Tag: black hills

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Doane’s Favorite Places

By Paul Higbee

Doane Robinson began his career in law, but eventually he became a poet, writer, publisher and state historian.

It’s an eight-minute walk in Pierre from Doane Robinson’s former home on Wynoka Street to the state capitol building, where he once had an office. Eight minutes, that is, if you walk with a sense of purpose.

And it is impossible to think of Doane Robinson ever moving without a sense of purpose. In the early days of South Dakota statehood he was South Dakota’s idea man, and he ranks among our most prolific writers. Usually men of letters leave behind books, and men with big ideas leave thinking that spurs others into action over time. Certainly Robinson’s legacy includes books and inspiration, but he also left South Dakota beautiful buildings at Gary, Pierre and Hisega, as well as a solid foundation for a department of state government. Oh yes … there’s also that sculpture of four presidential heads blasted from mountain granite near Keystone.

Robinson’s grandson, Will Doane Robinson, a retired teacher in Rapid City, remembers long walks along Wynoka and beyond with his grandfather in the 1930s.”A very, very nice man,” he describes him, and other neighborhood children concurred, often tagging along on walks. At the time they had no real idea of who their older friend was. Professionally Doane Robinson was a homesteader, teacher, lawyer, poet, editor and South Dakota’s first state historian. In his personal life he was a devoted family man who was widowed young. In his spare time he sometimes tinkered trying to invent a perpetual motion machine.

Born into a farm family near Sparta, Wisconsin in 1856, he was christened Jonah LeRoy Robinson. Two childhood incidents impacted the rest of his life. First, younger sister Sadie couldn’t pronounce Jonah and called him Donah, later shortened to Doane. He answered to the name the rest of his life. The second event, says great-granddaughter Vicki McLain, was much darker. Typhoid fever hit his family. No one died, but the family struggled for years to pay medical bills, keeping them in poverty for most of Doane’s childhood. Forever after, Robinson believed debt had to be avoided if at all possible.

He possessed an amazing memory, claiming he could recall incidents that happened before age 2, and maybe even before age 1. Robinson seemed strangely attuned to history-in-the-making. He remembered his parents discussing news that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the month after Robinson turned 4. His parents were Democrats and he recalled they were unimpressed with the Republican Lincoln. Later he heard talk of distant fighting as the Civil War played out, and Robinson remembered news of Lincoln’s assassination — his mother worried Democrats would take the blame. Much later Robinson decided”in some ways the truth about Lincoln had been withheld from me,” and he committed himself to reading political theory. He became a Republican but, he wrote,”will give my support to another party any minute I am convinced that the sum of happiness will be enhanced by it.”

During his teens he worked hard on the farm, was able to run the place on his own in the event of family emergencies, and he worked equally hard in school where he honed his love of words. In his early 20s he taught school, homesteaded near his brother’s place in Minnesota, and began studying law at the University of Wisconsin. All the while he fretted about Jennie Austin, a Wisconsin girl he greatly admired and found beautiful, but who was a teenager too young for him.

Robinson fell in love with a spot he saw while traveling on the Crouch railroad line. He named it Hisega, and soon build a lodge there featuring a wraparound porch. Photo by Paul Horsted

Of course, Jennie matured. She became a teacher herself. The two decided their affection was mutual in 1883, the same year Robinson got serious about finding legal work in western Minnesota or across the border in Dakota Territory. He hadn’t earned a law degree but had learned enough to feel confident he could offer quality legal services — not an unusual course of action at the time. He considered setting himself up in Ortonville, Minnesota, but didn’t like the town. Then he visited Watertown”and made up my mind I had found the place I was looking for.” He opened a Watertown law office in September of 1883.

Months later he bought one-third interest in the Watertown Daily Courier.”The law is a jealous mistress and must come before anything else in your life,” Robinson would one day counsel his son Will, an attorney. By buying into the newspaper and, in fact, becoming its editor, Robinson demonstrated an unwillingness to focus on the law alone. The result, he decided later, was failing to be”much shucks” as a lawyer.

In December of 1884, Watertown’s young lawyer and editor rode the rails to Wisconsin to marry Jennie. Then the couple came home to Dakota Territory. Son Harry was born in 1888, and Will came along in 1893. In those years Robinson learned he could supplement his family’s income nicely by selling poetry to magazines across the country. He actually attracted a national following. The Boston Herald noted that”perhaps no one of the younger poets of America has so quickly established himself in the hearts of the common people.” Robinson came to know South Dakota in part because of requests to travel from town to town and recite his verse. His dialect poetry, recreating the speech patterns of the state’s immigrants, often for humorous effect, was well received. He also toured other Midwestern states. Even after he became state historian, Robinson remained a poet, and found he could sometimes combine verse and historical interpretation. An example is this poem about W.H.H. Beadle, Civil War veteran and pioneering educator who championed South Dakota School and Public Lands for generating public education funds:

Man of vision! Man of mission,

Patriot, soldier, scholar, seer.

Man of action! Man of purpose! Duty led

in thy career.

Forward looking; self forgetting; unwaged

drudge for learning’s gain;

South Dakota reaps the harvest planted by

thy care and pain.

In 1894 he moved his young family to Gary, a railroad town in Deuel County, close to the Minnesota border. He bought the Gary Interstate newspaper.”Getting out an edition of the eight page newspaper was frequently a family affair,” son Will recalled in an excellent little biography of his father.”The press was an old Washington hand press.” Jennie positioned the newsprint in the press and Doane swung a big lever to apply pressure and make the imprint. At age 6 Harry removed the finished newspapers from the press and stacked them.

After the town of Gary lost its status as the seat of Deuel County, Robinson urged the state to locate the School for the Blind there. Today the campus is the Buffalo Ridge Resort and Business Center.

The year after the Robinsons moved to town, Gary lost county seat status to Clear Lake. But the new newspaper publisher had an idea: Why not lobby the state to build a School for the Blind on the former courthouse grounds? Robinson did some research and determined it cost South Dakota $2,000 per student, every year, to send children with visual impairments to out-of-state institutions, in the era when it was assumed students with disabilities learned best in segregated environments. Robinson’s idea won statewide support and ground was broken in 1899. Students arrived in 1900. Vicki McLain thinks perhaps there was more to her great-grandfather’s passion for the school than commerce for Gary.”When he was studying law in Wisconsin,” she says,”he temporarily lost sight, apparently because of severe eye strain. He recovered but never took eyesight for granted.”

Over the next several years the school evolved into a pretty campus a couple blocks north of Gary’s business district. Services moved to Aberdeen in 1961 and the campus fell into disrepair, but more than 40 years later Joe Kolbach completed a beautiful restoration, creating Buffalo Ridge Resort.

Even as he was publishing the Interstate and advocating for the school, Robinson nursed a pet project, one he believed in so much that he was willing to sometimes serve as an”unpaid drudge,” to borrow a phrase from his Beadle poem. The idea was a magazine, the Monthly South Dakotan, that would heavily emphasize the young state’s history. Issues were produced over a period of several years and wherever Robinson moved, the magazine went with him. The Robinsons moved to Yankton where he bought controlling interest in a morning paper, The Gazette, and then it was on to Sioux Falls where Robinson hoped to find more ad revenue for the Monthly South Dakotan. Next the family made Aberdeen its home, and Robinson published the Brown County Review.

