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On the Quartzite Trail

By John Andrews

There’s a geologic treasure in southeastern South Dakota that has been here longer than our famed petrified forests or the prehistoric fossils painstakingly brushed from the soil. Outcroppings of ultra-hard, 1.6-billion-year-old Sioux quartzite protrude from grassy prairies and riverbanks over 6,000 square miles from the James River eastward into Minnesota and Iowa.

Jim Kersten

People have placed significance upon the unique pink rocks for centuries, but Jim Kersten believes that what he calls”quartzite country” holds even more potential. He’s spent years creating the Sioux Quartzite Outcrop Trail that takes people to 10 primary sites, nine secondary locations and over two dozen historical attractions in South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa that feature quartzite naturally or architecturally.

Kersten became interested in quartzite while operating a bed and breakfast in Alcester from 1995 to 2005. He often hosted kayaking ventures along the Big Sioux River and bicycle tours through southeastern South Dakota. Quartzite was right under his nose, though he never thought of the region as a destination until he served on the Big Sioux Recreation Council.”I ended up being the historian because I liked it,” says Kersten, who today runs a painting business with his twin brother in Aberdeen.”I decided to inventory some sites along the river from Dell Rapids to Sioux City. I found that a lot of my sites along the river were quartzite sites. I finally figured out that was the common denominator, especially in areas where outcroppings go across the river. I could develop a lot of themes, but the quartzite was the key.”

Quartzite is easily the oldest feature in eastern South Dakota, and it confounded early European visitors like artist George Catlin and explorer Joseph Nicollet, both of whom visited pipestone quarries in the 1830s.”The single fact of such a table of quartz, in horizontal strata, resting on this elevated plateau, is of itself a very interesting subject for investigation; and one which calls upon the scientific world for a correct theory with regard to this time when and the manner in which this formation was produced,” Catlin wrote.

Kersten says Nicollet and others offered a variety of scenarios to explain quartzite’s origin, including one with Biblical origins. But they had not heard the theory of Swiss geographer Louis Agassiz, who in 1837 became the first scientist to propose that Earth had endured an Ice Age, in which he argued that rocks — including Sioux quartzite — were shaped, transplanted and uncovered by huge, slowly-advancing glaciers.

Today’s impressive river formations began as fine grains of quartz no bigger than half a millimeter. They were deposited on the bottom of a shallow sea that once covered large portions of North America. The particles, rounded by water and compacted by heat and intense pressure, slowly built and hardened over millions of years. Then glaciers swept across the continent, revealing what Kersten considers,”the Black Hills of East River.””The Black Hills are gorgeous, but there’s little rock in the Black Hills as old as this,” he says.”This is as old as rock in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and there you’re looking at 1.7 billion years of strata going down.”

Kersten’s”Quartzite Country” extends from Redstone, at the junction of the Cottonwood and Minnesota rivers in Minnesota, and runs to the James River near Mitchell. Exposed stone is found between Flandreau and Canton, but quartzite has been discovered during well digging as far west as Stanley and Jones counties in South Dakota, and across the Missouri River into northern Nebraska.

His tour of 10 primary quartzite sites — selected because of the significant outcroppings or association with Indian history — begins in Sioux Falls. The trail loops 370 miles through eastern South Dakota and western Minnesota, and ends at the Dells of the Big Sioux River near Dell Rapids.”The whole picture is bigger than its parts,” he says.”Each one of these sites has its own story, and it’s about much more than the rocks. Prairie is being restored at a number of places, including all the primary outcroppings.”

Take time this summer to explore the Sioux Quartzite Outcrop Trail and see the unique role prehistoric rocks have played in developing the frontier.

Queen Bee Mill & Falls Park, Sioux Falls

Queen Bee Mill and Falls Park. Photo by Greg Latza

Sioux Falls town builders were awed by the powerful torrents of water cascading over the quartzite boulders that comprise the falls of the Big Sioux River. About 7,400 gallons of water drop 100 feet over the course of the falls every second. Richard Pettigrew, a city father, politician and businessman, sought to harness that power in 1878 when he began construction on the seven-story, state-of-the-art Queen Bee Mill.

The new mill was capable of producing 1,200 barrels of flour a day. But soon after it opened in 1881, investors realized that Dakota farmers couldn’t produce enough wheat to keep the mill solvent. By 1883, it was closed.

Entrepreneurs tried various businesses in the old quartzite mill, but each venture failed. The structure became a warehouse in 1929, and much of it was destroyed by fire in 1959. Its upper floors were demolished after the blaze for safety. Its ruins still stand on the riverbank.

Today the city of Sioux Falls has transformed the 123-acre Falls Park into a popular destination for families with a cafe, picnic space and trail system.

Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum and East Sioux Falls Historic Site, Sioux Falls

Arrowhead Park, East Sioux Falls. Photo by Christian Begeman

Construction is finishing on the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum and East Sioux Falls Historic Site at the junction of Highways 11 and 42. Sioux Falls’ newest park is the brainchild of Mary Jo Wegner, a local environmental advocate who envisioned a natural haven of gardens, plants and wetlands as an escape from the urbanity of South Dakota’s largest city. When completed, the area will include six gardens, interpretive exhibits and an extension of the Sioux Falls Bike Trail.

The 115-acre park sits on land rich in quartzite history. East Sioux Falls was once a thriving community of 600 residents, many of whom relied on local quartzite quarries for their livelihoods. A number of quarries were operating in Sioux Falls by the end of the 1880s, but the largest opened at East Sioux Falls in 1887. By 1890, nearly 500 men toiled there, cutting stone to ship via rail to cities like Omaha, St. Louis and Chicago for street paving.

An economic downturn in 1891 followed by the Panic of 1893 slowed production at the Sioux Falls quarries. As concrete became the building material of choice, workers began to leave East Sioux Falls. The city gave up its charter in 1913.

Jasper Pool, Gitchie Manitou State Preserve, South Dakota/Iowa Border

Jasper Pool. Photo by Christian Begeman

Just across the Big Sioux River in Lyon County, Iowa, the oldest exposed bedrock in that state is preserved at Gitchie Manitou State Preserve. From the 1890s to 1920, a quartzite quarry operated in the northeast corner of the 91-acre preserve. The remains have filled with water, creating the Jasper Pool.

Another feature of Gitchie Manitou is a series of conical mounds near its southern edge. Archaeologists are still determining their significance, but they may be part of a larger complex found at Blood Run, South Dakota’s newest state park along the South Dakota/Iowa border that was home to the Oneota people for 8,500 years.

Queen Rock, Palisades State Park, Garretson

King and Queen Rock, Palisades State Park.

South of Garretson, quartzite cliffs and rock formations rise 50 to 60 feet along the banks of Split Rock Creek. Among the most unique formations are two spires called King and Queen Rock.

At just over 150 acres, Palisades is South Dakota’s second smallest state park. Still, it boasts a campground, a lodge and four hiking trails, including the King and Queen Rock Trail. The 0.2-mile route passes the King and Queen and the rest of the park’s most impressive quartzite formations. The trail also winds past the site of Palisades, a small town formed in 1870 after homesteaders built a large flourmill along the creek. But A.S. Garretson, an entrepreneur from Sioux City, made sure a railroad junction was placed two miles north on land he owned, spawning the town named for him and facilitating Palisades’ demise.

Adventurers come to Palisades for kayaking and rock climbing, which poses special challenges. The surface of the quartzite ranges from gritty to slippery smooth, the result of glacial weathering.

Devil’s Falls, Devil’s Gulch Park, Garretson

Devil’s Gulch. Photo by Christian Begeman

Outlaws Frank and Jesse James robbed a bank in Northfield, Minn., in 1876 and rode west. Legend says that as they eluded a posse, Jesse spurred his horse and jumped a 20-foot chasm across Split Rock Creek on the edge of Garretson.

If it’s true, Jesse probably didn’t have time to appreciate the quartzite-lined gulch or the nearby waterfall. Some geologists speculate that an ancient earthquake split the quartzite and created the fissure. Today an iron footbridge spans the gap where Jesse is said to have leapt. A hiking trail leads to the falls and other quartzite features, such as Devil’s Kitchen and Devil’s Stairway.

Touch the Sky Prairie, Rock County, Minnesota

Here the trail turns east into Minnesota and stops near Luverne at Touch the Sky Prairie, site of a major prairie restoration project. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Brandenburg Prairie Foundation, led by local photographer and filmmaker Jim Brandenburg, have purchased 1,000 acres of land northwest of Luverne. Fences and old farmstead buildings have been removed to make room for native plants and animals. The acreage also features a mile-long quartzite ridgeline that served as a buffalo rub. Some of the outcroppings have surfaces as smooth as glass, the result of centuries of rubbing.

Blue Mound State Park, Luverne, Minnesota

Homesteaders traveling west across the prairie noticed a strange mound with a blue tint as they neared South Dakota. They soon discovered the”blue mound” was a 100-foot tall outcropping of Sioux quartzite, one of many at Blue Mound State Park, an 1,800-acre oasis of prairie grasses and flowers north of Luverne.

Local historians believe Plains Indians first utilized the mound as a buffalo jump because of the large number of bones recovered at the outcropping’s base.

Pipestone National Monument, Pipestone, Minnesota

The pipestone quarries near Pipestone, Minn., just across the state line east of Flandreau, have been sacred to Plains Indians for centuries. A Brule legend told by Lame Deer in the 1960s relates their importance in the creation of the Lakota people. It began with a flood that inundated all the land except a hill next to the sacred quarries. People clamored to the hilltop, but rising waters killed everyone except a young girl saved by a bald eagle that flew her to safety in the Black Hills. The Lakota people were descended from that union. Meanwhile, the blood of the flood victims turned to pipestone and created the vast quarries.

Indians have journeyed to the quarries for at least 800 years to extract pipestone from the layers of Sioux quartzite that jut from the Earth at the Pipestone National Monument. The monument was created in 1937 to ensure Indians of all federally recognized tribes had access to pipestone, used in making ceremonial pipes. A feature of the monument is a quartzite outcropping that forms a 10- to 15-foot cliff line that runs north to south along the entire length of the 301-acre site.

Jeffers Petroglyphs, Comfrey, Minnesota

Flat slabs of quartzite dot the prairie at the Jeffers Petroglyphs Historic Site near Comfrey, Minn. Here, Plains Indians — including the Lakota and Dakota — scratched over 4,000 images into the hard stone. The oldest drawings could be 9,000 years old, while the newest were done within the last two centuries. They tell of important events, sacred ceremonies, legends and stories of hunting and other daily activities. The age of the drawings indicates that Jeffers is among the oldest continually used sacred sites in the world.

Dells of the Big Sioux, Dell Rapids

Little Dells. Photo by Christian Begeman

The trail concludes at the Dells of the Big Sioux River, south of Dell Rapids in Minnehaha County. Quartzite was key to Dell Rapids’ development. Many of the 39 buildings in the downtown business district were constructed using locally quarried quartzite. Even the high school mascot is a”quarrier.”

At the peaceful dells, the river flows between 40-foot quartzite walls sprinkled with lush trees and prairie grasses.

