Tag: black hills

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The Old Growth Pines

By Mark Meierhenry

Photography by Stephen Gassman

Our oldest trees are seldom the prettiest specimens in the Black Hills forest. They survive on high granite crags, far from civilization.

Eight centuries of South Dakota news and weather are recorded and preserved in gnarled old Ponderosa pines that grow high in the Black Hills forest. Stories of fires, earth slides, wet periods and severe droughts are stored beneath their bark.

Ponderosa pine is a relatively new species on the Great Plains, only dating back about 11,000 years. But the prolific pines now cover about 1 million of the Black Hills forest’s 1.25 million acres.”No one is sure exactly when the tree took root in the Black Hills,” says Frank Carroll of the Black Hills National Forest Service. Researchers at the University of Wyoming hope to answer that question.

The oldest pines live in granite crags high in the mountains of the central Black Hills, in places not easily reached by people or fire.”Rocky ridges are typically difficult areas for other trees to grow, and offer great defenses from fire and insect predators,” Carroll says.

The forestry term”old growth” generally refers to pines 150 years of age or older. Many such patches exist in the Black Hills, despite more than a century of logging and development. One particular place near Mount Rushmore has trees known to be over 600 years old; another summit by Hill City has trees over 750 years old.

The aged pines are gnarled, knotted and crooked, and often show damage from lightning and wind. They usually survive on barren, rocky environs that hardly seem fit for plant life. Their bark is thick and plated like armor, with big crevices.

The forest floor is a cornucopia of cones, needles, wildflowers and grasses. When the vegetation become stoo dry, it can ignite into fire, the scourge of old growth trees.

Forest Service officials don’t advertise such trees’ exact locations because some people do not respect antiquity. The oldest living thing on earth was killed in 1964 when a student cut down Prometheus, a 4,862-year-old Bristlecone pine in Nevada, for study. Now the oldest is a 4,769-year-old Bristlecone pine known as Methuselah, rooted in the White-Inyo Mountains of California. Methuselah was recording climate conditions on its rings before the written word was developed in Mesopotamia (now Iraq).

Trees tell their stories through their rings, layers of wood cells formed during each growing season. Thin-walled cells formed early in the growing season are called earlywood. Later in the growing season, thicker-walled cells called latewood are produced. The ring is determined from the inside edge of the earlywood to the outside edge of the latewood. The most fruitful growing conditions produce larger cells, and the circumference of the tree expands accordingly.

Tree rings can also be used to date wooden artifacts even after a tree has been cut down. They can determine the age of a long abandoned cabin in the Black Hills, or of a wooden bridge, or old mineshaft. A thousand years from now, scientists will be able to determine when the Missouri River’s concrete dams were built by studying the rings of trees drowned by the rising water.

Scientists can determine when ancient events occurred by tracing the effects of landslides, fires, glaciers and other catastrophes. The mapping of younger trees surrounded by older trees might reveal, for example, that the new growth of young trees filled the rubble of an earth slide.

Ring data is obtained by taking core samples from the pines, causing no harm to the tree. Scientists insert a small hollow rod into the trunk to capture a cross section of the rings. The tube is then withdrawn and the data is preserved and interpreted.

The rings inside ancient trees tell the stories of catastrophic natural events from centuries ago.

Scientists can compare the rings of individual trees to others in a certain geographic area — for example, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota — to learn the history of weather patterns that occurred on the Northern Plains before written time.

A particular 762-year-old pine tree near Hill City was the source of a scientific paper by Matthew Bunkers on the history of droughts in the area. Bunkers, a science and operations officer at the National Weather Service’s Rapid City bureau, has written many papers on our local weather.”The most interesting fact from our research is that droughts likely have exceeded the duration and intensity of the 1930s Dust Bowl drought,” Bunkers says.

South Dakota students were once taught that the Great American Desert began at the 100th Meridian, which runs through the small town of Blunt, east of Pierre. Eastern bankers once hesitated to loan money to homesteaders and businesses west of that longitudinal line. Locals scoffed at the notion that the West was a desert, but the bankers had a point. The 1860s brought one of the worst droughts in the history of the Great Plains, and the period of 1859 to 1873 was drier than the infamous Dirty Thirties.

Our driest spell may have been a 20-year drought from 1531 to 1551, when the yet-to-be-mapped Dakotas were twice as dry as they were in the Dirty Thirties. The older dates are less scientifically reliable because of the lack of sufficient older trees to sample.