ìHe had a thousand irons in the fire,” Will wrote. As for the Monthly South Dakotan, he added, it claimed a loyal readership willing to pay for subscriptions, but ad revenue constantly fell short. The publication folded in 1904, and by that time Robinson’s life had changed drastically. In 1901 he was selected Secretary of the new South Dakota State Historical Society, a branch of state government. Now he had the opportunity to publish articles of the sort he prepared for the Monthly South Dakotan, but at state expense. After a few years in the position his income would allow for a very comfortable lifestyle. It should have been a happy time, but in 1902 Jennie died of acute bronchitis. Who else but Robinson, with his head for historical dates, would note that Jennie died 19 years to the day after she and Doane decided they were in love?

Robinson advocated for the stately Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Pierre after World War I. It once housed the state’s history museum. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

ìOh, my dear boys,” Robinson later wrote his sons,”I can never tell you how dearly I loved your Mama, not only those nineteen years, but long before, and every moment since.” He was 45 and never remarried.

Sadie, the sister who gave him his name, moved in to help run the household. The family relocated to Pierre and Robinson arranged for construction of the home on Wynoka Street. Future governor and U.S. senator Peter Norbeck would be a neighbor on Wynoka, and became Robinson’s good friend and ally.

Robinson perhaps occasionally lost himself in work as he grieved Jennie. He helped plan the state capitol building and wrote 1905’s Brief History of South Dakota, more commonly called”the little red history book,” which for decades was the standard volume schools used to teach about South Dakota’s past. Most important, though, Robinson got the State Historical Society off to a strong start, publishing the first volumes of South Dakota Historical Collections, the biennial series of papers that most every South Dakota historian has referenced.

ìHis was the foundation we’ve built on ever since,” says Jay Vogt, current State Historical Society director.”In his time, he was much more hands-on than we’re able to be, doing most of the research and writing himself.”

Indeed, when something big developed, such as the discovery of the Verendrye plate that proved French trappers passed through the state in 1743, Robinson jumped into action and researched, wrote and edited until he had 300 pages for Historical Collections. He also gathered South Dakota newspapers and indexed them, along with government documents, and he took special interest in seeking out American Indian historical perspectives. He considered it a great honor, before his state historian years, to have interviewed Hunkpapa leader Gall, one of the victors at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

While no one ever questioned Robinson’s work ethic, he has sometimes been criticized for not being an academically trained historian.

ìBut you have to put that criticism in context,” says Vogt.”At that time, in all states, history organizations were kind of amateur clubs, made up of people who had interest and maybe connections to historical sources. Doane Robinson brought a wide range of professional experiences to his work, and he possessed great curiosity.”

For many years his office was on the capitol building’s ground floor, along with a little museum. When the legislature was in session, lawmakers knew the state’s best writer was close at hand if they struggled with a bill’s wording.

After railroad tracks spanned the Missouri River and were extended west to Rapid City in 1907, Robinson had easy access to the Black Hills for the first time. The region offered intriguing history, and it was a perfect place to relax. In 1908 Robinson arranged a camping adventure for 17 friends, relatives and Pierre colleagues. The party stepped off the Crouch Line train in a beautiful canyon west of Rapid City and pitched tents. Robinson loved making up words and announced he would call the spot Hisega, a name derived from the initials of six women in the group: Helen, Ida, Sadie, Ethel, Grace and Ada. Everyone loved the place, talked it up back in Pierre, and Robinson devised a time-share scheme. If enough people contributed $100, he would build a mountain lodge for them at Hisega. The big structure with wrap-around porches awaited visitors the next summer, and it still greets guests today.

A building of an entirely different style that stands as a Doane Robinson legacy is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, down the front steps and immediately across the street from the state capitol. Robinson pushed for the building after World War I, and it took more than a decade to raise funds and get the stately memorial finished. In addition to honoring South Dakotans who served and died in military service, the building housed the state’s history museum for many years and was usually referred to as the Robinson Museum.

Robinson dreamed of carving into Black Hills mountains. Newspapermen called the idea ridiculous, but Robinson partnered with Gutzon Borglum and history was made. Photo by S.D. Tourism

Of course, when it comes to tangible legacies, nothing tops Mount Rushmore Memorial.”My grandfather thought the Black Hills were beautiful, but that not enough people would visit just because of that,” says Will D. Robinson.”There had to be some other reason. I can show you the spot on the Needles Highway where his Model T Ford touring sedan got hot one day, and he sent my dad to bring water from a spring. When my dad got back to the car, my grandfather was looking at the Needles, thinking how they could be carved by a sculptor.”

That was 1923. Robinson talked to people who might help, especially Senator Norbeck, and sometimes took heat from South Dakota newspaper editors who considered the scheme ridiculous. But in short order internationally renowned sculptor Gutzon Borglum was on board and in 1927, as Robinson looked on, President Calvin Coolidge was present for a ceremony launching the project. Only the location wasn’t the Needles but nearby Mount Rushmore because, Robinson’s grandson understood, the Needles spires contained too much feldspar and Borglum didn’t want to alter that stunning piece of God’s handiwork.

Borglum also didn’t want to carve figures related to the American West, as Robinson proposed, but instead presidents. In Borglum, Robinson met a man whose vast vision matched his own. In another way, though, the men were polar opposites. Borglum liked to move ahead without much thought about costs, while Robinson insisted on budgetary constraint. As an executive of the original association formed to oversee Mount Rushmore’s creation, it fell to Robinson to confront the sculptor at times about spending. He was happy to pretty much leave the project in 1929, content in knowing his role as instigator had been successful. Robinson was back at the mountain on July 4, 1930, as a speaker when the Washington head was dedicated. He was 73 and had retired as State Historical Society Secretary six years earlier.

In the 1930s Robinson had more time for his walks and young friends on Wynoka Street, and he kept writing. Unlike Borglum and Norbeck, he lived long enough to see Mount Rushmore in its final form. He also saw his son Will become head of the State Historical Society in 1946. Doane Robinson lived a few weeks past his 90th birthday and his grandson recalls his mind and memories were as sharp as ever toward the end. He had witnessed America’s evolution from Abraham Lincoln to the atomic age. No one observed South Dakota’s first half century more intently.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Terry Peak’s Inferno

By Lee Schoenbeck

A 1950s-era scene inside the Inferno Bar.

South Dakotans who enjoy winter fun at Terry Peak know the Inferno, or at least they think they do. The black diamond run is the steep piece of the mountain that finishes your ski down under the red chair. But there’s another Inferno on the mountain, and it belongs on a list of classics with the Spur, the Crow Bar, Murphy’s, the Harbor or Dirty Nelly’s — South Dakota’s legendary adult watering holes.

A Polaroid from 1963 showing the entrance to the Inferno.

The Inferno Bar

It’s not clear when the adventure of the Inferno Bar began. Its early days didn’t involve serving alcohol; it was a mine. At some point after the economics of digging and hauling gold out of this narrow tunnel into the mountain played out, a different type of entrepreneur took over. Ten or 15 yards into the old mine tunnel is a stope, or a cavern that’s been dug out inside the mine. This particular stope became the Inferno Bar by 1950.

From the outside on a normal weekend, the Inferno was under-imposing. Newell native and current Deadwood Mayor Chuck Turbiville drove there to meet some friends soon after high school graduation. Since he was looking for a bar, which is usually located inside a building, he drove by it a few times before realizing he was going to a mineshaft. He was amazed to walk into the cave and find a bar, full of people with a live band playing.