Along the Way …

Kersten has identified nine secondary outcroppings along his quartzite trail. The first is Arrowhead Park in Sioux Falls. The 131-acre park features two quarry ponds that were once part of the bustling East Sioux Falls quarry scene. Dale Weir donated the land to the city of Sioux Falls for development as a park. Ducks and geese frequent the ponds, which are connected by a walking trail that also passes an 1888 barn designed by Sioux Falls architect Wallace Dow.

At Split Rock Creek City Park in Garretson, and Split Rock Creek State Park in Ihlen, Minn., quartzite walls tower over the placid stream. Kayakers enjoy paddling the stretch through the Garretson park, which includes a dam, bridges, a rock wall and a bathhouse built in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration project. All the structures are made of quartzite.

Rockport Hutterite Colony.

The Red Rock Falls and Red Rock Dells in Cottonwood County, Minn., feature more quartzite outcroppings. A 0.34-mile trail skirts the edge of some boulders and through a gorge to the small waterfall. Keep heading east toward Redstone, the eastern edge of quartzite county near New Ulm, Minn. An active quarry on the eastern edge of town has been operational since 1861.

Kersten’s trail re-enters South Dakota at the Three Sisters quartzite formation in the Big Sioux River near Dell Rapids and two sites of early construction: the Dell Rapids Mill and Saint Olaf Roller Mill and Power Dam in Baltic.”There are 20 mills in a pretty tight radius of Sioux Falls,” Kersten says.”Every town had a mill. My next project could be on the grist mills of southeastern South Dakota.”

The final stop is Rockport Hutterite Colony along the James River south of Alexandria. It marks the western edge of significantly exposed quartzite. Huge slabs lie between the colony buildings and the lazy river, along with quartzite foundations of buildings that comprised Fort James, built in 1865 to maintain peace between homesteaders and Indians. Soldiers occupied Fort James — one of the only stone cavalry forts in the West — for a year before it closed in 1866.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Rapid City Treasure

Story by John Christopher Fine

Entrepreneurial storekeepers Chris and Trevor Johnson operate Rapid City’s eclectic Clock Shop.

Photos by Mike Wolforth

To appreciate the Clock Shop and Presidential Pawn in downtown Rapid City, you need to know about Chris Johnson, who grew up 200 miles to the east in Highmore.

“We were not far from where the Arikara ran buffalo over a cliff. In a family of seven boys and six girls, there was plenty of fun,” Johnson says.”Dad would pile us into the station wagon and we’d have a picnic at the buffalo jump 11 miles east of Highmore. We’d chase each other around the hills. Dad would show us how to find arrowheads and buffalo teeth. That’s how we spent our Sundays.”

The Johnsons weren’t wealthy, and gold was the furthest thing from their minds. Mr. Johnson was a high school history teacher and a carpenter. Mrs. Johnson baked bread for local restaurants, and for her children.

Years later, while working in the mailroom for the Rapid City Journal in the 1980s, Chris helped his in-laws, Tom and Jean Uhrich, start a shop called The Clock Shop, a spin-off to their jewelry store.”There was a large calling for clock repair,” Chris says.”I helped him put it together in the basement of his store across the street from here.” He started working full time for them in 1993 and bought the store eight years later.

Clock and watch sales sank with the recession of 2008, but a funny thing happened.”People asked if we still bought gold. Because my father-in-law did as a jeweler, I knew how. I just didn’t pursue it. In the recession, clocks were considered luxuries. My son Trevor was just getting involved in the business. We were not doing well selling fine watches and clocks. We had advertised $2 watch batteries for years, so as people came in for a watch battery we started handing out a business card that read, ‘We Buy Gold.'”

Chris Johnson and David Peck, the shop’s clock repairman, have dealt with a wide variety of merchandise, including a rare 1964 Harley Sprint motorcycle.

Timing is nearly everything. Gold prices were soaring and there was an opportunity to sell unwanted gold scrap and jewelry.”It was just like our childhood,” Chris says.”You learn to survive. The survival instinct brought about my desire to buy historic items. I have to pinch myself to realize that we not only survived the worst economic time but flourished. Trevor pushed me to start the pawnshop. He said a pawn shop does well in a good economy, and flourishes in a poor economy.”

But the Johnson family pawnshop, at 610 Seventh St., in Rapid City’s bustling downtown, is different. Customers are often offered a free book on how to escape debt.”We feel that every day there is something important happening here,” Chris says. As many as 400 people visit the store daily, and the Johnsons now buy and sell $5 million a year in gold and silver bullion.

But they aren’t hoping for higher gold prices.”Rising gold prices have a direct correlation to an unstable economy and uncertainty,” Chris says.”I have no hope for gold to go up. I would much rather have a good economy. Gold bullion serves better as an insurance policy for money than a growth investment. We don’t hoard it. We buy it and sell it.”

Chris credits Trevor for having a good business mind.”I am more of a romantic,” he says.”Money, like life, is fleeting. An old person told me long ago a bit of philosophy that I stick to: I’d rather regret what I did in life than what I didn’t do.”

So he steps into the window of the Clock Shop and takes a key out of the drawer of a clock.”I found this in an antique shop. The glass was missing. It is an original Samuel Whiting clock. It has the original case and movement. I sent the doors to be gilded. Whiting was an apprentice of Simon Willard, patent holder of the banjo style clock.”

Chris Johnson’s collection includes original negatives from President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in 1963. The photographer’s girlfriend brought them to the shop in 1982.

The clock may have stopped running 150 years or more before he found it.”My uncle was a clock maker. Later on in his life we talked about it. He said, ‘Take a clock built in the early 1800s. Get it started. The clock says thanks old buddy, you got me going again.'”

Then Chris shows us a miniature dog preserved by a taxidermist that might have been the smallest dog in the world. And a Salvadore Dali drawing. And the Icebox Nugget, thought to be the largest undisputed placer gold nugget from the Black Hills in existence.

Chris’ brother Ron, who also works at the shop, goes to the vault and brings back a plain manila envelope. Inside are 190 35mm negatives shot by photographer Robert Tobin at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in 1963.

“You see John John saluting,” Chris says.”Look at this negative. We believe it to be the original of the photograph published in Life.” But most of the pictures have never been published.

Tobin was murdered in 1982. The Rapid City woman who brought the negatives to the Johnsons identified herself as the photographer’s girlfriend.

“You just really don’t know what’s going to come into this store,” he says. But one thing is predictable: at the top of the hour, the Clock Shop resonates with melodious gongs, chimes and cuckoos from the clocks. It is a wonderland of warm sounds, perhaps as comforting as was Mrs. Johnson’s bread, baking in the oven at Highmore many years ago.

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

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West River Oasis

By Paul Higbee

“Cattle for respect, sheep to pay the bills,” goes an old West River axiom. It was probably coined by a sheep man at Newell, where weekly sales are held every Thursday. The annual show and sale dates back to the 1940s. Photo by Greg Latza.

If you consider the Black Hills home, maybe you’ve got a soft spot in your heart for Newell. Perhaps you’ve returned home across the prairies via Highway 212, from points north and east, and have spotted this town with Bear Butte as its backdrop, and with the Black Hills defining its southern and western horizons.

“Almost home,” you’ve said to yourself.

Not quite. Despite its proximity to the Hills, Newell claims a separate history. It came into being more than 30 years after Rapid City, Sturgis, Spearfish, Deadwood and Lead were founded. Frederick Newell, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation chief engineer, inspired the name. In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt had established the Bureau of Reclamation in hopes of transforming dry western expanses into fields of crops. Among the Bureau’s first projects was damming Owl Creek in Butte County, creating one of the world’s largest earthen dams, 6,262 feet long and 122 feet high. Water would be diverted from the Belle Fourche River into the reservoir, and there would be more than 500 miles of irrigation canals and laterals channeling this water to virgin croplands. The Newell town site sat in the middle of some of the most promising countryside. As the dam progressed, this land sold for as much as $25 an acre, a price most South Dakotans considered sky high.

In 1907 the Bureau of Reclamation developed an”Experiment Farm” at the town site. The farm would research crops best suited for local soils, and later it would train young people who were interested in agriculture. The year 1910 saw the dam’s completion and construction begin for Newell’s first homes and businesses.

Churches went up too. Father Wenzel Sobolewski served multiple Catholic churches and sometimes faced frontier-like conditions in traveling from one to another. On foot outside Newell in 1916 or 1917, he found himself in danger of freezing, desperately lost in a blinding blizzard. But, he later recalled,”God was with me and guided me to a barn, where I found myself draped around the neck of a cow.”

Karen Swan and her associates at K-J Leather Company sew chaps, saddlebags, chinks and other tack for working cowboys.

In Newell’s early years there were always outside critics who considered the land there best suited for such cows, even though good crops of corn and grain were growing, along with produce entirely new to the region: cucumbers, pinto beans and sugar beets. But, some observers wondered, were those products worth all the government expense — more than $2 million for the dam’s construction alone? In the 1920s, when farm profits were down everywhere, and in the 1930s when more dust than water filled the reservoir, the criticism seemed valid. Then the rains returned. By the late 1940s local farmers were enjoying banner years and were in a position to manage and maintain the irrigation system themselves, rather than watching the government run it. In 1948 landowners formed a board of directors and made Newell irrigation district headquarters. Today corn and alfalfa dominate the 57,000 irrigated acres, and there are fields of wheat and oats. To the delight of loyal aficionados, the Newell area is also known for honey derived from clover.

Not only is water from the irrigation system the area’s lifeblood, but irrigation has always been central to Newell’s identity. When Black Hills high school athletes say they’re heading north to play the Newell ‘Gators, South Dakotans know the team name doesn’t refer to a big reptile.

Step into TJ’s Cafe and Waterin’ Hole to meet Neil Vollmer and Ken Wetz for coffee, and you’re guaranteed some funny stories and Newell area history. But mostly these men are focused on contemporary life and future opportunities. Vollmer owns an insurance business and is president of the Newell Economic Development Corporation. Wetz, manager of the Butte Electric Cooperative, is a former mayor and state legislator, and along with Vollmer, a driving force behind the development corporation for its entire 15-year history. Thanks to that organization’s volunteer work, Newell got behind a successful effort to re-open its grocery store after it closed for about a year in the 1990s. The group has also recruited industry. Aker Woods Company, a Black Hills company manufacturing items ranging from roof beams to classroom products, needed a milling and cutting site, and Newell got the nod.”It was the quickest community to have a place for us, and the most welcoming,” says owner Alan Aker. The friendly attitude also won over K-J Leathers, which moved into a downtown building to manufacture high-quality chaps, chinks, saddlebags and tack. Rodeo competitors and working cowboys and cowgirls throughout the West know K-J Leather products well.

Newell’s community leaders have aggressively recruited small industry, and the resulting jobs have kept the town’s population stable at about 650, bucking rural trends.

A Newell industry that predates the economic development corporation is Boom Concrete. Founded by Newell native Craig Van Der Boom in 1964, the company earned a reputation for its cement stave silos sold across South Dakota. Now Craig’s son, Troy, runs the company, well respected today for its virtually indestructible picnic tables and rock-exterior restrooms found at South Dakota’s state parks and recreation areas.

Other businesses and services that are key employers include the school district, Butte Electric Cooperative and the irrigation district. Residents have always commuted into Black Hills communities for work, too. Positions at Fort Meade Veterans Administration Hospital, 25 minutes down Highway 79, are especially attractive. Newell’s population is about 650, and Vollmer and Wetz say that figure has held pretty steady over the past 20 years.

