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Gateway to the Sandhills

Story and photos by Bernie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they begin in South Dakota.

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

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Between the Reservations

By John Andrews

Bennett County, sandwiched between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations in southwest South Dakota, is the home of one of the country’s most noted Indian scholars. Visitors can still see his old haunts, and while they are there they can observe wildlife found in few other places in South Dakota or see our state’s version of the sandhills that Nebraska has made famous.

Vine Deloria, Jr., was born in Martin in 1933. Before his death in 2005, Time magazine had named him one of America’s greatest religious thinkers. His literary contributions included God is Red and Custer Died For Your Sins, leaving no doubt where the author stood regarding the history of Native and non-Native relations.

Martin greatly impacted Deloria’s thinking, as he wrote years later.”My earliest memories are of trips along dusty roads to Kyle, a small settlement in the heart of the reservation, to attend dances where people danced as if the intervening 50 years had been a lost weekend from which they had fully recovered,” he wrote.”The [Wounded Knee] massacre was vividly etched in the minds of the older reservation people but it was difficult to find anyone who wanted to talk about it.”

Vine Deloria, one of the most celebrated Indian scholars of the 20th century, grew up in Bennett County.

Deloria’s father was an Episcopalian preacher who served congregations in Allen, Porcupine, Vetal, Batesland, Wanblee and Tuthill. After attending reservation schools and serving in the Marine Corps, the young Deloria studied at Iowa State University. He earned a degree in theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary; but rather than follow in his footsteps as a pastor, he chose a path as an activist educator and writer. He was the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians in the 1960s, and during that period he wrote Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. The book, published during the turbulent years when America was coming to grips with civil rights, challenged readers to reconsider cultural stereotypes, generalizations, patronization and even historical inclinations.

He earned a law degree from the University of Colorado and then taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1978 to 1990, when he returned to Colorado to teach at Boulder until retiring in 2000. Along the way, he wrote and published 20 books and gained a reputation as a gifted orator and scholar.

The historic Inland Theater in Martin was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.

Fewer and fewer of Martin’s 1,000 residents remember the word warrior, but life continues here just as it did during Deloria’s childhood. Situated on Highway 18, Martin is part of the Oyate Trail, a 395-mile route through southern South Dakota that stretches from North Sioux City to Edgemont. Services are still held every Sunday at the church built by Father Deloria. The rectory where the Delorias lived is standing but vacant.

Zane and Dorene Zieman’s little bookstore on Main Street has a copy of Custer Died For Your Sins on the shelves. Down the street, the town library has four of Deloria’s books. Marsha Fyler, the library director, says they are popular.”Anything with a Native American theme is in demand here, especially his. The Native American population knows about him.”

Bennett County is young compared to its 65 counterparts. It was organized in 1909 and named for Granville Bennett, a justice of the Dakota Territory Supreme Court, delegate to Congress and probate judge in Lawrence County. The land, once belonging to the Oglala Sioux people, was ceded to the federal government and opened to settlement in 1912.

Waterfowl may not jump to mind when discussing Bennett County, but it is home to South Dakota’s only wildlife refuge west of the Missouri River. Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge was created in 1935 as a refuge and breeding ground for migratory birds and other animals. Since its establishment, the refuge has grown to encompass over 16,000 acres in the shallow Lake Creek valley 12 miles southeast of Martin. It helps sustain sandhill cranes, shorebirds and other migratory waterfowl, but its primary mission is to provide wintering habitat for trumpeter swans. The birds were hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th century because their feathers were in demand for quill pens. In 1960, 20 cygnets were released at Lacreek. They were the seed for the High Plains Flock of trumpeter swans that now includes about 600 birds. The best time to view the swans is October through March.

Trumpeter swans, once on the brink of extinction, have been successfully reintroduced at Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge.