The driest recent periods, as determined from tree rings, were the 1933 to 1942 drought and a stretch from 1956 to 1961. The converse is also interesting. The period from 1962 to 1969, the wettest in recent memory, is the 10th wettest era. The period from 1882 to 1889, when much of South Dakota’s territorial history occurred, is the sixth wettest. Railroad and town boosters were then advertising Dakota’s lush prairie to people around the world. They didn’t mention the 1860s, especially not to the bankers.

Today many policy-makers, pundits, politicians and scientists are debating causes of climate change and whether our current shift is natural or man-made. We have a responsibility to sort through their arguments, and the oldest trees found in the United States — the Bristlecone pine, and their younger cousin, the Ponderosa pine — have much of the data we need to make informed decisions. We can argue about the weather, but the pine trees know.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Treacherous Trek

The Community Caves of Spearfish Canyon are among the best-kept secrets in the Northern Hills, probably because they are so difficult to reach. The hike is just a half-mile, but it is nearly vertical and the path is strewn with rocks shed from the canyon. Bonny Fleming shared these photos from a recent visit with the Black Hills Photography Club.”Freshly fallen snow and a layer of ice made the hike rather hairy. I think it’s safe to say that no one escaped without at least one slip or slide,” Fleming says.

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Galena’s Ghosts

By Paul Higbee

An old footbridge crosses Bear Butte Creek in Galena.


Galena, high in the Black Hills eight miles east of Deadwood, is a state treasure.

Nothing in the American West has been romanticized quite like ghost towns. But in the 21st century many of those places have deteriorated to the point that it’s hard to get a feel for the community that once thrived there. So an authentic ghost town that retains a sense of itself, as Galena does, stands out as a gem. In fact, there may be no ghost town experience in the West that tops Galena’s the second Saturday of each June. That’s when Galena is put on display with food, bluegrass music, and a long self-guided hike to historic structures–some still standing, some memorialized with markers and historic photos.

If Galena ranks as a top-drawer ghost town, thanks goes to volunteers associated with the Galena Historical Society. The pretty alpine setting works to Galena’s benefit, too. Instead of tumbleweeds rolling through this ghost town, Bear Butte Creek babbles its way down the gulch. Credit goes also to the quality of ghosts here. They include prospectors, saloon keepers (lots of those), merchants, school marms, South Dakota’s most famous coyote, a member of George Custer’s gold-finding expedition to the Black Hills, shady speculators, and at least one bloodthirsty gunslinger. Thrown together in this gulch, these real life characters played out a Western drama Louis L’Amour couldn’t top.

Galena is a quiet village surrounded by forest about eight miles east of Deadwood.

In blatant violation of the federal treaty with the Lakota people, gold seekers panned for flashes of color along Bear Butte Creek in 1875 and’76. Gold quantities were a bit disappointing. But astute prospectors recognized lead sulfide deposits, called galena, in the hillsides rising above the creek. That obviously meant lead and also, quite likely, silver. While other Black Hills towns sprang to life with visions of gold mines, Galena banked on silver. Most everyone in the Hills recognized the names of Galena’s silver mines: Sitting Bull, Richmond, Florence, Merrit No. 1, Merrit No. 2, General Cook, Alex, Chub, Cora, Emma, El Refugio, Moll, Double Rainbow, and others.

None of them made great profits but by no means were they fly-by-night operations. Many won backing from major East Coast venture capitalists, but a big portion of that money ended up in the pockets of lawyers. Galena silver mines took form immediately adjacent to one another, and sometimes on top of one another. Claims were in constant legal dispute. John McClintock, early Black Hills entrepreneur and historian, wrote that a national drop in silver value combined with”prolonged litigation by mine claimants” dashed many Galena hopes.

Still, in 1878, it appeared Galena had perhaps found a counterpart of Lead’s George Hearst, who spared no expense in developing Homestake Mine so that it became the Western Hemisphere’s biggest gold producer. Into Galena rode wealthy Colonel J. S. Davey. He first leased, and then bought, the Sitting Bull and built a great mine mill. However, Davey quickly fell into a legal dispute with the neighboring Richmond Mine operators. Richmond owners believed Sitting Bull miners, deep underground, were tunneling into their claim. Davey spent lots of money defending himself, lost, and faced even uglier charges before the first case was decided. By some accounts one Jack Gorman was connected to the Richmond Mine, but John McClintock believed Gorman owned another claim that Davey hoped to buy.

When Galena’s century-old schoolhouse faced demolition in 1983, townspeople raised funds for restoration.

Recalling what happened next, McClintock observed,”On more than one occasion, in the Black Hills, it was proven that a sure way to get a mining claim was to first ‘get’ the owner.”

