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An Original River Town

By Chloe Kenzy

John McNeill, pictured with his wife Susan, has written many songs about the Missouri River.

The ever-growing delta of the great Missouri borders Springfield on the south, and a state prison housing 1,200 men sits on the north side of town. But you can’t pigeonhole Springfield as a river town or a prison town. It’s more complicated than that. Ask John McNeill, a singer-preacher-teacher who moved there with his wife, Susan, in 1976.

The McNeills settled in Springfield because it had an excellent library on the college campus, good water and not a single stoplight. They’re known to country music fans in southeast South Dakota as regular performers at Gayville Hall, where they do tribute concerts to the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. John also serves as pastor and resident musician for the Springfield Community Bible Church, and he taught for years at the prison and the college that preceded it.

John also writes music, including more than 100 songs inspired by the life and hard times of the river valley.”We have a unique history that’s different from other farm communities,” he says.”This is an old river town that had many hopes, most of which never materialized quite the way the people wanted. Springfield was promised many things that ended up in places more prominent and politically connected.”

Springfield was established along a chalkstone bluff on the Missouri River in 1870. Town leaders hoped to land the state’s university, but it went to Vermillion. They fought for the prison, but it was built in Sioux Falls.

However, there were victories. A small teacher’s college was established in 1881, and the campus became the pride of Bon Homme County. Construction of Gavins Point Dam, 28 miles downriver, in the 1950s gave the little college town a lakefront and boosted the population over 1,000 in the 1960s. But dark clouds were circling; civic leaders were constantly worried that penny-pinching state officials might close the college, and finally it happened in 1984 when the governor and legislators decided South Dakotans needed less classroom space and more prison cells.

Losing the school was gut wrenching, and about that same time it became obvious that the new lake was becoming shallower due to sediment flowing in from the Nebraska Sandhills via the Niobrara River.

The town lost some families when the college closed, but most stayed and found ways to adapt. A number of today’s 800 un-incarcerated residents — like McNeill — transitioned from jobs at the college to work at the prison. In fact the institution is named for the late Mike Durfee, a heavyweight wrestling champ and football star for Southern State of Springfield in the 1960s and a popular coach and teacher at the college in the 1970s who became a prison administrator.

Greg and Sandy Stockholm at the helm of a big sailboat dry-docked in downtown Springfield.

Midway between the prison and the river, in a small downtown business district that shrank even more when the college closed, Greg Stockholm has been working on a 72-foot sailboat for the last 14 years. In the beginning, the frame of the boat was upside down alongside the body shop and looked like a shiny beached whale.

Stockholm continued to repair automobiles and sold his motorcycle, cars and an airplane to help pay for the project. Even though he found most of the metal at salvage prices, it has still been costly in time and money. The ship, yet to be named, will weigh 30 tons and hoist 3,500 square feet of sails.

Townspeople and visitors often stop by for a look. Stockholm’s wife, Sandy, maintains a website (sailingdakota.com) so interested observers can monitor the ship’s progress.”Doubting Thomases” are slowly converting to believers, especially after Greg turned the boat on its bottom in 2007 and it began to look like a vessel.”People don’t think I’m so crazy anymore,” he says.”I like to remind them that amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.” He hopes to finish by 2018.

The boat will sleep 12 in six cabins and feature space for a vegetable garden, solar panels and a 175-horsepower John Deere combine engine. Most importantly, it will be sturdy enough to withstand storms at sea.

The Stockholms might eventually use the boat for a charter business but first they hope to sail around the world, starting somewhere below the dam at Yankton. They may suffer a tinge of homesickness if they sail past the White Cliffs of Dover in England, geographic cousins to the chalkstone bluffs bordering the Missouri River where Greg learned to sail as a youth. Such bluffs, formed over eons by calcified mineral deposits from sea plankton, are found only along the Missouri River in South Dakota, Dover and a few other spots in the entire world.

Pioneers used Dakota chalkstone as a building stone a century ago. Some homes and churches built of the stone are standing today, but it never became popular because it was considered too porous. Still, the soft texture makes it the perfect stone for Ron Livingston, a white-bearded artist in overalls who has a studio not far from the sailboat.

Ron Livingston creates art from the chalkstone of the Missouri River bluffs.

Livingston has lived in Springfield for 28 years. He awakens before sunrise to begin carving images in the chalk. He prefers fish designs but he aims to please, so he also does other prairie wildlife and even entertains requests. The son of a Yankton auto body repairman, he has never taken an art class and is uncomfortable being called an artist — but he’s not the type to argue and there’s no better word for his popular creations.

Livingston quit drinking a year ago and the change has affected his output.”My creative juices don’t work as good anymore but my work sure has gotten better,” he jokes. The bluffs’ chalk rock seems inexhaustible, but the Corps of Engineers forbids him from collecting it along the lake’s 90-mile shoreline. Instead, he salvages material from the ruins of old buildings.

Between Stockholm’s sailboat and Livingston’s studio sits a building with a nondescript exterior that serves as the Schneider family’s private winery. Dallas Schneider stores his grandfather’s 1937 Nash Lafayette hunting car in the front of the building, and in the rear he ferments fruits grown nearby.

Schneider came to Springfield 30 years ago to work at the state prison. He bought land on the east end of town along the river and soon began clearing brush and planting trees. Today his well-tended orchard includes peaches, apples, plums, apricots, gooseberries, rhubarb, raspberries, cherries, pears and grapes. It’s a hobby, but in good years the winery produces enough bottles for family and friends and extra fruit that he shares with Springfield’s popular senior nutrition program.

Schneider, acknowledging the plethora of interesting projects going on around Springfield, thinks that the town,”is off the beaten path and so quiet and peaceful that you can get things done.” That would explain artist Cheryl Halsey’s bursts of creativity. She and her husband, Jim, live and work on the family farm north of Springfield on a gravel road. Giant cottonwoods surround a big farmhouse that became even larger when an old country church was moved to the farm and attached. Now the house has a cathedral ceiling, stained glass and ample room to display Cheryl’s art.

She calls her space Blue Heron Studio, fitting because the heron navigates air, earth and water. Likewise, Halsey works in various mediums and methods that include jewelry, painted cylinders, sculpture, masks and paper. Halsey also enjoys making intricate jewelry from leather with unique designs. She had the opportunity to use leather from the singer Madonna’s world tour when she helped her son, Travis, who is a costume designer in Chicago.

Giant cottonwood trees shade Cheryl Halsey’s farmyard north of Springfield.

Like McNeill, Schneider and many other Springfield area residents, Halsey was employed in the prison for several years, working with inmates to develop their artistic skills. Now she does stints in schools as an artist-in-residence, helping students expand their imaginations.

The town has other unexpected finds. Workers at a factory called Rush-Co design and manufacture fabric buildings, boat canopies and other custom covers. Another small business, Mr. Golf Cart, refurbishes gas and electric carts. And perhaps coolest of all, Dennis DeBoer makes a career of building kits of model submarines and spaceships like the USS Enterprise. He works from an inconspicuous shop in a residential district.

McNeill, the songwriter, thinks the town’s historic”ups and downs” might explain the originality and creative spirit of its citizenry.”Springfield never got anything easy and it didn’t get anything without some sweat and heartbreak,” he says.”Some of that probably provides grist for the artists’ mill. Cheryl Halsey can paint it and Ron Livingston can sculpt it and people like me can put it to poetry and song.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Howes Corner

By Bernie Hunhoff

Bob Hansen (left) has run the till at Howes Corner for 38 years.

“I’ve never worked a day in my life,” claims Bob Hansen, proprietor along with his wife, Lavonne, of Howes Corner Store for the past 38 years.”I like everything about this store. I love the ranch life and all my customers. I like everything I do.”

Still, all good things end. The Hansens sold the Meade County store this summer to Dawn Simons, a longtime employee, and her husband, Russell. Hansen says he’ll miss the customers, morning cribbage games with neighbors over coffee and the camaraderie that goes with running the only public establishment for many miles in any direction.

Hansen’s good humor has survived intact.”He never forgets a story,” complains Lavonne with a good-natured grin. For example, he likes to tell about the only time he was rude. He says a lady customer abhorred the idea of visiting his store’s modern, clean outhouse on a particularly warm summer’s day. She was traveling north on Highway 73 to Highway 212. While cooling her ample self by opening the beverage cooler doors, she asked Hansen what it would take for her to get to 212.

“Go on a diet,” he quipped.

Such has been the atmosphere at Howes Corner. Everyone was welcome, and at risk of some good-natured ribbing.

Interesting characters come and go at the intersection. The Longbrake family, famous in rodeo circles, lives nearby along the Cheyenne River. Native American residents of the little town of Bridger also stop for supplies, including folks like Wally Little Moon, a middle-aged long distance runner who just returned from a marathon on the East Coast. State Representative Dean Wink ranches just north of the store. Currently the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Wink’s one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers but he’s been as vulnerable to Hansen’s joking as the stranger who was looking for 212.

The store was built near the juncture of Meade, Ziebach, Haakon and Pennington counties in 1931 by Ed McQuirk. According to local legend, he won federal approval for a post office in 1940 after suggesting it might be named after W.W. Howes, a South Dakota politician who was serving as First Assistant Postmaster General under President Franklin Roosevelt.

A series of people ran the store until 1977, when the Hansens moved there and stayed — swelling the population to four thanks to their small children, Angela and Todd. Lavonne sold stamps for 13 cents that first year, and she’s been postmistress of zip code 57798 ever since, filling 50 post office boxes in the store and almost as many for rural delivery.

Though Howes’ post office was one of the last to be established in South Dakota, it has outlasted many in larger places because of a regulation that post offices cannot be closed if they are more than 25 miles from the next facility. Howes Corner is barely that far east of White Owl and south of Faith, which is located along Highway 212. But don’t ask how to get there if you can’t take a joke.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Bad Roads, Good Roads

By Bernie Hunhoff

Near the town of Kidder, Marshall County.

