Tag: Belle Fourche

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The Cowboy’s Artist

By John Andrews

Tony Chytka fired his sculpture of saddle bronc champion Clint Johnson in his Belle Fourche foundry.

A BLACK CAT PURRS beside a homemade kiln that would raise the eyebrow of any OSHA inspector, but Tony Chytka doesn’t seem worried.”They would probably have a fit with me, but I’m the only one out here,” he says.

“Out here” is Chytka’s 360-acre ranch, which lies in a zigzag of red dirt roads southeast of Belle Fourche along the Belle Fourche River, part of the historic Redwater Irrigation District. The peak of Bear Butte, some 20 miles away and still snowcapped on an early May morning, is just visible on the southeastern horizon. He bought the place 20 years ago. He keeps a few cows and horses and puts up some hay. Chykta also does some irrigating; piles of irrigation pipe lie near an old tin cattle shed that doubles as a foundry, where Chytka produces some of the best contemporary Western art in North America.

When we spoke, Chytka was laboring on a 3/4 life size sculpture of Spearfish native and four-time PRCA world saddle bronc riding champion Clint Johnson. When it was unveiled in August of 2019 at the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center in Fort Pierre, it became the third and final piece added to the center’s sculpture garden, which is a tribute to South Dakota’s amazing history of exceptional saddle bronc riders.

Chytka has been on a lifelong path to becoming one of the country’s premier Western artists. He grew up on a farm west of Yankton; his surname (pronounced KIT-ka) is typical of the Bohemian families who settled that country in the late 1860s and 1870s. Growing up, he developed two passions — art and rodeo. The Chytka property also included the local saddle club arena, where South Dakota rodeo greats like Casey Tibbs performed. Chytka became enamored with rodeo at a young age. He remembers that after school at the one-room Longfellow District 11, he held on for dear life to a barrel suspended by ropes while his older brothers tugged the lines, simulating a teeth-chattering bronc ride. That led to competition in Little Britches and the high school rodeo club.

Teachers at Longfellow and the high school also encouraged his artistic endeavors. He took art classes and was introduced to sculpture during his senior year through clay modeling. While the other students were fashioning clay pots, Chytka created some 300 individual fired one-of-a-kind ceramic pieces.

After the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center opened in 2009, Chytka donated sculptures of Casey Tibbs (left) and trick rider Mattie Goff-Newcombe.

After graduating in 1972, Chytka enrolled at the University of South Dakota in Springfield. He took as many art classes as he could and became a member of the rodeo team, competing in bull riding and bareback bronc riding. He transferred to Black Hills State University in Spearfish in 1974, where he continued studying art and rodeoing. Chytka became a contemporary of Clint Johnson, who was on the rodeo team at South Dakota State University in Brookings.”He was a very strong rider,” Chytka recalls.”Very positive and an easy-going guy. Always had a chuckle to him.”

Drive around Belle Fourche and you’ll see evidence of Chytka’s success in Western art. Sculptures honoring brothers Marvin and Mark Garrett, two of the nation’s best bareback bronc riders, stand at the corner of Sixth and State streets. Another Chytka creation called Legacy, placed along Highway 85, was completed for the South Dakota centennial in 1989. Chytka has also memorialized Jerry Olson, a former rodeo clown and bullfighter from nearby Fruitdale, and his tribute to 1920s trick rider Mattie Goff-Newcombe can be found in Sturgis.

Chytka’s pieces are part of private collections around the world. Several are on display at the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So when the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center was becoming a reality in the mid-2000s, and its directors sought art to place inside, they turned to Chytka, who donated two pieces that greet visitors as they enter: Casey Tibbs in the moments leading up to a bronc ride and Goff-Newcombe performing at the Faith Fair and Rodeo in 1928.

“He’s really a perfect fit,” says Cindy Bahe, longtime director of the center.”He’s a rodeo guy and rode broncs, so he knows exactly the stature of the cowboy and the animal. They are pretty true to life.”

The center sought Chytka’s expertise again when planning began for a sculpture garden overlooking the Missouri River. Johnny Smith, a former board member of the Casey Tibbs Foundation, was particularly proud of South Dakota’s saddle bronc riding champions and wanted to honor the very best. Plans called for three sculptures, all produced in Chytka’s Belle Fourche foundry. The first, placed in 2013, depicts Ree Heights native and five-time world saddle bronc riding champion Billy Etbauer scoring 89 atop Painted Valley at the 2009 Cheyenne Frontier Days. The second, added in 2018, is Casey Tibbs on The Old Gray Mare, honoring his performance at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1949, the year he won his first of six world saddle bronc riding championships. Clint Johnson, a four-time world champion, took his place in 2019.