Photos from the 1950s show a wooden bar with at least a half dozen stools on a polished concrete floor. The bar included an area for the band, as well as a pool table and a jukebox.

Bathrooms

There’s some dispute about the nature and location of the restroom facilities in this former mine. At some points in its history, former patrons question whether it even had any. Other former patrons claim there was a bathroom down a drift to the left off the main stope. Others, with pictorial support, show a second entrance structure to the left of the main mine entrance that they describe as the bathroom. Dr. Robert Arnio, a Lead native now living in Rapid City, enjoyed the Inferno is his younger days and explained that the bathroom was down the drift, and then the tunnel looped back to the outside. As for the quality of the restroom facilities, suffice it to say that the Department of Health had a better sense of humor in that era.

Glory Days

From the 1950s through about 1978, the Inferno thrived as a”3.2″ joint. In the days of lower drinking ages, South Dakota was one of the states that made a distinction between low point and high point beer. A”3.2″ bar could only serve beer, and its alcohol content could not exceed 3.2 percent. The drinking age was 18, but the Inferno had a reputation for being”age flexible.” Lead students enjoyed the local watering hole in the 1960s and regularly celebrated their 18th birthdays there (the legal drinking age). The momentous occasion often came as a surprise to the owner, who had treated the new adult as a regular patron for some time. The Inferno operated before national security issues made fake driver’s licenses a near impossibility for creative teenagers.

The Inferno’s exterior today.

Marty Teupel Hogan grew up across the road from the Inferno. As youngsters, she and her sisters would run across the road on weekend mornings and look for change that patrons had dropped in the parking lot while digging through their pockets for their keys the night before.

Inside, the temperature didn’t change much with the seasons, due to the underground nature of the mine. It did come with a few other challenges. Lead native Marty Ann Apa reports that you didn’t want to wear good clothes, as the mine ceiling dripped and you could come out with a little rust color.

The Inferno regularly had bands and drew crowds of hundreds or more. To the right, inside the stope, is a relatively large area where the bands staged, unless it was a special occasion like the Days of ’76. For special events there was a concrete slab built into the hillside, above the old toilet entrance, where the bands would play into the Nevada Gulch night air. The outdoor concerts must have been smashing successes, because the Inferno’s effort to resurrect itself in 1982 failed, at least in part, because of neighborhood memories and complaints about those events.

The Inferno not only served as a local tavern in Nevada Gulch, but also as a place for special homecomings in the tumultuous times of the 1960s. High school graduates were being drafted, trained and sent to fight in Vietnam, not exactly sunny prospects for those young men. Dr. Arnio recalled that when these young soldiers came home on leave, they’d see their parents first, and then meet up with their friends at the Inferno. The owners of the Inferno, sensitive to the challenges that lie ahead for these young soldiers, would stay open late into the morning, or until whenever the soldier wanted to call it a night.

The Days of ’76

The Days of’76, Deadwood’s annual summer celebration, had a near-cult following of people who never missed the event, and the Inferno was clearly a preferred destination. Every person who knew of the Inferno starts their stories with,”You should have seen the Days of’76 … .” There is universal agreement that crowds numbered in the thousands.

Vehicles made due with parking as they could find space, filling both sides of Nevada Gulch from the bar down to Highway 85, and north up the canyon as far in the other direction, effectively shutting down the area and turning the canyon into one very large outdoor party. Beer was sold inside the mine/cave, and could then be carried back outside. But for the Days of’76, there were also large horse watering tanks filled with water, ice and beer to handle the sizeable crowd.

The mineshaft goes straight into a steep mountainside that made a beautiful backdrop for the bands, and an irresistible canvass for the more creative’76ers. Attendee Al Glodt reported seeing a lineup of”twelve to twenty moons” across the hillside above the band, a pretty amazing achievement considering the hillside the revelers climbed before dropping their drawers in unison.

Resurrecting the Inferno

The Inferno nearly came back to life in 1982, but its history proved too much to escape. Neighbors opposed the application, not so much because it was a bar, but the outdoor concerts, traffic and litter had a new generation of neighbors not so receptive to the glory days of the Inferno. It appears the application didn’t make it past the Lawrence County Commission.

A Shadow of Its Former Self

There’s no electricity in the Inferno anymore, so it’s careful-stepping back in to the cavern. The bar is gone, but part of an old tapestry still hangs as a reminder of where the Hamm’s beer sign stood guard. There’s still a chandelier and an old pool table, and the Pepsi machine is ready to go (pictured below).

It wasn’t until after we left that I learned of an old challenge the bar used to have, and probably still does. The Inferno didn’t have a kitchen and didn’t serve food in that sense, but it had chips and candy bars. When Ole Teupel, who had worked there a few years, closed the bar at night, she hated to turn off the last light before scurrying out of the tunnel. As soon as the lights went out, the dark was like a dinner bell for the rats in the mineshaft to scurry in and finish up any goodies the patrons had left behind.

The old mine/cave is at rest these days and is not available for the public to enter. Not surprisingly, the owner doesn’t feel the old Inferno needs its former patrons hanging around. There was a time when tunes like Roy Orbison’s”Pretty Woman” created romantic moments in this cozy little underground cavern, but no more. These days, the folks who made great memories at the Inferno probably wouldn’t keep the neighbors up with any more revival concerts. But when you talk to them, every one smiles and fondly recounts the great memories they made at the Inferno, may it rest in peace.

Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Quest of the Lost Henry Arch

By Phillip Henry

Beth Krueger is dwarfed by the rediscovered lost Henry Arch.

We were lost. Not the kind of lost where you wander around for days trying to get the attention of circling helicopters, or listen for the sound of blood hounds sent to find you. But we were a mite turned around, and had been for a couple of hours.

We were somewhere in the rough country between Black Elk Peak and Mount Rushmore, and after prolonged brow knitting over my map, I guessed we were in the upper Pine Creek Drainage. From the high ridge we had climbed to get our bearings my plan was to keep heading in the general direction of north, and eventually pop out on Highway 244 in the vicinity of Horse Thief Lake. How to do that with the greatest economy of time and effort was the problem.

It was mid-October of 1974, and my kid brother Cliff and I were on the tail end of a backpacking trip in the Black Hills. I had planned for this to be our last day out, and I hoped to quickly find a phone so I could call home. My wife envisioned a world in which husbands didn’t do these outdoorsy things at all. I had promised her I would wrap our trip up in a few days, and my few days were up.

But that hope was rapidly fading. The drainage we were in was metamorphosing from a broad, gently sloping basin to a high walled, narrow canyon; its slippery boulders and tricky down climbs would have been trouble to negotiate even without the 60-pound packs we carried.

The route to upper Pine Creek Drainage offers views of magnificent spires.

Still, the difficult descent was not without its blessings. As the hiking got tougher our surroundings changed from scenic to spectacular. There were lofty spires paralleling our route on two sides, interspersed with weirdly shaped knobs and monoliths crowned by formations reminiscent of gnomes who had abandoned the netherworld to sit blinking in the sun.

As we proceeded with painful slowness down the canyon an extraordinary mass of twisted rock began to reveal itself, a bizarre sight even in this alien world. Its form kept changing as we approached. From one angle it was a huge twist of bread, prepared by some long forgotten race of titans; as we came around it showed its face to be a massive slab of granite, with a great Jack-O-Lantern mouth frowning toothlessly down at us.