Lacreek lies on the northern edge of the sandhills, a geologic formation that Nebraska has made famous but which begin in southern Bennett County. Just take Highway 73 south of Martin. You’ll pass by farms and fields, perhaps wondering if you’ve yet reached the beginning. You’ll know when you do. The switch from what locals call”the hardland” to the sandhills is literally a line in the sand. They can’t be missed.

Jim Buckles is a third generation rancher in the Bennett County sandhills.

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

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

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

So Bennett County’s sandhills aren’t necessarily a desert, but the county does have the unusual distinction of being the farthest spot from a coastline in North America. Officially called the North American continental pole of inaccessibility, the spot is specifically 7 miles north of the town of Allen.

A group of college students share encouragement and wisdom with an instructor at Wingsprings.

Bennett County is also helping build bridges between Native and non-Native people. Ten years ago architect and anthropologist Dr. Craig Howe began building Wingsprings on his family’s land north of Martin. It is home to the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS). Rapid City native Eric Zimmer, a doctoral candidate in American History at the University of Iowa, says CAIRNS brings together a coalition of scholars, teachers and area residents to bridge the cultural and historical gaps separating Native and non-Native people in South Dakota.

“CAIRNS acknowledges the troubled history and current tensions between many Native and non-Native peoples,” says Zimmer.”It builds bridges through education and stands to improve not only the quality of life but to strengthen the common bonds that hold the diverse residents of this land together.”

If Vine Deloria could see it, he’d surely be proud of his home county.

Editor’s Note: This is the 17th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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Winter is for the Birds

By Christian Begeman

A friend of mine recently shared a link to a bird photographer’s exquisite work capturing small songbirds in flight. The message was accompanied by a good-natured challenge to start producing similar images of my own. I’m always up for a challenge. The problem, I soon discovered, is that getting a good photo of wild birds in nature is extremely hard … not to mention predicting where and when said bird will take flight. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve failed miserably in this particular challenge … so far.

With that confession on the table, I figured I’d share some tips (and photos, both good and bad) that I picked up along the way. Now I’m not much more than a greenhorn birder myself, but I do have a starting suggestion. Find the nearest winter bird feeder and camp out nearby. Last year I had good luck at the Sioux Falls Outdoor Campus during a steady morning snowfall. This year I tried the bird feeders at Farm Island State Park near Pierre and at the entrance to Good Earth State Park southeast of Sioux Falls. These feeders allow you to get fairly close as long as you stay still and are willing to wait for the birds to return after initially disturbing them. This wait can take anywhere from five to 15 minutes. At Good Earth, I chose to sit cross-legged on the ground next to an evergreen as I waited. Soon I had juncos hopping a few feet away and a downy woodpecker nearly ran into my head. I sat so still for so long that my leg fell asleep. Good thing no one was around. Standing up was accompanied by numerous mutterings and murmurs.

I read that Farm Island is home to northern saw-whet owls, so after spending some time at the feeder missing shots of flying finches (those things can move!), I searched for a couple of known saw-whet roosts reported on a birding website. I failed to find them as well. My guess is that the high water a few years back may have re-arranged a lot of things on the island (but in reality, being a rookie birder didn’t help much either). I did, however, have a fun game of hide and seek with a noisy northern cardinal male for about a half hour along the trail. I must have been near its nest when I saw a flash of red and heard the telltale metallic chirp. Long story short, he let me get the closest I’ve ever been to a cardinal, with one stipulation: he put as many branches and twigs of his favorite tree between the two of us at all times.

I really like owls, and earlier in the month I accidentally scared a great horned out of an abandoned church. He flew to the tree windbreak nearby and, like the cardinal, kept the densest part of the tree between him and me. I saw a long-eared owl for the first time in my life while checking out the swans of LaCreek National Wildlife Refuge in Bennett County. He was sunning himself in the early morning light and I happened to notice his outline from at least a quarter mile away. I didn’t get a great shot of him from that distance, but it made the day worthwhile.