Summer visitors pass through town for boating and fishing at the reservoir. There’s little evidence that irrigation boosters 100 years ago saw much potential for recreation on the waters, but it’s been a huge economic boost over the years. People ask for directions to Orman, always the dam’s unofficial and locally preferred name; it refers to a Colorado contractor who got the original bid for the big government project. Officially the name remains Belle Fourche Dam.

Newell has always been able to attract area farmers and ranchers looking to retire in town. Once in a while someone from far away — drawn to Orman for boating, perhaps, or just driving down highways 212 or 79 — decides to make Newell home, too.”They’re people looking for a laid-back way of life and for safety,” Vollmer says.

“What attracts them in the summertime is our green lawns and gardens, and our trees,” adds Wetz.”Because of the irrigation district, we look a little different than some towns in western South Dakota.”

Newell homeowners can access irrigation waters, piped through town, for just $3 a month. One retired rancher told Wetz he spent his whole life”trying to grow grass on the prairie, and now I have to mow the damn stuff.”

One of Newell’s most pleasant amenities is its nine-hole golf course, on the town’s north side. Irrigation waters have been put to creative use; golfers tee off and putt alongside the waters of a small dam. Writing a town history for Newell’s centennial in 2010, Wetz was surprised to learn that golfers have played at that spot since 1910.”We were golfing before we had electricity,” he observes.

Fall is a busy time in Newell, beginning with a Labor Day celebration that’s featured a rodeo the past 55 years. It may be the world’s only rodeo to showcase sheep tipis. As veteran sheep producers know, a tipi in their industry is a tent that shelters a ewe and new lamb in case of bad weather on the prairie, or forces ewe and lamb togetherness when a ewe rejects her lamb. The timed rodeo event involves teams of two people, one who erects the tipi and the other who collects the animals and gets them into the tent.

“We call our rodeo the sheep tipi-ing world’s championship,” Vollmer says.

The Newell Ram Show attracts ranchers from four states. Photo by Greg Latza.

In some ways Labor Day feels like a warm-up for the big Newell Ram Show and Sale, always held the third Friday in September. First organized by community leaders in 1946, the event has succeeded in meeting its original goal: improving sheep flocks in South Dakota and neighboring states by making the best breeding stock available close to home. Consignors show up with high quality stud rams, registered ewes and purebred range rams. Area sheep producers say the show and sale has helped them remain nationally competitive over the years, as they’ve faced fluctuating prices, foreign wool competition and more artificial fibers.

Big as Labor Day and the Ram Show and Sale are, a series of more spontaneous events epitomize Newell. The next time you’re headed to the Hills on Highway 212 and you come upon the town, roll down your windows and sniff the air for pancakes. It’s possible that Newell holds the world’s record for dollars raised per capita by pancakes. Anytime there’s a serious illness or accident involving Newell residents, you can count on the Lions Club to stage a free will donation pancake supper. You can also count on seeing the omnipresent Vollmer and Wetz flipping the cakes. There are big pancake dollars behind a community ambulance, and behind the building that houses the ambulance.

“Those suppers have been happening for years,” Vollmer says,”and people keep coming, responding to whatever need Newell has.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Different Drums of Flandreau

By Chuck Cecil

The Moody County Courthouse square is a popular gathering place for Flandreau youth. The courthouse, built in 1914, has an architectural twin in nearby Rock Rapids, Iowa. Both were designed by Sioux Falls architect Joseph Schwarz, who is best remembered for designing many Gothic-style Catholic churches in the region.

Every Fourth of July in Flandreau’s restored 1880s railroad depot, the Lutheran ladies sell lefse by the pound, while nearby the Episcopal Church ladies dish out Indian tacos by the dozen.

But neither snack outdraws the popular Long Johns that are baked daily a few blocks away at the 83-year-old Flandreau Bakery.

The community’s gastronomic variety is one of many subtle and not so subtle dichotomies that blend in this Moody County community’s abundance of cultural habit and history.

One of the state’s oldest communities, Flandreau was settled in 1857. Its tone and fabric since has been fashioned by white settlers and Native American homesteaders who found the good life along banks of the serpentine Big Sioux River. At Flandreau the river makes a right turn to tumble over the largest dam on the river and then meanders west through town before resuming its southward journey. That river twist inspired early Native Americans to refer to the heavily timbered river valley as”the bend in the river.” Decades earlier, trappers were at the bend in the 1830s.

Flandreau is named after New Yorker Charles Flandrau, who came west as a young lawyer and took up railroading and the Dakota Land Corporation. Unfortunately, the town with his name is misspelled. A Flandreau newspaper editor in 1891 accidentally added the letter”e” to the type stick, and that spelling made it into history books.

The main streets of downtown Flandreau feature a mix of facades, but the town’s working class atmosphere is best personified in this business alley begind Pipestone Avenue, where Don Ulwelling has operated Don’s Tire Shop for more than 25 years.

At the river’s bend the two cultures often dance to different drummers. Citizens still trip the light fantastic in Flandreau’s iconic 1919 ballroom in Riverside Park while a mile away along the same river others do the grass dance to a resonating rawhide drum at the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe’s powwow grounds. The Japanese Gardens ballroom was named in the 1920s because of the colorful, inexpensive oriental paper decorations adorning its walls. It’s the last of the old dance halls in eastern South Dakota. Like the Japanese Garden, the tribe’s powwow ground for nearly 50 years is in a park-like, shaded swale along the river. The traditional dances of the two cultures are set aside most days of the week.

“We take pride in working together with the tribe on matters of community concerns,” said Flandreau Mayor Brad Bonrud.”We have great cooperation.” Tony Reider, Flandreau Santee Sioux tribal president, agreed.”I can’t begin to count the number of ways we cooperate and work with the city,” he said. He mentioned the county Boys and Girls Club the tribe has taken on as a project for 200 children in the county.”But we try to get together whenever we can,” Mayor Bonrud said.

The federal government took notice of the coexistence of the two cultures in 1883, bought the mission school and established the Flandreau Indian School that today is the nation’s oldest continuously operated federal Indian boarding school for grades 10 through 12.

Betty Belkham, who served a dozen years as superintendent, said about 350 Native Americans representing 44 tribes from nine states live and study there. She likened the school to”a giant melting-pot of Native American cultures.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs school has an annual budget of about $5 million and 120 employees. Among its buildings is a museum of school and Native American artifacts. Last spring, 49 students graduated from the federal school. The Flandreau Public School in 2012 graduated 30.

Across Highway 13 from the school is the venerable First Presbyterian Church, also known as River Bend Church that was organized in 1869. Members built the church in 1873. It is the oldest continuously used church in South Dakota, said Pastor Paula Armstrong. Before there was a church on the hill, Native Americans used a simple building they called the Bend in the River Meeting House. The refurbished building has been moved, stocked with historic memorabilia and is open weekday afternoons as part of the county’s impressive museum complex.

Grace (seated) and Gabby Flute Player enjoy a Flandreau front yard decorated with red pipestone. Their parents, Rick and Kelly Flute Player, and their siblings quarry the stone at Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. Rick Flute Player makes ceremonial pipes from the catlinite, which is sacred in Lakota and Dakota culture.

Another old timer, the privately owned, now empty St. Vincent Hotel with its broad veranda and 1887 look, is something of a museum piece in downtown Flandreau. Perhaps its most infamous guest was gangster John Dillinger, who stayed there while planning his successful March 6, 1934, robbery of the Sioux Falls Security National Bank.

Flandreau’s tradition of the melding of cultures is also illustrated in some of its wealth of local art. Wall murals by Native American artist Paul Iron Cloud brighten the tribe’s Royal River Casino. Harvey Dunn’s salute to homesteaders, The First Furrow, and an 1895 painting by Elsbeth Jackson of a famous Indian woman of the late 1800s everyone at the Great Bend called”Granny Weston,” are in the County Resource Center near the high school.

Just pass the town’s Aquatic Center there are fabulous paintings in the William Janklow Armory-Auditorium. The series are by then-Flandreau resident Dorothy Lyford, now of Brookings, who was commissioned to illustrate the city’s history as part of the city’s State Centennial Lasting Legacy project.

The first of Lyford’s six large paintings was inspired by a personal account written by Helen Locke Pettigrew, a child of a pioneer Flandreau minister. She wrote of her friendship with a Native American girl. The painting shows the two girls playing on the banks of the Big Sioux River, communicating in the ways of children and amusing one another with Indian beads. The paintings by Lyford are available for public viewing. Each mural is a montage of historical highlights in 20-year slices

One of those colorful slices shows the Flandreau Dam, the river’s largest. Concrete has replaced the first wooden barrier built in the late 1890s that until World War I ground wheat into”Golden Girl” and”Lily of the West” flour. A changing preference by area farmers to grow corn rather than wheat contributed to the mill’s demise. Today only part of its sluice remains.

The dam is still a big draw. Noisy water cascades over the 12-foot high barrier, reinvigorating the pokey river that attracts fish and fishermen.

Most of the flour in Flandreau that is kneaded in profusion today at the popular Flandreau Bakery isn’t the old mill’s”Golden Girl” variety. The late Mel Duncan, a popular businessman who later served 20 years as Flandreau’s mayor, started the bakery in 1930. His sons Ed and Don now operate what is the state’s oldest family bakery.”We make 32 different kinds of bread and 21 different pastries every day. Of the pastries our Long Johns are the best sellers,” Ed says.

Ground corn, not wheat, is a big item on the menu at the Dakota Layers massive egg production facility north of town that was hatched in the late 1999 by 100 local farmers and businessmen led by second-generation Flandreau businessman and Dakota Layer President Scott Ramsdell. Hyline and Shaver hens peck away at a million bushels of ground corn and about 10,000 tons of soybean meal a year.

The menu and the flock will be expanded soon to 1.3 million hens. Then the annual production will be about 324 million eggs trundling along the plant’s conveyor labyrinth to intricate sorting and packaging stations.”We’re the largest egg producer in the state and have the only in-shell, in-line pasteurizing system in the nation,” Ramsdell said. About 60 people work at the facility shipping eggs to Midwest groceries and to an expanding California market.

Local artist Dorothy Lyford painted six large murals in Flandreau’s armory as a state centennal project. Each painting is a montage of historical and cultural highlights that represent a 20-year period in the region’s history.

Although Flandreau’s wealth of cultural and historic attractions draws people to town, it’s the river that is the constant for everyone. Its profusion of flora and fauna has a magnetic attraction, just as it did for early Santee Sioux families who found the area similar to their former home in Minnesota.

That momentous move to the bend in the river took place in 1869 when 25 Santee families became the first Sioux ever to take up homesteads. Those Native American settlers and others who followed in 1870 sought peace, which wasn’t the case for others who became involved in the Dakota Uprising of 1862.

Leaders of the uprising were arrested, and 38 were hanged at Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 27, 1862. One leader, Chief Little Crow, was among many who were released. He died in 1863 at age 45. In 1971 his body was moved and reburied at the Native American Cemetery near the Bend in the River church.

Not far from there his burial place is a monument to another uprising victim. Mrs. Joseph Thatcher and three other women were taken prisoner by Inkpaduta’s band near Lake Okoboji. Fleeing into the interior of what is now South Dakota, while crossing the Big Sioux River on a fallen log near what is now Riverside Park, Mrs. Thatcher fell into the river and drowned. A 10-foot high obelisk in her memory was erected in 1937 approximately 300 yards west of where she disappeared.