What a great idea. We’d cross South Dakota on gravel roads to see what we could find off the pavement. Maybe we could offer some tips to readers interested in a similar adventure?

A quick perusal of our Rand McNally Atlas & Gazetteer showed that it would be impossible to make such a trip east and west. West River has lots of dirt roads but it also has more curves and dead ends than a Black Hills cave. Going north and south from Nebraska to North Dakota across East River looked passable, however, with some careful zigzagging to avoid paved roads, lakes and East River dead ends.

The most feasible route, according to the Atlas & Gazetteer, would be from Bon Homme County to Marshall County. So off I went on a spring day with the atlas, a cooler of water, a camera and an 8-year-old grandson, Steven, for company.

We left at 8 a.m. on a glorious spring morning, the air freshened by a heavy rain that had fallen overnight. But what’s a little mud? We had a four-wheel-drive Jeep. Meadowlarks were singing and big black bulls were grazing belly-deep in brome grass. Steven and I could see Nebraska across the Missouri River. North we went on 424th Avenue.

The first official road in Dakota Territory was a dirt trail that ran from Yankton, the territorial capitol, to Smutty Bear’s Camp in Charles Mix County. Smutty Bear was one of the last holdouts on the 1858 treaty that allowed white settlement west of the Big Sioux River. As the story goes, Washington officials threatened to throw the old chief in the Atlantic Ocean if he wouldn’t sign; another version is that he was told he’d have to walk home from Washington.

The thought of walking home didn’t faze Smutty Bear even though there weren’t many roads west of the Mississippi. America was then more interested in rail development. Dakota Territory established a railroad commission in 1885, but a highway commission wasn’t formed for another 28 years.

Tyranny Smart enjoys an evening walk along 424th Avenue, near the North Dakota border.

However, decades before the invention of the automobile, politicians showed some vision for transportation. In 1866, Congress passed a law that allowed states and territories to claim public rights of way on lands in the West that were being opened to homesteading. The 1870 Dakota territorial legislature in Yankton acted on that authorization and declared that 66-foot strips dividing sections (square miles) should be established for the public.

When cars became available in the early 20th century, section line roads became a travel grid. In 1905, 10 years before he became governor and a champion of road building, Peter Norbeck bought a new Cadillac and drove it from Fort Pierre to the Black Hills on dirt roads.

State Representative Joseph Parmley of Ipswich introduced a bill two years later to make road construction the duty of county commissioners. His proposal was ridiculed and then defeated by fellow lawmakers. Undeterred, Parmley returned home and thought even bigger — he spearheaded development of The Yellowstone Trail, a dirt road that guided travelers from Minnesota’s Twin Cities to Yellowstone National Park.

The Yellowstone Trail became today’s Highway 12. Further south, business leaders promoted an east-west trail from Sioux Falls to Rapid City as the Custer Battlefield Highway. State workers smoothed the ruts with horse drawn drags in the 1920s. Gravel was added in 1928 and when concrete was laid in 1931 a”pavement dance” was held at Pumpkin Center near Wall Lake. That road is now Highway 16.

Thanks to the foresight of Norbeck, Parmley and many other pro-road politicians, South Dakota now has 83,609 miles of roads and 70 percent of them — 49,046 miles to be exact — are gravel. That doesn’t even count the 3,195 miles of dirt roads.

Most of South Dakota’s gravel roads never had a fancy name or a hard surface. However, they were numbered as streets and avenues 30 years ago in a statewide rural addressing program that has made life easier for hunters and fishermen exploring the back country, and for 911 dispatchers unacquainted with the red barns and lone trees that acted as landmarks prior to the green signs that now stand at every intersection. Rural streets run east and west in South Dakota while avenues are north and south.

Roger Holtzmann, South Dakota Magazine‘s resident humorist, lives on a gravel intersection west of Yankton. He recently wrote that the addresses make it much easier to give directions to relatives:”If you needed to tell someone how to get to your farm you’d tell them, ‘Go to Wyoming, and when you’re 127 miles away from North Dakota, hang a right. Then go 391 miles east and you can’t miss us, a white house with green trim. If you hit Minnesota, you’ve gone too far.'”

The rural numbering system gave gravel roads very urbane names, but in many cases the street numbers might also be the traffic count for the year. Steven and I only met a dozen vehicles (10 pickups, one car and one big tractor) during our entire trip on gravel. So we were free to enjoy the sights. The first thing we noticed was a proliferation of red-winged blackbirds. Perched on cattails and fence posts, the chattering birds dominate every pond and swamp. Meadowlarks were singing from the street signs and an occasional rooster pheasant peeked his head from the wet grass, perhaps hoping to dry his feathers on the gravel.

Presbyterian Cemetery, Bon Homme County.

We also saw several modern-day reminders of southeast South Dakota’s diverse ethnic heritage. Our starting point was 312th Street and Colony Road, which leads to the Bon Homme Colony that was organized in 1874 and became the mother of all Hutterite colonies in North America. A few miles north of the colony, we came upon a Presbyterian Cemetery established by Czech settlers in 1878. A church they built of chalk rock was moved to nearby Tyndall in 1953, but a waist-high stone border surrounding the large cemetery is well preserved, as are its few hundred gravestones.

Our first challenge, I thought, might be to find a gravel crossing on the James River, but that’s not a problem. We approached the river on 423rd Avenue, and did have to detour east on a mile of”oil” on State Highway 44 (we knew we’d need to make a few east-west hard-surface corrections). We resumed the trip north on 424th Avenue and soon dipped into the river valley, where a concrete bridge provides a sturdy crossing. A large flock of swallows performed acrobatics over the muddy river. Steven had a fishing pole, so he made a few casts with a spinner. But the muddy water didn’t look like a northern fishery, so he quickly agreed to reel it in and we headed north.

At the intersection of 424th Avenue and 269th Street, we saw one tall gravestone in the corner of a cornfield. What a lonely place to be buried, especially compared to the well-tended Bohemian cemetery we’d just seen. The gray stone belongs to Abraham Bechthold and it includes this notation: Geboren 1880, Gestorben 1903. He was just 23 when he died.

“Why was he buried all alone?” wondered Steven.

History is everywhere along South Dakota’s gravel roads, but much of it is buried by graves and grass. Very visible, however is the changing face of agriculture. In the eight counties we traversed — Bon Homme, Hutchinson, Hanson, Miner, Kingsbury, Clark, Day and Marshall — the human exodus is harder to ignore than the chattering blackbirds.

All that remains of many family homesteads are a few rows of cedars or elms that served as a shelterbelt. Churches and schools are shuttered or gone. Even entire small towns have disappeared. Still, every acre of the land is tilled and seeded unless it’s too steep, wet or rocky for a tractor and planter. South Dakota farmers have remained true to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of a good man,”that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.” Nary an acre is wasted whether it’s along gravel or a concrete thoroughfare.

Lone grave, Hanson County.

Ironically, as the population dwindled the need for good roads increased. East River South Dakota is the western edge of America’s grain belt. The surviving farmers feed the world, and their machinery is bigger than some of the houses in which their grandparents lived.

County officials thought they were modernizing when they asphalted more than 13,000 miles of gravel roads in the 1950s and 1960s during the heyday of family farming. But today’s tractors can weigh up to 30 or 40 tons, and a semi-truck loaded with corn might be nearly as much. At that size, vehicles can wreak havoc on hard surface asphalt roads. It’s cheaper to maintain gravel, so many counties are grinding up asphalt roads and returning them to gravel. In some cases, they just let the asphalt crumble and go to weeds, giving some old roadways an apocalyptic appearance.

Dick Howard, a longtime road guru in Pierre, says there are differing attitudes about roads even within South Dakota.”The country roads still serve an important function in farming country, especially in those areas where we have ag development, dairies, grain transfer facilities and the big feedlots,” Howard says.”They need roads to move the products in and out. But when you go west of the river, where there are mainly cattle ranches, they don’t necessarily want roads every mile where people are running around in their pastures and have too much access.”

Howard’s theory is plainly illustrated in the Atlas & Gazetteer. Roadways in counties west of the river look like the crooked crease lines on your palm, while east of the Missouri the road system is a perfect grid, straight as a checkerboard.

Howard, now a mustached and affable lobbyist, has advocated for roads all his life. He served as the Secretary of Transportation for three governors and worked for the Association of County Commissioners and the Association of Towns and Townships. As Yogi Berra might have said, local government in South Dakota is 90 percent roads and 50 percent taxes. Howard has been on the front line of that paradox.

Everybody wants to live on a hard-surface road, quips Howard, but most of us want to pay for gravel.

A long trip on gravel demonstrates why rural residents — and their once-happy-to-oblige county officials — preferred asphalt or concrete over gravel. We started our journey slipping and sliding on muddy roads. After a few hours of sloshing our way, one could hardly tell that the Jeep was red. Despite the scarcity of vehicles, there are ruts on some of the poorer roads reminiscent of the wagon wheel tracks still visible in some native pastures. Ruts can outlast people and farms.

By afternoon, the hot sun dried the gravel and soon we were kicking up a trail of dust that seeped in the rear door of the Jeep. We zipped up the camera bag and covered it with a jacket to keep dust off the lenses.

A man could starve on gravel, so we diverted onto an oil road to eat at Carthage, a little town that gained attention for the welcome it gave to another traveler of the back roads. Chris McCandless abandoned his comfortable Virginia roots to hoof and hitchhike his way across the American West before stumbling onto Carthage, where he temporarily found work, friends and perhaps even a home. However, he soon resumed his wanderings and came to a bad end in Alaska. Moose hunters found his body in the Denali wilderness in August of 1992. McCandless’ story, including his brief respite in Carthage, was documented in the book Into the Wild. Denali’s rugged, remote and unforgiving nature seems further-than-the-moon away from Carthage, where a teenaged waitress laughed at Steven’s antics as he played hide-and-seek by the cash register.