The last tip I have is to use your ears. The best tool for locating a bird while out and about is hearing them. I’ve still got work to do on this one. Just last weekend, as I sat quietly along Sergeant Creek at Newton Hills State Park, I could pick out cardinal, chickadee and at least two other unknown songs amongst the steady drumming of woodpeckers and the brazen calls of blue jays. The only birds I could actually see were two bald eagles soaring high above the distant Big Sioux River. Experiences like this make birding addicting. I know they are out there, I know they make great photos, and I know it is a challenge to put it all together and get the unique shot. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing our prettiest spots around the state. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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Dakota’s Other Dunes

By Christian Begeman

Every year as I travel South Dakota’s roads something new surprises me. The latest example was discovering the north edge of the Nebraska Sand Hills is actually located in South Dakota. South of Martin, in Bennett County, the Sand Hills march at least seven miles across the border. When I discovered this, I looked at a topographic map and noticed the lack of roads in this region, which intrigued me. Doing more research, I stumbled across an article online that lamented the fact that hardly any photos can be found of the region in state publications or South Dakota Tourism material. Sounded like a challenge to me.

The Sand Hills eco-region is fascinating. Most of the area has never been under the farmer’s plow, mostly because no decent crops can be grown. It is just over 20,000 square miles of land that is 85% intact natural habitat. Geologists say the area used to be active sand dunes as recent as eleven hundred years ago. It is hard to imagine Sahara-like dunes in South Dakota but once you take a hike out into the hills, it is actually pretty easy to see it. The ground is soft and easy to move. The grasses and plants are not as dense as in other South Dakota grasslands, but the variety of species are surprisingly vast. It is good cattle country and many large, sprawling ranches still thrive.

Sitting on top of the vast Ogallala Aquifer, the Sand Hills boast many wetlands and small lakes throughout the rugged country. Because of this, the area has become a hugely important corridor for migrating birds. Right up against the northern edge of the Sand Hills, pretty little Lake Creek sends a healthy stream out into the picturesque valley of LaCreek National Wildlife Refuge. The US Fish and Wildlife Services maintain this important wetland area of over 5,000 acres. I spent a good amount of time traveling the refuge’s roads, hiking a few trails looking for wildlife and being surprised by brilliant wildflowers at almost every stop.

LaCreek is full of wildlife in the summer, but if birding is your thing, then the refuge is actually better visited in the spring or fall during the migratory seasons. I saw an owl, a couple eagles and a few pelicans, but these sightings are nothing compared to the numbers of birds the place hosts at migration’s high tide. Trumpeter swans are the biggest attraction — LaCreek was a key place that helped the bird’s population rebound in the United States in the early to mid-1900s. A group of cygnets (young swans) was transplanted from Montana and a new colony grew and soon thrived at LaCreek.

Although I missed the swans, I thoroughly enjoyed my two-day stay in Bennett County. The weather was hazy and humid. In the evening the setting sun resembled a molten ball of rock settling into the west. As I looked out over the wide valley and into the Sand Hills on the horizon, it struck me that this place reminded me of my visit to East Africa’s Serengeti in December 2009. I mean, there are no lions or zebras at LaCreek, but I could easily imagine a hippo or two popping out of one of the trout pools. It is funny how the mind plays tricks on you out alone under a vast South Dakota sky. Then again, there used to be real sand dunes and a desert on the southern horizon. So who am I to question South Dakota’s variety and ability to continue to surprise?

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing our prettiest spots around the state. Follow Begeman on his blog. To view Christian’s columns featuring other unique spots in South Dakota’s landscape, visit his landmarks page.


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Buying a Lawyer for Your Town

In our travels around South Dakota, we love to poke around the small towns to see what makes them tick. Sadly, many of them are ticking more slowly than they did a generation ago. The population is graying; there are still some dynamic leaders in the communities, but they are busier and fewer.