After that uprising, about 1,300 uninvolved Santee Sioux were relegated to the Santee Agency in Niobrara, Nebraska. There, a few made the decision to leave the reservation and establish a community in 1869 at the bend in the Big Sioux River. They broke the nomadic mold, accepted Christianity, took up homesteads and adopted English names. Today the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe has a national membership of about 750, of which about 350 live in and near Flandreau.

Paula Armstrong is pastor of First Presbyterian, the oldest continuously operating church in South Dakota.

Contiguous to the Flandreau city limits is a portion of the tribe’s approximately 3,100 acres of trust land. The line between city and trust land is a street with access to the tribe’s attractive headquarters building and its well-equipped clinic. That area also boasts a comfortable Native American neighborhood. Nearby on the same trust land is the tribe’s glitzy Royal River Casino and Hotel, opened in 1992. It provides jobs to tribal members and others, and issues a monthly stipend to tribal members. The casino offers the River’s Bend dining area, and just down the hall is the auditorium where popular shows are staged. The tribal business complex also has an RV camping area, convenience store and bowling alley.

Flandreau’s downtown Crystal Theater has also been a popular entertainment venue, although the last movies were shown in the early 1980s. The theater was falling in on itself. Interested citizens came forward, and with donated funds and labor, saw to its restoration. Today, with its showy original neon marquee lighting the way, the theater is a font of entertainment, from magic shows to speakers, and musical and dramatic presentations. It’s also home for the J.C. Wade Children’s Summer Theater, started by the late J. C. Wade. A member of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and recognized for his work nationally and in South Dakota in Native American education, Wade moved back to his hometown after retiring.

A herd of 250 buffalo owned by the tribe as a tie to its past was an attraction to highway passersby in the 1990s. Now in that large pasture is a herd of about 50 that South Dakota State University scientists, tribal members and students at the Flandreau Indian School work with to find ways to better market the meat.

For better police protection in the town of 2,400 and on the 3,100 acres of trust land and other Santee land ó it owns 2,500 acres for which it pays property taxes ó the tribal council and the city council formed a joint powers committee. The five Santee and six Flandreau residents on the committee meet monthly with the contracted Moody County Sheriff’s Department to discuss enforcement matters.”I believe Flandreau was the first, and it may be the only city in the state, where the tribe and the community work so well together in matters of law enforcement,” Mayor Bonrud said.

That same cooperation, pride and community spirit tumbles out in so many other ways all along the historic and still popular Big Sioux Bend in the River.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Gateway to the Sandhills

Story and photos by Bernie Hunhoff

“Soap weed is what keeps the Sandhills from blowing away,” says Jim Buckles, a third generation rancher. The spiny plant, also known as yucca, sometimes shoots a pod of seeds that cattle love to eat.

Nebraska has bragging rights to the Sandhills, and so it should. They cover a quarter of the Cornhusker State. But the Sandhills actually begin north of the Nebraska border with an oasis of cactus, hills and water in southwestern South Dakota. And as is often true with beginnings, the South Dakota Sandhills have a story of their own.

Maps of the Sandhills show them spilling into South Dakota, but you won’t need a map to find them. Just take Highway 73 south of Martin. You’ll pass by farms and fields, perhaps wondering if you’ve yet reached the beginning. You’ll know when you do. The switch from what locals call”the hardland” to the Sandhills is literally a line in the sand. They can’t be missed.

“There’s nothing like it in the United States, except maybe very locally along barrier islands, a few hundred yards off the East Coast, and in southern California,” says Dr. Perry Rahn.”Certainly nothing to the extent that you find in Bennett County and on into Nebraska.”

Rahn, a retired professor from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, says the history of the Sandhills dates back 2 million years to the Pleistocene, or Ice Age.”The glacier never got to Bennett County and western Nebraska, but the wind from that era might have blown away the topsoil and exposed the sand.”

Though the Sandhills have been intensely studied over the past century, scientists remain uncertain of their origins. As the glaciers melted about 11,000 years ago, the dunes took shape. Some call them a”desert in disguise” because the geology is much like dunes found in hotter climates. However, thanks to an average rainfall of 15 inches a year, a thin cover of vegetation makes them look more like Ireland than Africa.

That hasn’t always been the case, according to Rahn. He says there have been drought cycles in the past 10,000 years when the vegetation probably all but disappeared and the dunes actively shifted with massive sandstorms.

In modern times, the Sandhills have been stable. But their fragility has never been a secret. The U.S. Congress, recognizing the region’s arid qualities, passed the Kinkaid Act in 1904 to allow homesteaders 640 acres rather than the customary 160.

Retired rancher Jim Buckles, who now lives just north of the Sandhills, says his grandfather came from Oklahoma to become a Kinkaider, as the homesteaders were called. He’s lived and farmed in and out of the Sandhills, and says there’s a big difference.

“There’s a line just like that table’s edge,” Buckles says.”And when you hit the Sandhills the water is soft water and out here it is hard water.” Buckles says water is more plentiful in the Sandhills, where wells are often only 50 feet deep.”I just dug one for our house that’s 400 feet deep.”

Buckles says Lake Creek runs west to east along the very northern rim of the Sandhills in South Dakota. Largely spring-fed, the creek eventually flows into a series of man-made reservoirs that were begun in the 1930s as the Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge. Locals pronounce it Lay-creek as a reference to Lake Creek.

The northern edge of Nebraska’s famous Sandhills formation spills over into southern South Dakota.

The refuge has developed into an oasis for hundreds of bird species. American white pelicans nest in large colonies. Trumpeter swans winter there from September to March. Grassland birds, burrowing owls and waterfowl can also be found, many year-round and others as a migratory resting place.

Few roads were ever built in the South Dakota Sandhills, and there is little obvious evidence of settlement other than fences, windmills and a few small cemeteries. One exception is the Ted Turner ranching enterprise. The billionaire media mogul turned buffalo rancher owns 37,365 acres in Bennett County, most of it in the Sandhills. Turner is the largest property tax payer, according to County Treasurer Jolene Donovan. He will owe $94,521.92 this year.

But Turner’s spread represents only about one-tenth of the South Dakota Sandhills, which run 80 miles east and west and extend from a few miles to 12 miles north of the Nebraska state line. Altogether, South Dakota’s Sandhills encompass about 360,000 acres, and most of it is pasture for local ranchers.

“This is really neat country,” says John Markus, who runs cattle on the demarcation line with his wife, Cathy.”The hills around here act like a sponge when it rains. This is not a desert. Water is a part of what makes it so special.”

Markus, who also keeps cattle on the hardlands, says the Sandhills are”harder to manage but worth the trouble. You don’t want to overstock these hills, but there’s a lot of the grasses, the big blue stem and some others, that are good quality for grazing and the cattle will do real good.”

He said even the yucca, a bush of yellow-green spikes that dominates much of the Sandhills landscape, is a benefit. The plant is known locally as soapweed, probably because the root was used by pioneers to make soap.”Cows are a herd animal and they are great mothers,” said Markus.”But I’ve seen good cows leave the herd, and leave their calves, and race all-out when they spy the seeds from a soapweed. They love them, and it must be really high protein, because they will really shine up on them.”

The Markuses are third-generation Sandhills ranchers. Cathy’s grandfather Carl Micheel built a ranch in Lake Creek Valley in the 1940s. His sons, bachelor brothers Melvin and Leon, ran the place for decades.

Melvin’s dream came true when Cathy and her husband decided to move there from their ranch near Mission, becoming the fourth generation.

Lake Creek begins on the old Micheel ranch and eventually flows into a series of ponds that form the Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge.

Like many Sandhills ranches, a long dirt path connects the headquarters to the nearest paved road. The house, old barns and corrals are strategically situated in a flat valley at the foot of a big hill that provides protection from the north wind. Lake Creek cuts right through the farmyard, and a grassy wetland lies to the south of the buildings.

“We mow that grass for hay,” says Cathy.”You might be able to drive along one spot just fine, and then a week later it’ll be too soft and spongy in that same spot to carry a small tractor.”

She gave us a tour of the hills and valley, bouncing along dirt roads and up and down the soft hills in a big white pickup. Springs can be found at several locations, filling small basins. At some points, the creek disappears underground. Burrowing owls spook from holes in the surrounding hillsides. Geese swim on wetlands. An 8-foot waterfall seems out of place among the yucca and cactus. The noise of spilling water is as delightful here as in the Black Hills, 100 miles to the west, but this Sandhills waterfall appears to have been plucked from the forest and planted on the prairie.

Rahn, the former SDSMT professor, says the arid Sandhills, ironically, are linked through eons of time with the massive Ogallala Aquifer that also begins in South Dakota, just beneath the dunes. That’s not a coincidence.”The source of the sand for the Sandhills is the underlying Ogallala formation,” he says.”The aquifer is 5 million years old, and the sand dunes are much more recent.”

The Ogallala Aquifer begins in Bennett County and extends to Texas, providing water for 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States. Although it holds 3 billion acre-feet of water, it has been declining at the rate of 325 billion gallons per year for decades because of over-use in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

The aquifer’s depth has been holding steady in South Dakota and northern Nebraska because the sand dunes collect rainwater and snowmelt that would drain away to major rivers, like the Platte or the Missouri, under normal circumstances. Shifting sand through the centuries has clogged the creeks, allowing the water to sift into the big Ogallala.

The aquifer also remains deep and clean in the northern region because there is less of a need for irrigation. The land is mostly too rugged to farm. This is country for cows, horses and buffalo.

The Micheels and other Sandhills pioneer families were tough and colorful, according to Joyce Wilson, who runs the Martin pharmacy with her husband, Kirk, and also helps maintain the Martin museum. Old photographs and stories illustrate that nature has not only shaped the Sandhills, but the people who have lived in them.

Wilson’s grandfather, Alex Livermont, raised Clydesdales and Belgian horses in the Sandhills a hundred years ago. He also participated in massive roundups when the hills were unfenced and considered open range. Cattle could be herded, but the Livermonts once tried to trail 100 hogs to Cody, Neb., by leading them with a wagon of corn. The hogs followed along until they reached a creek or river, but then they quickly scampered for mud.

The Hillman family held dances and fish fries at their ranch near Lacreek Valley. Sometimes, the men and boys would fish for trout in a dam. On one occasion, a 3-year-old named Delbert Rolfe could not be found. Thinking he may have entered the water, the men cut a hole in the dam and drained it in their haste to find the boy. Fortunately, he was not in the water; they found him hours later in a sand blowout, sleeping.

The Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge covers 16,410 acres of marshland on the northern edge of the Sandhills.

He awoke and reportedly told his father,”I knew you would find me, Dad.” Many stories had unhappier endings.

Prairie fires were especially dangerous in grass country. In March of 1921, a fire started south of Martin when a car cushion caught fire and was thrown into a dry road ditch. A strong north wind fanned the flames and it expanded into the Sandhills, burning winter hay supplies that were badly needed.

After major fires, ranchers had the soul-wrenching task of traveling across the land to find and shoot any cattle and horses that were too badly burned to live.