Davey had a guard on his payroll named Billy Thacker, whom McClintock described as”anxious to gain notoriety as a dangerous two-gun man and killer.” He got his chance one day when Gorman stepped out of the Galena post office. Thacker verbally insulted Gorman, who replied with an angry remark and shook his fist. That prompted Thacker to draw, fire, and send Gorman to his grave.

Now Colonel Davey had another costly court case on his hands as he defended his employee. The jury, in curious reasoning not entirely uncommon in Black Hills towns of the era, decided Thacker acted in self-defense when Gorman shook his fist. But the victory further depleted Davey’s wealth, and destroyed his reputation. He eventually left town. Billy Thacker left sooner, certainly knowing he was lucky in having been spared the noose.

As all this unfolded, Galena grew into a full-fledged community with general and grocery stores, barbershop, assay office, blacksmith shop, sawmills, boarding houses and livery stables. Some Northern Hills residents took pride in knowing the names and character of all of Galena’s saloons: Sudden Death, Mint, Irish World, Dempsey’s, Cavanaugh’s and Scandalous Bill’s, to name only a few.

W.V. Doyle built the schoolhouse in 1882 and it served students until World War II. A Catholic church and a Methodist church were built, although there’s some doubt about whether any Methodist services were conducted. By some accounts the minister made off with church funds, leaving the would-be congregation to cover the building’s costs by using it as a dance and social hall.

Galena’s early mines faded away only to be replaced by late 19th century and early 20th century mining operations that embraced new milling technologies. These included the Union Hill, Gilt Edge, and Branch Mint mines, and in 1902 the Deadwood Central Railroad built a spur line to Galena. The Deadwood Pioneer Times newspaper reported that”ore shipments from the district are growing every day, and the road will soon have all it can do to handle them.”

Today the school is the starting point for Galena’s annual history hike, a fundraiser to further preserve the old mining town.

Within 10 years, though, the new mines were gone or fading fast. Galena’s population had peaked at about 800 just before 1900, but now it quickly dwindled. In the 1920s Black Hills journalist and historian Richard Hughes reported that”Galena is nothing more than a post office.”

Not quite. Galena remained a naturally beautiful spot, always cool when summer heat scorched the prairies below, and there were folks who liked it best after the mines, saloons, and stamp mills ceased their racket.

Some of the wood frame buildings fell into disrepair and the lumber was hauled away. Other structures were put to new uses. The Borsch Boarding House, for example, had catered to miners but changed to become the Borsch Resort, serving visitors seeking quiet respite in the Hills. There are still people in the region who recall Sunday drives to Galena, decades ago, for the resort’s famous chicken dinners.

In 1947 Galena’s most famous resident appeared on the scene–an icon in the true sense of the word. Tootsie, an orphaned coyote, was adopted by Fred and Esther Borsch. Fred taught Tootsie how to howl along to songs, howl greetings and goodbyes to humans, and how to behave in parades and other celebrations. Photographers and artists couldn’t get enough of Tootsie. In 1949 Governor George T. Mickelson made her South Dakota’s official animal and mascot. She toured other states as a South Dakota ambassador. Like South Dakota itself, Tootsie was colorful and not entirely tame.

ìShe tolerated me being around her, but I couldn’t pet her,” recalls Marilyn Schwaner, a young relative to Fred and Esther during the Tootsie years.”That was my dream, to pet her, but I never did until she had surgery for cancer and was groggy as she came out of it.”

Tootsie died in 1959 but her likenesses are still with us regularly, including sketches in this magazine’s pages over the years.

Marilyn spent much of her teen years attending school in Ohio, but always came to Galena for summers with her grandmother.”There’s something mystical about the Black Hills,” she says.”They draw you back.” Marilyn used to cry when she saw the Black Hills appear on the horizon as she traveled west after the school year, and she cried again when she left them in late summer. Now, happily, she lives at Galena in the house where her grandmother resided, and she commutes into Deadwood to work as a med tech at the hospital. It’s a job that keeps her busy, but she finds time to play active roles in the Galena Historical Society. Marilyn was, in fact, part of the group when it first got together in 1983 to save the 101-year-old schoolhouse. The Deadwood-Lead board of education had decided to tear the school down, but then worked with the historical group as it first raised dollars with bake sales in front of Deadwood’s Ben Franklin Store.

Galena’s cemetery, on Vinegar Hill, is the final resting place for Civil War veterans, a member of George Custer’s 1874 Black Hills Expedition and miners. Volunteers are re-marking many of the cemetery’s earliest gravesites.

