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A Musical Bridge

By John Andrews

Bryan Akipa is a self-taught red cedar flute player who also makes the instruments in his home near Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Akipa has joined the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra for several performances in South Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Delta David Gier was among five finalists to be the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s next music director in 2003. When the search committee asked why he was interested in moving from New York to Sioux Falls, he said,”I’m looking for someplace to build something significant.” Gier won the job, and his innovations have elevated the orchestra to national prominence, elicited praise from the nation’s most respected music critic in the pages of The New Yorker and earned him the 2022 Ditson Conductor’s Award, presented by Columbia University to conductors who demonstrate an extraordinary passion for advancing American music.

But perhaps his most important contribution to the people of his new home state has been the Lakota Music Project, an endeavor that seeks to heal relationships between Natives and non-Natives through music. Since the idea germinated in early 2005, it has blossomed into multiple performances, recordings, workshops and, most importantly, relationships that might never have developed had music not served as the bridge between two cultures that have long been mired in mistrust.

‚ÄãGier arrived in Sioux Falls with a solid musical background. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, a Fulbright Scholarship allowed him to begin a career in professional conducting in Europe. He completed an apprenticeship with the Philadelphia Orchestra and then spent 15 years as an assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic, the last five years dovetailing with his appointment with the South Dakota Symphony.

‚ÄãAs Gier planned his inaugural 2004-2005 season, he also wanted to gain a sense of how the orchestra fit into the fabric of Sioux Falls and South Dakota. “The one thing that was an unknown for me was how the orchestra was really serving its community and what the potential was for that,” he says.”During my first year, I was assessing — other than just playing concerts in the Pavilion — what else the orchestra was doing and what else could be done.”

‚ÄãAt a reception one evening, Gier met a young African American woman who was involved in the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities.”I suggested to her that maybe we should do something together, because a lot of orchestras have MLK concerts and bring in Black composers and Black artists,” Gier recalls.”She smiled and nodded and said, ‘If you really want to talk about racial prejudice in South Dakota, you should be talking to the Native Americans.’ After 20 years of living in New York, my jaw hit the ground.”

‚ÄãThe seed was planted for what became the Lakota Music Project. The SDSO hosted a lunch for about a dozen Lakota and Dakota leaders at the Falls Overlook Cafe in the spring of 2005. Gier remembers the undercurrents of mistrust that seemed to waft through the room as he spoke.”I came in with all kinds of ideas on ways we could collaborate, and that was my first lesson in learning to shut up and listen,” he says.”They didn’t need yet another white man’s program coming in and trying to help. That wasn’t anything that would be helpful to anybody.”

The orchestra welcomed the Creekside Singers to the Lakota Music Project. Pictured are (back, from left) SDSO music director Delta David Gier, John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear and SDSO principal oboist Jeffrey Paul and (front, from left) Brent Spoonhunter, Hanna Gasdia and Ari Black Bear.

Fortunately, Barry LeBeau was intrigued. LeBeau was a veteran lobbyist in Pierre for United Sioux Tribes, but he also had a background in theater.”I think he had an understanding for what the arts could do in terms of helping to generate understanding across cultures,” Gier says of LeBeau, who died in 2020.

The two of them began traveling to reservations across the state. Their first stop was Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, where tribal elder Robert Moore — who is also a classically trained singer — brought them into a tribal council meeting.”He gave us a five-minute platform to talk about what we’d like to try to do. That was the first stamp of approval that we got.”

They also sought input from Ronnie Thiesz, a longtime professor of Native Studies and literature at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, author of several books on Lakota music and culture and a founding member of the Porcupine Singers. Moore and Thiesz began traveling with Gier and LeBeau.”In talking with Ronnie, we really fleshed out what kind of a program would be meaningful to people,” Gier says.”Those relationships became the most important thing and helped to shape our initial tour and program.”

In the meantime, other orchestra members were doing their own groundwork. Jeffrey Paul, who is entering his 20th season as the symphony’s principal oboist, had also been traveling to reservations with the Dakota Wind Quintet, a small group of orchestra instrumentalists that performs concerts in smaller settings around the state.”My first time out with that group was in Pine Ridge,” Paul says.”It was just so clear to me that we needed to be listening and communicating and developing lasting relationships. So, we started opening the doors to other conversations. ‘What’s important to you? What kind of music do you listen to and how does music play a role in your life?’

“On some of our tours, we’d have a discussion and a jam session where we might talk and learn about the function of music in each other’s traditions and play some of the music that fits these functions back and forth. As you might expect, there was a lot more commonality than difference. It was kind of serendipitous that David took an interest in that as well.”

Paul was uniquely situated to help develop the Lakota Music Project. A native of Thousand Oaks, California, he studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Southern California, earning two degrees in oboe performance while also playing and learning piano, saxophone, guitar, bagpipes and even Irish whistles. He also developed a strong interest in the folk music of other cultures, likely because of trips he took as a boy to visit his grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada.”Back in the old days they used to say that Scottish culture was more preserved in Nova Scotia than it was in Scotland because there was so little traffic in and out,” Paul says.”When I was in the throes of studying classical music really intensely at one of the conservatories, a Scottish musician came in. It was just his voice and a guitar, but it really struck a chord in me. It was just beautiful music, profound in its simplicity and tradition. For me, that kind of tore down those conservatory walls because it affected me so much.”

That new perspective helped as he visited with elders and musicians, exploring the nuances of indigenous music and how it might blend with traditional orchestral music. Paul had written a piece called Desert Wind for electric guitar before moving to South Dakota. Gier heard the piece and asked him to expand it for chamber orchestra and to explore how to incorporate it into the Lakota Music Project. He performed it for Melvin Young Bear, keeper of the drum for the Porcupine Singers.”It dealt with feelings of being alone in both positive and negative connotations, and he said it went really well with a song that he had written for his granddaughter,” Paul says.”He said he had these same feelings when he held his granddaughter on his knee, and then she went home.”

Organizers spent four years traveling and talking to tribal elders, musicians and cultural leaders before the first Lakota Music Project performance in 2009. Since then, the group has staged concerts around the state, launched workshops and recorded an album.

Paul and Young Bear began working on an adapted version of Desert Wind that included Young Bear’s Harmony’s Song. That collaboration became the hallmark of the Lakota Music Project.”We were learning as we were going, how to listen to people and how we might actually build this thing together by listening to elders and musicians and cultural leaders. That building together became the key, and still is the key, to the Lakota Music Project,” Gier says.

“Orchestras are good at programming and implementing. That’s what we do. We’re not good at being flexible, and this kind of cross-cultural stuff was totally new. There was plenty of Indianist music that could be played. These are white composers who were truly inspired by Native American culture and seeking to honor that, but this is not something that was going to accomplish any kind of cross-cultural understanding. This cultural appropriation discussion wasn’t as heated a topic 15 years ago as it is now, but it became really evident that this was something that we needed to avoid, so we’ve never implemented that music in any of our Lakota Music Project tours. It’s always been original music that was created together.”

Members of the orchestra, tribal elders, scholars and musicians met, talked and played for more than four years before the inaugural performance of the Lakota Music Project was staged in 2009. The two-hour concert, featuring the orchestra and the Creekside Singers, explored how each culture experiences love, war, grief and celebration.”We would go back and forth. The drum group and orchestra would play examples of music that expressed each of the four themes,” Gier says.”It demonstrated not just the musical but the interpersonal relationship that we were developing between our orchestra and these Lakota musicians.”

The Lakota Music Project then took the show on the road, performing on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Lake Traverse reservations, Sioux Falls, Rapid City and at Crazy Horse Memorial on Native American Day in 2010.

All the work culminating in that first performance and tour is now considered the first phase of the Lakota Music Project. The second phase, spanning 2012 through 2016, included a new partnership with the South Dakota Humanities Council and the world premiere of WaktÈgli OlÛwa≈ã (Victory Songs) by American Indian composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Its five movements each honor a Lakota warrior: Red Cloud, Gall, Crazy Horse, Two Strike and Sitting Bull.