Even in our haste to find a way out of this place we were riveted momentarily by the sight of this great stone arch. During the past three days of hiking around Cathedral Spires and Black Elk Peak we had seen enough striking geological formations to know we were looking at something special. It would be many years before I came to an understanding of just how special.

We unlimbered our cameras and snapped some pictures before hurrying on our way. The going got rougher, requiring two rappels and lowering our packs by rope at points, as though the spirit of the great arch was punishing us for disturbing its rest by making it well-nigh impossible to escape its domain. By the time we reached the highway it was so late we decided to give up on going home that night. We retreated back into the woods, there to make camp.

In time, the details of this trip lost their clarity and merged with memories of other adventures. But now and then thoughts of the arch would come back to haunt me. I shared my experience with others occasionally, and was usually surprised with the underwhelming response it evoked. It seemed no one could get excited about something as prosaic as a rock with a hole in it. Maybe it was one of those moments you had to experience to appreciate.

I made myself a promise to return and locate the arch when I could take more time to fully savor the experience — a promise I finally kept after 23 years. During that time I saw or was told of other arches in the Black Hills, including one of the better known, a graceful span which holds court 350 feet above the Sand Creek road on the Wyoming side.

The structure my brother and I encountered had none of the graceful attributes sometimes associated with the geological phenomena we call arches. It might be more fittingly called a natural bridge, though from my first look I called it the Pine Creek Arch.

My physical condition would not be the major obstacle in my quest. The real challenge would be finding a place I had been to once. A long time ago. While lost.

Arches are formed in soft limestone or sandstone, which is amenable to sculpting by wind and water. Usually they are in rimrock formations, near the tops of drainages where water finds a small channel in the rock to cut through, a hole which gets bigger and bigger with the march of time. The overlying rock that forms the arch is susceptible to the erosive forces of wind and falling water. Together with the running surface water below, they can enlarge the area under the arch to a sometimes-spectacular size before it finally weakens and collapses.

The Pine Creek Arch, on the other hand, was formed in the bowels of the earth. Countless eons ago molten magmas from the world’s fiery core pushed upwards into fissures, faults and cracks in the billions and billions of tons of deposited rock on the old sea floor. There it crystallized and cooled into the spires and shapes we see today, including the arch, but for millennia these formations rested many miles beneath the surface.

Inexorably driven upward by unimaginable forces within the planet, the arch was finally forced into the light of day. Wind and water had been polishing the already ancient formation for centuries before the first humans made their way into the canyon; much later, prospectors might have searched around the hulk for gold. A handful of recreational hikers probably found their way into the narrow cut before we did, and the old arch looked on, unimpressed throughout.

None of which really explains why I became obsessed with finding it again. But over the years I had begun to think of it as “my” arch — The Lost Henry Arch.

Hikers Bob and Peggy Schluening of Sturgis are framed by another arch discovered on the quest.

By the late summer of 1997 I decided that if I was ever going to see the arch again, I had better move ahead. My long-suffering wife, Dorothy, had seen this coming. When I announced that I was going to make a reconnaissance into the upper Pine Creek Drainage before the snow fell, she said nothing, just looked at me as though I had sprouted a banana in the middle of my forehead.

A series of health problems had kept me from attempting anything like that for some time. Though on the mend, I recognized I wasn’t half the man I had been in 1974. I hoped I didn’t have to be. During those intervening years I had acquired the good sense not to carry around 60-pound packs. Besides, I suspected that my physical condition would not be the major obstacle in my quest. The real challenge would be finding a place I had only been to once. A long time ago. While lost.

I spent some time studying topographic maps, but I couldn’t pinpoint any place that fitted my recollection of the lay of the land. Then an unexpected resource emerged in the form of an old friend named Virgil Van Heuvelen, a retired dentist who had been teaching technical rock climbing in the Black Hills for 27 years.

Doc was as knowledgeable as anyone alive about the Pine Creek Drainage, but he had no knowledge of the arch, nor did he know of anyone who might. This was not heartening news.

I had no specific plans formulated when a good friend and strong hiker, John Natvig, by chance blew into town over Labor Day weekend. I had worked with John in the Forest Service for a number of years and shared some backcountry camping trips with him. He is a great navigator, though that was not necessarily a plus since I didn’t know precisely where I wanted to go. But I figured he could keep me from getting lost again.

My idea was to try and find the same high, open ridge my brother and I had climbed to get our bearings, and then retrace our route toward Highway 244. When we reached the ridge I had picked out on the map, though, it was anything but open. Great rock outcrops and lofty pine trees didn’t allow the magnificent 360-degree view I’d had in 1974. I figured the pine trees might have grown up since then, but I couldn’t explain away the rocks.

A notch in a rock wall began to look very familiar — but my God, I thought, had I really led my brother into this treacherous place?

By the time we hiked to where the canyon started to narrow I felt sure we were in the wrong place, and we reluctantly turned for home. On the hike back to the trailhead I remarked that I had snapped some pictures of the arch the day I found it. John, never timid when I have done something less than brilliant, remarked dryly that something like that might have been a help in locating it.

Even though Doc had somehow missed it in his travels, I figured there were people around who knew where the arch was. But I didn’t know who these people might be, and they were not advertising guided tours in the yellow pages. Obsession or no obsession, my chances of returning to the Lost Henry Arch seemed to grow bleaker with each passing day.

Then one evening while talking to my brother Cliff, a bush pilot in Alaska, I asked if he remembered our backpack trip in 1974. To my surprise he remembered it quite well, and went on to describe some of the details of the trip that I had completely forgotten. I asked if he remembered the natural bridge we found in that secluded canyon, and his recollections seemed so convincingly vivid I decided to try again — though the irony of someone two time zones away directing me to a spot 60 miles from my front door was not lost on me.

Going into the rough part of the canyon, I wanted at least three people along. If I fell down and broke my leg I wanted someone to stay behind and stroke my brow while the other person went for help. After a couple of weather-related postponements, three friends and I were finally all available at the same time.

The first was Russell Yuill, of rural Sturgis, with whom I had shared a number of memorable climbing adventures. We drove to just north of Black Hawk and rolled my son-in-law, Shawn Kvanvig, out of bed and loaded him in the car. The fourth member of our party, Beth Krueger, met us at the trailhead.

Shawn Kvanvig, Russell Yuill and Phillip Henry savor the discovery of the lost arch.

We set out at mid-morning into the Black Elk Wilderness, climbing toward 6,000 feet, where we would turn across the slope and try to find the correct drainage. I couldn’t shake some doubts about my brother’s memories, but it was such a fine day I concluded it didn’t really matter. All of our little group would want to be here anyway.

Shawn set a blistering pace that I had no hope of maintaining, so I described the landmarks where he would have to stop and wait for us. I thought Beth and Russell would want to press on with him, but they were content to hang back with me and make idle banter.

After about an hour we left the developed hiking trail and began a steep ascent, paralleling an incredible display of spires and megaliths that now and then looked curiously familiar. As we continued, the hillside steepened noticeably, and the whole affair started taking on the distinct feel of work. We had all packed light, but I had a fair amount of camera gear along, and the pack I carried had a way of reminding me it was there.