Carthage also has a second link to literary history; it’s located at a place once known as the Bouchie Settlement, where author Laura Ingalls Wilder first taught school. She wrote about the experiences in her book Those Happy Golden Years. Heading north, it’s easy to imagine Wilder’s love for the region; even today the landscape is rich with tiny lakes and grassy fields. This is now lake country, a lowlands geography shaped 10,000 years ago by the last of the glaciers.

North of Carthage, 5 miles into Kingsbury County, we came upon Esmond, possibly the best-marked ghost town in the West. The town was platted on a treeless prairie of grass. Early residents debated whether to call it Sana or Esmond but the latter won. They constructed dozens of impressive buildings, but only a few remain standing. Small green signs with brief histories of the site mark the others.

Esmond, Kingsbury County.

Esmond is no longer treeless. The lots and yards where men and women gardened and painted and gossiped in the hot sun are now a shady forest. Lawns that had been mowed for generations have grown wild except at the United Methodist Church, a pretty white-frame chapel that still hosts Sunday services.

The church door was unlocked so Steven and I took a peek. He played a few reverent notes on the piano and signed the guest book. Can it be a ghost town if people still go to church there, he asked?

The glacial lakes have been a blessing to South Dakotans. They are rife with walleye and northerns. Beautiful homes circle the waters, and an important recreation industry has developed that includes not just hunting and fishing but boating, bird watching, hiking, camping and countless other activities.

The gravel roads of northeast South Dakota are vital for visitors who come to enjoy the outdoors, and there are some excellent routes. Driving on 425th Avenue west of Willow Lake on a dry, sunny summer afternoon is paradise. You wouldn’t mind if the road stretched all the way to Alaska.

But once you’re west of Willow Lake you might just as well throw away your Atlas & Gazetteer. Even a cell phone with Mapquest and Google apps will be of little help. The atlas shows that 428th Avenue should be passable, but within a mile we ran into water and a dead end. We reversed course and tried 427th Avenue, but the Froke/Waldo Waterfowl Production Area (WPA) shown in the atlas has grown. Another dead end.

And so we tried 425th Avenue and made some progress. But the road grid is now a maze. Soon you long for a road that will just take you a few miles and then provide an east or west outlet to another. Is that so much to ask?

423rd Avenue brought us to the western outskirts of Clark, but as soon as we passed the manicured country club we encountered more prairie potholes. We found our way to Crocker, pop. 18, saw water on two sides, and took 422nd, but it ended at another swelled lake.

The glacial lakes put South Dakota”on the atlas” so to speak for geese, mallards and numerous other winged creatures — even the dainty whooping cranes — who migrate across North America every spring and autumn. But the lakes and potholes expanded during a wet period in the 1990s, and that has made it nigh impossible to go any distance on the excellent gravel roads of Clark and Day counties, where the transportation budgets must have a line item for yellow”Dead End” and”No Travel Advised” signs.

North Dakota border, Marshall County.

Our predicament improved somewhat in Marshall County. We made tracks on 421st Avenue before it was interrupted, so we circled to the east because Steven had spotted a town name in the atlas called Spain, south of Britton. He was imagining bullfighters and taco chips, but all we found was a railroad track and a few dilapidated buildings. The ghosts of Esmond should erect some green signs in Spain.

As the sun began to set on our 12-hour trip, we came to an end on 422nd Avenue. We drove through Newark, another tiny hamlet, and came to 100th Street on the North Dakota border where a dirt path and a row of cottonwoods separate the twin states.

Google Maps estimates that the trip from Tyndall to Britton should take four hours. But who would want to drive straight through without stopping to dine, fish, worship, bird watch and enjoy the sights and history of South Dakota’s gravel roads?

Would we recommend such a trip to readers? Steven pointed to a cloud formation in the Marshall County sky as we were closing in on North Dakota. Clearly the clouds formed the letters NO.

Like a lot of things that are less than perfect, our gravel and dirt roads are best enjoyed in smaller doses. Get off the paved roads. But don’t try 212 miles (plus another 100 or so of zigzags) in a day.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Witten: A Town on the 100th Meridian

By Bernie Hunhoff

Seventy people and two goat hers share space in Witten, one of only a few towns that sit exactly on the 100th Meridian.

Disguised between glossy pages of beautiful photographs in Andrew Moore’s book, Dirt Meridian, are harsh themes of survival, loss, emptiness and isolation. Witten is one of a handful of small South Dakota towns with a longitudinal reading of exactly 100 degrees.

Wondering what life is like in a gateway town to the hard country, we traveled to Witten to find the answer. We arrived via S.D. Highway 44 on a late-autumn morning. Main Street was thick with the dust of white 18-wheelers trucking corn and milo to the local grain elevator. Cars were coming and going from a little gray post office. A block away we saw a light in the Village Grocery, so we stepped inside and met Kenny Van Kekerix, the proprietor.

We told him we didn’t expect to find a grocery store in a town of 70 people.”It’s a good thing I’m retired so I can keep it open,” laughed the tall, cheerful man of 75 years. Wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt and overalls, he presided over the cash register with just the proper amount of dignity you hope to see from someone operating the last retail establishment in your town; a blend of business and”old buddy.”

When he’s not working, grocer Kenny Van Kekerix creates wood cutouts of South Dakota and other states.

Van Kekerix and his wife, Sandy — who has a day job at the Holiday Inn in Winner, 16 miles away — stock the old store’s shelves with canned vegetables, frozen pizza, milk, candy, cigarettes and soda.”Enough to keep you alive until you turn the key and drive,” he says.”We used to have cosmetics, but we were dropped. We used to have a seed corn license but it was dropped. There were a lot of franchises we’ve dropped.”

The word ‘dropped’ sums up the town’s history. Witten was created in 1909 when the Rosebud Indian Reservation was opened to homesteaders. But the original town site was dropped a mere 20 years later when the railroad track missed the town by 2 miles. Witten’s pioneer residents showed typical West River resourcefulness by disassembling the town and moving it to the tracks, where it stands today. Only an old bank vault still marks the old site.

The new town was simply called New Witten. A long brick building was constructed on Main Street to house a bank, mercantile and grocery store. That fine building still stands, but only the grocery remains; all the other doors on the building are locked, even though the roof is falling in on the bank.

Thirty years after the town moved, the railroad dropped the tracks from its route. The high school was dropped in 1969, the same year that Van Kekerix came to Witten to work for Larry Bauer, a contractor who started a little factory that made building blocks.”We brought the sand from Gregory, and the concrete from Rapid City and the crushed red rock from a quarry by Spencer,” he says.”They called it Miami Stone because it’s a brand name that came from Miami, Oklahoma.” Buildings constructed with Miami Stone can be found across the Rosebud country. They include the newspaper office and farm cooperative at nearby Winner and the American Legion Hall in Gregory.

But Miami Stone was dropped in 1976, so the Van Kekerixes bought the grocery store. Partners helped for a few years, but soon they dropped away and the Van Kekerixes were the sole owners. Is that opportunity or responsibility? Van Kekerix has been too busy to ponder anything that profound these last 40 years.

He and Sandy have no children –“no more Dutchmen running around” — but they’ve adopted the town, running the only retail store for many miles. Every day is different. Monday brings customers that ran out of milk on Sunday. On Wednesday, a small stack of Winner’s weekly paper, The Advocate, arrives, followed by certain residents who aren’t subscribers. Van Kekerix plans his weekly stocking order on Thursdays and the delivery arrives on a Friday truck.

Doug Best runs a welding and equipment repair shop in Witten with help from his daughter, Naomi.

He might be closed for a doctor or dentist appointment — his own or more likely that of an old veteran who can’t drive himself to Rapid City. His duties as commander of the local Legion and VFW chapters also might infringe on his store hours, but other than that you’re likely to find the Village Grocery open six days a week.

Main Street in Witten is busy during harvest. Dozens of grain trucks come and go, kicking up dust and spooking a pair of Norwegian dwarf goats penned across the street from the big gray steel grain bins.

All of Witten’s eight streets are gravel. They squarely separate several dozen modest houses, a few commercial buildings (leftovers from more prosperous times) and two churches — Baptist and Lutheran.

Cars and pickups converge at the post office on the south side of town. The clerk’s window is only open for two hours in the morning, but the building also doubles as a meeting hall. Fourteen wood chairs face an old desk, the setting for official affairs. Atop an upright piano lies a spiral notebook containing town ordinances that govern gambling houses, indecency, poison control and pets.

Just a block away, LuAnn Klemann raises rabbits, chickens, donkeys and goats on her tiny farm at the edge of town. She likes the quiet pace.”People come by to look at the goats, but nobody bothers anybody here,” she says. That’s a high compliment in any West River town.

Witten might not seem like much of a gateway community to the 100th Meridian if judged solely on its eight dusty streets. But that’s not how you gauge a town surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat, milo, sunflowers, cattle and cowboys.

The post office, the grain elevator and the grocery store would probably have been dropped long ago if not for the ranching community that surrounds the town. And Doug Best’s welding and repair shop would never have started.”We’ve got more cats and dogs than people in town,” says Best, 58, but his customers come from miles around, mostly with farm equipment that needs repairing.

The youngest member of the Witten workforce is Best’s 29-year-old daughter Naomi, who grew up there and lived in Tennessee and California before returning to marry Will Littau, a local rancher. Naomi helped her dad as a child, so welding and wrestling iron wasn’t foreign to her. Their bright, clean shop has a satisfied aura, as best evidenced by the ever-wagging tail of Naomi’s big white Husky named Hatschi.

Best also serves as fire chief to a department of 17 volunteers. Along with extinguishing an occasional grass fire and hoping nothing worse happens, the firemen also host the town’s biggest annual social event — a Third of July barbecue and fireworks display.

Successful small town fundraisers usually have a precise formula. That’s true in Witten, where local ranchers donate”three hogs and a whole beef,” all of which are barbecued by the firemen and served to a hungry crowd of about 500. As many as 1,000 people arrive by the time the fireworks begin, spooking the town’s two herds of goats and all those dogs and cats.