There were performances at Crazy Horse Memorial, Pierre, Eagle Butte, Sisseton and Mobridge. A fourth commissioned work, Pentatonic Fantasy, combined the talents of Paul and Bryan Akipa, a cedar flute player from Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation.”We spent some time on Clear Lake near Sisseton getting to know each other and talking about the instruments,” Paul says.”He demonstrated a lot of cedar flute traditions, how he makes them, and the symbolism involved. It’s been a wonderful friendship with him for many years. I wrote him an entire concerto to play with the orchestra, but the second movement, ‘Wind on Clear Lake,’ seemed to grow legs and turned into its own piece.”

John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear (the Keeper of the Drum) and Ari Black Bear perform as the Creekside Singers.

Akipa is a self-taught musician and flute maker who began studying the instrument as a student of Oscar Howe at the University of South Dakota. He received the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work preserving the flute and its music. The lifetime honor is the country’s highest award in folk and traditional arts.

He is heartened by the diverse audiences that have seen Lakota Music Project performances.”For the traditional flute, it’s relaxing music, but it’s almost like you are talking to the people,” Akipa says.”You are communicating with them and you’re telling a story with the song. You’re playing a song that could be sung. That’s for one type of audience. The orchestra has a much different style, and you’re bringing those two audiences together.

“For me, it was good to get more exposure for the flute. The traditional red cedar flute is really important to the culture, but maybe to other people it’s like a new age thing, or just a fad or something. Playing with the symphony helped other people take the music and the flute more seriously. The flute, and what it can do and the sound it can produce, really gets their attention. Some people might even have a spiritual experience. It’s just the way they interpret or feel the music.”

The third phase, from 2017 to 2019, included a chamber music program series of concerts in Washington, D.C., featuring Akipa and Emmanuel Black Bear, a traditional singer and drummer from Pine Ridge and two-time winner of a Native American Music Award. Jerod Tate (the orchestra’s composer-in residence in 2017) also launched the Music Composition Academies, week-long workshops every July in Sisseton and Black Hills State University in Spearfish open to students of all musical skill levels. They work with three composer mentors — Jeffrey Paul, Michael Begay and Ted Wiprud (composer-in-residence in 2018 and 2019).”It’s maybe one of the most important things to me that I do musically in life,” Paul says.”We do maybe a little bit of teaching but that’s not the primary focus, which is to draw out pure musical ideas from students.”

In September, when members of the orchestra are back on contract, they return to Sisseton and Spearfish and perform the world premieres of the pieces written by the young musicians. Gier says the experience can be cathartic.”These kids are dealing with deep emotional issues. They’re writing pieces of music about suicide because they lost a friend in school, or about missing and murdered indigenous women because this young woman lost an auntie. They’re processing this through the music they’re writing.”

Unfortunately, while the student academies have continued operating in Sisseton and Spearfish, other aspects of the Lakota Music Project have temporarily fallen silent. Like many initiatives in the arts world, much of the symphony’s programming is reliant upon grant funding, and in 2022 there has been little to none. But Gier and the other musicians who have invested 17 years into the one-of-a-kind endeavor are hopeful for brighter days.

“I went into it maybe crazily but with the idea that this is something that the South Dakota symphony should be doing. There are nine Indian reservations here, there’s a history of racial tension to put it mildly, and so rather than ignore it we could embrace it. My hope was that it would become so much a part of the fabric of who we are as the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra that when I’m gone it would continue, that the relationships between us and the Native community across the state would be so rich and meaningful on both sides of the equation that there would just be no question that this would continue, that this is who we are.”

That would certainly be something significant.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Why We Fall for Balanced Rocks

By Bernie Hunhoff

Balanced rocks near Sylvan Lake.

Ever since there have been poets, which is roughly the last 5,000 years, they have lauded the permanence of nature, and they might be right because Beecher Rock has stood on a mountaintop between the present-day towns of Custer and Pringle for perhaps 1.6 billion years.

The natural phenomenon of precariously balanced rocks (called PBRs in some scientific circles) not only fascinates poets but anyone who enjoys the natural world. Since the advent of human history, the fragile formations have served as guideposts and curiosities for travelers. They are studied, photographed, climbed, carved and sometimes intentionally toppled or dynamited.

All the above are true in South Dakota, where PBRs are most often found on granite peaks in the Black Hills. To learn more about the geological novelty, we sought out Perry Rahn and Kenny Hargens, two old friends who have been exploring the backcountry for decades. Rahn is professor emeritus of geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. Hargens has been hiking and studying the Hills ever since he was a boy, growing up across the road from the legendary poet Badger Clark.

We met Rahn and Hargens at the trailhead for the Mickelson Trail in Hill City, where the retired professor spread a large map across a picnic table and explained the geological history that created PBRs.”What we have here,” Rahn said, pointing to the buttes around Mount Rushmore,”is the old basement rock that was intruded by granite, exposing some of the oldest rocks on Earth.”

Kenny Hargens (left) and Perry Rahn, pictured below Black Elk Peak, have studied and explored the Black Hills back country for decades.

Rahn said the uplift was not a sudden eruption but a slow rise that continued for tens of millions of years as the earth’s crust was warmed by volcanic activity far below the surface. It caused strange rock pilings that would not have been visible because today’s canyons and valleys did not exist. However, another 20 million years of erosion by water, wind, snow and bacteria exposed boulders that had been stacked — sometimes precariously — by that ancient upthrust.

John Paul Gries, a predecessor to Professor Rahn at the School of Mines, noted in his 1996 book Roadside Geology of South Dakota that the original uplift happened about 58 to 50 million years ago. He wrote,”By roughly 37 million years ago, the Black Hills had much of their present size and shape. Hard rocks formed the ridges and plateaus, softer rocks became valleys and parks.”

The gradual erosion left so many balanced rocks — especially in the Sylvan Lake and Mount Rushmore range — that sightseers might take them for granted, especially since they share the terrain with a beautiful and dense pine forest.

Boulders, some as large as cars or trucks, are perched on the mountaintops surrounding Sylvan Lake, below Black Elk Peak. Though most are unnamed, one is called Guardian of the Pools due to its face-like appearance. It was popular on travel postcards a century ago. To people with some imagination, others could easily be seen as buffalo, dogs or frogs.

Hargens came across another”geological marvel” while hiking along Grizzly Creek in the Black Elk Wilderness Area, above Horsethief Lake. He found a 10-foot granite boulder stacked above another of similar size, both standing on bedrock. A smaller stone sat atop the two. Altogether, it reminded him of a gigantic snowman. Nearby was an outgrowth of rose quartz.

If the Snow Man, the Guardian and other Black Hills formations stood apart on a vast desert or prairie they might be better appreciated, perhaps enough to end up on a license plate or a postage stamp, like the iconic arches of Utah or Chimney Rock in Nebraska.

Arches are another category altogether, Rahn explains.”There’s lots of situations in nature that catch our attention. There are also leaning rocks and the wrinkled rocks near Mount Rushmore.”

In the Badlands, toadstool formations (also known as hoodoos) are common. While toadstools appear to consist of a rock on a pedestal, they can be a single rock formation with a wide crown. Similar situations are found in the Cave Hills of Harding County. Rahn says he was sitting on a rock in the Badlands many years ago when he heard,”a sound like an earthquake. One of those pillars was falling to the floor.”

Three hundred miles east of the Badlands, in the land of pink quartzite near Garretson, a promontory stretches high above scenic Split Rock Creek in Minnehaha County. Locals call it Balanced Rock, though scientists would likely describe it as a pedestal spire.

A pair of PBRs known as Beecher Rock north of Pringle.

Rahn noted that unusual rock formations are rare in eastern South Dakota because that region was levelled by the Ice Age just 20,000 years ago.”The Black Hills was never glaciated, unlike eastern South Dakota where the continental glacier moved down over the landscape and smoothed it off. Here in the Black Hills this did not happen, so the weathering processes etched out these remarkable balancing and leaning rocks.”

Rahn and Hargens guided us southeast of Hill City to Sylvan Lake and Needles Highway. Rahn, ever the professor, could not walk for more than a minute or two without kneeling to identify a stone or pebble — rose quartz, mica, feldspar or tourmaline.

The shoreline of Sylvan Lake offers two interesting and picturesque examples of wedge rocks, yet another category of precarious formations. The easiest to find is above the far end of the trail which circles the lake. You can identify first-timers from frequent visitors because newcomers will look up, eyeing whether or not it’s safe to pass underneath. An even bigger specimen is near the trail, but harder to reach.