Legacy, completed for the state centennial in 1989, was Chytka’s first large-scale piece. It stands along Highway 85 in Belle Fourche.

For Chytka, the creative process begins with a pose that perfectly encapsulates the subject and the context of the piece.”Then I’ll use other photographs to try to get a three-dimensional draw from it,” Chytka says.”It’s really hard to work off a flat surface when you’re working three dimensionally. That’s what’s unique about it. You can walk around to the other side and see the depth of it.”

Those drawings eventually become a table-size clay model on which Chytka does the brunt of the shaping and sculpting.”That’s where you do all the designing, work out all the detailing and that type of thing. There are certain guides you can use for the length of the horse’s head, the legs. A lot of it is just the view. I like to just stand back and see it all together.”

Over the next four to six months, the project goes through various stages. A rubber layer is applied on the outside of the clay, and then plaster of Paris on top of that. The process yields a wax version of the sculpture, and a ceramic shell is built around it. When the wax is melted, the shell is ready to receive molten bronze from Chytka’s homemade kiln.

Chytka brought his pieces to other foundries until 1984, when he learned the process himself at a foundry in Bozeman, Montana.”The casting process has always intrigued me,” he says.”When you use commercial foundries, pretty soon all the work from that foundry starts to look the same. There’s just as much art in the foundry process as the beginning sculpture.”

His kiln, fueled by propane and powered by a Kirby vacuum motor, heats the bronze to 2,200 degrees. It’s a two man pour, he says, meaning a man at each end of an 8-foot-long metal tong holds the piece as it’s dipped into the furnace (the 10-foot tong was too hard to handle, he explains).”After it cools you can hit the bottom of the shell with a hammer and you aren’t going to hurt it,” he says.”The permanence of it is something I always liked.”

Chytka sculpted Johnson atop Kicking Bear, the horse he rode to win his fourth championship in 1989 (his previous titles came in 1980, 1987 and 1988). Visitors who attended the unveiling surely appreciated its artistic merits, but when old cowboys — and even Chytka himself — glance into the horse’s eyes or see the way Johnson sits in the saddle, they might be transported to their old rodeo days. There will be features that only those who’ve landed on their backside in the arena will notice.

“There are little things. Positioning, the equipment, the action and that kind of thing,” Chykta says.”I’m not hung up too much on detail, just as long as it flows. But when somebody who does know rodeo says, ëHey, you did a good job on that,’ then that means just that much more, coming from people who have been there.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Brimming With Enthusiasm

By Michael Zimny

At Star of the West in Belle Fourche, Brad Montague makes cowboy hats for West River ranchers as well as sports and television stars.

Is the generational divide over cowboy hat brim width just another indicator of the deepening socio-aesthetic chasms in our nation? Probably not. In any case, wide or tight, Brad Montague at Star of the West can shape you up.

He’s been shaping hats since he was knee-high to a buckaroo in Fruitdale, just east of Belle Fourche.”As a kid growing up wearing hats all the time,” Montague recalls,”we had to learn to shape our own hats. We had a pan with a little knob on the top that you could take a screw out and pull the knob off, and when it started boiling it shot steam. So we’d stand over the pan and steam our own hats and shape them.”

He didn’t know then that standing over that jerry-rigged steam kettle, he was shaping more than just his hat.

Much of what makes a hat unique is in the curvature of crown or brim. “In my opinion,” he says, “the harder part of making a hat is the shaping.”

A hat’s shape conveys subtle messages about the age, persona or social milieu of the wearer. The”taco” look — a high, narrow crease in the crown that looks ripe for a spoonful of carne asada — is popular on the horse show circuit. The “cattleman” crease is a little wider and tends to be favored by more mature cowboys.

Brim width tends to correspond with age.”For years, the standard brim width of a hat was 4 inches. You’re starting to see the factory hats go to 4 and a quarter. A quarter inch doesn’t sound like much, but when you add a half inch in diameter it makes a huge difference in the appearance of the hat.”

“When you start getting into the older generations — 70s and up — you’ll see them going to a 3 and a half inch brim as opposed to a 4.”

Montague understands the visual subtexts communicated by a hat. More importantly, he intuitively understands how to formalize that visual language with his hands. And he knows what every cowboy used to know — that while styles can fade, a hat made of the right materials will endure.

Like most makers of Western hats, Montague uses the”X” rating system (unrelated to the old MPAA rating) to grade his hats.”The higher the Xs, the more quality and durability you get.”

Montague begins with a raw hat body and shaves away any excess felt before shaping the crown over a hat block.