But when the fuse is lit on the last rocket, all but 70 of the people get in their cars and trucks and depart in darkness down Highway 44.”It’s nothing but tail lights all the way to Winner,” laughs Best.

As if a curtain dropped, darkness and quiet reclaims a gateway town to the 100th Meridian.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Winter in Keystone

By Bernie Hunhoff

Officials in Keystone post three-hour parking limits on Winter Street during the busy summer season, but such restrictions are hardly necessary when the weather turns cold.

Tis not the season when you can don petticoats for a picture at Professor Samuel’s Portrait Emporium. Afternoon gunfights at the Red Garter Saloon are done, and nobody roasts prime rib at the Ruby House.

Winter has arrived in Keystone. Life in the busiest tourist town in the West slows to a crawl. The three-hour parking limit seems superfluous on the empty road called Winter Street. Yes, you can almost feel a community-wide sigh of relief as the 327 full-time residents catch their collective breath.

“I do enjoy winters here myself,” says retired tattoo artist Mike Trike, a self-described escapee”from the city of southern California.” He discovered the Black Hills while doing tattoos at the Sturgis Rally, then he”fell in love with this hokey tourist trap and I swore I would someday live here.”

Trike thinks his little mountain town is prettiest in winter.”I take pictures and send them to my friends in the metropolises.” He spends cold winter days working on new designs for his T-shirt shop. On warm afternoons, he might take a bike ride on empty mountain roads — the same roads that lead 2 million tourists in the spring, summer and fall through Keystone on their way to nearby Mount Rushmore. But in the depths of winter, traffic slows to a crawl on Winter Street, and the town focuses on itself. Youth skate on Friday nights at the community center. Adults enjoy a Saturday night dinner and bingo at the senior citizen’s center.

Smoke from wood stoves adds aroma to the chilly morning air. A yellow school bus collects children for a 15-minute ride to school in Hill City. A few locals sip coffee at The Country Store, near an ATM machine and a bulletin board with a notice for a small apartment for $384 and photos of a mountain lion spotted near town. A gas pump has been grandfathered into the wood sidewalk, just outside the store’s front door.

California transplant Mike Trike enjoys the leisurely pace of winter in Keystone. He illustrates T-shirt designs in his shop in the Old Town.

More than two dozen bars and restaurants serve travelers in the summer, but only the oldest is likely to be open in winter. The Halley Store was built in 1895. Halleys and Nelsons have operated it for almost all of the last 120 years. It was a rundown general store when Robert Nelson bought it in 1988. He fixed the foundation and converted it into an antique store. A few years ago, his son Trygve installed a horseshoe-shaped bar and started selling drinks and burgers.

“We’ll serve food anytime anybody wants something,” Nelson says.”If we’re here we’re open.”

Snow sleds hang by Halley’s front door, near a pile of firewood, a chain saw and several shovels. Inside is a raggedy buffalo mount that Nelson bought at auction from the Buffalo Bar in Deadwood.”As the story goes, Buffalo Bill Cody shot the buffalo and donated it to the bar,” he says.”At least that’s what I read.”

Nelson, a lifelong resident of the Black Hills, has dabbled in many trades. He had an antique shop at Piedmont, helped operate a bowling alley at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City, ran a sawmill and taught school. For a time, he and his family toured the country in a VW bus.

Today he’s happy in Keystone, winter and summer.”We don’t have much winter,” he says.”Just a few heavy snowfalls. Usually not much wind. We’re pretty sheltered.”

Though winter brings few tourists, James Anderson still cuts taffy at the Rushmore Mountain Taffy Shop.

Not far from Halley’s, in a neighborhood known as Old Town, is a tourist mine called Big Thunder that has outlasted and possibly out-earned any of the gold, feldspar, quartz and mica mines that operated in the valley more than a century ago. Sandy McLain has been the owner for 23 years.

Big Thunder is really a museum, restaurant and gift shop. McLain’s staff — including Hayward Halo, Rattlesnake Randy and Claim Jumper Chris — also guided 350 would-be miners on panning expeditions last year. She says 40 percent of the gold in local mines was never found, so there’s still plenty. A full day of panning costs just $65.”It’s a day in the boonies with no bathroom. You stand in water and do hard labor,” says McLain, wondering out loud why the tours are such a success.

Winter gives McLain time for such wonderings, and for planning the next season. She says it’s also a chance for the community to focus on its own needs.”In the winter we do community activities that get pushed aside in the summer,” she explains, starting with Holy Terror Days, a September celebration that includes a parade, ugly truck contest and street dance. The first Holy Terror Days was started in 1899 by pioneers who worked the mines. Proceeds from the festivities help families down on their luck.”It helps us pay for peoples’ heating bills if they fall behind — or groceries, medicine or utilities. Many of our people only work six months of the year and then they’re laid off until spring.” At Christmas, Mike Trike dresses like Santa Claus and delivers toys and food baskets to families who might be having a tough year.

The community also hosts a haunted house in October at a big, old white-frame schoolhouse that was built in 1899 atop a hill in Old Town. The school was designed for 300 students because everyone thought the mining boom would last, but enrollment never reached half that number and then dwindled — as did mining — until the doors closed in 1988. Today the Victorian-style school serves as the town museum after the Halloween ghosts and goblins are put away.

Off-season events help fund charitable causes, and McLain says they’re good for community spirit. She hopes they also help the few businesses that do stay open through the winter months like The Rock Shed, another Old Town staple run by Shawn and Gene Kuhnel, a father-son team of lapidaries. They offer travelers everything from a $4,500 fossil fish to stone bookends and petrified wood for $3 a pound. Linda Haverly works at a restaurant on Winter Street in the summer months. In the winter, she helps the Kuhnels at The Rock Shed.

She says the shop’s online trade allows the Kuhnels to keep the doors open. For her, it’s a nice change.”This is my relaxing job. Summers are busy. It is a madhouse with every table full of people and often people waiting in line. This is peaceful.”

Online and wholesale trade also enables The Rushmore Mountain Taffy Shop, one of the town’s signature businesses, to stay open in winter. George Stverak bought the candy factory in 1967, including a quaint 130-year-old taffy cutter that can be seen from the street. Candy maker James Anderson lovingly tends to the machine, lubricating its 50 zerks with vegetable grease just in case any drops on the taffy.”The taffy puller is where you add the color, the flavor and air,” explains Stverak.”If you don’t add air it’s hard as a rock.”

Although the Rushmore Borglum Story is closed, this statue of Abraham Lincoln still receives attention.

The Stveraks, transplants from East River, stay open every day, regardless of the weather, except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. They make special eggnog taffy for the holidays, one of more than 100 flavors they’ve developed. Cinnamon is the all-time favorite.

Near the taffy shop, Dean and LaVeta Giannonatti keep their Black Hills Gifts and Gold shops open as well, largely to keep their staff employed year-around. Their two shops — one on either side of Winter Street — are a special joy to visit in the off-season because the Giannonattis have more time to talk. They know and love West River history. LaVeta was born to a mining family and attended the old school. Dean was a Harding County rancher before they bought the store in 1983. He has collected record racks of elk and deer, including the”King of the Bucks,” a whitetail shot by Francis Fink in Marshall County in 1948 with an 18×13 rack, a state record and one of the largest in North America. He also has a monstrous rattlesnake skin, two fighting rooster pheasants and a record elk rack among a big taxidermy collection that’s displayed on the walls.

On winter Sundays, the Giannonattis bring a TV to the shop so visitors and other Main Street workers can tease one another about NFL football.

Just down Winter Street, the Uhrigs also keep a souvenir shop open. Called The Indians, the store was purchased by Eugene and Lucille Jelliffe in 1970.”It’s the only job I’ve ever had,” says their daughter, Kathy, who now runs it with her husband Bruce Uhrig and their three sons. In winter, the family members clean, inventory and re-stock.

A quarter of their sales comes in July, and 90 percent from May to October, but a few travelers straggle in on winter days unless snow is forecast.”Then the visitors don’t drive, especially if they are not used to mountain driving. But by November we’re ready for a slower pace anyway,” Kathy says.

Further up Winter Street near the Rushmore Borglum Story, someone dresses a statue of Abraham Lincoln in a knit cap and scarf. The sun fades beneath the mountaintops by mid afternoon. Soon the children will be back from classes in Hill City. The taffy shop and the rock shop will close for the day, and the town that hardly sleeps in summer will say an early goodnight.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Clocks, Cars & Tractors

By Bernie Hunhoff

The origin of Jack Vondra’s jewelry store on Bridgewater’s main street can be traced to a shop started in 1884 by A.G. Gullander, an immigrant watchmaker from Sweden.

Visit Bridgewater’s Main Street for a glimpse of South Dakota small town salesmanship from 50 years ago.

Jack Vondra has been repairing clocks and selling diamonds in the same jewelry store since 1947. He still tends to his display window, even though the foot traffic in this McCook County town of 500 has dwindled to almost nothing.

A block south, Steve Sievers sits on a stool in the farm store where his father, Abe, once sold horse-drawn plows. The odor of oil and grease is rich in the air, a welcoming scent to all who love old tractors, and that’s the only kind of people who still step through the door.

Just west of Sievers’, Ed Meyer and his son, Craig, tend to the cars of Bridgewater. They lost the official Ford dealership years ago, but a white 1967 Mustang gleams in the showroom, surrounded by Ford memorabilia.

Kevin Stahl, 36, just built a new building on Main Street for his high-tech company Native Seed Testing (NST). Stahl thought about locating his company on the family farm near town,”but there’s something about being on Main Street,” he says. Especially when the neighbors are local legends.

“Jack is right out of a Norman Rockwell painting,” says Stahl.”Up until a couple of years ago, he showed up every day in a three-piece suit with a vest and a tie. I wondered ever since I was a kid what he worked on in his shop.”