Oscar Greenough, a pioneer rancher, wrote in the Bennett County history book about a fire that started in a place called Buzzard Basin in 1925.”You could see fire in every direction,” he remembered.”The fire was moving many miles an hour with the 50-mile-an-hour wind behind it. People trying to fight the fire would have to run their horses to keep ahead of it. That evening when the wind changed, it looked like the heavens were on fire. The light showed above the smoke and dust. Some people believed the world had come to an end.”

Blizzards were another worry. Joy Fairhead wrote in the history book about a 1919 spring storm so furious that,”you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.” The Fairheads helped a neighbor.”We rode to White River. There we found 200 of his steers, also a bunch of range horses. They had mud and ice all over their backs and tails. We headed back to Dead Man’s Lake and found 1,000 steers frozen in Ö they looked like sardines in a can.”

Most of the steers were alive. The Sandhills cowboys spent a full day trying to rope and pull the animals out of the icy lake, and rescued about 100. They were able to drive out about 25 more by kicking and yelling.”We were near freezing so we gave up and went home,” Fairhead wrote.”Our chaps, Levis and underwear were all ice and mud. We couldn’t get out of them until we thawed out around the living room stove.”

When they returned early the next morning, half of the remaining steers were dead. Those still alive were barely able to bawl.”We didn’t have the heart to try again,” Fairhead wrote. The tragedy was reported in newspapers across the United States.

But before the carcasses thawed, hundreds of Native Americans came from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations to butcher the frozen beef.”The weather was nice, and they started skinning,” wrote Fairfield.”There was jerked beef all over the wagon wheels, wagon tongues, ropes, wire fences. It was sliced real thin and dried.”

Fairfield wrote that Native American families were a big part of Sandhills history.”One of the highlights was gatherings the Indians liked to have they called Indian Fairs. They would have horse races and dancing. We boys and a pal fixed up a wagon with a tent and a box for our eats. The first one I attended was about September 1910, north of Lacreek. Our neighbors were White Rabbits, Bad Wounds, Bad Hairs ó all fine neighbors and it was a good place to live.”

South Dakota’s Sandhills lie in the southeastern corner of Shannon County on the Pine Ridge Reservation and extend into the southwest corner of Todd County on the Rosebud Reservation. But most of the South Dakota Sandhills lie in Bennett County. The Little White River ó once known as Stinking Water Creek ó runs along the north edge.

“The South Dakota Sandhills are unnoticed, overlooked and unheralded,” says John M. Crowley, professor emeritus at the University of Montana in Missoula. Crowley explored and wrote about the region, and was surprised by the lack of attention it receives. He says the South Dakota Sandhills differ from Nebraska’s in three important ways.”The South Dakota Sandhills have no towns, few roads and few ranch headquarters, whereas the Nebraska Sandhills have many of all three of these. The South Dakota Sandhills do not have a single town and never did.”

Martin residents seem surprised when asked about the Sandhills. The town has never marketed the history or the geology, though the town of 1,000 people certainly could declare itself the Gateway to the Sandhills. The Lacreek Refuge, southeast of town, is the only opportunity for visitors to learn about the land.

To further study the Sandhills, a South Dakotan needs to drive U.S. Highway 73 across the Nebraska border toward Merriman, Neb., (pop. 128). As soon as you leave South Dakota, you’ll find the Bowring Ranch, a state park that preserves the history of Sandhills ranching. The ranch was owned and operated for many years by Arthur and Eva Bowring. She was Nebraska’s first female U.S. Senator. The Bowrings’s humble ranch buildings and their white-faced Hereford herd of cattle are all still there, along with exhibits of ranch life amidst the cactus and yucca. Merriman, just south of the Bowring Ranch, is a tiny place with several farm stores, a cafe and a few churches.

The Sandhills were formed in about the same era as when the Paleo-Indians, the first human inhabitants, arrived about 12,000 years ago. They hunted mammoths and other species that became extinct in the Archaic Period. Archeologists have explored and excavated numerous fossil sites in both states. Often, fossils and artifacts are found when the sand dunes are exposed by wind or water. Ranchers call such events a”blowout.”

Only man and bison survived. Man nearly killed the bison in the late 19th century, but now the ancient beasts thrive on tribal lands, Turner’s empire and local ranches.

But the real survivors are the Sandhills themselves. They’ve been laid bare by droughts, tromped by mammoths and sculpted by wind and rain. Yet they endure as one of America’s most unusual and imperilled terrains. †† †††

And they begin in South Dakota.

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

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The Road Less Traveled

By John Andrews

Motorists driving state Highway 20 see the steeple of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church on the horizon for several miles before reaching Hoven.

South Dakota Highway 20 passes through nearly two dozen East River towns between Minnesota and the Missouri River. Only four have more than 300 people. Motorists often choose U.S. Highway 12 through Aberdeen or U.S. Highway 212 through Watertown when traversing the state’s northeastern quarter, so Highway 20 has become less traveled. The route could be considered one of our most rural highways, and it’s worth exploring. We found 200 year old pianos, South Dakota’s only pressed flower artist, legends of a prankster Indian chief, Civil War history (Union and Confederate) and new businesses injecting life into small towns.

Minnesota to the Big Sioux

Our journey began in Grant County, where Minnesota Highway 40 becomes South Dakota 20. Between the state line and Watertown, the road weaves around rolling hills dotted with huge boulders that could only have been left by glaciers that scraped the earth thousands of years ago.

The first stop was Steve Misener’s piano shop on the Main Street of Stockholm, population 105. Misener began tuning and restoring pianos 30 years ago, and since then he’s become an avid piano collector and passionate music advocate. He has about 75 pianos and boxes stuffed with miscellaneous parts packed into his small shop, which was once the town grocery store.

Steve Misener tunes, restores and collects antique pianos in his Main Street shop in Stockholm.

His most prized pianos are two John Broadwood concert grands with connections to famous European composers (see sidebar). He also owns French and German pianos made in the mid-19th century and smaller square grands. One was made by Jonas Chickering in Boston in 1832, and may be the oldest privately owned Chickering. Misener knows of four others of that age in existence. They are at the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Misener jokes that he’s the first member of his family to pursue a career outside of agriculture in 100 generations. At age 13 he bought a player piano at an auction and became fascinated with its parts. After graduating from high school in Revillo, he attended technical school for piano tuning and repair.”I found out the ratio of pianos to piano tuners, and 35 years ago it was 5,000 to one,” he says.”There were 5,000 pianos out there with my name on them.”

The ratio may still be the same, but times have changed.”Seventy percent of the pianos in American homes today are furniture,” he says.”You set your family pictures on them and no one plays them.” He also read a study that found only 7 percent of Americans play an instrument. Those factors motivated Misener to revive interest in music by having students tour his shop and exhibiting a portion of his collection at Blue Cloud Abbey near Marvin last spring.

One morning 15 students enrolled in a music theory and history class visited his business. When he asked how many played an instrument, only three students raised their hands.”My generation has taught convenience,” he laments.”It’s much easier to spend 60 seconds and learn how to run an iPod than it is to spend six years and learn how to play the piano.”

Misener hopes to take his exhibition on the road to reach as many students as he can. He also welcomes tour groups. Call (605) 676-2355 to make sure he’s there.

In South Shore we met Tina Nielsen, owner of the South Shore Mercantile. Her business is the hub of activity in the town on the south shore of Punished Woman’s Lake. The Mercantile is a grocery store, hardware store, thrift shop, restaurant, video rental, library and gift shop all under one nearly 100-year-old roof.

Nielsen and her husband opened the mercantile three years ago as a small grocery store that served rolls and coffee in the morning.”The people accepted us, and we’ve expanded to fit their needs,” she says. And the townspeople have helped by donating freezers, shelving, cabinets, tables, chairs and decorations for the walls.

Nielsen also helped revive the town’s traditional Punished Woman’s Pageant, held in 2010 for the first time in nearly a decade. It commemorates the story of Wewake and her lover Black Bear, both of whom were slain by the tribe’s jealous chief. When homesteaders settled the area in the 1880s, they found stone effigies of Wewake and Black Bear on a hill south of town. Nielsen says they plan to stage a pageant again in two years, but for now a video of the 2010 event is available at the Mercantile.

There’s a brief break in Highway 20 north of Watertown. The route resumes on the city’s west side and loops around Lake Kampeska. It also passes the apex of the triangular Lake Traverse Reservation.

Big Sioux River to the James

West of Watertown, corn and bean fields pockmarked with countless lakes and sloughs dominate the landscape. This is the oldest stretch of Highway 20, which opened in 1929 between Watertown and Highway 45 near Cresbard. In 1944 the highway was extended through Hoven to U.S. Highway 83. In the 1950s a stretch to the Minnesota line was added, and in the 1960s it overtook what had been Highway 8 to Montana. In all, Highway 20 spans 432 miles.

Every town along Highway 20 has an elevator, though Bradley’s is long abandoned.

Grain elevators are prominent in nearly every town from Watertown to the Missouri. Through the wheat belt of Spink County, huge elevators sometimes stand alone. Grain bins greet travelers in Florence, a town rebounding from a devastating fire in June that destroyed an elevator that Terry Redlin used as the backdrop in many paintings. We stopped for root beer at Max Johnson’s Pioneer Cafe, then walked down the block to the elevator’s temporary office where Steve Schlenner was checking markets. Schlenner has managed the Florence elevator for 27 years, and it was he who discovered the fire. Construction crews working on remodeling had left for the day, and Schlenner was running wheat around the large elevator complex when he saw smoke.

“I knew right away it was going to be all gone,” Schlenner says.”I just knew there was no way we would be able to save it. I looked up the chute, and for just a brief second I thought about going up there with a fire extinguisher, but I realized I’d never get it out. It was just a ball of fire. So I dialed 911, and I knew then it was all going to go.”

During our visit, crews busily repaired two adjacent grain bins, and Schlenner said the elevator hoped to be ready to handle the fall’s corn harvest.

Eight miles down the road lies Wallace, birthplace of U.S. Senator and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, though the sign announcing the town’s claim to fame no longer stands along the highway. In Wallace we met Marie Ann Robinson, the state’s only pressed flower artist. She gathers flowers, leaves, fruits and vegetables from her yard and creates award-winning pieces of art.

She showed us a sample of her work. In a Black Hills scene, a flowing waterfall is made from onion membrane, and the rocks are mushrooms. In another, the wooden walls and floor of a weathered building are day lilies. Robinson explained that after they die and are rehydrated, lilies develop a deep brown color and resemble wood grain when pressed. Her interpretation of Henri Matisse’s Woman With a Hat uses peony petals, poinsettia and white poplar leaves. Robinson’s popular South Dakota series includes pheasants, mallards, geese, buffalo and a work in progress featuring wild turkeys.

Marie Ann Robinson turns flowers and plants that grow around her Wallace home into works of art.

To prevent deterioration, the art is secured with aluminum tape and sealed beneath a layer of Mylar and two pieces of glass. Oxygen absorbers and silica gel packets remove any moisture, so any changes in the botanical material won’t be noticeable for decades.

In the early 1990s, Robinson was arranging wreaths and working with live flowers when she found a lily of the valley pressed in the pages of her grandmother’s Bible. She learned about pressing flowers and began making small bookmarks and magnets (some are for sale at Watertown’s Expressions Gallery, where you can also buy originals or prints of her larger pieces). Then a friend gave her a book on pressed flower art, and she expanded into bigger pieces. She joined an international pressed flower art guild on the Internet, and learns many of her techniques from Russian and Ukrainian artists, including a new framing method that is similar to vacuum packing the art within the frame.