Sylvan’s wedge rocks are not likely to fall on you, but Rahn says PBRs will all topple eventually — tomorrow or 10 million years from now.”Once I was walking with a friend in Spokane Creek when I noticed the sand started to flow and before I realized what was happening the whole cliff came down on me,” he says.”I ended up in the creek with a few broken ribs.”

Rahn says most formations are gradually weakened by fracture joints.”Some of it is weathering and expansion. Maybe water gets in there and it causes an expansion when it freezes. There is also a chemical weathering where the feldspar slowly dissolves into clay and the rock crumbles away.”

However, humans have toppled more PBRs in the last century than Mother Nature. In 2016, pranksters pushed a famous formation known as the Duckbill onto the Oregon coast. Two years later, vandals shoved over the 320-million-year-old Brimham Rock in northeast England. A decade ago, a Boy Scout leader in Utah pushed a hoodoo to the ground in Goblin Valley State Park. He was sentenced to a year of probation for criminal mischief. Defacing natural sites in state or federal parks is a crime.

Fortunately, many of South Dakota’s PBRs are not as fragile as they may appear. Hargens led us to a ledge north of Pringle where twin spires known as Beecher Rock stand high above the forest. They appear precarious, but they aren’t likely to be toppled by man.

A Forest Service Road leads from Highway 385 to the western base of the 5,580-foot Beecher formation. Paul Horsted, an accomplished Black Hills photographer known for researching historical pictures, says Beecher Rock was visited by General George Custer and his expedition in 1874. They called it Turk’s Head, perhaps because from the south the twin rocks resemble faces with turbans.

Hargens says his father, Holland, once told him that he often climbed the ledge up to Beecher Rock with friends.”They would lay on their backs, he said, and when moving clouds passed above them, they got the sensation that the rocks were falling over on them.”

Custer photographer Paul Horsted created a “then and now” scene of a formation called Parapet with Nodule that can be found on the Badlands Loop Road.

Horsted says he has found teetering formations in the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Acadia, Death Valley, Olympic and Yellowstone parks.”They are not uncommon, but they capture our imagination somehow.

ìI think we like these formations because they defy gravity, and they sometimes look like nature couldn’t have made them. The Needles in the Black Hills might even qualify under that definition. These balanced rocks speak to geologic time as well,” Horsted says.”I think of how much time must have passed since that sandstone slab was resting on a hillside, which gradually eroded away around it, leaving the pedestal.”

While the formations have an aesthetic and poetic appeal, the concept of PBRs is also rooted in science. James Brune, a geophysicist with the California Institute of Technology, was studying earthquakes in Nevada when he recognized that the tenuous boulders provide a unique seismic history, telling a story in the way that tree rings do.

Today, many geologists and other researchers are continuing Brune’s work. They follow an unwritten code: never, ever knock a rock off its pedestal. Poets, photographers and all lovers of natural history share the sentiment.

Life is fragile enough, for people and for PBRs. Why not enjoy them while we can?

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Nestled in the Badlands

By Chad Coppess

The lights of Interior twinkle against the Badlands wall.

There once was a town called Black on the White River. Black was the name of an area pioneer family when the post office was established in the 1880s. After several floods and a fire that burned much of the town, it was reestablished a mile or two north where the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad tracks were built in 1907. Postmasters Louis and George Johnson had recently received a letter from the Department of the Interior, which went hand-in-hand with the community’s new location in the”interior” of the Badlands and the town of Interior was born.

The little town’s remoteness has presented challenges. Jerry Johnston, owner of the Wagon Wheel Bar on Main Street, remembers when a dorm next to the school housed some of his classmates from area towns too small to have a high school and from area ranches too remote for daily travel. He also recalls a business called the Peace Pipe, which was a hangout for kids. A jukebox, pinball machines, comic books, burgers and ice cream were offered.”As soon as school was over that was our social grounds,” Johnston says. The owners had the only television in town and let the kids watch it in their home as long as they sat quietly on the floor.

Ansel Wooden Knife operated a cafe famous for authentic Indian tacos in Interior before the fry bread he made overtook the business. So many people asked for it that he began packaging and selling Wooden Knife Fry Bread Mix throughout the region and closed the cafe. He now offers frozen fry bread as well.

Until recently the highway signs at opposite ends of town disagreed about Interior’s population.”They said something like 97 on one end of town and 64 on the other, so it depended on whether you were coming or going,” laughs Johnston. Both signs now read 94.

***

Badlands B&B

Phil and Amy Kruse at the Circle View Guest Ranch.

Before even hearing the term, Phil Kruse had an agritourism bed and breakfast in mind. The third-generation rancher began building his dream lodge on the family place a few miles west of Interior in 1996 with help from his father and family. Circle View Guest Ranch opened in 2000 with eight rooms and a spectacular view of the White River and the Badlands wall.

Four years later his wife Amy came to Badlands National Park with plans of a career in the National Park Service. Instead, she met Phil and,”the B&B became my baby,” she says. Actual babies followed. Their kids are now 14, 12, and 11 and help around the ranch.

A steady stream of visitors enjoys the ranch each summer.”People love seeing the chickens, cattle and burros,” Amy says.”They just eat it up.”

“We do get people who are plum scared after they drive out here, though,” Phil adds.”They ask, ‘How do you live here?’ Covid actually boosted our business. It’s easy to isolate here because that’s what we do.”

Cheaper than Disney

Sue Leach

Located within sight of Badlands National Park, Interior’s economy naturally depends on the visitor industry. Sue Leach, owner of the Cowboy Corner convenience store and cafe for 14 years, says people are traveling differently in the last two years than previously.”As long as you have internet service, they are happy to be outdoors,” Leach says. Her Friday and Saturday night steak specials are well-known around the area, and she expects another good summer season in the Badlands.”We are a lot cheaper than Disney World,” she laughs.

An Eye on Interior

Elsie Fortune

Elsie Fortune grew up on her family’s ranch south of Interior and went to college on a rodeo scholarship. Photography caught her eye and she worked for a wedding photographer, leading to one of Interior’s newer businesses. Now around 90 percent of Fortune’s wedding and portrait customers are friends from the area. That’s just one of many hats she wears. She still helps on the family ranch and is a brand inspector and veterinarian’s assistant at the Philip Sale Barn. Fortune was the 2012 South Dakota High School Rodeo Queen and won the state breakaway roping title that year.

Badlands Guides

Jordan and Casie Donald

Casie Donald’s Hurley Butte Horseback riding adventure business weathered the pandemic fairly well.”In 2020 we didn’t know how it was going to go, but we are at least six feet apart anyway,” she says.”Overall, our business wasn’t hurt at all.”

Donald’s father started the horseback riding business when he offered his teenage children as guides for interested guests at the nearby Circle View Guest Ranch.”We weren’t excited at first, but when our first customer handed us tips, we decided there might be something to it,” laughs Casie. She and husband Jordan now have a full-time gig leading four or five riders at a time across the prairie in addition to ranching.

World champion cowboys frequent Interior’s Wagon Wheel.

See a World Champ

Rodeo has always been important in Interior. In the 1920s Interior hosted the third largest rodeo in the world, Johnston says. Old newspaper accounts and photos hang on the wall in the community center next to the fire hall. The Interior Roundup was so popular that trainloads of tourists would come from Chicago and camp in town. One story describes 100 Native Americans charging through the campsite on horseback, firing guns in the air and leaving stunned visitors in their wake. Pow wow dancing, buffalo and beef feeds, a parade and rodeo events filled out the three-day extravaganzas.

Cowboys still frequent Interior.”Some nights there will be two or three world champion cowboys in here,” Johnston says of the Wagon Wheel.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117

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Watertown’s Pizza Champ

By John Andrews

Sean Dempsey’s innovative pizzas are turning heads in Watertown, where he owns Dempsey’s Brewery, Pub and Restaurant.

“Another 30 seconds,” Sean Dempsey says as he slides an Oktoberfest pizza back inside a 550-degree oven. A quick tap on the crust hadn’t produced the light knocking sound he wanted, indicating that it wasn’t quite done. There’s no timer in sight, but exactly half a minute later the pizza comes out and onto the counter, where Dempsey applies a brush of butter around the outside edges of the crust along with a little sea salt. Then come crumbles of sharp port cheddar cheese, a dash of oregano and tiny dollops of sweet lingonberries to complement the spicy sausage, dilly sauerkraut and spicy brown mustard.

