” Tesnow says), an original Seventh Cavalry safe that appeared in the film Dances with Wolves and other artifacts from the soldiers and their families who lived here across nearly seven decades.

The Fort Meade Backcountry Byway is maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. Its National Backcountry Byways system includes more than 2,900 miles of trails in 11 Western states, but the 5-mile stretch of gravel between I-90 and Highway 34 is the only such byway in South Dakota.

Several years ago, the idea was raised to turn the byway into a bypass route between those major roads, allowing for more traffic and increased speeds. But the BLM nixed that plan, arguing that the road itself is an important part of the historic and natural integrity of the area. Perhaps there’s no better way to explore the land of cowboys, Indians, gold hunters and soldiers than on a modern-day dusty trail.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on March 28, 2019 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

A Ghost Town Called Spokane

By David Ford

Editor’s Note: The mining town of Spokane, 16 miles northeast of Custer, was founded in 1890. The surrounding hills produced gold, silver, copper, zinc, mica and graphite. Mining proved profitable into the 1920s, but unfortunately Spokane met the same fate as did dozens of other Black Hills mining camps. By 1940 it was largely abandoned. Only remnants of its heyday still exist. Writer David Ford visited in the summer of 1990 and wrote this account for our May/June 1991 issue. It is illustrated with images by Spearfish photographer John Mitchell, captured in early 2019.

“It is said that there is a place on the small hill overlooking the old Spokane Mine, where on a moonlit night with the wind brushing softly through the pine trees, you can hear the miners clinging faintly to each other. As you listen to the wind, you can hear in it the faint sound of the miners working with picks hitting rock and see in the ever changing shadows, the dim outline of feathered Indians, fortune hunters, hard rock miners, loggers, rangers, and farmers driving their oxen, all passing by.”

— From Rushmore’s Golden Valleys, by Marthe Linde

I wasn’t exactly sure where Spokane was. I just knew it was there. Four of us had been hiking up the overgrown road in the draw for about 20 minutes, give or take a few. You lose track of time in the Black Hills. It just doesn’t seem as important as it does other places.

The first signs we found were scattered treasures of civilization: garbage, an oil filter, barrel hoops, and evaporated milk cans. The trash population increased as we climbed a rise on the left side of the road.

“Ssh, hear that?” I asked. Voices. Nothing you could understand, just muffled voices. Mixed with the voices was a sort of clanging — the kind of clanging one might hear in a factory or in a mill … a mill that should have been quiet for a quarter of a century, at least.

I was the tour guide for our quartet of explorers, Judy, Ron, Marietta, and myself. I had hoped to have Spokane to ourselves so we could explore to our hearts’ delight. It sounded as if we weren’t the first here today. I figured I would find, just around a curve or over a hill, a bus load of picture-taking tourists from Japan or Boy Scouts from Chicago. Those guys seemed to be following us everywhere we went since we arrived in the Black Hills. But when we reached the top of the rise, all human noises stopped. There was no one there. No bus, nothing. The sounds of nature were still there — the birds and the rustling of the leaves in the trees. Nothing else. What else could there have been?

The first mine feature to be seen was the top of the headframe. The large stamp mill came into view beside the house and machine shop. Just think what it was like with the huge cables running from the hoist house to the headframe, lowering men down to work the mine and bringing up buckets of ore laced with gold, zinc, lead, and silver. On the north wall of the mill we found graffiti left by previous explorers. Now it is a sad part of Spokane history.

We followed a road that led through the mine buildings and down around the hill. It was a beautiful day and the hike was refreshing along the shaded lane. We rounded a last curve and a lush green meadow opened before us. It seemed to have been waiting for years for us to take in, or maybe to take us in. The road we were on circled the meadow so we circled with it. Foundations were now appearing on either side of the road. A basement here, what looks like a vault or cold cellar there. At one comer of the meadow another small road trailed off up the hill. It was littered with all types of garbage — fenders, stoves, and the ever-present evaporated milk cans.

At the head of the meadow, a two story house and garage stood guard over what we now realized had to be the townsite of Spokane. The house was deserted now but for how long has it been that way? It had a timeless quality about it. Further up from the house was a one-room schoolhouse. The steps were gone, as were the windows and the floor. Just like in a lot of other small towns, this school must have been used as a church. There seemed to be an energy about this building. Did it come from the pupils at recess or a teacher writing today’s lesson on the blackboard? Maybe it was left over from some fire-and-brimstone preacher or the weeping of a wife and family who had lost a husband and father in some mine disaster.

As we left the schoolhouse I realized we were now speaking quietly and with reverence, a sort of new respect for the area we visited. This quietness continued as we took the road back to the stamp mill, the road that was the avenue to and from the mine for so many years. Every morning they marched up that road to work and every evening, home to their families. That was the key. We hadn’t just left foundations and piles of garbage. We had been to see the homes of a community. A town that had once been filled with laughter and tears. A town that had felt the excitement of a gold strike and the fear of an Indian attack. The ruins hadn’t changed but we had. Even though we had seen no one, I now knew we weren’t alone. We had never been alone. We were surrounded by the spirits, the life forces of folks who had walked here before us. Indians, who had been here first, miners and their wives, farmers, shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, undertakers, children and their teachers, and maybe now our little group. I could feel the ghosts of another time, not necessarily a better time, but different. It was a taste of life I hope to experience just a little of through my travels, my photographs, and now my writing.