Robinson has lived in South Dakota since 2002, but still speaks with the slight Southern twang she developed growing up in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. She and her husband, a Webster native, lived on an acreage near Clark, where she tended 12 flower beds and a large vegetable garden. But a few years ago she decided to downsize. The flower patch at her Wallace home is considerably smaller, but she still finds what she needs around town and by exchanging materials with fellow artists.

We passed through Bradley and Crocker before arriving in the smallest town on our journey. Just five people live in Crandall, but an old gas station and its summertime music festivals has brought over 3,000 people to town since Dave Swain bought it in 2005. The Pumps was a full-service Standard station opened in 1934 to serve townspeople and passers by on Highway 20, which once ran right past the station (today the road is gravel, and Highway 20 passes 3 miles south of Crandall). When it closed in 1971, it was the last Standard station in the country to use gravity pumps. Standard wanted to include the pumps in a museum exhibit after the station’s closing, but owner Ben Hildebrant produced receipts showing he owned them, and they stayed.

The station was a popular stopping point for motorists traveling from Aberdeen to Watertown. Gov. Sigurd Anderson and Hildebrant were good friends, and the governor often visited. It was also the site of weekly poker games.

Swain opens The Pumps every other Sunday during the summer. There’s no gas, but he sells ice cream, candy bars and pop and displays memorabilia from Crandall’s heyday. One old photo shows the entire town boarding a train for Aberdeen in 1911 to see President Taft. In honor of the 100th anniversary next year, Swain is planning a celebration.

The Pumps is also home to music jamborees, usually one in the spring and another in early autumn. Musicians set up outside and Swain serves a light lunch.

Crandall lies near the western foothills of the Coteau des Prairies, a flatiron-shaped rise across eastern South Dakota. Today giant wind turbines dot the horizon; hundreds of years ago it was a popular gathering place for Indians. Burial mounds and remains of fire rings lie in the hills just north of town. Chief Drifting Goose and his Hunkpati band of Yanktonai were headquartered near here at Armadale, an island in the James River four miles northeast of Mellette that the meandering river has since re-submerged. He’s remembered as a peace-loving chief who preferred pranking homesteaders instead of fighting them. Legend says he once stole the clothes from a settler and made him run back to his sod shanty naked. When railroad surveyors marked the line through his encampment, he moved the stakes. Eventually the railroad was routed through Northville, a more respectful 10 miles west of Drifting Goose’s camp.

Dave Swain bought Crandall’s old Standard service station in 2005 and hosts summer gatherings there. The gas is long gone.

Locals tell Drifting Goose stories with a chuckle, but they also respect the leader who never signed a treaty and, in his mind, never ceded any of his land. No markers commemorate the colorful chief, but Swain is leading efforts to rename the bridge that crosses the James on Highway 20 after Drifting Goose.

When we left The Pumps, we followed Swain through Conde and his hometown of Brentford to tiny Plainsview Cemetery on a narrow, dirt road northwest of town. A few years ago Swain was exploring the cemetery when he found a single, white tombstone that read,”Corp. George W. Melton, 45 Va. Infantry, Co. E, CSA.” After some research, Swain discovered that Melton is one of less than 10 Confederate soldiers buried in South Dakota. He learned that Melton and fellow Confederates Jeremiah Houseman (buried in Mellette) and William Henry Carrico brought their families to Huron from Carroll County, Virginia in 1884. Melton and Houseman both served in the 45th Virginia, while Carrico fought under famous rebel Jeb Stuart at Gettysburg.

The rediscovery of Melton’s grave has led to another mystery around Brentford. Every Memorial Day, an unknown visitor places flowers and a Confederate flag by the tombstone.

The James to the Big Muddy

Highway 20 beyond the junction with U.S. Highway 281 honors another veteran. Cecil Harris grew up near Cresbard, a tidy town in northeastern Faulk County. Harris joined the Navy in 1941 and became the second highest scoring Navy pilot in all of World War II. He once shot down four enemy planes while saving two of his squadron members. Twice more he shot down four planes without taking a single bullet. Harris returned to Cresbard after the war to teach, and eventually became principal at the high school. He rejoined the Navy during the Korean War and served as a career Navy officer. He died in 1981 in Washington, D.C. The state transportation commission renamed the 80-mile stretch of road through Spink, Faulk and Potter counties after Harris in 2009.

Brad and Joletta Naef operate Dakota Jo’s cafe in Tolstoy. They serve German food once a week to honor the town’s heritage.

The Harris Highway took us through Onaka and into Tolstoy, where a California couple has opened a new eatery in the town of 36 people. Brad and Joletta Naef moved to Tolstoy in 2009, and last summer they converted the town’s old post office into Dakota Jo’s Cafe. Joletta grew up on a farm four miles northeast of Tolstoy, but Brad is a California native. He was a paint contractor and did light construction, and Joletta managed dental offices. When they retired they wanted a slower pace of life. Their cafe fills a need in Tolstoy and a handful of surrounding small towns.

“We were looking for something to do locally, and she remembered coming to town to the old cafe, so we asked the locals if they’d like a place to meet for coffee in the morning,” Brad says.”And it snowballed into a full cafe. We’re not like Denny’s or IHOP. We don’t even have a deep fryer. We cook like we do at home.”

That means German food in honor of the town’s heritage every Thursday, hot beef combos on Wednesdays, Mexican Tuesdays and a full family dinner on Sundays. The cafe is decorated with items from their home in California; his mother’s plates and her grandmother’s tin can art adorn the walls. They revel in the solitude they have discovered in Potter County.”Where we came from, you’d have bars on the windows and alarms all over,” Brad says.”I used to wake up two or three times every night. Now she can’t shake me awake.”

The spires of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Hoven loomed high above the horizon for miles before we passed through town. West of Hoven, U.S. Highways 83 and 12 join Highway 20 on its final jaunt through East River. Next to a cornfield south of Selby we found the Bangor Monument, a tribute to the town that was Walworth County’s seat from 1884 to 1909, when it was moved to Selby.

Rodney and Sheryl Stroh converted Selby’s old Amoco service station into a gift shop and restaurant.

Tall cedar trees surround the century-old grand brick courthouse in Selby. On the southeast corner of the courthouse square stands a monument to Capt. Newton Kingman, a Civil War veteran and one of Selby’s founders. Kingman placed two Civil War cannons on the square, but they were melted during World War II. In 2000, Justin Randall raised money to buy a replica cannon and placed it atop a brick and concrete pedestal. The project earned him an Eagle Scout badge.

We met Justin’s mother, Sheryl Stroh, at Dakota Maid, one of Selby’s newest businesses. Stroh and her husband Rodney operated a gift shop in the basement of their home but soon ran out of space.”I knew the gift shop wouldn’t support itself if we rented a building,” she says.”So then we thought we’d do a coffee shop and maybe a few panini sandwiches.”

They bought the town’s old Amoco service station along the highway in 2009 and created Dakota Maid, which has become a full service restaurant, coffee shop and gift store featuring South Dakota made products, like Valiant Vineyards wine and chocolate from the Watertown Confectionery.

Beyond Selby, Highway 20 winds through the grassy mounds of the Missouri River valley and through Mobridge, our final destination. It crosses the Missouri River near its confluence with the Grand River and continues west, through the Standing Rock Reservation and ranch country before ending west of Camp Crook. We heard there’s a unique town market in Trail City, that the country between the Grand and Moreau rivers includes some of the state’s best scenery, and that if you pass the Castles of Slim Buttes in just the right light, they resemble medieval ruins. That’s a trip for another time.

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

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The Hoover Store

By Bernie Hunhoff

Hoover Store is the only business for several miles in Butte County.

When Jim and Leona McFarland bought a Butte County ranch in 1976, they found that it came with an old general store that was closed.”We had a couple of teenage daughters who were interested in opening it up so we did,” says Leona. The neighbors were appreciative; the next place to buy milk or eggs is 33 miles down the road.

Gas, sandwiches, salt blocks and other necessities for man, cattle and sheep are the store’s mainstays, but”beer is number one by far,” laughs Leona. Built of wood in 1902, the store still looks like a western movie set. Some evenings, cowboys and hunters play 10-point pitch around a wide card table.

Castle Rock Fire Department — which has no fire station, and parks its trucks on ranches — holds a Texas Hold’em fundraiser tournament every December. Grass and forest fires ignited by bolts of lightning are the biggest challenge for firefighters.

The store is a popular gathering place for local ranchers.

Hoover is along Highway 79, near Custer National Forest. Sixteen miles south of town is Castle Rock, a large sandstone butte that appears from a distance like a medieval palace. Tourists and bikers straggle in throughout the year, and hunters arrive in the autumn to look for deer, antelope and turkey. Some hang their trophy mounts in the store beside the McFarland collection of cowboy memorabilia, fossils, arrowheads and a picture of two big bull snakes in a mating pose.

Ranch families are the store’s bread and butter. Some buy nearly all their groceries at Hoover. Leona McFarland says the ranchers are unique.”They’ve had to be tough to stay in it with cattle and sheep. They’re just a very strong type of person, and yet they are good neighbors even if they live far apart. If anybody needs anything, everybody is there to help.”

Running a one-store town is probably as difficult as ranching, and Leona has been doing it alone since her husband died three years ago. But her daughter, Jean, and Jean’s husband Jerry McNulty are moving home this summer to help. Hoover’s population is about to triple.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A River Road Called 1806

By Bernie Hunhoff

Highway 1806 cuts through the Lower Brule Reservation, where tribal preserves and wide open country teem with wildlife, including a captive herd of over 200 elk.

Writers and poets have compared South Dakota’s prairie to an undulating ocean.”Oh, the wonder of the wind from the wild, mysterious green sea to the west!” wrote Hamlin Garland in The Moccasin Ranch. O.E. Rolvaag expressed the same in his 1927 book, Giants in the Earth:”Pure color everywhere. A gust of wind, sweeping across the plain, threw into life waves of yellow and blue and green. Now and then a dead black wave would race over the scene … a cloud’s gliding shadow … now and then.”

Water and wild prairie dominate the landscapes along Highway 1806.

If the prairie is a sea of black soil, then the stretch that follows the Missouri River from Lower Brule to Fort Pierre has some of the Dakotas’ grandest waves of gumbo-laden hills and grasslands.

A two-lane, oil road known as Highway 1806 follows the river. The number commemorates the 1804-1806 expedition of explorers Lewis and Clark. Highway 1804 runs on the east side of the river across much of South Dakota, and 1806 is on the west.

The 59-mile route between Lower Brule and Fort Pierre is slowly but surely gaining popularity — not for travel amenities (nary a single store or rest stop lays along the way) but rather for its extreme lack of commerciality. Unspoiled by much of anything man-made except fences, wheat fields and an occasional farmstead, the road winds up and down and around the West River hills and knolls. On a few occasions, the Missouri is just outside your car window; more often it shows up as a glimmering ribbon of blue in the distance.

Highway 1806 is an asphalt crossbreed of California’s famous Highway One that follows the Pacific Ocean, Custer State Park’s Wildlife Loop Road and your typical West River town-to-market highway. Loftier hopes are now developing for 1806. It lies near the south end of a 550-mile stretch of road that is part of the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program.