This is not the simple cheese, pepperoni or sausage pizza that many of us have eaten all our lives. Dempsey’s daring creations are earning him a reputation among the best pizza makers in the world. And they might make him a pizza champion.

Dempsey was there the day in 1999 when his father Bill opened the Highland Laddie in a historic building on Watertown’s Broadway Avenue. Bill had long dreamed of a Celtic-themed pub; he occasionally donned a kilt and played bagpipes for customers. (The elder Dempsey was a pipe major for the Glacial Lakes Pipe and Drum Corps.)

Dempsey’s Brewery, Pub and Restaurant, as it became known in 2001, is largely unchanged 25 years later.

Flags still hang from the ceiling, a large mural of a castle in the Scottish highlands adorns the western dining room wall and its menu of burgers, steaks and pasta remains as popular as ever. But as Sean worked his way up through nearly every job in the restaurant — from bus boy to dishwasher to server to cook — it eventually became clear that he would have a future in the family business. He just needed to find a way to make his own mark.

Inspiration struck in 2013 when the Dempseys attended the International Pizza Expo and Conference in Las Vegas. It’s a trade show for all things pizza, where chefs explore new toppings, ingredients and baking methods. The Dempseys had begun offering pizzas a few years earlier, and like all good business owners, wanted to learn as much as they could.

Dempsey launched Danger von Dempsey’s, an offshoot of the original Watertown restaurant, to focus on pizza and craft beer.

“It was an eye-opener, because in my mind pizza had always been this dough you make, you put some cheese and sauce on it, bake it, cut it and you eat it when you’re drunk and it’s great,” he says.”But at the Pizza Expo I saw the different styles and how you could express yourself. You could get really creative with this and do things that other people haven’t done. That’s what sparked my interest.”

A year later, Dempsey traveled to San Francisco to study with Tony Gemigani, an international pizza champion who had launched the International School of Pizza and the United States School of Pizza, both under the Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli, an Italian school offering the most complete training of pizza chefs in the world. He is now the only certified pizzaiola (pizza maker) in South Dakota.

With that boost in experience, he went all-in on pizza. The kitchen at Dempsey’s took on the air of a science lab as he tweaked dough recipes and topping combinations. More importantly, he had to convince South Dakotans to trust his pizzas, a challenge in a region where national chains are the norm and people passionately debate the merits of pineapple on pizza.

“The first year was a nightmare,” he says.”I’d just gotten back from Tony’s school, and we bought a $20,000, two-ton double decker oven. We built an entire pizza room for it, and then when we started making pizzas people weren’t really wild about them. People like a lot of toppings and they want a large serving. Our pizzas were different, and they were a little more expensive. We spent a lot of time emphasizing the use of Italian ingredients, but still it was a solid year of educating. Why would you pay $18 for this pizza when you could get one at Domino’s for $6?”

Eventually customers warmed to his unique creations. That behemoth of an oven now cooks as many as 700 pizzas a week, ranging from a simple margherita featuring his house red sauce, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil and tomatoes to his more daring”pizza of the week.” The Argentine Horizon features roasted red pepper hummus, mozzarella, Argentine shrimp, red peppers, chives, cilantro and a squeeze of lemon. The Fisherman’s Hangover has shrimp, crab, shredded carrots, garlic, onions and lemon zest. The French Onion includes roast beef, French-fried onions, mushrooms and shallots.

About five minutes inside a 550-degree oven, give or take a few seconds, should give the pizza’s crust the perfect color and texture.

His pizzas are also turning heads around the globe. In 2017, the year after he took over ownership of the restaurant from his father, who is now enjoying retirement, Dempsey began competing at the International Pizza Challenge, part of the annual Las Vegas expo. He took 10th place in the traditional division and first in the Northwest region. He won the Northwest twice more, in 2018 and again in 2022, a year in which he also finished .02 points behind the overall winner in the traditional division.

Which brings us back to the Oktoberfest pizza. This is his 2024 competition pizza, which he presented to judges in Las Vegas in March and will bring to Naples, Italy in June, where he’ll compete internationally as a member of the United States Pizza Team, earned by virtue of his wins in Las Vegas. It was still a work in progress when we visited Dempsey’s kitchen in February, where he practiced baking it under competition conditions.

The Oktoberfest was inspired by a celebration he attended with relatives in Austria. While the original components are still there, he has tweaked the ingredients, including a sauerkraut made with whiskey and dill. He tried muenster cheese instead of the port cheddar, but it wasn’t strong enough. Same with the lingonberries blended into a drizzle. He’s experimenting with tiny pieces of Granny Smith apple and a German beer reduction drizzled over the top.

There’s beer in the dough, too, a constantly evolving combination of high-gluten flour and rye that ferments for four days and sits out for 10 hours before it’s stretched into a crust. Sausage slices are crisped in the oven before being placed on the pizza along with the German mustard base, mozzarella, red onion rings and sauerkraut.

The pizza goes into the oven for two and a half minutes, then is rotated and cooked another two and half minutes, give or take a few seconds based on the crust’s color and texture. After a minute of rest, he adds the crumbles of sharp port cheddar cheese and spoons of lingonberries, all arranged so that a single bite includes every component and the slices — cut with pizza shears to protect the integrity of the crust — are uniformly topped.

Dempsey hopes the Oktoberfest is enough to put him over the top in competitions this year. Even if it’s not, South Dakotans have already demonstrated their willingness to”try weird things on pizza,” as he puts it. His Danger von Dempsey’s, an offshoot of the original Dempsey’s featuring pizzas and craft beer, has expanded to Aberdeen, Brookings and the Watertown airport. Sauerkraut, shrimp — and maybe even pineapple — on pizza is here to stay.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Winter Mornings in West River

By Christian Begeman

Highland Ridge Road in Wind Cave National Park is one of my favorite places to experience the breaking of a new day. Flanked by prairie dog towns and grazing buffalo, an early riser is sure to hear a coyote chorus across the rolling landscape. If you are really lucky, grazing elk, pronghorn and even a glimpse of one of the coyote choristers is possible when the morning light breaks above the distant Boland Ridge to the east.

I spent two mornings in early January getting my fill of morning’s glory in this special place. The first morning was mostly clear and the rising sun revealed pronghorn grazing on the edge of a prairie dog town with a small herd of bison in the distance. Coyotes sang all around me, unseen but close enough to count five distinct voices. Elk grazed on the northern ridge just opposite Custer State Park’s southern fences. It’s no wonder that folks liken this part of South Dakota to the Serengeti in East Africa. I have visited both places in the morning, and the experience does have similarities when it comes to wildlife and natural beauty.

As the morning progressed, I noticed slight hoarfrost in the lower draws of the park. Hoarfrost forms when water vapor in the air condenses on cold surfaces on clear, windless nights. Crystals freeze directly from the vapor state and do not turn into liquid water in the process. This is different than rime ice that is seen accumulating during fog events. Hoarfrost is typically finer and more delicate, but it is just as fun to photograph. With my trusty macro lens and some bright sunlight to help light the minutiae of grass, chokecherry branches and slender yucca blades adorned with ice structures, I spent nearly an hour bent close to the earth trying to record the beauty in detail. During the process, I came across a young buck overseeing a small group of mule deer. The does did not seem concerned, but they moved after the buck decided I was too close.

On the second magical morning, the sky was gray and colorless. There was fog in eastern parts of the park, which left rime ice on the grass and pine trees. Three bull elk weren’t far from the road and allowed me to photograph them before moving on. It was my last day of my West River winter vacation, and it did not disappoint. As is my usual habit, I detoured through Badlands National Park. Strong flurries added snowy drama to the scenery. My favorite sites were a few lone bison moving slowly through the weather and the colorful Yellow Mounds portion of the park framed by white snow. Winter in South Dakota may not get raving reviews, but in this case, my camera says otherwise.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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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.

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Following Black Elk’s Good Red Road

By Bernie Hunhoff

ONLY 11 AMERICANS have ever been canonized as Catholic saints. The 12th could be Nicholas Black Elk, a thoughtful and humble Lakota holy man who lived in the Pine Ridge country of southwest South Dakota in a tiny community called Manderson.

