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The Dusty Trail

By John Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curley Grimes was buried where he fell.

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

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

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

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

A marker along the Alkali Creek Trail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Ghost Town Called Spokane

By David Ford

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

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

— From Rushmore’s Golden Valleys, by Marthe Linde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Traveling Pine Ridge Today

By Bernie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wounded Knee Cemetery

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

Yellow Bear Canyon

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

Sheep Mountain Table

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

Singing Horse Trading Post

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

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

Fishing the Dams

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

White River Visitors Center

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

Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce

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

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

Oglala Lakota College

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

Red Cloud Heritage Center

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

Hunting the Prairie

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

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

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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.