Masses are no longer celebrated at this country church along the river road, but flowers are still placed on nearby graves.

The entire byway runs through four reservations, including the Lower Brule which owns most of the land on the west side of the Missouri between the city of Lower Brule and Fort Pierre.

The road begins at Chamberlain and runs on the east side of the Missouri along Highways 50 and 47 to Fort Thompson, where motorists cross the Missouri and travel 1806 to Fort Pierre. The byway departs from the river, following Highways 14 and 63 to Hayes and Eagle Butte before returning to hug the western side of the Missouri all the way to Bismarck.

Lower Brule leaders wish the byway — and particularly their 59-mile corridor — could become a two-way path to reconciliation between the races in South Dakota. That seems like an odd goal at first glance, because reconciliation would seem to require face-to-face exchanges. Unless you make a special effort, you’re unlikely to meet anyone as you travel 1806. This is a land occupied by elk, deer, buffalo, antelope, turkeys and ever-chattering prairie dogs.

Can wilderness bring about reconciliation? The Native American leaders’ hope is that people of all races will share an appreciation for nature, and that it will be a starting point for better relations.

Dakota Scultze-LeCompte takes his dogs, Minnow and Yo Yo, for a bath at the Iron Nation Recreation Area.

Lower Brule Tribe and the three others — the Crow Creek, Cheyenne and Standing Rock — do offer some recreation and tourist opportunities along the road, including wildlife tours, fishing excursions, hunting trips, lodging and, of course, casino gambling. Just a few miles southeast of Fort Pierre, the Lower Brule Tribe has opened a Buffalo Interpretive Center with exhibits, films and local arts and crafts in a small gift shop.

But promoters of the highway stress that economics are not driving the development.”We’re not selling Indianism,” says Clair Green, who works as a cultural resource consultant for the tribe.”We’ve tried to enter the tourism business carefully and reflectively and slowly. We truly are more interested in education than anything else.”

“The idea is to educate and to further the commonality of the people of South Dakota,” added Michael Jandreau, who led the Lower Brule tribe for nearly three decades before he passed away in 2015. Serving as tribal chair is possibly the most precarious job in American politics, so Jandreau’s longevity in office was a testament to his patience and tact. But he didn’t mince words when it came to racial healing:”We want to make real the concept of reconciliation in South Dakota. It should not just be a figment of someone’s imagination.”

Jandreau believed the pristine and wild landscapes found along 1806 are ideal for finding common ground between two cultures. Maybe. Rolvaag and Garland showed that you don’t have to be Native American to understand a land’s peace and beauty.

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

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Dinosaurs and Big Art

By Paul Higbee

Bison roam freely inside Wind Cave National Park.

Just after dawn I hit the Nebraska-South Dakota line, moving north on U.S. Highway 385. I had a hundred bucks in my pocket and lots to see and do along this incredible road, leading 122 miles from the state line to Deadwood. It would be a good day.

For the next 25 miles I drove through southwestern South Dakota’s beautiful grasslands. Most people, though, think of Highway 385 in this state as a way to experience the heart of the Black Hills, and the Hills were my destination. First I wanted to visit a favorite place that bills itself as a”transition zone between ponderosa pine woodlands of the Black Hills and the mixed grass prairie of the northern plains.” I spotted my turn-off at Wallygator’s Bait and Tackle and in five minutes sat sipping coffee from a Thermos, watching the full morning break over big Angostura Reservoir — a damming of the Cheyenne River. While the Black Hills stand within view of Angostura, the lake feels more attuned to the prairie. Pronghorns bounded through lush grass just yards from the water.

Twelve miles later I arrived in Hot Springs and felt fully enveloped by the Hills. The town is home to plenty of attractions: Evans Plunge, the Mammoth Site, lodging and dining in historic sandstone structures. But this morning I sought the Black Hills’ heartiest breakfast. That’s the liver and onion breakfast served on two platters, with eggs and potatoes and toast, at the All Star Bar and Grill right on 385. Usually I’m not much for big breakfasts, but something about spending a full day in the Hills suggested that one was in order.

Janell Andis (center) has been serving Spudburgers for 20 years at Custer Crossing, a Highway 385 pit stop enjoyed by locals and tourists.

After devouring the liver and onion specialty, a traveler may feel a walk is needed before climbing back into the car. There’s an excellent urban hike through downtown and up old slab stone steps to the hilltop 1893 schoolhouse. These days the four-story sandstone school, now the Pioneer Museum, puts every square foot to work interpreting the history of the Southern Hills. The grounds offer a pretty view of the town below. This is the first of many museums along the state’s stretch of 385.

Ten miles beyond Hot Springs I entered Wind Cave National Park, established in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Immediately inside the park a sign read, BUFFALO ARE DANGEROUS, DO NOT APPROACH.

“It’s a deal,” I thought.”I won’t.”

But moments later a buffalo bull approached me. I pulled off the road and sat in my car, lost in notes for this article, writing about the view at the park’s south entrance: a mountain prairie dotted here and there by pines, with the Central Hills’ high peaks serving as a backdrop. Suddenly a great shadow darkened my paper and there the bull stood, right up against my car. I was glad I had been too lazy to follow through on my original plan of getting out of the car, sitting on the hood, and incorporating the scent of the summer morning in my notes.

Wind Cave National Park is home to this free-roaming bison herd, 30 miles of hiking trails, camping and the famous cave that spouts air. Park staff lead tours through the cave, officially the world’s fifth longest. But people in Hot Springs and Custer scoff at that designation. Most believe Wind Cave and nearby Jewel Cave, a national monument ranked as the world’s third largest cave, are one and the same. If passages connecting Wind Cave and Jewel Cave are ever mapped, the cave is the biggest on the planet.

North of the park the highway ran through a section of forest devastated by a 2012 fire, and beyond that point I saw increasing evidence of mountain pine beetle disease. As beetles kill trees, pine needles turn the color of dried blood. Those trees are widespread throughout areas of the Central Hills especially.

Approaching the town of Pringle, outcrops of granite began to appear as the highway entered a rocky zone beloved by climbers and sculptors. Pringle boasts two pieces of roadside art that by no means are the most famous along this highway. But I like them and always keep an eye peeled for them: the sculpted mountain lion slinking atop the Pringle Mercantile bar, and an unusual bicycle creation right next to 385 (left side when traveling north). Dozens of bicycles — some rusted, some gleaming and all with histories — cling together to make a curious geometric formation that glitters in the sun. This is serious bicycle country. The 109-mile Mickelson cycling and hiking trail runs close, and sometimes immediately adjacent to, Highway 385 for many miles toward Custer and Hill City.

Hill City is home to Prairie Berry winery, where travelers are welcome to stop for a tasting.

The outcrops towered taller and the great granite peaks loomed closer as I put Pringle behind me. The land is a mix of forest and clearings with homes, barns and horses, along with evidence of sawmilling and other entrepreneurial endeavors. The town of Custer announced itself boldly with billboards, and the community definitely has a whimsical side. Where else would I find a shrine to Fred and Wilma Flintstone, complete with a full-size replica of Bedrock City? The town has preserved the handiwork and legend of Wilber Todd, builder of Custer’s first stone jail. He used the money paid him for the construction to get drunk and rowdy and became his jail’s first occupant. Like Hot Springs, Custer turned a big public building, the 1881 Custer County Courthouse, into a history museum. Some visitors know the courthouse made significant history itself in 1973, when law enforcement and the American Indian Movement clashed there — a precursor to the Wounded Knee occupation.

My reason for stopping in Custer today, however, was to experience one of Claude and Christie Smith’s burgers. It seems that by consensus two years ago the Black Hills decided their just-opened Black Hills Burger and Bun Co. served the region’s best hamburgers. That’s high praise in beef country. Friends had told me that the little diner on 385 would be packed regardless of when I visited. It was. Two bites into the Hot Granny burger (with bacon, cream cheese, fresh jalapeÒos and sweet jalapeÒo sauce) I decided I would join the chorus of Smith burger boosters. Christie told me she and Claude formerly ran an Iowa grocery store, then moved west with their kids after several Black Hills vacations, looking for a better lifestyle.

“We found a lot of local support here,” she said. They stay busy. Claude starts with whole chuck roasts and grinds the meat daily. Buns, potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans and a range of desserts are also prepared fresh every day.

As the Smiths get up every morning and grind beef, just up 385 to the north the Ziolkowskis prepare to blast granite. They’re creating Highway 385’s most famous piece of roadside art, the world’s largest mountain sculpture, recognized worldwide. The great carving of Crazy Horse is clearly visible from the highway, but turning into the grounds is well worth the admission fee. Mary Bordeaux, from Pine Ridge, is the new curator of the huge Indian Museum of North America below the sculpture, and she’s the site’s cultural coordinator, organizing artists-in-residence, performers, and lecturers.”We hope people will view the sculpture and then also interact with the museum collection,” she said.”For those hoping to buy art, here’s a chance to meet the artist, to have a connection with the artist.”

Paleontologist Pete Larson and his brother, Neal, founded the Black Hills Institute of Geology at Hill City.

As a kid I knew Hill City as a place of hard working loggers, a summer excursion train and mysterious Goodhaven,”the house of many doors.” It’s hard to think that any small town in America has transformed itself more completely than Hill City. The development of fine art galleries, including Jon Crane’s, has been well publicized, as has the arrival of wineries. The old city auditorium became a museum that never ceases to amaze, reminding visitors that South Dakota is prime dinosaur country. In addition to running this museum, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research continues to dig for fossils and is a resource for science centers around the world. Probably this Hill City museum’s star attraction, although he has considerable competition, is Stan, a T-rex excavated by the institute in Harding County in 1992.

I visited Stan and his prehistoric peers, then went up the road to see a new museum in the back of the chamber of commerce building that documents the Civilian Conservation Corps’ work in South Dakota during the 1930s. The steam powered excursion train of my youth, the 1880 Train, still makes its scenic runs, and for the past five years it has shared a parking lot with the fine South Dakota State Railroad Museum. As I talked to museum director Rick Mills, author of several books about railroading, it struck me that there’s tremendous expertise along 385 in many fields. And every expert I’d talked to on this trip seemed to have all the time in the world for me.

I’m happy to say Goodhaven still stands, although it goes by another name now. In 1894 husband and wife John and Kit Good built a one-story house in the Black Hills town of Sheridan. Kit had survived a terrifying house fire and wanted a home with doors leading directly outside from every room. The”house of many doors” — 11 to be exact — won Black Hills fame because of its unusual look. It drew even more attention when it was moved to Hill City in 1944, right next to the highway. In 2003 David and Dawna Kruse bought Goodhaven and turned it into a unique bed and breakfast. They renamed it Holly House because of Dawna’s love of Christmas and flair for decorating for the holidays.”We still have seven of the 11 doors leading out,” she told me. But I had been told earlier that when visitors speak of Holly House these days, the doors rank second to another asset: Dawna’s breakfasts.”When I say I serve a full breakfast, I mean a full breakfast where everything’s homemade,” she said.”We offer a Mexican breakfast, and breads and casseroles, and biscuits and gravy and lots more.”