Black Elk is remembered as a tragic 19th century visionary who, in his old age, despaired the loss of his lands and culture. That much is true. However, Catholic leaders say he was also an exemplary Christian who preached and practiced hope and forgiveness. There are disagreements over which part of his life was most meaningful, but of course his latter years prompted the Catholic Church to consider him a saint.

His road to canonization, which began in 2017, could span decades. The same process took more than a century for Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk woman who was canonized in 2012. First, Black Elk must be declared venerable by the Vatican. Then religious leaders will look for miracles attributed to him. However, the very fact that he is a candidate for sainthood has already brought bishops, religious pilgrims and other visitors to Manderson and the Pine Ridge.

*****

MANDERSON HAS 400 residents and one store. That is one store more that it would have if not for Emma Clifford, who for 40 years has operated Pinky’s, a social spot for youth and adults. As Black Elk’s legacy grows with the prospect of sainthood, travelers from far away now occasionally share the counter.

Sunday Mass welcomes worshippers at St. Agnes Church, which has become a centerpoint of the effort to canonize Black Elk.

“We are seeing not only Catholics, but non-Catholics, people of all faiths,” Clifford says.”But that is the story of Black Elk. When we pray to him today, we pray for people of all other faiths, hoping they will respect us.”

The town’s only other private business is Bette’s Kitchen, run by Betty O’Rourke, a great-granddaughter of Black Elk. She and her extended family serve meals in their home to locals and out-of-towners. Some days, they host meetings or gatherings on the hilltop residence, with its expansive views of the chalk-white bluffs that give the Pine Ridge its name.

The family’s land, on the southern edge of town, is where Black Elk famously welcomed Nebraska writer John Neihardt, author of the book Black Elk Speaks that brought literary attention to both of them many years after it was published in 1933. A one-room log cabin where the holy man spent some of his final years stands beneath shade trees halfway up the hill.

The busiest place in Manderson is a tribal school, the smallest of nine on the Pine Ridge with 152 students. Every year on Oct. 8, as the faculty and staff observe Black Elk Day, they track how many of the students are direct descendants of the holy man. At last count, there were 28.

St. Agnes Catholic Church, where Black Elk preached and prayed for decades, stands on the north side of town. The white church is plain even by rural standards. Below eight simple stained-glass windows are two rows of rickety pews — the same wood pews, no doubt, where Black Elk once sat and kneeled.

A brown tipi with a cross has been painted behind the altar. Statues of Mary and Joseph and a picture of Jesus stand at the front, but they share this church with Black Elk: his picture hangs above the sacristy door; prayer cards with his image lie in the pews; another photo of the Lakota holy man rests on a table with a sage bowl and an eagle feather; and just below the picture of Christ is a wood chair, colorfully painted by local artist Mark Anderson with Black Elk’s name and likeness.

*****

ON A WARM SUNDAY last summer, we departed Rapid City, turned left at Hermosa and drove two hours southeast, skirting the southern edge of the hauntingly beautiful Badlands country, to learn more about Manderson.

Black Elk descendants are numerous in Pine Ridge country. Betty O’Rourke, a great-granddaughter, ran a restaurant in Manderson with help from her grandchildren, Austin and Maisena. Photos of the man who may one day be a saint decorated the dining room wall.

When we arrived at 9 a.m., Betty O’Rourke and her family were busily preparing to serve a group of college-age missionaries who were scheduled to arrive for lunch. With her black hair drawn tightly back, you can see a resemblance between Betty and her famous great-grandfather, whose photos hang in the dining room of the restaurant and home.

“I was born a Black Elk,” she said, between checking casseroles in the oven.”My mother, Grace, was a Black Elk. They called her Gracie. My Aunt Kate was the first Native American woman in the U.S. Army.”

Betty says she and her husband, Chuck, are old enough to retire, but they keep running the restaurant for two reasons: the community needs an eatery and,”it teaches our grandchildren how to be in the world and run a business.”

She does not advertise or promote her connections to Black Elk.”Everything Grandpa said was that you should never profit from your culture,” she says.”We have certain people who do but I don’t think it’s right.”

Betty said she wouldn’t join us at Mass. She had to watch the casseroles.”When I was at Holy Rosary School, we would go to church every day. Sometimes two or three times a day, but you can’t get me to church today because I believe God is with me all the time. I don’t have to go to that building to pray to Him.”

She likes the priests from Holy Rosary, who often visit the restaurant.”They know how I feel and when they come here to eat, they don’t talk to me about going to church,” she laughs, and then she returns to the oven.

*****

MASS STARTS AT 11 a.m. on most Sundays. A priest and four Catholic nuns from the Holy Rosary Mission arrived just minutes beforehand because Joyce Tibbitts, the parish catechist, had already prepared the altar. Tibbitts does many duties that Black Elk performed for decades.

The simple but sturdy wood-frame church at Manderson was built by Black Elk and his friends in 1911.

The service began with Ave Maria, led by the nuns who had come from India to work as missionaries. One strummed a guitar. The church could hold a hundred people, but only a few dozen sat in the pews.

Father Edmund Yainao Lunghar, a priest from the Himalayan Mountain country in India, welcomed everyone with a smile. In a short homily, he told a story of a single mother who struggled to raise a troubled teenager. He said the woman steadfastly maintained that,”At the end of the day, no matter how much he misbehaves, he is still my son.”

Father Edmund asked,”How much greater is God’s love? How much will your heavenly Father forgive you if you turn to Him? Let us pray that we have a listening ear. The calling of the Good Shepherd, the whispers of the Good Shepherd, invites us to pastures where life is abundant.”

Midway through Mass, Tibbitts went from pew to pew, waving smoke from a bowl of smoldering sage toward each parishioner. It is a Native American version of the Catholic Church’s use of incense as ceremonial purification.

Rather than ring a bell, Tibbitts beat a drum as Father Edmund consecrated the bread and wine. A service at St. Agnes has the repetitive traditions of the Catholic Mass that bore the youth and comfort their elders, yet it is also like no other religious service in the world. During the Prayers to the Faithful, an appeal was made for a teen who had just died in a hit-and-run accident on the highway; another was said for a boy who was killed in a drive-by shooting that week.

One of the worshippers, a slender woman in her 50s, appeared to be intoxicated. During the Eucharistic prayers while everyone else was kneeling, she approached the altar. She’s not the first troubled person to do so at a Sunday service. It happens in other churches. But never was such a woman treated kindlier. Father Edmund gently assured her they could talk later. She returned to a pew.

At the close of Mass, the congregation recited a special Prayer for the Canonization of Nicholas Black Elk, which includes these lines:

Faithfully he walked the Sacred Red Road

And generously witnessed the Good News

Of our Lord Jesus Christ

Among the Native American people.

Open our hearts also to recognize

The Risen Christ in other cultures and peoples.

The congregation then stepped outside the old church building to socialize in an adjacent hall over coffee and baked goods. An artist’s drawings, featuring Black Elk with a halo, hang in the hall. Tibbitts says the art is considered inappropriate by the Church because halos are reserved for saints, and Black Elk is yet to be canonized.

*****

MANY SAINTS WERE imperfect early in life. Many suffered great injustices. Black Elk fits both categories.

He was born between 1858 and 1866. His tombstone in the weedy cemetery across the road from St. Agnes Church lists the former. The Catholic Church seems to have settled on the latter, while other historians cite 1863.

Black Elk nearly died when he was about 9 years old. He recounted the incident in great detail to Neihardt, whose daughter Hilda took copious notes for days and days during the summer of 1931. Her notes were published in Raymond DeMallie’s 1985 book The Sixth Grandfather. It’s considered more accurate than Black Elk Speaks, which is accepted as a more liberal translation embellished by John Neihardt’s own poetry and spirituality.

Black Elk used the missionaries’ Two Roads Map to teach children and adults about Christ’s life.

Black Elk recalled that his legs, arms and face became swollen and then he drifted into a dream state. He remembered being visited by grandfathers who instructed him in the good that comes from the harmonious red road and the evil that comes from the black road, including war and death. He realized that the sixth grandfather, a very old man with white hair,”was myself Ö at first he was an old man but he got younger and younger until he was a little boy nine years old.”

He saw a village of men, women and children who were dying.”I was frightened at the sight and tried to get away,” he said.”I passed in front of the tipi and all the people got up. The spirit said, ëThat’s the way you shall save men.'”