Our slow progress gave me time to look about, and I had the distinct feeling we were in the right neighborhood. Armed with the knowledge of where not to go from my last trip, I guided us toward a saddle guarded by towering spires which climbers are fond of calling gendarmes. Once over, we picked our way down a quickly narrowing drainage to a notch in a rock wall that began to look very familiar — but my God, I thought, had I really led my brother into this treacherous place while we were both loaded down with bulky, lurching packs?

Soon the canyon floor widened a bit and became less difficult under foot. We clambered over boulders and leaped a small flowing stream, which I am sure was not there in 1974, and Shawn called my attention to a huge twisted piece of rock coming into view around the bend.

I stopped and looked intently.

“I think that ‘s it!” I cried, more excited than if we had just discovered the biggest gold nugget in the Black Hills. One by one we came to a halt in a little knot on the canyon floor, the arch looming above us, deep gray and older than time. We stared up in awe, speaking in hushed tones, as if we had blundered into some great cathedral during High Mass.

As I stood there the thought came to me that the arch had stood the 23 years better than me. It was much more impressive than I remembered; if anything, I was more astonished than I had been the first time. Beth murmured that if you were going to find one of these things it might as well be a big one. Shawn summed up his feelings in one word: “Cool!” Russell said something that sounded like, “Wow.”

After some moments we overcame our surprise and began to function more normally. I began unpacking my camera gear. Shawn, who takes as a personal affront any attempt by a mere rock wall to bar him from where he wants to be, had already started to work out a route from the stream bed up to the sloping stone shelf where the arch stood. Like a bear cub, Russell was climbing over things, poking, prodding, testing, knowing that no matter what he found there was always more that could be seen. The two found separate routes to the base of the arch while Beth, in her more cerebral way, was taking the measure of the arch, asking silent questions about the how and why of this phenomenon.

While I ascended a steep cleft on the opposite side of the canyon to get a higher perspective, Russell and Shawn were like two gnats buzzing around an elephant as they explored on and around the arch. Beth finally had enough of sitting and looking and joined them.

Later, Russell was kind enough to escort me to a route which he assured me would take me right up to the arch, “without even the need to hang on to anything.” It wasn’t exactly as easy as advertised. I soon found myself doing an impersonation of a man about to be drawn and quartered, with one foot on a step which was more imagination than actual step and the other somewhere back there on terra firma. Beth and Russell came to my rescue, and finally, after all those years, I was within hand shaking distance of the arch.

It was too hard, cold and impassive to extend even a perfunctory greeting. No matter. After exploring around the base for a while I felt satisfied with the day’s work, and decided that I had earned the right to do nothing but rest. We took turns posing for pictures before climbing back down to the canyon floor, and at last there was nothing left but to admit it was time to go.

There were only two practical routes out: the way we had come or down the canyon. I had told my companions the story of our 1974 trip down the canyon — about the rappels, the narrow notches filled with jumbles of wet, slippery boulders and other obstacles. That settled the matter for Shawn. To ignore the challenge would be dishonorable. He would go down canyon.

Russell decided to go along with him. We had already explored one way, after all. What was unknown lay ahead, not where we had already been.

Beth was competent in the art of rappelling, but her rational mind saw no purpose in doing so if a reasonable alternative was at hand. She decided to return up canyon. As for me, I had done all the scrambling about over rocks I needed for one day, and decided to take the easier route with Beth.

It was early afternoon on a perfect autumn day, with a sky too blue to describe and breezes playing tag among the pine trees as we worked our way out of the canyon onto the easier walking above the slot. Soon night would deepen the gloom of the already dark shadows, and the spirit of the arch would return to its slumber.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the May/June 1998 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Black Hills Timber

By Paul Higbee

Alan Aker is a third generation lumberman who manages the forest, cuts the trees and markets niche wood products online.

At Christmas time David and Karen Papcke leave behind baffled friends in southern California. Why, these well-intentioned acquaintances wonder, is this couple in their 70s heading to the Black Hills now, for several months, just as winter starts throwing its hardest punches?

They go because they’re tree farmers. Assuming snow falls, this is the time to burn slash piles. It’s good for the forest’s health and, says David, for his health, too.”Being in the forest is the best thing for me,” he says.”The work is hard but in California I don’t have incentive to be outside and active like I do in the Hills.”

David and Karen Papcke thin and prune trees on their Custer County land to create a sustainable, healthy forest.

Farming implies harvesting, and while there’s more to tree farming than growing lumber, logging is a key part of what happens. Certified tree farms are lands deemed sustainable –thanks to forest friends like David and Karen.

Follow the Black Hills timber industry in the news and you might assume all harvesting stems from Forest Service contracts. Most Black Hills pine is, indeed, cut on federal lands, and there’s perennial public debate about Forest Service policy related to harvest numbers, overall environmental impact, whether forests are sufficiently thinned for fire suppression, and how to address the devastating mountain pine beetle epidemic.

Even without those contemporary matters Forest Service lands would steal the spotlight in most discussions of the Black Hills timber industry. That’s because of the region’s remarkable Forest Service history and its policy impact nationally. Think the issue of national health care gets a rise out of people in 2018? No more so than a proposed national forest reserve program with cutting regulations did across the West in 1891. Later that decade South Dakota’s U.S. Senator, Richard Pettigrew, argued the Black Hills should never be made a reserve because it was such a”sparsely timbered region.” There was some truth to that statement. Unregulated timber harvesting since 1875, when settlers began pouring into the Hills, had denuded entire mountainsides. President Grover Cleveland disregarded Pettigrew’s advice and announced the creation of the Black Hills Forest Reserve, effective in 1897 and with cutting rules enforced in 1898.

Gifford Pinchot, the visionary chief of the federal Bureau of Forestry then, decided the Black Hills region was a good model for developing timber policies for national implementation. In 1899,”Case No. 1″ was Forest Reserve terminology for the very first timber sale on Forest Reserve land. The buyer was Homestake Gold Mine and it obtained the right to harvest trees near Nemo. That was the birth of the modern Black Hills timber industry, and it did indeed set national precedent. Case No. 1 procedures were put into effect everywhere.

As if setting national policy in the Black Hills wasn’t enough, Pinchot found a Paul Bunyan of a man in the Hills who personified early 20th century sustainable forestry ideals. Plenty of people today think of Seth Bullock as an early Deadwood lawman, as portrayed on the HBO Deadwood series. In truth, Bullock was that and much more — entrepreneur, friend to Teddy Roosevelt, rancher, a founder of Belle Fourche and Black Hills Forest Reserve supervisor. If anyone could make logging on federal lands work, Pinchot reasoned, Bullock was the man. Bullock insisted Black Hills forest rangers be rugged westerners, not Washington appointees, and there’s no evidence he ever backed down from anyone — Washington bureaucrats or loggers skirting the rules.

South Dakota’s oldest certified tree farm was started by Korczak Ziolkowski, the visionary artist who began the Crazy Horse carving. Reddish trees surrounding the sculpture are evidence of a beetle infestation.

“Bullock was an important part of Pinchot’s experiment,” says David Wolff, Black Hills State University professor and Bullock biographer.”More than once he went to Washington to talk about timber as a sustainable crop and forests as lands of many uses.”

Bullock developed a national following among foresters, and in Washington officials who listened to his theories were even more impressed by the logging revenue he generated. Some years the Black Hills Forest Reserve made more timber sales than all other Reserves in the nation combined. In 1905, Forest Reserves were moved from the U.S. Department of Interior to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — very much in line with Pinchot and Bullock’s view of timber as a crop. The Forest Reserve’s name was changed to the Forest Service in 1907.