Jack Vondra came to Bridgewater in 1947 to apprentice at a jewelry and clock repair store that dates back to 1880, the year the town was founded.”I got $25 a week and a place to sleep upstairs above the shop,” he says.

He married a local girl and soon bought the store. He had opportunities to leave Bridgewater for bigger cities.”But my kids were able to walk to school. I was able to walk to work. I never had to lock the door. And I always liked the people.”

Vondra, now 89, can recite from memory where all the town’s long-gone grocers, bankers, barbers and hoteliers were located. It’s a talent he shares with Eddy Meyer, the ex-Ford dealer who has made a hobby of researching Bridgewater’s business history. He says rise and fall of business tells the story of the town.

Ford Motor Company closed the Bridgewater franchise years ago, but Ed Meyer can still find you a new car.

“The train came through in the 1880s and that’s what got the town started,” Meyer says.”Three or four trains loaded with people would stop here, and they all had three or four passenger cars on each train and the town was full of restaurants and hotels. Then Highway 16 came right through here and we had seven gas stations at one time.” Bridgewater also had three major car dealerships. Meyer’s dad landed the Ford franchise in 1945.

Meyer says the community also had some interesting personalities, including Henry Beebe, the proprietor of a general store who was a personal friend of Mark Twain. Beebe is a character in several of Twain’s novels. Sparky Anderson, the legendary pro baseball manager, was born in Bridgewater in 1934, the same year Highway 16 was paved and promoted as the Custer Battlefield Highway. Sparky’s father played amateur baseball and tried to feed five children in the Great Depression by painting houses but in 1942 he left for greener pastures in California.

The railroad and Highway 16 helped Bridgewater develop, but the town missed a third wave, the construction of Interstate 90, by seven miles.”One by one the gas stations and the stores started dropping off,” Meyer said.”Those of us who are still here, we eke out a living but here I am nearly 70 and I’m still working, so you don’t get rich.”

Steve Sievers agrees that times are tough.”The interstate highway system sealed the fate of a lot of small towns,” he says.

Ten years before the Meyers were selling Fords, the Sievers were pedaling Allis Chalmers tractors to farmers.”My dad started here in 1935,” says Sievers from his favorite perch on a stool by the counter. Allis Chalmers quit making its orange tractors in 1985 and closed for good in 1998, but the company logo still hangs above Sievers’ front door.

“What I’m here for is to take care of the people who took care of me for a long while,” he says, meaning nobody should have to scrap their old tractor for lack of a carburetor kit. A mechanic works on an old Allis Chalmers in the rear of the store, while Sievers tends to the front office and the phone.

Kevin Stahl started a new business in Bridgewater and marked the occasion by going next door to buy three timeless mementoes.

That spirit of caring for old customers and neighbors may be the thread to the jeweler, the Ford dealer and the tractor guy. Meyer still sells an occasional new car to longtime customers. He and his son, Craig, act as middlemen to dealers in the region.

Jack Vondra says he stays open partly because no one else is repairing old clocks, and also because he likes to help his 24 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren when they need rings.”That’s a non-profit situation for me, but that’s very special.”

Vondra, Sievers and Meyer are three very different people, but they share a penchant for salesmanship. No family business survives decades and generations without that skill. Sievers and Meyer are typical South Dakota”good old boys,” eager to joke about politics, sports or farming. Both were on the town council, and Sievers’ dad, Abe, was a state legislator and a friend of George McGovern, who sometimes ate at their table.

Vondra seems quieter, and more urbane. Think of the hours he spent with fingers and eyes focused on the intricate innards of old clocks. He has run a one-man store, except for help from his daughters at Christmas season when they and the town were younger.

But don’t mistake Vondra’s quiet nature. He is a salesman, and he sizes up every visitor.”I think I can get you a diamond as big as your shoe if you want,” he tells this writer.”I’ve developed credit ratings from New York to Los Angeles.”

He pulls two padded trays from beneath the counter.”You should take a ring home,” he suggests.”Keep yourself out of the doghouse.”

Kevin Stahl, the street’s newest and youngest businessman, says he’s always been intrigued by Vondra’s Jewelry.”When I was in fifth grade, that’s where we went to buy little gold chains to give to our girl friends. I think I bought two or three from him.”

Just before Stahl celebrated the grand opening of his seed testing business, he walked over to the jewelry store and bought three old pocket watches. Then he listened for an hour as Vondra explained the history of the watches.

“I have them on display here in the office and I will eventually give them to my kids. I just wanted a memory of our open house date, and I wanted it to be something old from down the street.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Old Highway 16

By Bernie Hunhoff

A stretch of Old Highway 16 east of the Black Hills is now Highway 14/16.

Can you buy the idea that a highway is a community? A long and narrow one-street town that connects places and people, good and bad happenings and a crazy conglomeration of dogs, deer and duck ponds? If a road is a community, then imagine South Dakota’s U.S. Highway 16 in its heyday. Gutzon Borglum was traveling 16 while carving Mount Rushmore. Korczak Ziolkowski helped him for a time before eyeing his own Crazy Horse carving just down the same road. Dorothy and Ted Hustead were nailing wood signs to fence posts, hoping to attract motorists to their Wall drug store. George McGovern was a shy student at Mitchell High School until he discovered a passion for debate, and motored up and down the highway attending tournaments. Sparky Anderson, the Hall of Fame baseball manager, was learning balls and strikes in Bridgewater, where businessmen promoted their stretch of 16 as Cornhusker Highway in honor of the local baseball league.

Russ Madison, one of the founders of modern-day rodeo, trailed wild broncs and bulls up and down 16 when it was dirt and gravel. Earl Brockelsby, a Black Hills kid with a fascination for snakes and reptiles, was pleased to discover that Highway 16 travelers would pull off the road and pay admission to see his collection. Alex Johnson, a railroader from Chicago, came to Rapid City to build a grand hotel for passersby; showing no modesty, he named it The Alex Johnson.

All that and a thousand more lesser-known stories along an east-west hodgepodge of dirt and gravel roads linked not only in South Dakota but across five states. The 1,600-mile journey was configured from Detroit to Yellowstone National Park, crossing Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Wyoming. Highway 16 was a central segment of several routes to the Black Hills and Yellowstone Park called the Black and Yellow Trail. An association formed in Huron in 1919 to promote the corridors, which also included parts of Highways 14 and 20 in South Dakota. Wood fence posts were painted black and yellow every mile or so to reassure tourists that they were still on track.

At first, Highway 16 was nothing more than a dirt trail. Model T wheels dug deep ruts during wet periods. In West River country, perhaps a car or two would pass down the road every hour on summer days — far fewer at night and in winter. At New Underwood, the road veered to either side of a giant cottonwood tree. Further east at Wicksville, W.H. Wolfenberger attracted travelers to his little store by leashing a pet coyote in the front yard. The store shelves were sparsely stocked with candy and staples, but rumors were that Wolfenberger sold moonshine under the counter.

Highway 16 bordered the north edge of Jack Brainard’s family ranch in eastern Pennington County.”We called it the Black and Yellow Trail, and before that they called it the Custer Battlefield Highway,” he says. It was also called”Fourteen” locally, because Highways 16 and 14 merged through much of West River.

Brainard parlayed his Dakota ranch childhood into a distinguished career as a horseman. Now 94 and living in Whitesboro, Texas, he still remembers a particular day when he saw a cloud of dust on the road to Wasta.”Russ Madison was driving his horses to Wasta for a rodeo, and running in the front was the first palomino I ever saw and I thought it was the prettiest horse I ever saw.”

A dinosaur looms over today’s Interstate 90 near wall. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

The travel industry soon followed in the path of that palomino. Henry Ford’s new Model A debuted in 1928; it and other car models offered more comfortable and dependable transportation. Mount Rushmore was emerging on the mountain west of Rapid City as a new attraction, along with a buffalo herd at Custer State Park. Soon a wave of hotels, restaurants, gas stations and automobile shops were built to serve the motorists.

The federal government helped gravel the route, providing jobs through the Works Progress Administration in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Workers often hauled the gravel by horse and wagon, and emptied the loads by shovel and muscle. One wagonload graveled about three feet of the roadbed.

The 400-mile stretch of Highway 16 in South Dakota connected Sioux Falls and Rapid City, the state’s two largest cities, along with several dozen smaller towns. Highway 16’s original route connected the main streets of most communities. In the 1940s and 1950s, bypasses were built on the edges of the towns, creating a second wave of motel and gas station construction.

A third wave came in the 1970s when Interstate 90 was constructed in a near-parallel route to Highway 16 across South Dakota, but even further from the local communities. Once again, new service stations, hotels, motels, rock shops and eateries were constructed.

Some travelers bemoan Interstate 90 as monotonous and sterile. Every ditch is mowed and every fence is straight. Highway beauty is in the eye of the beholder behind the wheel. Those who see boredom in the standardization of the federal four-lane — and who aren’t in a hurry to cross the state in 6 hours or less — will enjoy a nostalgic journey down the original 16.

Old trucks at Quinn.

Phil and JoAnn Stark have observed life in”the slow lane” for most of the last 30 years at Cottonwood, where they ran a bar and store called JoAnn’s Trading Post.”People think nobody lives here,” says Phil,”but Philip and Quinn and Wall are all one big community.” And in the summer, motorcyclists and other travelers who like to venture off the interstate become part of the mix.”They liked the sawdust on the floor, or the idea that they could just pitch a tent out back if they wanted,” says Phil.”Sometimes we’d have a dance the Saturday before the (Sturgis) rally, and the music would just keep going until morning and I don’t remember anyone ever getting in a fight. The people who like the two-lane are peaceful folks who just aren’t in a big hurry.”

South Dakota’s biggest car nut agrees.”People who like the back roads are our kind of people,” says Dave Geisler of the Pioneer Auto Show in Murdo, a sprawling indoor/outdoor museum of collectible cars, motorcycles, tractors, toys and Western memorabilia.