His recounting of the 12-day dream state took 22 pages in The Sixth Grandfather. Toward the end he notes,”They had taken me all over the world and showed me all the powers. They took me to the center of the earth and to the top of the peak they took me to review it all. I was to see the bad and the good. I was to see what is good for humans and what is not good for humans.”

*****

THREE YEARS LATER, Black Elk and his family were at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry were annihilated by the Lakota. Black Elk, then 12, was kept away from the main battle but he had close encounters with soldiers. At one point he was urged by an adult warrior to scalp a dying soldier. The Neihardt notes record him remembering,”Probably it hurt him because he began to grind his teeth. After I did this I took my pistol and shot him in the forehead.”

As the fighting concluded, he and about six other boys returned to the battle scene.”When we got there some [soldiers] were still alive, kicking. Then many boys came. And we got our arrows out and put arrows into the men and pushed some of the arrows that were sticking out in further.”

He took another scalp and handed it to a younger boy.”Then I got tired of looking around,” he said.”I could smell nothing but blood and gunpowder, so I got sick of it pretty soon. I was a very happy boy. I wasn’t a bit sorry.”

However, in the winter of his 17th year he felt a calling. He told the Neihardts that he heard a voice saying,”Your grandfather told you to do these things. It is time for you to do them.” He developed a horse dance.”After this ceremony was completed it seemed that I was above the earth and I did not touch the earth. I felt very happy and I was also happy to see my people, as it looked like they were renewed and happy. They all greeted me and were very generous to me, telling me that their relatives here and there were sick and were cured in a mysterious way and congratulated me, giving me gifts. I was now recognized as a medicine man at the age of 17.”

“He prayed with a pipe and a rosary,” says Father Daoust of Holy Rosary.

In 1886 he learned that Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show wanted to employ Indians to journey”across the great water” to Europe. He and about 10 friends joined, traveling by train to New York City where they entertained at Madison Square Garden for months.

“As we left New York I could see nothing but water, water, water,” he told the Neihardts. He performed for Queen Victoria in England, and later quoted her as saying that it was wrong for white people”to take you around as beasts to show to the people.”

He and three others became separated from Buffalo Bill’s entourage and found themselves lost in a strange country. None could speak English. Fortunately, London authorities linked them with another traveling show run by a man called Mexican Joe. They toured Italy and France for another year before returning home.

Back at Pine Ridge, he found his relatives and friends confined within reservation borders. Some were ill with strange diseases introduced by settlers and soldiers. Many were hungry and starving due to the demise of the buffalo culture and broken promises. Federal rules titled”The Code of Indian Offences” outlawed traditional dances and religious ceremonies. The rules also limited the practices of medicine men like Black Elk.

A new spirituality called the Ghost Dance was gaining strength. Black Elk heard that friends were dancing it below Manderson at Wounded Knee so he went to observe.”They had a sacred pole in the center,” he told the Neihardts.”It was a circle in which they were dancing and I could clearly see that this was my sacred hoop and in the center they had an exact duplicate of my tree that never blooms and it came to my mind that perhaps with this power the tree would bloom and the people would get into the sacred hoop again.”

The Ghost Dance’s popularity scared U.S. military leaders, and that led to Sitting Bull’s violent death on Dec. 15, 1890. It also contributed to the tragic confrontation between cavalry soldiers and the Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek on the morning of December 29.

Black Elk had spent a sleepless night because he sensed something was about to happen. He was walking at daybreak when he heard gunfire. From afar, Black Elk and a friend saw the wasicus (white men) coming with wagon guns. They heard shooting and cries. They saw women and children running to hide in the gullies. He and about 20 others rode to help. A bullet grazed his leg. He told Neihardt that he felt bulletproof, and that he heard bullets whizzing by.

In Black Elk Speaks, the holy man is quoted as saying that something died in the blood and mud and was buried in the blizzard that followed.”A people’s dream died there,” Neihardt wrote.”It was a beautiful dream Ö the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

That tragic poetry is not found in the actual notes, as published in The Sixth Grandfather. In DeMallie’s text, Black Elk describes the massacre and the aftermath. He laments that perhaps he should have died with the many others, and he says he prayed to the spirits above, saying,”Grandfathers, behold me and send me a power for revenge.”

*****

THIS IS WHERE Black Elk’s life story gets even more complicated. After the Wounded Knee massacre, he continued to serve his people as a medicine man. On many occasions, he found himself at sickbeds with Christian missionaries who were also there to serve. He had friends who had converted to Christianity. In fact, his first wife, Katherine War Bonnet, was a Catholic. She died in 1903.

This photo of Black Elk introducing the rosary to a Lakota child was widely used in Holy Rosary’s promotional materials in the 1940s.

In the autumn of 1904, he was tending to a sick boy who lived north of Holy Rosary when Father Joseph Lindebner arrived. The Jesuit priest, a native of Germany, was well-liked by many reservation residents, who called him”the Little Father.” Lindebner had baptized the lad earlier, and reportedly became upset that Black Elk was there with his tobacco offerings, drums, rattles and other items.

“Satan, get out!” Lindebner declared, tossing Black Elk’s belongings out of the tent. At least, that was the story told decades later by Black Elk’s daughter Lucy. She said her father did not return the anger. The priest obviously saw something special in the medicine man and invited him to accompany him back to Holy Rosary to learn more about Jesus Christ.

Black Elk, curious about the new religion, stayed two weeks at the mission. He found Catholic theology compatible with his traditional beliefs in the Great Spirit, wakan tanka, and on Dec. 6, 1904 he was baptized. It was the feast day of St. Nicholas, so he took the saint’s name.

The rest of Black Elk’s story is the era not covered in Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. He converted hundreds of people. He and his friends built the St. Agnes Church building that stands today. He traveled, sometimes long distances by horseback in stormy weather, to tend to the sick and dying. He served short assignments at St. Stephen’s Mission in Wyoming and Marty Mission on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, but most of his life was spent serving the Pine Ridge people.

Bill White, a descendant by marriage to Black Elk, is a member of the Sainthood Working Group. White is a permanent deacon of the Catholic Diocese, serving at Porcupine on the Pine Ridge. He believes Black Elk became comfortable with Christianity because it fit his childhood vision of unity among men.”He saw the same thing written in Revelation. We are all standing before the Lamb of God. He always was striving to unite people. He had many non-Native friends throughout his life.

“I am certain he fits the model of a man who lived a heroic life and a model life,” White says.”He remained fully Lakota, and he saw that as being compatible with Christianity.”

*****

“BLACK ELK IS MY hero,” Joyce Tibbitts told us, as her congregation departed the church social hall on that Sunday morning. Actually, there are two halls behind St. Agnes Church — a Tekakwitha Hall, where Native American women once met in prayer groups, and a Black Elk Hall for the men. Today, Tekakwitha Hall is Tibbitts’ parish office, and a repository of information for the sainthood effort.

Tibbitts says the process began when relatives of Black Elk, who had attended the canonization service for Tekakwitha in 2012, asked Robert Gruss, then the bishop of the West River Diocese, if their grandfather might also deserve consideration. The working group was created, and it has already submitted a request to the Vatican Congregation of Saints.

Joyce Tibbetts’ tattooed arms reflect both Christian and traditional Lakota spirituality. Her pastoral duties at St. Agnes Church are akin to those performed by Black Elk in the early decades of the 20th century.

Though there are 10,000 saints, none are quite like Black Elk.”He prayed with both a pipe and a rosary,” says Father Joe Daoust, the superior of Holy Rosary Mission and a member of the group.”Some say he walked the two roads between Lakota and Catholic spirituality,” Daoust says.”But he actually blended the two into one red road to God.”

Tibbitts says she and others now walk that same road.”We are a swirl of religions — traditionalists, Christians and combinations of the two. We go to church and we also go to the sweat lodge or the big sun dance in summer.”

She says priests from Holy Rosary once distributed Holy Communion at the sun dance, but the practice was stopped — not by Catholic clergy but by traditional Native American leaders.”If a priest does show up at the sun dance today, the people will be respectful, but they cannot participate anymore.”

Tibbitts believes the challenges of everyday life on the reservation demand that anyone who wants to help — Christian or traditional — must be welcomed.”We’ve once again had a string of suicides,” she said.”The youngest was just 11, the oldest 18. We had a boy hit by a car. This week we buried a 20-year-old who died from illegal booze.”