Bullock planted new growth of a tree type native to the Black Hills and central to its timber industry — what he knew as”yellow pine.” Today we call it Ponderosa pine, a species able to survive most fires and indeed thrive because of them. Bullock had no way of knowing how technical advances would eventually bring about far-reaching fire suppression. Decades later his forest stood so overgrown that fires would burn hot and likely kill everything.

“We created conditions where big Ponderosa pines, 600-year-old trees, are at risk,” says Frank Carroll, an independent forest management consultant. There are lots of acres in the Black Hills, he notes, where a thousand or even several thousand trees occupy a single acre. Long ago perhaps 30 to 70 Ponderosa pines stood in that space. Dense forests, beyond fire risk, are prone to disease.

Independent loggers were the key to thinning Black Hills forests in the 20th century. Sometimes they reminded fellow South Dakotans that they weren’t quite as independent as people thought. The region’s biggest buyer of timber sales was Homestake, which consumed vast quantities of pine for everything from underground mine bracing to employee housing. The mine operated its own sawmills and, in 1940, consolidated most of its milling in its new state-of-the-art sawmill at Spearfish. With its mammoth lumber infrastructure Homestake pretty much dictated the going rate for timber sales and could afford to under-bid when competitors turned too competitive. Logging has always been an expensive venture, requiring ever-evolving trucks and other equipment, and there were years when more competitive bidding might have helped everyone’s pocketbook.

Mark Ziokowski, son of the legendary Crazy Horse sculptor, now manages the trees around the monument.

Alan Aker has seen a lot of that Black Hills timber history, accompanying his dad on logging excursions as a boy, and owning his own timber company since 1983. Today Aker can be considered a consummate contemporary lumberman — Aker Woods Company makes possible half a dozen jobs, cuts timber on its own land and Forest Service lands, mills it, and uses it to build log homes and other products.

Aker attests to tremendous changes over the years.”Everything’s a lot more mechanical and there are fewer accidents,” he says.”I’m hearing more Spanish spoken in the forest.”

When Aker started his business there were about a dozen big sawmills in the Hills. Now there are three major ones at Hill City, Spearfish and Hulett, Wyoming — and a handful of smaller mills, which, in some cases, have developed specialized byproducts. Homestake is gone but that doesn’t mean independent loggers gained autonomy in arranging federal timber sales contracts. In today’s industry the mills deal with the Forest Service and then contract with loggers.

As the decline in big mills reflect, there’s less logging in the Hills than there was 30 years ago. Still, compared to some other regions — sections of the Pacific Northwest, for example — the industry is holding its own in the Black Hills. Logging trucks rumbling into Hill City and Spearfish are tangible reminders of a way of life that continues despite reduced demand for building materials in a sluggish economy, and despite a series of environmental lawsuits that slowed Forest Service sales. The lawsuits, however, spurred interest in timber coming off private tree farms.

Another challenge is the mountain pine beetle plague, an old disease that Seth Bullock recognized, but now attacking the Black Hills and Rockies as never before. In a single year, Black Hills residents watch entire hillsides turn from green to rusty-red. Once trees are infected the lumber can be salvaged within a few months. Then it deteriorates into worthless debris and is a frightful forest fire fuel.”I look at what’s happening and think we’ll probably see a lot of cutting the next five years,” says Aker.”But then what?”

Not that South Dakotans are surrendering to the beetle without a fight. Aker is impressed by the arrangement Lawrence County struck with the Forest Service to jointly attack the disease. It’s maybe yet another Forest Service precedent set in the Hills that will have national impact.”The Forest Service is committing to very different practices and is to be commended, as are Lawrence County officials,” says Aker.

Lawrence County commissioner Terry Weisenberg gives much credit to Rhonda O’Byrne, Forest Service district ranger for the northern Black Hills.”She really stuck her neck out for us,” he says.”As a result we were able to write a first-of-its-kind contract with the Forest Service, allowing Lawrence County to go to work and fight this tsunami of destruction.” The county hires subcontractors who”cut and chunk” trees the Forest Service knows to be infected, but which haven’t yet launched beetles that will fly and infect more trees. Lawrence County uses mining severance tax revenues for the fight, and has accepted funding from the City of Spearfish and Spearfish Canyon Foundation. The nonprofit foundation accepts tax-deductible contributions from anyone wanting to put dollars into Lawrence County’s battle.

Holes in the bark are evidence of woodpeckers attacking pine beetles.

For South Dakotans who would like to put their own hands to work in keeping forests healthy and productive, there’s always the example of David and Karen Papcke and fellow tree farmers. The Papckes first acquired Black Hills forest land in the 1970s and now own 640 acres in three locations near Custer, Rochford and Moon. They were named South Dakota Tree Farmers of the Year in 1986 and 2006.

“David and Karen are tree farmers extraordinaire,” says David Hettick, state service forester for the southern Black Hills who has greatly enjoyed his association with the couple.”Their property long ago became a certified South Dakota Tree Farm, which in the past was just a recognition of people who go above and beyond what’s necessary to keep a forest healthy. But now certification means a forest is managed in a way that’s sustainable. That brings a better price for timber cut there.”

The Papckes don’t plant trees. They describe their work as mainly keeping the forest thinned, keeping the best trees growing, and recognizing diseased trees and taking them out. Mountain pine beetle isn’t the only disease. Tip moth, says David Papcke, attacks seedlings and results in deformed”junk trees.” The Papckes have fought fires and dealt with the aftermath of winter storms that toppled trees.

When it comes to thinning, the Papckes handle trees with trunks up to 10 inches in diameter themselves. Bigger than that and they contract with commercial loggers.

Not far from the Papcke’s Custer area property is South Dakota’s oldest and biggest certified tree farm. Millions of people have visited, but few recognize it as a tree farm. Not only did sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski begin carving the world’s largest sculpture in 1948, but he also acquired forest property and implemented a management plan below the Crazy Horse sculpture site. Today, son Mark Ziolkowski is the forester, taking care of more than a thousand acres and winning South Dakota Tree Farm of the Year honors in 2007.

Crazy Horse has been aggressive in fighting pine beetles. Mark and a crew of four cut more than 20,000 infected trees in 2011. Additionally, an outside insecticide crew sprays 2,200 trees annually near the visitor complex. Spraying is an expensive annual process that can’t blanket the Hills, but it will save heritage trees and other pines considered significant.

Obviously, as a visitor destination, Crazy Horse Memorial has added incentive for keeping its lands aesthetically appealing. Yet tree farmers in the most remote sections of the Hills say aesthetics matter to them, too.

“The reward for us is to just walk through a healthy forest,” says David Papcke.”Supporting wildlife, thinned, no junk trees.”

We live in a naÔve era nationally when”save a tree” is a euphemism for”be environmentally responsible.” South Dakota tree farmers and others in the Black Hills know that sacrificing trees in proper manner will save a forest.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Why”Johnson Siding?”

By Michael Zimny

Johnson Siding lies just west of Rapid City along Highway 44.

Have you ever driven west from Rapid City on Highway 44 and thought,”Gee, I wish there was a remote vinyl siding outlet around while I’m out here exploring the beautiful Black Hills?” Then you round a corner and there’s Johnson Siding?

If you did, you soon realized that Johnson Siding is the name of a town, not an out-of-the way home improvement center. Hopefully you weren’t too disappointed. So, why “Johnson Siding?”