Geisler says Murdo changed with each of the three highway waves.”The old Highway 16 ran right into downtown on Second Street,” he says, on a tour of the town.”Here was a Mobil station. There was the Red Top Cabins. This was Young’s Cabin Park. That was a gas station. Here was Weber’s Deluxe Cabin Court. There was a Skelly’s station. Gas was 25 cents a gallon. Up here was the Conoco station. Nobody could have made much money but they all got along.”

Plenty of daring thinkers and doers populated the Highway 16 community in the middle of the 20th century. Many of their dreams remain intact at Wall Drug, Al’s Oasis, the Murdo auto museum and other lesser-known places. New promoters are also showing up. At the Community Pharmacy in Presho, a small sign boasts of the”Best Coffee Between Sioux Falls and Rapid City.” Further east at Kimball, Keke Leiferman remodeled an old Highway 16 gas station into an eatery and entertainment spot called The Back Forty.”I look at Interstate 90 as my community,” she admits. But the shop sits a half-mile from I-90 on Old 16.

If roads are communities, then I-90 is Sioux Falls on wheels — smooth and speedy — while Old Highway 16 is New Underwood without the cottonwood tree.

Most of Old 16 is still intact and passable. Here’s a guide to the 1950s-era corridor for those who might like to experience the slow lane for at least one nostalgic trip across South Dakota.

Minnesota Border to Bridgewater

Doug and Brenda Deffenbaugh run a honey stand on the honor system near Wall Lake. Brenda (pictured with her son, Drayden) says customers are almost always honest.

Old 16 enters South Dakota from Minnesota on 262nd Street, which skirts Valley Springs and the south side of Brandon. Just south of Brandon, take a right turn on Madison Street and enter Sioux Falls. Take a left on Sycamore, then a right onto 10th Street and follow it past the backside of Michelangelo’s David statue. The road runs through the heart of Sioux Falls, exiting the city as Hwy 42. Wave goodbye to suburbia because you’ll see little of that for the next 350 miles. You’ll drive past Wall Lake, through the East Vermillion River valley and into the heart of East River farming country on your way to Bridgewater, where Sparky Anderson played baseball as a child before becoming the first Major League manager to win a World Series in both leagues.

Bridgewater to Mitchell

Mitchell’s Corn Palace is just a few blocks north of Old Highway 16. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

Leave Hwy 42 at Bridgewater and drive northeast on SD Hwy 262 to Alexandria, then north on 421st Avenue. Cross I-90 and you’ll come to Hwy 38. Take it west across the Jim River and Firesteel Creek and enter Mitchell. Watch for a big fiberglass Hereford bull, the trademark for Chef Louie’s. Perhaps the oldest steakhouse on the route, it dates to the 1930s. Hwy 38 becomes Havens Avenue through the city. The famous Corn Palace is just a few blocks north.

Mitchell to White Lake

Bob and Edith Zoon are the longtime proprietors of the A-Bar-Z Motel in White Lake.

Continue on Hwy 38 past Mount Vernon, home of Minnesota Vikings star linebacker Chad Greenway. As you enter Aurora County, Hwy 38 is still posted as Hwy 16 for a stretch. You’ll drive past Gordy’s Campground in Plankinton. See the war memorials indoors and outdoors at the county courthouse. West of Plankinton the roadbed roughens, the shoulder is gravel and you begin to see less cropland and more grass. You’re now driving between the 99th and 100th meridians, a north-south stretch called America’s”middle border” by some agrarian-minded historians who believe the big difference in rainfall amounts east and west of those imaginary lines affected the settlement of the region.

White Lake to Kimball

The Back Forty in Kimball grew from an old gas station.

The A-Bar-Z Store & Hotel was built in White Lake along U.S. Hwy 16 several years before President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Construction Act. Thirty years later, Bob and Edith Zoon were”just friends” when they arrived in 1985 from New Jersey to visit relatives.”We came out and fell in love with the area,” explained Bob. And with each other. They took a trip to the Aurora County Courthouse in Plankinton, where Bob asked,”What does it take to get married here?” The sheriff and his secretary served as witnesses. Then they bought the six-room hotel and gas station on Old 16 and renamed it A-Bar-Z.

As you leave White Lake, local Hwy 16 crosses to the south of Ike’s concrete legacy and you find yourself on 252nd Street. About 12 miles later, you approach Kimball and the South Dakota Tractor Museum. You pass by a tiny Frosty King ice cream shack and then, a half-mile west, a funky coffeehouse, restaurant and bar known as The Back Forty, where proprietor Keke Leiferman gives traditional South Dakota sandwiches a gourmet twist. A mile down the road, you drive beneath an underpass and find yourself on the south side of I-90 once again, going west on what’s now called 251st Street.

Kimball to Chamberlain

Hillside Motel in Chamberlain survived the decommissioning of Highway 16. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

Eleven miles after leaving Kimball, you pull up to a stop sign for Hwy 50. To the west is a big body of water known as Red Lake. Take Hwy 50 north across I-90 and head for nearby Pukwana, lawn mower racing capital of the Northern Plains. Leave Pukwana on 249th Street going west and you’ll soon rejoin Hwy 50 as it enters Chamberlain, descending into the wide valley of the Missouri River. Spend some time in Chamberlain, a little city with a one-way Main Street that includes a movie theater, restaurants and a bakery called Indulge. Just to the west of Main Street, River Street leads to a shoreline park and walking paths, good opportunities to stretch your legs or enjoy the sweets from the bakery.

Chamberlain to Kennebec

The Lyman County courthouse at Kennebec.

You’ll cross the Missouri — the USA’s longest river — on an old steel bridge that transformed travel on Hwy 16 when it was finished in September of 1925. The two-way bridge became too narrow for modern cars and trucks. When construction of the Fort Randall Dam expanded the river’s width, an identical bridge at nearby Wheeler was declared surplus and floated upriver. The old bridge became the west lane and the Wheeler bridge is the east lane yet today. Cross the bridge into West River and you’ll drive past Oacoma and Al’s Oasis, a grocery store and highway restaurant made famous by the Mueller family. The old highway ends and you have no choice but to take I-90 for about nine miles, but then you can rejoin Old 16 by turning north on Hwy 47 at Exit 251. Take Hwy 47 northwest into Reliance and then onto Kennebec, where the Lyman County courthouse serves as the bastion of government for 3,700 citizens.

Kennebec to Kadoka

Dave Geisler entertains travelers at the Pioneer Auto Museum in Murdo.

Now you embark on a long stretch of Old 16 known as Hwy 248 that closely parallels I-90, which is usually within a rifle’s shot. Hwy 248 leads you through eight more little West River towns, in this order: Kennebec, Presho, Vivian, Draper, Murdo, Okaton, Belvidere and Kadoka. Some look like ghost towns at first blush, while others are busier than their modest populations would suggest.

When Highway 16 was in its prime, Keith Patrick’s repair shop at Vivian was a Ford dealership and gas station. Today, pilots occasionally land small planes on the road without fear of hitting a motorist. Patrick fixes anything from cars and tractors to”lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners and eye glasses.” He and his brother, Kevin, display old pictures and memorabilia of Vivian in the shop.

Fading wood gas stations, motels, shops and restaurants are scattered around Draper, pop. 82. Gene Cressy remembers when Highway 16 was constructed in the 1940s, south of the railroad tracks.”The speed limit was 45, 25 on the curves because they were 90-degree curves.” Neighboring schools borrowed the road’s nickname when they organized the Custer Battlefield Conference for sports teams. The conference still exists.

Gurney Seed & Nursery of Yankton started a chain of rural gas stations in the 1930s. Vivian’s station is preserved at Pioneer Auto Museum in Murdo. Dave Geisler has an eclectic collection of 275 old automobiles (including the Dukes of Hazzard’s General Lee) and 30 buildings stocked with Old West and pioneer memorabilia. It grew from a Highway 16 gas station and Chevy dealership started by Dave’s father in the early 1950s.

Check out the dollar bills pinned all over the Reliance Bar, and the Lyman County Courthouse in Kennebec, built in 1925 when Henry Ford was still making Model Ts. In Presho you drive past a sprawling indoor/outdoor museum and Hutch’s, a restaurant and cafe built in the early 1950s that locals love for the hot beef sandwiches.

Kadoka to Cottonwood

A longhorn cow roams the quiet roadway west of Philip Junction.

The Kadoka to Wall route is not for everybody, or every car. The Old 16 roadbed is still passable, but at times it becomes a West River back road seldom used even by local ranchers.

The stretch begins nicely. You travel east of Kadoka for 7 miles along the same old Hwy 248 until you reach what’s known as Seven Mile Corner. Then Old 16 runs north (now Highway 73) toward Philip. In a dozen or so miles (before arriving in the city of Philip), you drop into a valley called Philip Junction. Notice a family farm in the valley; the building closest to the highway is landscaped with old auto memorabilia. Turn west on a forgotten road that once was U.S. Highway 16, the grandest route from Detroit to Yellowstone. Today, the little asphalt that remains is cracked and dry. It looks like a road from an apocalypse movie.

The path (now 237th Street) is still marked as a”principal route” on many maps and atlases, but they are mistaken. Ruts and holes make it barely passable on a dry summer’s day, and a bad idea on a wet day. This is Jackson County, population 3,200, one of the poorest places in the United States. Little money is available for road maintenance.

You’ll travel 10 slow miles along 237th Street, mostly past pastures and grasslands. You cross two creeks, one called the South Fork Bad River, which flows northward to the Bad River, which flows into the mighty Missouri at Fort Pierre.

Bridges on the creeks seem scary, but they hold a car.

Cottonwood to Wall

Pavement is gone from the road east of Wall.