Bake sale fundraising evolved into the annual history hike.”You can get a little exercise and learn some history,” advises Marilyn. You can also rest assured the dollars you spend on brats and beans will support good historical preservation.

Participants do, indeed, get exercise. The basic hike runs 3.65 miles and there’s climbing involved, up to hillside buildings and the Galena cemetery on Vinegar Hill. The route includes the school where storytellers engage listeners, the assay office, and Sammy Moll’s diggings. A climb up an abandoned railroad bed brings the Methodist steeple into view (the steeple is all that remains of the church). Then it’s on to the Catholic church, saloon sites, livery stable and Tootsie’s home. The cemetery is a fascinating stop because of ongoing work to determine who is buried where. Many of the original grave markers were wood and rotted away. Mark and Suzanne Luken have volunteered their expertise and long hours to make certain the graves of a dozen Civil War veterans are properly marked, and their lives interpreted. The Lukens also took the lead in re-marking Sarah Campbell’s grave here. She worked as a cook for Custer’s transformational 1874 expedition, was drawn back to the Black Hills, cooked for Galena area miners and died in 1888.

If 3.65 miles isn’t quite enough to quench a hiker’s thirst for history, there’s an optional 1.6-mile add-on to consider. It’s a somewhat rugged climb to the Hercules Walls. Hercules was to be the name of a mighty mine mill, and its stone foundation was skillfully completed before financing dried up. The Hercules never went into operation but its foundation walls attest to remarkable stone craftsmanship often found in Western mining regions.

It takes about 25 volunteers, some of them working very hard three days in advance, to stage Galena’s history celebration. They mark trails, set up interpretive signs and photos, prepare and serve food, tell stories, park cars, and haul trash. If the weather is good maybe 700 people will show up.

Then, after the last car rumbles away toward Highway 385, the deep quiet of the high Hills settles in. Along with fewer than 20 living friends who call Galena home year round, the ghosts have the place to themselves again.

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

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The Puritanical Potter

By Michael Zimny

Her mother wasn’t happy when Linda Meyer moved into a cabin in the woods with no electricity, phone or running water.

Surrounded by Black Hills National Forest, Meyer lives the solitary lifestyle of a backwoods Black Hills potter. Her home and studio sit a few miles outside Rochford (pop. 9) in a divot above Irish Gulch high in the Northern Hills.

She built nearly everything she has here. Four years ago, when a fire that started in her kiln room destroyed her studio, her work, portfolio and copious notes, she started the process of building it all over again, with some reference books, her hands, a hammer and nails.

Raised on a dairy farm in central Wisconsin by her German Lutheran grandparents, she was infused from birth with Weber’s Protestant work ethic.”On the farm you improvise,” says Meyer, who sometimes uses the handle Mud Woman.”If something broke, you fixed it.”

After a year at Lawrence University on a basketball scholarship, she transferred to Northland College, a small liberal arts school on the Chequamegon Bay of Lake Superior. There she found a calling in the painstakingly detailed traditions of midwestern stoneware pottery.

She graduated in 1981 and came to Rapid City to visit a friend. The Black Hills got into her blood. She found a job at a frame shop and stayed.

By 1991, she was an experienced potter when she approached Prairie Edge with some of her work. The relationship is still going 25 years later. With a relative dearth of potters in the Hills, the gallery takes them as fast as she can make them.

When she moved to her mountain home in 1995, the only thing there was an unfinished wood frame cabin. For the first six years, she had no electricity, working at night by the light of candles and oil lamps. She gradually finished the cabin interior, built cabinets, added a kitchen and built a studio — all by hand.

She started throwing her work on a foot-powered potter’s wheel, but has since refurbished and rewired an old electric.

Her childhood on the farm taught her some of the basics of architecture, woodworking and electrical work, but she is mostly self-taught, absorbing books and manuals.

In the beginning there was no road to the cabin. To get groceries in the winter she would walk to where she parked her truck in a pull-off on the main road, make the trip to Lead and back, then haul them in on a sleigh. Nothing perishable, of course.

“I need 80 or 90 percent solitude,” Meyer says.”It’s easier to find people than solitude.”

Sometimes people find her out here. Mostly hunters.

One cold night, while she had gone to town for a couple days, a hunter got lost in the dark and panicked. He broke a window and sheltered in her cabin till morning. Fortunately he was a conscientious breaker and enterer. He left a note and said he’d pay for the window, and he did.