The answer — like the answer to so many town etymologies — has to do with the railroad, and a sawmill built on Rapid Creek in the 1890s by a Swedish immigrant named John Johnson. You might have guessed correctly that Mr. Johnson is the namesake of the Johnson in “Johnson Siding.”

A “siding” in railroad lingo is a short section of track where trains can pull off to load or unload, and allow others to pass. In 1906, the last spike was driven on the Crouch Line — the rail spur that conveyed passengers and freight through the heart of the Black Hills from Rapid City to Mystic until 1948. The Johnson mill provided much of the lumber used in constructing the many bridges and trestles the Crouch needed to cross the rocky terrain. The siding also allowed the Johnson mill to fulfill lumber orders from Rapid City or anywhere else on the line. Over time, “Johnson Siding” evolved from an informal to a formal town name.

The Big Bend Powerhouse in 1920.

The Johnson family provided lumber to the Dakota Power Company when it bought the flume built by the Dakota-Placerville Mining Company — delivering water from Pactola to the Placerville mine — and extended it to the Big Bend Powerhouse, near Thunderhead Falls.

The line dropped more than 300 feet along its course to generate enough pressure to turn the turbines of a generator that helped supply power to Rapid City. The Flume Trail is built along the old flume bed. Hikers can still see remnants of the flume, and the adjacent catwalk used by maintenance workers, along the trail.

Johnson Siding isn’t the only town with “siding” in the name. Tie Siding, Wyoming is so named because in the late nineteenth century “tie hacks” — lumberjacks who felled trees and hewed them into vast numbers of ties for western railroad expansion — would float logs harvested in the Colorado Rockies down the Cache la Poudre River to Laporte, where they were hauled in ox-drawn wagons to the siding.

Tie hacks felled trees through summer and winter, stripping and hewing them with a broadax. Their river shipments sometimes created enormous logjams that had to be cleared with dynamite.

The Tie Hack Memorial near Dubois, Wyoming commemorates the efforts of the tie hacks. There are no worker-hero monuments in either Johnson or Tie Siding. Johnson Siding has a church, gas station, community center and bar. Tie Siding has an antique/fireworks store and a post office.

Building railways from sea-to-sea was temporary work, so there may have been more “Sidings” that have faded into unmapped memories with a faint scent of sawdust and steel.

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Winter Wonderland

By Christian Begeman

A couple weeks ago I wasn’t sure this column was going to happen. Since October I had planned on taking the full week off before Christmas to spend some time in the Black Hills, camera in hand. Early winter in the Hills is a magical time. Fresh snow, active wildlife and very few people make great reasons to wander places like Spearfish Canyon, Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park. This year, however, things were looking grim for a peaceful vacation in mid-December when little to no snow was on the ground and the massive Legion Lake Fire was tearing through Custer State Park and portions of Wind Cave National Park.

Thankfully, through great work by local and regional firefighting teams and some much-needed snowfall, the fire abated and the parks re-opened just days before my scheduled arrival. I was nervous about what I might see as I arrived on the evening of Dec. 21. I had spent the majority of the day in the Northern Hills waiting for the snow to end, and then cruising Spearfish Canyon as the sunlight broke free of the clouds and danced along the high ridgeline. The play of light and shadow through one of our state’s most scenic byways was worth the trip by itself. By the time I arrived in Custer State Park it was nearly dark, and I could smell the faint odor of burned grass and timber, but otherwise all was quiet and peaceful.

The next morning, I accidently turned off my alarm when attempting to hit the snooze button, so I missed my planned rendezvous with the sunrise. But the morning was not lost. Just outside the window of my room at the Creekside Inn a flock of nearly 30 blue jays were calling, flying and digging in the snow. Beyond the creek a lone deer crossed the road. On the flanks of the far ridge, a flock of wild turkeys slowly made its way eastward and at the top of the same ridge, the early morning sunshine began to kiss the tops of the snow-covered ponderosa pine. It slowly enveloped the entire ridge as it chased away the blue-tinted shadows with warm, yellow-hued light. The scene before me was truly a winter wonderland. It was a special kind of peace and quiet that I think only the Black Hills can provide.

Later that morning, I made the rounds on my favorite park roads looking for wildlife and trying to measure the extent of the fire damage. Enough snow had fallen to cover the blackened ground and singed trees, so I had to look closely to spot fire damage. About mid-afternoon, snow-laden clouds rolled in from the north and west. I found a group of old bison bulls along the southern curves of the Wildlife Loop road, and those same clouds let loose. While taking bison portraits, my camera and I both had a hard time finding true focus through the snowflakes. Even so, the out-of-focus shots were cool too, showing the extent of the snowfall with the bison silhouetted in the background.

As I was leaving the park on Dec. 23, I stopped at the Game Lodge chapel to snap a photo. Just a week before, I had seen an image on social media showing the fire line behind the chapel and cabins. Now the whole valley and park lay under a peaceful blanket of snow. The fires were out and the beauty and peace of winter in the Black Hills had once again fallen over the landscape. All seemed right again — at least for now.

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 South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Stories Beneath the Stones

Six national cemeteries lie within South Dakota’s borders: Black Hills National Cemetery, Fort Meade National Cemetery, Hot Springs National Cemetery, Akicita Owicahe Veterans Cemetery (Rosebud), Akicita Owicahe Lakota Freedom Veterans Cemetery (Pine Ridge) and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate National Cemetery near Sisseton. Our November/December issue features a story about them and a new initiative through Black Hills State University in Spearfish that seeks to uncover the stories behind the men and women who are buried within these hallowed grounds. Our photographers traveled the state to gather images from each cemetery. Here are a few more that didn’t fit into the magazine.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Where Elk Speak

By Paul Higbee

The bugle of an elk is unmistakable and unique. Seasoned buglers can identify individual elk based solely on the animal’s call. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

I thought Kevin Lineback was playing me for a greenhorn when he stooped, picked an inch-long elk dropping from the forest floor and pronounced it the product of a bull elk rather than a female.

No, he assured me later, there’s a difference in shape — Black Hills outdoorsmen can tell. I should have known Lineback was being straight with me. He has a fine sense of humor, but I’ve never heard him joke about elk, or about the special place he goes to watch them.

An hour before dawn that cold fall morning, Lineback and I had bought coffee at Spearfish’s Mini Mart.

“You didn’t use any deodorant or cologne?” he asked, and I answered no. He’d told me the night before that elk can smell those substances at great distance, and that I needed to also avoid bright colors and freshly laundered clothes. So, appropriately muted in hue and naturally scented, we warmed ourselves with coffee as we drove from Spearfish up a gravel road a few miles. Then we hiked along a clear stream in a narrow draw. After 15 minutes, the sky was turning gray as we reached a pool fed by the stream; the mud had been gashed and marked with large hoof prints.

“A wallow,” Lineback whispered. Here a bull elk had created its own cologne by digging up the soft mud, urinating in it and then rolling in it. That’s part of the rutting ritual each fall, when bulls show off by sight, sound and smell. Then it’s pretty much the cow elk’s decision with whom to mate and run.

From the wallow we made an aerobic climb out of the draw and walked through wide stands of aspen and ponderosa pine. Not far from where he picked up the dropping, Lineback motioned me behind a wide pine trunk and said, “With luck we’ll get you face to face with a bull. Well, maybe not face to face, but real close.”