Because liquor and beer sales are prohibited on the Pine Ridge, bootleggers are making home brews known as skips.”They use everything from hand sanitizers to rubbing alcohol, anything with an alcohol content,” Tibbitts says.”The result is a toxic brew that is killing our people.”

Poverty and health crises further complicate life in Manderson and the surrounding communities. Premature deaths are so frequent that plans are being considered to expand the parish cemetery, which lies just across the highway from St. Agnes Church.

Cynics might surmise that neither Native or Christian spiritualities have done enough to change a sad trajectory that has persisted since the buffalo were nearly exterminated and reservation borders were drawn. Optimists, on the other hand, would find hope among the good people who run the restaurants, stores, schools and churches of Black Elk’s home territory.

When Black Elk and Neihardt climbed Harney Peak (now known as Black Elk Peak) in 1931, the holy man spoke of the troubled times that faced his people.”The good road and the road of difficulties you have made to cross,” he said that day,”and where they cross, the place is holy.”

Seven decades after Black Elk’s death, it’s still easy to encounter holiness in his hometown. Sainthood might someday bring greater attention to the holy man’s humble, forgiving legacy. Maybe it would even bring about miraculous change.

However, the people we met in Manderson are not waiting for miracles. Like their town’s famous native son, they face the intersecting roads of good and bad every day.”I could see that it was next to impossible,” Black Elk said of his vision for a great flowering tree of unity in 1931,”but there was nothing like trying.”

Perhaps the beautiful miracle is that the trying continues today.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Needles Highway in Winter

By Bernie Hunhoff

Needles Highway is also known as Highway 87. It is part of the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway, a 66-mile circle that also includes Iron Mountain Road. When snow become too deep for vehicles, state officials close it until snowplows are able to reopen the route. During such closures, hikers are welcome.

Rich Zacher and his family happily welcomed a foreign exchange student from the Czech Republic last winter, but they struggled to entertain the worldly teen.

“Of all the places we showed her in South Dakota, the thing that she really enjoyed was hiking the Needles Highway in winter,” Zacher says.”That and a rodeo at the Monument.”

The young European has good taste in hikes. More and more people are discovering that the historic, 14-mile Needles Highway (aka Highway 87) takes on a special ambience when experienced afoot in a landscape of white. Perhaps that’s because the steep and winding route — which ranks among America’s crookedest roads — was designed on foot.

“You are not supposed to drive here at 60 miles an hour,” said Peter Norbeck, a visionary leader who founded Custer State Park in 1913 when he was still a state senator.”To do the scenery half justice, people should drive 20 or under; to do it full justice, they should get out and walk.”

Norbeck, despite his portly 240-pound frame, did literally walk the high country as he personally selected the route.”With C.C. Gideon and Scovel Johnson, state engineer, he tramped the trails on foot because horses could not walk over much of the terrain,” wrote author Gilbert Fite in a Norbeck biography, Prairie Statesman.”Working their way through towering granite cliffs and heavy forest, they finally traversed the entire distance of a road which would take tourists through the Needles. The governor’s trousers were badly torn and his legs were scratched.”

Summer traffic makes it difficult to enjoy the Needles Eye Tunnel, but winter hikers like Michael Belmont and his golden retriever, Salvatore, can dawdle in the unusual passageway.

Fite noted that Norbeck and the road engineers had heated arguments.”His desire was to preserve the natural beauty and to build roads where the public could obtain the best artistic view. This contradicted commonly accepted engineering principles, but his policies usually prevailed.”

Fite wrote of a particular day when Norbeck sat on a log, breathing heavily, and asked Johnson whether he could build the road.

“If you can furnish me enough dynamite,” Johnson answered.

Norbeck was then governor. He found both the money and the dynamite, and Needles Highway opened to traffic in 1922. It became a huge success for South Dakota. Up to 1,700 vehicles now pass through on a busy summer day, maneuvering the dips and dives and hairpin turns, and squeezing through narrow tunnels designed for Model A’s rather than today’s big SUVs. Though 1,700 a day may not sound like a huge number, it’s enough to cause congestion — especially at the two tunnels — because, as Norbeck planned, the drivers crawl along at 10 to 20 miles per hour.

Since the highway is difficult to clean after heavy snows and dangerous to drive when the roadway is icy, the northern half has long been closed to car traffic in winter. Zacher, a 29-year veteran of the State Transportation Department (he now serves as Area Engineer for the Black Hills region), says the state kept it open for a winter about 30 years ago as a test.”We did a count to see if there would be any traffic, but the only people who drove it were Custer State Park employees looking for a shortcut from Sylvan Lake to the park headquarters. Except for them, there was zero use.”

Consequently, the state highway department still blocks the road with steel gates on the day before the first forecasted snowfall. That creates a one-day holiday for Black Hills bicyclists.”We get more calls asking when we are going to close it than we get in the spring about when it’s going to reopen,” Zacher notes.”The bikers want to bike the dry pavement before that first snow, without the car traffic.”

Once closed, a 7-mile stretch beginning at Sylvan Lake stays off-limits to cars and trucks until spring.

*****

We parked by the lake and walked the highway on a January morning. Several inches of snow had fallen overnight. There was one other set of tracks, so we knew we were not the first.

With only a few inches of snow on the pavement, walking was easy. The snow muffled the forest. Soon after passing the winter gate at Sylvan Lake, the only reminders of civilization were road signs, bridges and the tunnels that were blasted with Norbeck’s dynamite.

In summer, the road seems like a busy Main Street carved through a forest. On the frosty, cloudy winter morning we arrived, it was so quiet that you could hear tufts of new snow slipping from the pine branches. A squirrel playing in the banks and a few small birds were the only living creatures to be seen.

You hear no traffic, no livestock and no people — only your own feet loudly crunching in the snow. The silence and the scenery combine for an apocalyptic atmosphere, as if all the world has frozen and you are alone with nature on a good day. Civilization is represented only by the concrete ribbon of highway and yellow road signs that warn of curves and tunnels.

Iron Creek Tunnel, one of two tunnels along the winter hike on the Needles Highway, has an elevation of 5,285 feet, considerably lower than Needles Eye Tunnel, which stands at about 6,000 feet.

The Needles Eye Tunnel is just a mile or so from Sylvan Lake. In July, you wouldn’t dare to walk through the 8-foot tunnel for fear of being hit by a car, but in January you can take all the time and photographs that you desire. You might see bits of red and orange glass along the tunnel’s edges, evidence that a car or truck grazed the granite.

Further along, the jagged and jutting Needles spires inspire your imagination. You discover granite heads, shoulders, fingers, castles and caves. Soon after you pass the Needles Eye Tunnel and the nearby Cathedral Spires formations, the roadway descends nearly a thousand feet as you exit some of the Black Hills’ highest country. Walking is easy. You can either continue another 4 or 5 miles, covering the entire stretch of highway that is closed (if you have a way to return to your vehicle at Sylvan Lake) or you can retrace your steps. We went back to our car.

*****

The next morning, we drove east of Custer into the park on Highway 16 and turned north on Highway 87, which is the southern segment of Needles Highway. That stretch remains open in winter for about 6 miles. Once you reach the winter gate, which is north of the Playhouse Road, you can park and proceed on foot.

Zacher, the DOT engineer, asks that you never block the winter gates with your car.”You never know when an emergency services vehicle may need access, or we may be on our way to open the road and need access.”

The southern hike differs from the northern. Now you are lower in the forest. The pine trees are thicker and you’ll hear the gurgling of running water, though the stream, Iron Creek, is often invisible below ice and snow.

As with the northern route, you arrive at a hole in a mountain — the Iron Creek Tunnel — after less than an hour of walking. The two tunnels are milestones for winter hikers.

Dan Ray, an outdoor enthusiast from Rapid City, says both tunnels can be challenging.”Sometimes you have to break through a drift on one side or another. Sometimes the opening is completely blocked, I’ve heard tell, and that could be a blast to push your way through.”

Ray says some people use cross country skis on the roadway, though drifts and deep snow can make skiing difficult. He says snowshoes are helpful.”Prepare for 3 feet of non-packed snow, and if you are in a group, switch up who’s in front often.”

Ray also advises against blue jeans.”If you sweat or trip and fall in the snow, the jeans will get wet and then freeze. You will be miserable. Wear nylon pants and long johns that are polyester based. In the winter, cotton kills if you get it wet.”