The voices were always there, I just didn’t know how to hear them. Now I know.

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Traveling Pine Ridge Today

By Bernie Hunhoff

Horseback riding remains a common form of transportation on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Photo by Jerry Grier.

Nowhere in South Dakota is history more raw and alive as on the Pine Ridge. Black Elk’s log cabin still stands on a hillside near Manderson. Lakota artists bring their paintings and carvings to the Red Cloud Heritage Center, a missionary outpost of old red brick architecture built by Jesuits a dozen years before the great massacre of 1890.

The Wounded Knee gravesite is perhaps the most solemn place in the American West; beneath the cemetery hill, Emerson Elk and his extended family market their crafts and try to explain that opening and never-ending chapter in South Dakota’s history.

Yet, despite the abundance of culture and history on Pine Ridge, many South Dakotans are hesitant to visit. The news media seldom reports on the reservation unless there’s a murder, suicide, crime, government corruption, racial issue or poverty study. So is it safe to travel the region?

As executive director of the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce for the last 14 years, Ivan Sorbel has answered that question many times.”Wherever you go in the world, you need to use common sense,” he says.”You wouldn’t go to Chicago and walk down dark alleys at night or drive around in the projects. But if you are mindful of where you’re at, you’ll find that people are the same everywhere.”

Sorbel likes to tell the story of an elderly couple who visited the Badlands and inquired about driving south through the Pine Ridge.”Someone advised them that they should not do so because it’s not safe,” he says.”This guy and his wife decided to go anyway. They came through Interior, and a tire blew out on their car. So they were stuck along the road when a Native American fellow pulled up in his pickup truck. He helped them change their tire and got them on their way, and when they got to the Chamber of Commerce they couldn’t wait to tell me what happened.”

Belva Matthews runs a busy coffee shop called Higher Ground in Pine Ridge.

Sorbel says stories like that happen throughout rural America, and that’s his point; the reservation is no different.”We’re rural America, a place where country folks are more apt to stop and help you than city folks.” He also explains that all of the modern safeguards are available on the Pine Ridge: tribal police, EMTs, cell phone service, park rangers and search and rescue teams.

You can’t really know South Dakota without exploring the Pine Ridge. Encompassing 11,000 square miles, it is roughly the same size as the state of Connecticut. Landscapes are so pristine that it takes little effort to imagine the past. So much remains unchanged, the prairie or the architecture or the people, from the 19th century when the Lakota suffered a major tear in their universe.

Black Elk was injured in the massacre. Many years later, he wrote that he”could still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. A peoples’ dream ended there. It was a beautiful dream.”

By the numbers, the Pine Ridge remains a distressed place 125 years later, arguably the poorest in America. Unemployment is 80 percent. Most people earn only a few thousand dollars a year. Cancer, suicide, alcoholism and heart disease rates are well above the U.S. average. Diabetes and tuberculosis are eight times higher.

More than a third of the Pine Ridge’s 40,000 people are under age 35, partly because the youth stay home but also because the average life expectancy is just 48 for men and 52 for women. Seventy percent of teens drop out of school.

“We are a very depressed people,” acknowledges Brad Piper, 25, who works in a Pine Ridge coffee shop called Higher Ground.”We don’t always have enough to look forward to. We go to Rapid City on weekends because it feels livelier, we feel younger there. But when we are back here we feel old.”

Brad Piper and his wife, Stephanie, help run Higher Ground with Piper’s mother, Belva Matthews.

However, cultural isolation hasn’t resulted in an exodus of youth. The median age of the 40,000 residents of the Pine Ridge is just 20.6 years. Some of the youth are determined to challenge the cycles of poverty.”It will take a lot of hard work to change things but we’re trying,” Piper says. He and his wife, Stephanie, cleaned out a storage garage near the coffee shop and started a fitness center where young people lift weights and exercise.”We have some high school athletes with so much talent, but not everybody has learned a work ethic to keep going off-season. Once the season is done, they’re done. We’re trying to show them how to make it a lifestyle.”

Piper is lucky to have an entrepreneurial mentor — his mother, Belva Matthews, who started Higher Ground a dozen years ago because she wanted her hometown to have a gathering place like shops she saw as a student in St. Paul, Minn.

“She’s a whirlwind,” says Piper.”She constantly keeps this place running. It’s a place where people feel safe, one place where they can forget they’re in Pine Ridge.”

He is intrigued with customers who come from afar because they’ve read or heard about the Lakota and their history.”We get German people who like to trade coins, and a man from Switzerland was here who grew up in Italy. People from China come. You hardly feel isolated, at least not here at the coffee shop.”