The apocalyptic segment runs onto Hwy 14 just east of the tiny town of Cottonwood. Highways 14 and 16 once joined there and continued together to Rapid City. Enjoy the next 10 miles on the smooth and solid Hwy 14 to Quinn, past Wall Drug signs advertising jackalopes, donuts and a 6-foot rabbit.

At Quinn, you face another test. You can continue along Hwy 14, a newer route for Hwy 16, or you can once again”rough it” on the original roadbed to Wall. To find the old road, drive into Quinn and look just south of the railroad tracks for a road marked as Old Hwy 16 & Quinn Road, and take it west.

At first you’ll be on a dirt path, heading past a cattle ranch. Again, this is only for adventurous souls on dry days. The asphalt has all but disappeared. At times, you’ll be on a one-lane path and at one point you’ll even need to enter the ditch to avoid a washout.

Unlike the first stretch of rough road, which is over-promised on most maps, this brief 5-mile path from Quinn to Wall is not even shown on the official state map. Keep driving west and you’ll be rewarded by a scenic jaunt past some swampy land and small bumps, precursors to the big Badlands to the south. You’ll see gnarled old wood posts along the way, and it takes only a little imagination to picture a young Ted Hustead nailing”Free Ice Water” signs on them to attract Model A drivers to stop at his now-famous Wall Drug Store.

Wall to Wasta

The owner of the old Packard Cafe and Motel in Wasta borrowed the name from the luxurious automobile of the 1930s and ’40s. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

We would be remiss as travel guides if we didn’t recommend a stop at Wall Drug — still owned and operated by the Hustead family — for a buffalo burger, the crispy-soft chocolate doughnuts, 5-cent coffee and free admission to one of the West’s amazing art collections.

According to legend, Hustead actually traveled to Wasta to get water for his customers. If that story is true, then he surely made the drive by heading west on Fourth Avenue. You can do the same, but then the exact route of Old 16 is a mystery. Most likely, today’s I-90 was built over some of the original roadbed. Our recommendation is to take I-90 to Wasta, but then drive into Wasta, where you’ll easily find traces of Hwy 16 on the north side of town. It soon dead-ends if you turn west, but go east a mile and you’ll be rewarded with a better look at the Cheyenne River valley than I-90 travelers enjoy. Park your car and take pictures of the Old 16 car bridge and the nearby railroad bridge, both still in service.

The nearby town of Owanka died due to lack of water.”If they did find water, it had a high sulfur content and they couldn’t drink it,” says Jack Brainard.”They shipped water in on the train.” The name Wasta came from the Lakota name for the springs, mini wasta, or”water good.” When Highway 16 was routed to the north side of town, hotels and restaurants were opened like the Redwood, where motel scenes for the movie Thunderheart were filmed in 1991.

Wasta to Rapid City

Margaret Larson, Alice Richter, Janice Jensen and Joyce Wolken play cards at BJ’s Country Store in New Underwood.

Return to I-90 and head west for just a few miles, then take Exit 90 and go south on 173rd Avenue to the Wicksville Community Church, where services are held on the second, third and fourth Sundays of every month — leaving travelers to wonder what happens on the first Saturday that carries into Sunday morning? At the church corner, you’ll find an old stretch of the original highway that leads east but dead-ends a mile down the road. Head west and you’ll once again be on Old 16, but it’s diplomatically called Hwy 14/16 these days. The Black Hills are now visible on the horizon, just two towns away.

The first is New Underwood, Margaret Larsen’s home for 86 years. Most mornings she can be found at BJ’s Country Store, playing cards with friends. They cheerfully interrupted the game long enough to share stories.”Before the interstate we had a lot more stores — two grocery stores and a lumberyard,” says Larsen.”We still have plenty of bars.”

The next town is Box Elder, home to Ellsworth Air Force Base and one of the Dakotas’ boomtowns of the last 50 years. Box Elder was a tiny place in the heyday of Old 16, but nearly 10,000 people now live there. Hwy 14/16 skirts an old part of the boomtown and enters Rapid City.

Rapid City to Custer

Buffalo graze west of Custer.

No longer do you need much guidance, because you’re now driving the lone surviving stretch of U.S. Hwy 16. It starts out in downtown Rapid City as Mount Rushmore Road. You’ll climb out of Rapid City and into the mountains on a highway made to accommodate the two million people per year who visit Mount Rushmore. You drive past the Brockelsby family’s Reptile Gardens, Bear Country USA, Fort Hays Old West Town and numerous other visitor attractions.

You skirt the old mining community of Keystone, which sits at the foot of Mount Rushmore, and then follow the old highway as it cuts right through Hill City. There are many interesting stops in the little town, ranging from the century-old Hill City Cafe that remains as unpretentious as the small town eateries you might have enjoyed 200 miles to the east in farming country to an 1880 excursion train and the popular Prairie Berry Winery.

A dozen miles south, you’ll find the Ziolkowski family’s Crazy Horse mountain carving, and then dip down into the city of Custer. Black Hills Burger & Bun Co. is on the west side of the highway as you arrive downtown, one of 35 restaurants in a city of only 2,000 people.

Custer to the Wyoming Border

Three scenic paths wind through Jewel Cave National Park.

As the elevation climbs you rise beyond all the manmade accouterments that you’ve enjoyed between Rapid City and Custer. Now it’s just you and the forest and the highway, until you reach Jewel Cave National Monument. Want some strenuous exercise? Two unusual trails descend into Hell’s Canyon. This is a rare opportunity for a wilderness walk into one of the Black Hills’ deepest canyons. You’ll likely see birds and wildlife, and feel blasts of cold air as you poke your head into caves that connect to the 170-mile maze that comprises Jewel Cave.

It’s a short drive down the mountain. You enter private rangeland as you reach Wyoming. There’s no official”Welcome to Wyoming” sign, but the border is just a short distance west of the ruins of an abandoned cowboy bar and cafe. U.S. Hwy 16 continues on to Yellowstone, the original destination when federal road planners created this east-west route nearly a century ago.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Autumn On Highway 18

Wisconsin photographer Stephen Gassman likes to make autumn trips across South Dakota on Highway 18, driving from Canton to the Black Hills on a two-lane road that many South Dakotans probably haven’t traveled. One of his recent east-west treks happened at that golden spell of autumn when you wish you could just sit on a pumpkin and enjoy the season.

Highway 18 begins in corn country, then crosses the Missouri River over the Fort Randall Dam and enters a long stretch known as Rosebud Country. The Rosebud Reservation once stretched from the river westward to the Pine Ridge, but the federal government reduced the tribe’s territory and opened it to homesteading in 1908.

Today the actual reservation boundary begins at the Todd County line, but Gregory and Tripp counties are still considered Rosebud and a rich Native American culture now blends with pheasants, farming and small town life.

Farming slowly gives way to ranching, especially once you head west from Winner and pass through the river valleys of the Keya Paha, Antelope and White. Travelers get a taste of sandhills, badlands and pine forest.

Farm towns have grain elevators and reservation towns have pow wow grounds. Both might have a rodeo arena and all have country churches. Yes, Highway 18 always has a lot to experience for the visitor who isn’t in a hurry. But that’s all overwhelmed on a blue sky day in September or October as the fading autumn sun robs the foliage of chlorophyll, exposing the red and yellow colors so representative of the Rosebud country.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Black Hills Mountain Lodges

By Paul Higbee

The State Game Lodge is a casual place where the greeters sometimes have horns and four legs.

Check into a Black Hills mountain lodge and you’ll get a taste of something classic. Book your stay in the fall and you’ve added a rich spice. What could be better than absorbing sunshine and piney breezes on a wide unscreened porch, then retreating inside to a fireplace blaze as the cool of an autumn evening hits? Wide porches and big stone fireplaces are essential lodge elements. So are immediate proximity to natural splendor, separation from towns and four-lane highways, and hosts who know their Black Hills history, flora and fauna.

For over a century Black Hills builders have fashioned lodges from pine and spruce, and they’ve usually accented their structures with Black Hills quartz, crystals, petrified wood and other rock. Thankfully, this construction style is not a lost art, as evidenced by a handful of recently built lodges.

Hisega Lodge

Hisega Lodge features a double-decker wrap-around porch.

Some lodges are grand while others are understated and intimate. But they all share one characteristic: for certain visitors they stick in the consciousness forever. Every lodge proprietor can tell stories of lives transformed under their roofs. Carol Duncan, for example, sat on Hisega Lodge‘s porch a few years back, listening to the rushing waters of Rapid Creek just below. She had grown up in Stickney, vacationed in the Black Hills with her family as a child, later lived in the Hills, and eventually found herself in Florida with a good job that she enjoyed. Then while visiting Hisega (just up the creek from Rapid City on Highway 44) Duncan realized she belonged to this rugged landscape of pines, stony outcrops and ice-cold streams.

“Guests have revelations at Hisega Lodge,” Duncan says.”Or perhaps another way to put it is that they make an acknowledgement.” After her visit she left knowing she would return to live in the Hills, but never guessed Hisega Lodge would be for sale just weeks later. Since 2007, Carol and her husband Kenn have been owners, greeting visitors from around the world. Theirs is a 1909 lodge with two porch decks wrapped around the building. There are nine guest units, exceptionally comfortable chairs before the fireplace, lots of Black Hills art on the walls and even a little library. Just outside trout swim in this catch-and-release section of the creek.

“Our guests tend to be about the outdoors, not about being in their rooms,” Duncan observes.”And they’re often interested in history.”

Doane Robinson, South Dakota’s first state historian, is credited for proposing the sculpture project that evolved into Mount Rushmore. He can also be credited for Hisega Lodge. In August 1908, Robinson organized a railroad and camping adventure through the Black Hills for 17 young adults, including his secretary, sister and a niece. The group rode the old Crouch Line rails out of Rapid City, stepped off the train to pitch tents in this narrow canyon, and named the spot Hisega — derived from the first initials of six campers named Helen, Ida, Sade, Ethel, Grace and Ada. In 1909, Robinson found 50 people who wanted to vacation in the same place, only now he said he would have a lodge in place for them if everyone contributed $100. The plan, actually modest by Doane Robinson standards, worked. Originally railroad tracks lay immediately in front of the building. Over 100 years later the trains are long gone, but the lodge still stands. It has had many names over the years while the spot on the map has always remained Hisega. As would be expected, guest rooms are small by today’s standards.”But we’ve got bigger beds, king and queen sized ones, because people are bigger than they were a hundred years ago,” Duncan says.”We make sure everything is spotless, and our towels are cushy.”