Ray also recommends that hikers carry water, but leave the camelbacks at home.”They do not work well in winter. The water line from the bladder and the mouthpiece will freeze solid if it’s cold. Water bottles work well.”

While thousands of people travel the road on a summer day, park officials say a dozen or less usually do so in winter — partly because many hikers don’t know that the opportunity exists. Michael Belmont and his wife, Amy Hornstra, of St. Anthony, Minnesota, learned about it when they stopped at an art studio in nearby Hill City.”My husband asked the clerk for suggestions, and she told us you can hike Needles Highway.”

Hornstra, a native of Yankton, said the highlight for them was,”having the road to ourselves. The area is gorgeous Ö it was peaceful and beautiful. We have both hiked many parts of the world, and the Needles Highway now ranks near the top of our favorites list.”

She also recommends dressing for winter.”We were very happy that we both had on boots, as there were parts where the snow had drifted and was fairly deep. Other parts of the road were clear.”

In winter, many of the Black Hills’ other popular trails can become treacherous due to buildups of ice and snow. Ironically, the famous Sunday Gulch Trail, which also starts at Sylvan Lake, is closed to hikers in the winter because it is considered so dangerous. That makes the Needles Highway an even nicer find.

Norbeck is now remembered as the father of the highway and Custer State Park. Though he loved the outdoors, he wasn’t a hunter or fisherman. He found joy in the splendor of the natural world, and he would be delighted to know that hikers are following his very footsteps.

We thought of him as we enjoyed his creation. One man or woman can truly make a difference, given enough dynamite.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Border Town

By Chad Coppess

Gary is a true border town. The east end of Main Avenue intersects the South Dakota/Minnesota state line.

It’s been many years since a train rumbled through Gary, but people here believe this was the place where railroad service first crossed into Dakota. Trains also arrived in other border towns like Sioux City and Vermillion in 1872, the year of Gary’s founding, but the local citizenry stands by the claim, more than 150 years later. The east end of Gary’s Main Avenue intersects the Minnesota border, where rails awaited their extension into Dakota Territory, so it’s hard to doubt them.

The town began as Tent City, then Stateline, Headquarters, DeGraf and finally Gary, for rail and postal official H.B. Gary. It’s also known as”The Gate City” for its role in welcoming settlers to the western prairies.

Almost 600 people called this beautiful spot along the west branch of the Lac Qui Parle River home in 1920, but less than half as many remain today.”Maybe we are lucky,” says construction contractor and city councilman Doug Nelson, who calls himself a”move back” because he returned to his hometown after several years of living away.”At one time we were on a trajectory to become a big city, but instead we have a hidden gem.”

Progress is measured differently in tiny towns.”We’ve got stop signs now. We didn’t used to,” Nelson laughed.

Gary Historical Association members (from left) Ellen Schulte, Doug Nelson, Carolynn Webber and Perry Heaton gathered in the city museum to reminisce about the town’s early days.

Perry Heaton and his father before him operated the Gate City General Store at the main intersection in downtown Gary. Jennifer Pederson now manages the former bank building and shop next door, known to locals as”Jen’s Store.” Over the years the buildings have held a drug store, barber shop, grocery store and the Gary Post Office. Today shelves are packed with tools, greeting cards and energy drinks.”We still have hardware from when Perry had the store,” Pederson says.”It’s fun to actually sell something with one of his old price tags on it. We’ve tried to keep the original intent, which was a little of everything.”

Nelson says residents are happy with the products and services available, except for the lack of a gas station. Ideas are being floated to bring a service station and convenience store to property owned by the city.

An adult prom last year brought back memories of dances every Friday and Saturday night in the 1960s and’70s.”Of course they don’t dance anymore, just stand in the middle of the floor and jump up and down,” says Heaton, a former mayor and city councilman.

The town’s newspaper, the Gary Interstate, began in 1878 and ceased traditional publication years ago, but the Gary Historical Association continues a monthly newsletter that carries the Interstate name. Laura Swoboda and her mother, Patricia Haas, produce the new editions.

A picturesque two-story brick courthouse was built in the lower part of town in the 1890s. When the county seat moved to Clear Lake, the community offered the building as the first South Dakota School for the Blind. The school opened in 1900 after the city raised funds and built additional facilities on a 37-acre campus, including a small dam and lake.

Tunnels were built to assist blind students getting between buildings on the School for the Blind campus. Today they are decorated with historic photos of the school and surrounding area.

Longtime Gary residents remember blind students attending churches and joining locals for dinner at their homes. Along with Braille instruction, students learned music, farming, furniture repair and other skills utilizing their hands. A large barn on campus hosted wrestling and boxing matches as well as roller skating.

The School for the Blind moved to Aberdeen in 1959. Decay, deterioration and vandalism took a toll on the buildings until local entrepreneur Joe Kolbach purchased the property in 2008. Kolbach held an idea-generating town meeting, which led to the renovation of the school buildings as a resort, hotel, campground and restaurant.

The Buffalo Ridge Resort and Spa, including the Herrick Hotel and Talking Waters Campground, opened in 2009 for Gary’s Fourth of July celebration, an annual five-day party that includes a rodeo, soap box derby, live bands, children’s events and a rendezvous. By the following summer the Rock Room Bar and Grill was added.

Buildings housing the Gary Historical Association’s museum exhibits, the Gary City Park, the resort and the campground all blend into a beautiful complex somewhat hidden to travelers who only pass through town.”This park is the nucleus of what Gary is,” Nelson said as he walked by the new playground equipment and sports courts, the fruits of fundraisers held through the American Legion, the Alibi Bar and others.

Patricia Fields purchased the Buffalo Ridge Resort in 2023 and is continuing renovations that will add spa and massage facilities. Rick and Jessica Christens operate the Talking Waters Campground next door.

Ghost hunters have visited the resort’s buildings and found some activity, although one said a ghost told her she wasn’t willing to talk that day.”They are friendly,” Fields says. She’s seen some”photo bomb” ghosts appear in pictures taken there.

Maybe someday, one of them will reminisce about the day the railroad came to town, and finally settle that old debate with Sioux City and Vermillion.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Postcards from December

By Christian Begeman

As another year comes to an end, I find myself watching the weather closely like most of us in the Upper Midwest. When there is fog and overnight lows below freezing, I really pay attention. I know those conditions mean there is a good chance of frost appearing, which means great opportunities to find and photograph ordinary scenes that become transformed into extraordinary winter works of art.

This year what little snow we had in early December melted on a few relatively warm days, but the cold nights caused the moisture to return again in the form of fog and rime ice. Rime ice is the scientific term for it, but folks around here know the phenomena simply as frost. I particularly enjoy when frost appears like it did this season, with little to no snow to hinder traveling. I have family in the northeastern and north central part of the state, and this winter I’ve found myself on the road more than usual with holiday travel and attending basketball games. For two of those trips Jack Frost was hard at work, so I left early to see what I could find.

On Christmas Eve I was due in Mobridge for supper. That gave me all day to search out frosty art on my way. I started at Terrace Park in Sioux Falls. Ornamental cherry trees still had red fruit attached and few leaves had yet to drop. These provided excellent bases for frost to accumulate. After about an hour, I drove up to the Dells of the Big Sioux, stopping to shoot a favorite red barn and the railroad tracks that go through downtown Baltic. At the Dells, a pair of bald eagles were patrolling the river, and I was lucky enough to watch them fly below me as I was checking out the scenery.

From the Dells, I drove west to Highway 81 and then turned north after detouring through Lake Herman State Park near Madison. I stopped in the city park at Arlington where the rime ice was particularly thick. An old red hydrant that reminded me of watering calves back home on the farm was particularly striking adorned in frost. Later on, I spotted what looked like an elevator building on a ranch in rural Faulk County. By the time I was driving through Potter and Walworth counties, the snow was gone, but the fog still covered the taller grass and trees white with frost. It was hard not to be in good holiday spirits after a trip like that.

December seems to be the time when winter is most beautiful on the Northern Plains. Maybe it’s the holiday season, or because we simply aren’t tired of the cold yet. Either way, I hope you enjoy my collection of December postcards as much as I enjoyed capturing them. Happy New Year and good luck with the camera work the whole year long!

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.