But he doesn’t necessarily recommend relying on the rating system.”For years, Xs meant a lot more than they do now.” A higher”X” rating on a hat will generally mean a higher ratio of wild fur, but there is no governing body to set exact requirements for any given rating.”Anybody can label whatever they want.”

“If you take a hat from the’60s or’70s and it’s labeled as a 3X, you’ll find that little 3x is probably better than most of the 10Xs nowadays.”

Montague uses rabbit and beaver fur exclusively. A higher”X” rating means a higher percentage of beaver fur. More fine, short beaver hairs make for a stronger, more compact hat.

Older cowboys and cowgirls know this, but,”It’s gotten to the point that somebody my age or a little younger can’t feel a hat. I’ve had people come in here and argue with me that the higher quality the hat, the thicker the material is. No, that’s a lesser quality felt.”

Somewhere along the way, a tactile kind of knowledge was lost. People lost touch with their hats and started relying on the labels.”Cowboys that have been wearing hats their whole life will tell you that the movie Urban Cowboy is what killed it.” Not because John Travolta wasn’t true West, but because the movie’s popularity triggered a wave of hat inflation. Xs became status symbols rather than a measure of dependability.

“Around here, most people buy a hat to wear for dress, but eventually they make a work hat out of it. They wear it on a daily basis where it’s going to shed the sun, rain, the snow — the durability becomes a big issue. You know, if you’re going to spend $400 on a hat, you want something that’s going to hold up.”

Like most custom hatters in the U.S., Montague gets his felt hat bodies from Winchester, Tennessee. The Winchester Hat Corporation processes beaver, rabbit and other furs and forms them, with liberal use of steam, into a basic hat body.

At this point the hat body is cone-shaped and looks something like the hat worn by your classic hillbilly caricature. Maybe real hillbillies saved moonshine money by buying unfinished hat bodies directly from Winchester.

Cowboys are more particular about their hats.

Ironing helps shape the brim, which typically finishes right around 4 inches wide.

Montague starts with the raw hat body, molds it into the crown height he needs by pulling it tight over a hat block, cuts the brim to the desired width, irons out the Dionysian hillbilly lilt and forms a forward-facing Apollonian ellipse — a brim built to unfurl the Plains beneath a gaze like a hot branding iron. Nature renounces chaos beneath the benevolent tyranny of the brim, huddling into ordered bands like branded beeves. Rattles cease abruptly as its power surges over the land like a spinning blade severing serpent heads. Voles hunker. Storm clouds dissipate. Raptors trace its lines with flight.

That this instrument, so crucial to the breaking and taming of nature, itself comes from nature … well, Mother Nature should have seen that one coming. What else could the beaver portend? The beaver — nature’s self-intervention, altering ecosystems with its chompers and can-do. The beaver, whose pelt-money would launch wars and help John Jacob Astor build Manhattan, whose tail would make Davy Crockett a living legend. Of course the hat that donned the heads that broke and platted the Plains would be prized above all for how much of it was beaver.

Montague moved to Rapid City in the 1990s. He’d been working construction in the summers and took a winter job at the since-closed Western Way Work Warehouse.”Once they figured out I knew how to shape a hat, they paid me enough to keep me on.”

A couple years later, previous Star of the West owner Todd Christenson called him and offered him job. The plan was to take six months to apprentice Montague in hat making, then eventually sell him the store.”I’m one of those, if I can watch you do something, I can pick it up,” he says.”So I’d get ahead of what I was doing, and I’d watch [Christensen] finishing the hats. He was gone one Saturday, so I went to finishing hats. He came in that Monday and said, ‘Well, you got it figured out. Holler if you need anything.'” Montague was running the store within a month, and bought it out four years later.

Six days a week he takes felt hat bodies from Winchester — made up of more or less beaver depending on the X-quality the customer wants and is willing to pay for — shaves the excess felt down to an impervious surface, shapes the crown to the bespoke needs of the buyer, cuts, embosses and sews in the goat skin sweatband (“they cost a little bit more, but in the long run they’re more durable”), and makes hats out of them. He shoots for three per day on average.

A hat’s crease says a lot about its wearer. High and narrow creases are popular on the horse show circuit, while cattlemen often prefer a wider crease.

His shop is a like an enclosed fumarole. Most steps in the process involve plenty of steam. Steam, shape, steam, cut, steam some more. Gradually the union of heat, moisture and fur spawns something obdurate and supple.

“There are a lot of tools that take the hands-on thing out of it, but the more machines you get involved, the less custom-made it is.”