He produced an elk call, an instrument with a latex reed that fits into the mouth, and a 2-foot corrugated plastic tube — a “grunt tube” for imitating various snorts and growls. “Years ago, when I was learning to call, I sounded like a wounded animal from another planet,” Lineback once told me. “I drove my wife crazy, and my neighbors. The call fits way back by your wisdom teeth, so when you’re learning, you’re trying both to get the right sound and to prevent yourself from gagging.”

He pierced the still air with a clear, high trumpet tone.

Silence.

Lineback waited a minute, then called again. This time, almost immediately, he was answered. Through the trees floated the sound most symbolic of the natural American West: the musical bugle of the bull elk. And music it is, too rich in tone to be called a moo, or screech or anything else.

Kevin Lineback demonstrates his call, with its grunt tube for imitating snorts and growls.

Lineback called again. He usually tries to mimic the sound of the elk he’s calling, and each animal sounds different. He’s been able to recognize certain bulls from year to year by their distinctive bugles.

Again Lineback was answered. How far away was the elk? Quarter mile? Half mile? I couldn’t guess. But when it answered a sixth or seventh time, it was suddenly much closer. A couple minutes later we could hear branches and undergrowth snapping, maybe a hundred yards off.

Something huge was moving our way.

Properly speaking, these animals are called wapiti. Once, they ranged as far east as the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. There, English settlers needed to distinguish them from small deer and took to calling them “elk,” the term for a European moose. The name stuck. Although they are part of the deer family, they differ from white-tailed and mule deer common to the Black Hills in countless ways, beginning with the way they noisily crash through the forest, and their size. A half-ton bull elk weighs easily four times what a large mule buck would weigh. Also unlike deer, a bull elk mates by attracting a “harem” of 15 or 20 cows, then fighting off other bulls. That’s partly what all the bugling is about each fall — the bull Lineback called thought another bull was challenging him for cow rights.

There is evidence that elk roamed South Dakota 35,000 years ago. Plains Indians hunted them for meat and hide, created ornaments from teeth, fashioned tools from bones and antlers and ground antlers to make medicines. Lewis and Clark, in 1804 and 1806, found Manitoban elk on the prairies along the Missouri River, but 75 years later few remained on the Plains. Gold rushers in 1876 found the Black Hills rich with Manitoban elk, but, within a dozen years, they were also gone. Between 1911 and 1920, 200 Rocky Mountain elk (lighter in color than the Manitoban, and with bigger antlers but slightly smaller bodies) were transplanted from the Tetons and Yellowstone to the Black Hills. They thrived and were the beginning of the Hills’ present herd, which numbers more than 2,000. Archery and rifle hunting each fall keeps the herd size constant, and the state Department of Game, Fish and Parks, the U.S. Forest Service and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation work together for the herd’s well being and for improved habitats.

Bill Aney, wildlife biologist for the Forest Service, has hiked with Lineback to that special place many times. “Kevin’s spot is ideal for elk,” Aney told me. “It’s isolated. There’s plenty of water, which isn’t all that common in the Black Hills. There’s a nice mix of aspen, birch and pine, which makes a cool microhabitat that elk like.”

Those are conditions the Forest Service works to enhance elsewhere through road closures for isolation, water catchment and efforts to hang on to aspen and birch growth. In some parts of the Hills, meadows have been cleared for better forage.

During the fall rut, bull elk attract a harem of several cows and then fight for supremacy. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

It hasn’t happened in the Black Hills yet, but human population encroachment in parts of the West has led to elk losing fear of people. That brings up another distinction between deer and elk — deer can hurt people when cornered or protecting fawns, but they are Bambis compared to an aggressive, hormone-driven bull elk, in rut with a full set of antlers. Lineback recently read about a bull that terrorized a community in another state until authorities sawed off its antlers.

“They would have been better off killing him,” Lineback said. “To send him off to face other bulls without his antlers, and with no way to protect himself from predators, was terrible. They took the crown from the king.”

Lineback had told me that a bull’s bugle, at close range, is a powerful statement, “a nine hundred or thousand pound animal proclaiming to the world that it’s his mountain.”

It is powerful, and indeed majestic when you add the visual image of the bull moving in search of the caller, closer and closer, until he stands just 20 yards away.

Elk are much larger than the white-tails and mule deer that also roam the Hills. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

That’s how close the bull came to us that morning. Then he stood suddenly still, all 900 pounds of him; Lineback had explained they sometimes pose silently when they know they’re near the competing bugler, as if to say, “Look. I’m a force to be reckoned with.” I twisted around the tree trunk and snapped a photo, concerned that the bull’s white rump would register bright in my picture while the rest of him, grey and brown, would blend into the forest background. And yes, his vast antlers were like a crown, six points on either side. With them he dug at the ground, sniffed the dirt, then sniffed the air. He was deciding something was wrong, that no other elk were present, though he hadn’t spotted us. Slowly he lumbered back the way he came, and then ran. Beyond our view we heard him stop, and Lineback, using the same call instrument, began “cow talking” … a series of mews and chirps. In Lineback’s experience, cow talk brings a bull back about nine times out of 10.

But not this one. He bugled back once, and then was finished with us. We realized it was a cold morning for standing motionless, which we’d been doing for several minutes, and we began walking back to the car. En route, Lineback found tracks he knew were made by cow elk (“their hips are wide, so the rear hoof marks are outside the front”) and trees where bulls had stripped bark with their antlers. His tracking and calling skills keep Lineback in demand as a guide for elk hunters, but he never brings them to this place.

It’s been several years since Lineback’s drawn a hard-to-get Black Hills elk hunting tag, but he hunts them annually in Idaho. “Hunting is one way I help take care of an animal I admire,” he said as we drove back to Spearfish. “If there were no hunting, there would be immediate overpopulation and starvation.

“An elk means a year’s worth of meat for my family,” he continued. “Take the animal’s weight, subtract about 60 percent for bone and waste, and that’s how much meat you’ve got.”

He has no patience for deer hunters who accidentally shoot elk, which happens every year in the Black Hills. “Having hunted both animals, I can tell you there’s just no way you should mistake one for the other, because of the size difference. If you can’t tell, or just don’t care, either way you shouldn’t be out there.”

The sun had climbed over Lookout Mountain’s shoulder as we reached Spearfish. “You know,” I said as we drank Mini Mart coffee again, “we’ve had an experience some people would drive a thousand miles for, and save money all year for.

Lineback nodded. “I can’t imagine why everyone who lives in the Hills isn’t out there. But I’m glad they’re not.”

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Fall Roundup

Around 20,000 spectators were on hand to watch the 52nd annual Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup last Friday. Park employees and volunteers gathered about 1,200 bison into corrals to be branded, vaccinated and checked for pregnancy. Around 400 bison will be auctioned off on November 18 to keep herd numbers manageable. Photos by John Mitchell.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Spearfish Canyon Color

The highway through Spearfish Canyon is a favorite fall drive for many South Dakotans and out of state visitors. Jerry Boyer, who has tracked the progression of fall colors in Spearfish Canyon for more than 20 years, predicts Wednesday will be the peak day to view the full rhapsody of fall colors — especially the reds of the sumac, nanny berry, wild grape and ivy. But beware the alluring red leaves near the ground; they are poison ivy.

John Mitchell visited the canyon this past weekend. Here are some of his photos.