The price of a night’s lodging includes breakfast, perhaps an open-face breakfast sandwich or breakfast pizza, and always featuring fresh fruit and Duncan’s homemade muffins. A century ago, she notes, house rules warned against alcohol and gambling.”Now,” she says,”our instructions are mostly about accessing the wi-fi and finding the recycling bins.”

State Game Lodge

Two presidents (Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower) have stayed at the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park.

What do Carol Duncan and President Calvin Coolidge have in common? It’s possible that each experienced a revelation about their futures while visiting a Black Hills lodge. After making the State Game Lodge his summer White House in 1927, Coolidge surprised the nation before departing South Dakota.”I do not choose to run for president in 1928,” he stated in typically terse style. By 1929 he was out of office and enjoying boating back home in rural Massachusetts.

Built in 1922, 13 years after Hisega Lodge, the State Game Lodge combines Sen. Peter Norbeck’s vision, architect A.R. Van Dyke’s design, stonemason Monroe Nystrom’s handiwork, and C.C. Gideon’s construction skills. The remarkable Gideon, also remembered for designing the landmark pigtail bridges on nearby Iron Mountain Road, stayed as Game Lodge host and state park concessionaire for 27 years after the lodge’s opening. His wife Elma worked closely with him.

Granddaughter Marilyn Oakes says the couple nearly perished here in 1921. Gideon had just completed construction of the original State Game Lodge and was living there when an arsonist struck. The couple escaped the flames and smoke with just their nightclothes, business ledgers and some photographs. The Game Lodge was lost, yet planning began immediately for the building we know today. The original lodge was intended for use by state officials only, but the second was developed with the public in mind. Today there are seven guest rooms in the original structure, plus several more in adjacent additions, nearby cabins and Creekside Lodge — all part of the State Game Lodge complex. Wherever they sleep, most guests drift through the original lodge.

With its dark woodworking, hardwood floors and Nystrom fireplaces, the lobby feels both historic and inviting. There’s usually an artist-in-residence at work here. In a pleasant lounge just off the lobby a portrait of President Dwight Eisenhower hangs over the fireplace. He stayed at the lodge in June 1953.

Small as it is, this may be South Dakota’s most famous hotel. It also ranks high among the state’s very best restaurants. You’ll be hard pressed to top the lodge’s smoked chicken fry bread as an appetizer, followed by an entrÈe of buffalo filet mignon wrapped in bacon. Waiting for dinner, you may wander and see how the building was expanded and altered, mostly in back, to accommodate more diners, and to meet Americans with Disabilities Act codes. The building’s original lines are clearly discernable. The lodge is open through October 31 and the Creekside Lodge, just across the lawn, remains open year-round.

Spearfish Canyon Lodge

A perfect fall day at Spearfish Canyon Lodge might include a breakfast of trout and eggs and a hike along the ’76 Trail to the canyon rim.

Spearfish Canyon Lodge is a new-era lodge built in 1995. It’s 13 miles south of Spearfish at Savoy, where the canyon widens and sunshine streams in. A perfect fall day here might begin with a walk across the road to the Latchstring Restaurant, featuring a traditional canyon breakfast of trout filet, two eggs, roasted red potatoes, and toast. This breakfast is listed in the menu as the Little Spearfish although there’s nothing little about it. Thus fortified, you may be ready for a strenuous hike to the canyon’s rim by way of the ’76 Trail. The trail climbs 1,000 feet in three-quarters of a mile, and begins just steps from the lodge’s front doors. Gentler trails lead to photogenic Roughlock Falls and Spearfish Falls or to trout fishing venues; there’s lots of canyon variety to experience from this point without getting into your car. Evening is time to relax by the fireplace in the impressive high-ceiling lobby. There’s a lounge just off the lobby and there’s no telling whom you could meet. Well-known guests have ranged from pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall to the late comedian Robin Williams.

Guest rooms feel like those in a hotel. Some are full suites with gas fireplaces, outdoor balconies and Jacuzzis. Few hotels in the world offer window views matching these, with towering limestone cliffs and the brilliant yellows and golds of autumn birch and aspen. All rooms are equipped with TVs if, for some reason, you need to detach from the canyon and plug into a blander world.

Though the lodge is just 22 years old, people have traveled to this spot in the canyon for overnight lodging for 101 years. There are some parallels between Savoy and Hisega. In 1909, the very year Doane Robinson built the lodge along the Crouch Line rails, Glen Inglis of Deadwood turned a former sawmill structure into a little inn right next to the Spearfish Canyon railroad tracks. Similar to the campers at Hisega, Inglis used his own name (and his wife’s) to come up with a new word.”Glendoris” was the inn’s original name, changed to Latchstring Inn by new owners a few years later. It stood exactly where the restaurant of the same name stands today.

The inn was a one-story, rambling affair that couldn’t be called a lodge. It claimed as much authentic Black Hills charm as any building, with its odd artifacts, crooked doorframes and wonderful cliff-side dining room. The much-loved inn served railroad travelers until a flood washed away the tracks in 1933, and guests who arrived by the canyon highway until Latchstring was razed in 1989.

Buffalo Rock Lodge

The Buffalo Rock Lodge was constructed with great spruce logs and mammoth pine timbers.

Another newer structure is Buffalo Rock Lodge, which opened in 1999 on Playhouse Road north of Custer State Park. If builders and owners Art and Marilyn Oakes seem remarkably astute as hosts, they come by the attribute naturally. Marilyn, C.C. Gideon’s granddaughter, worked some of Gideon’s possessions into the dÈcor, including a beautiful Navajo rug he purchased and made part of the State Game Lodge’s look during President Coolidge’s stay. If you want to hear stories about early-day Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore, Wind Cave National Park, Iron Mountain Road and the Needles Highway, this is the place. If Black Hills history isn’t your thing (although that could change while you’re here) ask Art and Marilyn how they created this impressive structure with great spruce logs, and mammoth ponderosa pine timbers that support an interior balcony. The fireplace is their masterpiece, comprised of many varieties of native stone plus some amethyst.

Mention a place you want to visit and Oakes will print her own recommended itinerary.”We’re very involved with our guests,” she says.”When people call to inquire about us, I tell them that fall is the best time to visit. There are fewer people in the Hills. We’ll get that one frost in September, then after that comes our beautiful Indian summer.”

Any time of year a highlight for guests is Buffalo Rock Lodge’s own perspective of Mount Rushmore, viewed from across 3 miles, thrust high above forests and lesser granite outcrops. The four faces can be seen from the lodge’s big porch and from two of the three guest rooms. Those rooms are spacious, beautifully decorated and TV-free. Guests awake to one of Oakes’ breakfasts, such as her Buffalo Rock Lodge French toast, and they turn in having sampled one of her evening desserts.

Leaving Buffalo Rock Lodge, driving past a natural formation that inspired its name, you feel like you’ve enjoyed all of the contemporary comforts of the Black Hills, yet also glimpsed the more rustic hills that C.C. Gideon knew and loved.

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

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Looping Along

Photography by Stephen Gassman

Story by Katie Hunhoff

“I would rather be remembered as an artist than as a United States senator,” said Peter Norbeck.

If art imitates nature, then Norbeck’s wish is reality because his conservation advocacy resulted in the creation of parks, preserves and bird sanctuaries nationwide. His greatest environmental canvas is Custer State Park, and a favorite way to enjoy the park is a ribbon of road known as the Wildlife Loop, an 18-mile auto tour through prairie and pine forest.

“He was attracted to and loved natural beauty,” wrote Gilbert Fite in his biography of Norbeck.”A deer grazing in a protected glade in his beloved Black Hills, a flock of honkers winging northward, or trees, lakes and mountains blended into a picture of serene beauty — to him were the embodiment of art in nature.”

Growing up in Clay County as the son of a minister-farmer, young Norbeck gained an appreciation for the natural world. In his childhood, the fauna of the Black Hills was changing. Wolves, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep and bears disappeared, and the bison was nearly hunted to extinction.

Norbeck became a well driller. He began to champion the notion of a state park in the southern Black Hills after a trip to the Custer area in 1905, but little was accomplished until he arrived in Pierre as a state legislator and persuaded his fellow lawmakers to create a state game preserve. When the park was fenced (under Norbeck’s supervision) in 1914, he estimated there were possibly as few as 15 deer in the entire 61,000 acres.

The state soon purchased 36 head of buffalo from the Philip ranch at Fort Pierre, and today 1,300 call the park home. Elk were reintroduced in 1916 and bighorn sheep were brought from the Canadian Rockies. Black bear sightings have been reported, but never confirmed.

Nearly 200 species of birds live in the park or migrate through in the four seasons.”The park is where east meets west, so there is a crossover of birds you won’t find in other places,” says Craig Pugsley, the park’s visitor services coordinator.

And burros arrived in the 1960s.”They were being used to haul visitors to the top of Harney Peak,” says Pugsley.”When they discontinued the rides, the burros were let go in the park. They are such a hit with visitors that they’ve always let them remain.”

The Wildlife Loop’s attraction is its natural beauty and wildness, just as Norbeck intended. Elk are rarely seen from the loop, except in springtime when the grass along the loop road is greenest. And don’t expect wolves or grizzlies to reappear. Pugsley says the park might be a tad too civilized to accommodate them. The elk and sheep agree.

But the other flora and fauna of today give visitors a view of the untamed West, a God-given masterpiece that survives only because of some strokes by artist Peter Norbeck.

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