That’s why the South Dakota State Legislature voted last winter to fund a program that will subsidize lawyers who start a practice in a rural area. Taxpayers in the Rushmore State already do the same for nurses and doctors. Beginning farmer programs are always popular, though apparently helpless against the waves of rising land costs.

We’ve seen towns go to great lengths to recruit a new publisher for the weekly paper and in Howard, the entrepreneurial epicenter of farm country, they’ll help you start anything short of a gang of thieves.

Lawmakers thought they were skating on thin ice when they voted to subsidize lawyers, but they recognized that it’s silly to have a courthouse in every county when two-thirds of our lawyers live in four of the 66 counties. We like the new program because it reminded us of Fred and Luella Cozad of Martin, a town of 1,000 people that sits between the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations.

Several summers ago, we were in Martin to learn about how the community affected the life and work of Vine Deloria Jr., the town’s most famous native son. Deloria, who died in 2005, ranks among the most important Native American authors and philosphers of the 20th century.

While looking for interesting folks in Martin, we knocked on Fred’s law office door. He immediately stopped what he was doing and drove us around town — past the nursing home and the assisted living, around the high school and out to the golf course and swimming pool. We visited the library and drove past the SuAnne Big Crow Boys and Girls Club. We also stopped at the tribal college. What Fred didn’t tell us — and we learned later — is that Fred, as the only lawyer in town, was involved in every community betterment project accomplished in Martin over the last 60 or more years. Most of the afore-mentioned institutions didn’t exist when he was studying the law in Vermillion.

Fred joked that he was already in Martin when Custer came through. “My advice was ‘George, don’t go,'” he told us. Actually, Fred’s father came to Martin in 1909. They ranched until a blizzard nearly wiped out their cow herd. Then they moved to town and ran a cream station. Fred got his law degree from USD in 1949. More importantly, he met a music major from Iowa and together they moved to Martin and hung a shingle. Then there were five other lawyers in town. He has been the lone practitioner for many years, unless you count Luella, who quit teaching music long ago because Fred was overwhelmed with office and community work.

New York Times writer Ethan Bronner had the same good fortune as we did when we went to Martin a month ago to write about South Dakota’s new “subsidize a lawyer” program. Bronner met Fred and Luella. They have a tiny house just behind their humble law office. One of them leaves the office at about 11:30 to prepare lunch — usually soup. They dress alike most days. They can speak for each other (though Fred does most of the talking). They are the best argument for lawyers in small towns — or any neighborhood — that we’ve ever seen.

Then Bronner did a nice job of introducing the Cozads to the world with a front page feature article on April 9. It was a good day for Martin. A good day for South Dakota. A good day for the legal profession. And just another day for the Cozads because, in their late 80s, they are still too busy — as the only legal office for a hundred miles around — to spend much time fussing about having their picture in a magazine or even a newspaper like the Times.

Hopefully your tax dollars will get them some relief. They’ve earned it, and Martin needs another couple like them.

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Nature’s Buglers

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in the Sept/Oct 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Listen closely while in the Black Hills in September. Fall is the rut for South Dakota’s elk herd, and as they shed the velvet from their massive antlers, bulls will be bugling for cows. One of the most distinctive sounds in nature, the call begins low and resonant, then rises to a high-pitched squeal.

South Dakota’s elk population has recovered from the brink of extinction to become the largest in the country east of the Rocky Mountains. When Lewis and Clark paddled up the Missouri River 200 years ago, elk were so abundant that one of the first places they camped in present day South Dakota was known as Elk Point. The heavily wooded site was a runway for elk traveling between the Missouri and Big Sioux Rivers. But by 1900 hunters had thinned the American elk population from 10 milion to less than 100,000.

Rocky Mountain elk were captured and used to replenish herds. According to the South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks site, about 4,000 elk roam the Black Hills National Forest and the grasslands of Butte, Bennett and Gregory counties. A herd has also been established on the Lower Brule Reservation north of Chamberlain.