And a truly custom-made hat is getting harder to find. Since the 1990s, Western wear retail options have been steadily diminished, in Rapid City and the region. Even Pete’s Clothing in Belle Fourche — the local shop Montague grew up with — will close in the next few months. Consolidation means it’s harder to find something unique. And custom craftspersons with their own storefront are more rare than the shrinking number of Western wear outlets. He estimates there might be 50 makers of custom Western-style hats in the country. That’s why people come from far and wide to Star of the West.

“If you’re wanting anything different than what the shelf hats are,” says Montague,”you’ve got to come to me.”

Cowboys and cowgirls have noticed, including some noteworthy athletes.

“There was a year I think I had 10 of the top 15 bare back riders in the world wearing my hats.”

The walls of his store are lined with pictures of rodeo stars and country musicians wearing his hats. The most star struck he ever felt was when country artist Bobby Bare walked in. Outside of American ranch country, he ships hats to Japan, Australia, Russia and the UK. He’s even been commissioned to hat the casts of TV series like Fargo and Hell on Wheels.

Western styles are his bread and butter, but not a bridle on his powers of expression.

“I actually built a steampunk [fedora] here not too long ago.”

Still, the only trade show he does is the Black Hills Stock Show. Winter is his busiest time. Once calving season starts, some people might not make it to the shop for a while.”Hats will start to pile up on the floor.”

“A lot of my customers are people like me, people that I grew up with, that are interested in a lot of the same things. And the ones that aren’t cowboys, ranchers and all that — you get to learn.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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An Irrigated Valley

Our September/October issue includes a feature on the Belle Fourche River valley. Butte County is a West River oasis, thanks to the Belle Fourche Irrigation District, a century-old project that can be traced back to 1885. Bernie Hunhoff took several photos in the area last summer while working on the story. Here are some that didn’t make the magazine.

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Welcome, Mr. President

By Bernie Hunhoff

Mr. President, welcome to South Dakota. You’ll be landing Air Force One on Friday in the center of our great USA. The official geographic center is near Belle Fourche, a six-hour car drive straight west of where you’ll speak in Watertown.
In between are farms and ranches, towns and small cities — all populated by mostly hard-working and decent people who don’t expect much of the Washington whence you come.
Oh, we’ll take what we can get when offered. We’ve seen enough hard times — droughts, floods, hail storms and tornadoes — to know that you don’t bite anybody’s hand. But we don’t expect much. Most of us were raised with the belief that the next government check — like the next rain — might be the last for awhile, and we’re ok with that.
We figure we’d have the same number of farmers and ranchers if Washington had never sent a nickel through an ag program. We farm because we farm. For the sake of pure patriotism, we’d host Ellsworth Air Force Base for the nation even if it didn’t add a dime to the economy. Our Native American citizens would still call places like Pine Ridge and Standing Rock their home even if you tore up the treaties and never spent another dollar on the rez. And we would have probably allowed you (I say”you” because as president, you represent the government to us) to flood our middle section of the state by the four Missouri River dams even if we didn’t get some fine walleye fishing in exchange.
As a state senator, I can promise you that we’d find a way to balance our state budget if we lost the 40% that comes from Washington. It wouldn’t be easy, but we’d survive the same way we dig out of blizzards. One shovel after another. Our senior citizens appreciate Medicare and Social Security, but the cost of living is lower here so we’d probably even get by without those wonderful perks.
Washington is a million miles away from our daily lives.
I wish you had a a day or two to spend in South Dakota. You could take federal Highway 212 from Watertown and drive to Belle Fourche, past the most cussedly independent folks on our planet. Most of them don’t belong to your political party, but you could stop in any small town or pull into any farm driveway and you’d be met with the biggest smiles you’ve ever enjoyed. As a Democrat, you’d love the giant concrete donkey at Tinkertown, just west of Watertown, and the immense fiberglass pheasant at Redfield.
As you cross the great Missouri, America’s grandest river, you’ll enter the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, one of the places where our government sent the Lakota. It hasn’t worked well from most viewpoints. Capitalism hasn’t taken root. Health care is a disaster. Alcoholism is a problem. But it is Home to the Lakota, with a capital H. The reservation people face many challenges, but it wouldn’t take you long to find very spiritual and determined people who are working to make things better for the next generation.
The Cheyenne also marks the gateway to true cowboy country. On down Highway 212, you’ll want to stop for a hot beef sandwich and some conversation at the Faith Livestock Auction Barn. The salty ranchers of West River are everything Ronald Reagan dreamed of being.
South Dakotans neither love or hate the government you run. Likewise, most neither love or hate you. Oh, we have a few political nut cakes. But fewer than most places. Most South Dakotans are too busy with daily life to think a lot about Washington and all your problems.
But don’t get me wrong. I welcome you to South Dakota. We all welcome you. We’re always happy when folks come here and spend some money, just as we like a good rain.