Dakota’s Bullwhackeress

By Chuck Cecil 

Emma Buckingham (center), at 37, and her freighting family, including husband Emmond Knutson, whose head can be seen in front of the wagon at left, and their son, Charlie, far right. All three are carrying their bullwhips.

Alice Ivers excelled at poker, while Martha Jane Cannary shot straight and drank with dispatch. Nineteenth century journalists extolled the talents of those Black Hills women but little attention was paid to Emma Buckingham, who could make a bullwhip crack as loudly and accurately as Calamity Jane’s pistol and pivot a 20-head bull train on a Poker Alice silver dollar.

Buckingham was among thousands of rough and tough-talking Black Hills bullwhackers who ate dust and beans on the grimy Sidney, Cheyenne, Bismarck, Chamberlain and Fort Pierre wagon trails, hauling tons of necessities into the busy Black Hills gold towns.

For a couple of decades before railroads nudged aside the massive animal-powered freight trains in the late 1880s, the Black Hills was a contentious, bustling place. All three women were born in the 1850s and moved to the Hills during those booming times after Lt. Col. George Custer’s 1874 exploration discovered gold.

There was great need for goods and machinery for a flourishing population and burgeoning industry. Deadwood was the most populous city in what would become South Dakota. The closest railroads — the Union Pacific to the south at Sidney, Nebraska, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Northern Pacific at Bismarck to the north — carried everything as far as rails would allow. Then bull trains, with faster mule and horse teams added to the mix, hauled goods by the ton at 2 miles an hour into the gold fields.

Much of the freight traveled the shorter route to the Black Hills from Fort Pierre. The Chicago & North Western line had barely reached Brookings County by then, so steamships fishtailed upstream to the rescue, hauling goods from Yankton and Sioux City to Missouri River docks at Chamberlain for a time, but mostly at Fort Pierre. From there, bull trains — three wagons powered by 10 pair of yoked oxen — plodded the 200 miles to Rapid City and Deadwood.

Black Hills towns and the mines and mills they served needed everything from bank vaults, water pipes, hammer mills, roofing nails, shovels, coat buttons, pool tables, placer pans, door hinges, mining monstrosities and more. The bull and mule trains (and teams of horses for special, faster deliveries) lugged millions of pounds across the prairie each year, bringing a modicum of civilization to the Black Hills. Most of what rolled overland, often in mile-long caravans of dozens of teams of oxen, didn’t need leather harness or iron shoe, and could eat what nature provided along the way.

Emma Buckingham, before her bullwhacking days took their toll.

Doing her part in urging the oxen on their prairie junkets was Emma Knutson Buckingham, who was the only known “bullwhackeress” in all of Dakota Territory. She made the three-week bull train runs from Fort Pierre to the Hills and also plied the routes from Belle Fourche to Valentine, Nebraska, with stops in between.   

The woman with the whip soon became well known. In 1887, Deadwood’s Black Hills Daily Times opined, “the most industrious man in the Dakota Territory was a woman.”

The Deadwood newspaper on May 11, 1887, waxed poetic about her visit. “She was in town yesterday with a string of critters as long as Main Street and as scraggy as Old Rip’s Snyder, and yet she engineered the outfit though the city with ability, unloaded with alacrity and retired with dexterity.”

A few months later, on Nov. 11, 1887, the Sturgis Record reported on a picture that local photographer John Grabill displayed in the window of his photo studio of, “the lady familiarly known as the bullwhackeress.”

“In the operation of cutting an ox in two with a whip,” the Record reported, “this woman’s name is Knudson or Canuteson. She is married, her husband driving a ten-yoke team of bulls (oxen), and they both have been on the road between Pierre and the Black Hills for six or seven months. The couple drive their own teams, about 15-yoke of cattle with five or six wagons, and are reputed to be worth some little money.”

Emma Buckingham was born Ingeborg Botne in Vinge, Norway, in 1856. She came to America in 1873, settling in Minnesota. Nine years later, as Emma Botne, she moved to the Black Hills and married Emmond Knutson, also a native of Norway. The couple started a successful freighting business before they parted ways in 1888.

Emma married another bull train operator, George Buckingham, in 1889. They retired from the freight business after rail lines finally reached the Black Hills, and she and George took up ranching near Tilford a few miles north of Rapid City.

The Rapid City Journal’s front-page obituary on Sept. 4, 1902, told of her death from cancer at age 46. “Thus passes away one of the characteristic pioneers of the Hills. In the days of freighting to the Hills she evinced her sturdy independence by driving her own outfit across the plains, and wherever she went she won the respect of all who met her.

“She it was who safely landed The Journal’s cylinder press at its destination on Main Street in 1885. When the days of freighting ceased she took up ranching, showing the same independence and good judgment she had previously shown …

“But withal she was a womanly woman and her pleasant word and cheery smile will be missed by her friends, of whom she had many, and her passing away will be deeply regretted.”

Emma Knutson Buckingham, Dakota’s famous bullwhackeress, is buried in Rapid City’s Mountain View Cemetery.

This story is revised from the March/April 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.