It’s an increasingly rare Highway 385 traveler who makes it out of Hill City to the north without being lured into Prairie Berry Winery for free wine sampling. I joined in and got personal instruction from my server about which foods go well with the wines I selected. She suggested asparagus with my dry Phat Hogg, and roast duck with my sweet Calamity Jane. Actually Prairie Berry is becoming a wine and beer campus, with a new events center next to the main building, and Black Hills Miner Brewing Co., the winery’s beer making arm, right across the parking lot. Sandi Vojta is the company’s award-winning winemaker, and she brews the beer, too.

Black Hills Burger and Bun’s crew includes (from left) Jessica Smith, Lindsay Percival and owners Christie and Claude Smith.

North of Hill City a sign told me to watch out for bighorn sheep, and immediately I spotted three. It appeared that they saw me, too, and watched me pass from a safe distance off the road. I thought they demonstrated more sophistication about traffic than lots of domestic animals I’ve known. Then Sheridan Lake came into view. A man fishing from shore reported trout were shy this afternoon but crappies were hitting his bait in a frenzy. I got back in the car and in no time came to spectacular Pactola Lake, the Black Hills’ biggest. Sheridan and Pactola are actually manmade reservoirs, products of 1940s era reclamation (as is Angostura). It surprises visitors who regularly bring boats, water skis and lake fishing gear to the Black Hills to learn the region was shortchanged when it came to natural lakes. Both Sheridan and Pactola are named for towns that surrendered the ghost to rising waters. It’s why Goodhaven ended up in Hill City.

Beyond the lakes the highway made a final 25-mile sprint to Deadwood. It’s the home stretch not only for South Dakota’s 122-mile section of the highway, but for all of U.S. 385, which begins at Big Bend National Park in Texas and extends north through Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, and of course South Dakota, for 1,206 miles. Old-timers sometimes called the route the Potash Highway, after a form of fertilizer that transformed big sections of the Great Plains. The road is one of South Dakota’s Blue Star Memorial Highways, honoring the Armed Forces, and it has also been called the George Hearst Memorial Highway, recognizing the man whose investment brought Homestake Gold Mine to full production.

The road climbed and dropped over several ridges. Pines closed in at points, then opened up to reveal draws, meadows with grazing cattle, and Custer Peak with a summit so pointed it resembled an upside down V. And then, amid pastoral scenery, things almost surreal popped into view, like a Ferris wheel in the middle of the Hills, and the World’s Largest Log Chair. How large? About 34 feet high with a seat so big that a family and several friends could picnic up there. Why? That’s a harder question to answer. I stopped by the Sugar Shack, within view of the chair, and the best answer I got was,”Well, there are lots of logs out here.” Plus, of course, no one does anything small along 385. The Sugar Shack, incidentally, is a cozy old diner with a long wooden lunch counter, behind which are prepared huge and excellent burgers. It should be noted plenty of Northern Hills partisans consider these the best Black Hills hamburgers. Evidence that the Sugar Shack has topped public polls to that effect is posted in the diner.

Twelve miles north, the Ferris wheel stood at Brownsville, long ago a busy logging and sawmilling town and now sometimes called”50s Town.” That’s because of Boondocks, a roadside business that celebrates all things 1950s — Elvis, cars, food. The centerpiece is an authentic Valentine diner shipped in more than 60 years ago and still serving up sandwiches, milkshakes, apple pie and more.

I knew I was nearing Deadwood when I spotted the Tomahawk golf course. Then I made a steep climb and descent over Strawberry Hill, coasting past a runaway truck ramp and under hills left bare by a great 2002 forest fire. I breezed through the little town of Pluma and then … well, Highway 385 just ended. Abruptly and without ceremony.

I could turn left and drive on to Lead, Terry Peak, and Spearfish Canyon. Or I could go right, into the heart of Deadwood with its entertainment, casinos and dining. It wasn’t a bad place to be, stared in the face by attractive options the northern Black Hills offer. But I wished for a sign saying, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE COMPLETED A TRULY CLASSIC AMERICAN DRIVE.

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

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Into the Badlands

By Mike Heintz

Editor’s Note: The March/April 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine features a story on an old World War II era bombing range in a portion of the Badlands. Mike Heintz, a South Dakota native now living in southern California, photographed the area in October of 2000. This is the story of his journey.

Heading out of Rapid City into the Badlands on Highway 44 can put you into another dimension. It starts when you drop down into the Cheyenne River Valley with its great stands of old cottonwoods. You might be lucky enough to catch them after the first frost when the leaves have turned. The wind won’t let them stay for long. From there, you approach the Badlands, a maze of eroded cliffs and spires carved in prehistoric times. They are aptly named for their inhospitable reality, stark beauty and threatening nature. Little has changed since the beginning. These canyons have produced a colorful and foreboding history.

Dozens of old cars litter a remote portion of the Badlands that was once used as a bombing range during World War II.

Just before I entered the park I drove through the little town of Scenic. The Longhorn Bar survived there from 1906 until just a few years ago. It may well have been the most infamous bar in South Dakota. I can’t imagine the characters that sat on those bar stools made from iron tractor seats bolted to the angle iron. The bullet holes in the walls are real. Now, the skulls hung over the porch roof are melting away and falling off the board rack to which they were tied. A piece of plywood is nailed over the front door, which has become a place to note your feelings. The old sign reads:

Long Horn Saloon

1906 Scenic So Dak 1906

Whiskey Beer Wine Soda

Tobacco Lunch Dancing

Indians Allowed Lakota Iyos Nina Upo

You can sense the Pine Ridge. It lies across the White River just south of town. It’s a huge piece of land as large as the state of Connecticut. Much of it looks as it did 200 years ago, and much has happened there since. It was created as a place to contain some of the last of the warrior tribes. This can be a lonesome road because it’s little used except by the people who live out there, or by the occasional traveler wanting to see the wilder side of South Dakota. The highway gets bumpy as it crosses into the Badlands. It’s the gumbo soil on which the road is built. It’s always changing. I passed a big prairie dog town. There has been a real effort to kill them off, but with only limited success. Most drivers in that country are on a point A to B mission. Everything in between is wasted time. To me it’s a movie that’s different every time I drive it. The landscape changes with the seasons and light.

Another 20 miles and you come to the town on Interior. A survivor of its own history, these little towns next to the rez have always been a result of the collision of culture. It’s a rough and tumble place that still buys groceries at the old Badlands Store and socializes at either the Horseshoe or Wagon Wheel Bar. They have both seen wild times. The owner of the Wagon Wheel had a pet bull named Radar that he kept out back. Many a patron found out the hard way that old Radar wasn’t an easy ride. There is a gas pump across the street in a vacant lot. You can pay for gas at the bar — a good thing to know if you’re caught on Highway 44 after dark. It’s probably the only place to get gas between Kadoka and Rapid City.

It was there that my mother and I met Ansel Woodenknife at his cafe. We were the only visitors, and as usual I struck up a conversation while trying some of his special fry bread. He mixes and packages it behind the cafe. The ingredients are based on his grandmother’s recipe. He markets Woodenknife Fry Bread Mix all around the country.

Old car bodies were arranged in a circle with a cross through the middle as targets for B-17 pilots and machine gunners from the nearby Rapid City Army Air Base.

I have been finding and photographing old abandoned vehicles all over the West for many years. I’ve felt compelled to do so out of a sense of art and history, and to do it before it’s too late. When I told Ansel about my project, he said,”I know where there are some old cars.” He said that in 1942 the then Army Air Corps seized a big piece of the Pine Ridge and turned it into a bombing range. Much of the property was confiscated and the people living there were forced to leave.

Sometime around then, many old cars were gathered and hauled out to several remote places. They were arranged in the shape of a circle with a line crossing itself in the center — a giant bull’s eye to be practice bombed. Mostly the pilots used dummy bombs filed with sand. As Ansel told the story my imagination grew.”Yes,” he said.”Those cars are still there.” We agreed that maybe someday we could go out there and find them.

The years passed by, and almost every fall when I came home from Southern California, I’d ask him about the cars. Finally, after about seven years, he said,”Let’s go tomorrow.” I met him that morning and we headed west with our pickups to get into the rez. We had to ford the White River, aptly named for the sediment it carries out of the Badlands. We drove down a little dirt road to the riverbank and he said,”Water’s too deep.” We’d have to try another time.

Three more years passed and I was visiting a friend near Silver City. I called Ansel and he said,”I’ll meet you at the station in the morning.” He had his friend Leroy with him, a very gentle older Indian who helped Ansel around the place. I first met Leroy on an earlier visit when he was loading boxes of fry bread mix into Ansel’s truck.

Most of the cars are pre-World War II models, though some have been identified as late 1940s.

I hadn’t even had a chance to get coffee before I raced out of the Hills and across the Badlands to Interior. By that time I was getting hungry and had no idea when I might get something to eat. The Badlands Standard had two gas pumps and sold a little bit of everything. We gassed up, I got my coffee and had a cheese sandwich that was frozen solid as a rock. Then we headed off to the White River.

This time he thought we could get across. I was apprehensive. The river was wide and so cloudy you couldn’t see the bottom. I watched them go first. The water was up to the bumper. I let them get clear across before I drove in. No way was I going to lose my truck”Butch” to that white water.

We set out across the raw prairie, occasionally coming to a fence that we had to follow until we found a gate. We climbed into the back of Ansel’s truck and Leroy pointed south to a distant set of hills.”See that pine tree on that hill way over there? The second hill to the right is where I saw the planes fly over when I was a kid,” he said. We headed that way. The grass was grazed down close to the ground, so we left no track. There aren’t many roads across that land and we weren’t even close to one. We drove a long way and never even saw a cow.

Then, as we crested a little hill, there they were. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. There must have been 50 or 60 cars out there, mostly in a circle about 40 feet apart. They were rusty brown with the burnt gold grass up to their hips. They were mostly of a 1930s vintage with a couple of ’40s. Some had roofs caved in, but most of them were intact. The engines were gone, so they were just shells.

Both Native and non-Native farmers were moved off their land to make way for the bombing range.

After all these years I was finally there. After a bit, Ansel said,”We’re going to go now.” It had never occurred to me that they were going to leave me out there on my own. Could I even find my way back out? Soon the boys were gone, and I was left alone in that haunted cemetery of old cars. The grass was tall and leaning over in the wind. The cars creaked and the loneliness of that place settled into my bones. It reminded me of a little graveyard.

Shooting with film is becoming a lost art. All of my work has been on Kodachrome and most of it with a hand held camera. I like my old Nikon because it’s heavy and you can hold it still. You have to wait for a moment when the wind dies down and hold your breath for each shot. A couple of hours of that can be exhausting. I knew that I was a rare visitor, and that carried a responsibility to do my best. Sometimes you know that you were chosen for a moment in time, and I think that’s what happened on that day. Some of the cars had”OST” spray-painted on them in orange. Ansel told me that meant”Oglala Sioux Tribe.”

The days grow short in late October and I knew it would soon be time to go. I didn’t know how long it would take to find my way back. I think we had come about 14 miles, and things look different when you are going the other direction. I had to find the same spot to cross the river, maybe spend the night in the truck and continue the next day. I was lucky and got back across before dark. By that time the frozen sandwich seemed like a long time ago. I stopped at the only cafe (the Woodenknife had long since closed). The girl was curious about what I was doing out there. When I told her she said,”Oh, you’re the one. Ansel called my husband this morning and asked if he knew where those cars were?”