That’s true wherever a traveler is likely to go, whether it’s Big Bat’s Convenience store, just down the highway from Higher Ground, or Red Cloud Heritage Center, west of town. Drive another half-hour west and you’ll arrive at the tribe’s Prairie Winds Casino, where gamblers play blackjack or sit at one of the 250 glittering slot machines. The casino is open 24 hours a day, and now has a restaurant and hotel — all providing paying jobs in a county where the average per capita income is less than $7,000.

Highway 18, which runs east-west along the southern edge of the Pine Ridge, is often the only road that visitors travel. That’s unfortunate because the prettiest scenery and much of the history — and the future — of the reservation lies north of Highway 18 along back roads and small towns.

Here are 10 travel tips gleaned from traveling the reservation. It’s far from an inclusive list, so explore for yourself.

Jerilyn Elk and three generations of the Elk family operate a gift shop below the cemetery at Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee Cemetery

There is no museum or visitor’s center; only the mass grave of the massacre victims high on a lonely hill. However, on summer days the Elk family operates an arts and crafts bazaar below the hill by Highway 27. They make and sell dream catchers, tomahawks, beaded bracelets and necklaces — and they patiently tell and retell the history to interested visitors. They also share clippings, photos and papers of the massacre, including a four-page listing of the men, women and children who were killed at the massacre.

Yellow Bear Canyon

Pristine prairie, forest and river valley scenes are everywhere on the Pine Ridge, but Yellow Bear Canyon between the towns of Allen and Kyle is a favorite of many locals and travelers. Trout can be caught at Yellow Bear Dam, along with largemouth bass.

Sheep Mountain Table

Badlands National Park lies on the north edge of the Pine Ridge. The White River Visitor’s Center offers information and exhibits on the ancient landscape. Sheep Mountain Table is a little-known gem. Motorists can drive to the top of Sheep Mountain on a dirt path that was carved by homesteader Mary Hynes and her children in the 1920s. Atop the table, you’ll be as far removed from civilization as you’re likely to get in the Dakotas.

Singing Horse Trading Post

Roswitha”Rosie” Freier, a native of Frankfurt, Germany, runs a bed & breakfast and gift shop. She also sells beads and other art supplies to local artists, and features their work in the store alongside $5 slingshots from China.”When we tell people where they’re made, they usually put them back,” she laughs. Freier also gives trail rides on her herd of gentle horses, and arranges stargazing excursions, hikes and tours.

Roswitha “Rosie” Freier, a native of Germany, offers horseback riding and other tours at Singing Horse Trading Post near the Badlands.

Fishing the Dams

Local anglers catch catfish in the White River, but the best Pine Ridge fishing is found at four dams built for irrigation in the 1930s. Irrigation didn’t work in the arid soil, but the dams have become popular recreation areas. The tribe stocks the waters with largemouth bass. The four include Kyle Dam, Yellow Bear Dam, White Clay Dam (south of Pine Ridge) and Oglala Dam, the largest and the only one with walleye. Tribal fishing licenses are required, but they are affordable; a five-day family pass is $20.

White River Visitors Center

The National Park Service exhibits and videos tell the history of the Badlands with a Lakota perspective, including the story of The Stronghold, a nearby mountain table where Native Americans fled after the 1890 massacre. An artist-in-residence program is held throughout the summer. Located on Highway 27 in the north-central region of the reservation.

Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce

Cultural displays, animal exhibits, art, a veterans’ tribute and children’s section have all been developed in the Chamber building, which is 7 miles west of Kyle along Highway 2.

Chuck O’Rourke and his family keep watch over Black Elk’s cabin near Manderson.

Oglala Lakota College

Tribal colleges have led major changes in reservations across South Dakota. OLC, located across the street from the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce, welcomes visitors to a cultural center with an audio-video tour of the Lakota in the 19th century, ending with the events that culminated at Wounded Knee in December of 1890.

Red Cloud Heritage Center

The highly respected Native American arts gallery includes a historic collection and gift shop. Housed in a 19th century Jesuit mission, it is part of a lively complex that also includes a Catholic church, Red Cloud Cemetery and Red Cloud School, where students have an 88 percent graduation rate and usually head for college or other educational training.

Hunting the Prairie

Pheasants have expanded their range into the Pine Ridge country. Other game includes mule and whitetail deer, antelope, buffalo, elk, turkey and various varmints. Tribal licenses and guides are required for all hunts.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine, which also included a series of stories commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117. For more information on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, contact the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce near Kyle at (605) 455-2685.

Category: travel

The Nemo Life

Serenity in the Pocket

Box Elder: Under the Radar

Lemmon: The Cowboy Capital

The Beauty That is Hermosa

A Town Every 10 Miles

The Entertainers of Milbank

THE CHEESEMAKERS

A BEDROCK INDUSTRY

NOW AND THEN

WHIMSY ON MAIN

URBAN THREADS

VPD STUDIO

MUSCLE CARS

The Dusty Trail

A Ghost Town Called Spokane

Traveling Pine Ridge Today

Wounded Knee Cemetery

Yellow Bear Canyon

Sheep Mountain Table

Singing Horse Trading Post

Fishing the Dams

White River Visitors Center

Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce

Oglala Lakota College

Red Cloud Heritage Center

Hunting the Prairie

Thank you for your response. ✨