A self-proclaimed”coward and hypocrite” (because she’s an omnivore but can’t bring herself to hunt), Meyer is an occasional patron saint of lost or stranded hunters, a unique post on what Jack London would call”the trail of the meat.” She has helped free her share of marooned ATVs. It’s impossible to know if they tell their friends how the Mud Woman rescued them.

Most hunters who cross her land are friendly enough, but some feel entitled to go wherever they will. She’s had to get surly at times.

In the end, her mother’s worries may have been misplaced.

Over the years, the potter has slowly nudged her colony of one toward technological norms, first running power from wind and solar batteries. As of a few years ago she’s on the grid, even has Internet via satellite, but no cell phone and no plumbing. She has a hand-pump well and a freshwater spring for water. She heats with wood. She’s gotten handy with a chainsaw since the pine beetles started dropping trees.

“It is an introspective and contemplative journey,” she says,”a way of life, not a living.”

The self-sufficiency required by living here writes a long chore list that must be checked off before she can make time for the wheel. She’s up and running every day by 5, just like her farm days, and there are no days off.

The fire set her back. She rebuilt her studio, getting help to raise one wall, but otherwise board by board with a hammer and nails. Without much yet in the way of storage space though, she works in a “state of disarray” which offends her inherited tendency toward rigorous precision.

Like her lifestyle, her pottery is soulfully austere, particular and utilitarian. She works with stoneware clay, makes her own glazes from natural ingredients and everything she makes has a function.

“It’s very practical. You can use it every day. Because it’s made by hand it’s a little more of a ritual, and eating used to be such a ritual ancestrally. I like the idea that you can take something as common as eating and enrich people’s lives with something as simple as clay.”

She incorporates the abundant Black Hills flora that surrounds her into her designs, making impressions in clay of spruce, aspen, grasses and sage and casting ornamental pinecones. Local animals, like buffalo and wild horses, show up in the stoneware as well.

“I choose to live here because I can hear what my head and my heart are telling me without a lot of external static. I have a puritanical attitude about simplicity. Although, while on the surface it might seem simple, it’s a lot of work to live simply,” she laughs.

“I try to live my philosophy. I grew up this way, so I was sort of bred for it. But then there were four of us. Here it’s just me. I can do the tasks, but it’s a yeoman’s approach because there’s not enough energy or time in a day.”

Though her work is still sold at Prairie Edge, Meyer started exhibiting at gallery shows several years ago to build a rapport with the people who love her work. And though she may not have indoor plumbing, she does have a website.

You can see Linda Meyer’s work on Saturday, Nov. 7, at the 34th annual Pinedale Bazaar, at Pinedale Elementary School in Rapid City.

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

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The Victim’s Daughter

By Paul Higbee

Musty smelling and crumbling, Black Hills newspapers of April 1917 report names that confirm their age. President Woodrow Wilson calls for an all-out American effort to win the World War. Former President Teddy Roosevelt suggests sending gung-ho, mature veterans into combat. Closer to home Robert Tallent, credited by the papers as”the first white boy in the Black Hills,” dies.

Only a few Black Hills residents knew the names Martin Conheeney and Eimel Joukkuri before April 25, 1917–the date the Lead Daily Call reported a deadly encounter between the two. The night before at about 9:30, just inside the Terraville tunnel, Joukkuri shot Conheeney. Then he walked to a police station at Mill and Main in Lead, turned himself in, and was placed under arrest.

The tunnel, long gone, once ran nearly a mile through a mountain ridge and connected Lead and Terraville. It was Homestake Gold Mine property and pedestrians regularly used it. But the mine built the tunnel so a train — a little air powered tram — could haul ore into Lead. If a pedestrian met the train in the tunnel, says Lead historian Wayne Paananen, he would have to back against the wall and watch the engine and ore cars pass within a foot. So guards were instructed to keep people out of the tunnel when the train was due, especially if they appeared intoxicated.

Joukkuri was one of those Homestake guards and Conheeney an off-duty Homestake explosives expert.

“Shortly after his arrest and before being advised to remain silent regarding the circumstances of the killing,” reported the Call,”Joukkuri made a statement to Chief of Police Keffler, in which he said that immediately before the trouble, he was on duty in the entrance of the tunnel and probably 60 feet away from the roundhouse where the concrete work of the tunnel begins, when Conheeney came through from the Lead end of the tramway, on his way into the tunnel. Conheeney was under the influence of liquor…”

Conheeney’s family and friends would later fight the notion that he was drunk. But in the hours after the shooting, Joukkuri’s statement looked like a fact in the Lead Daily Call.

Joukkuri said he told Conheeney to stop, the Call continued. Conheeney”paid no attention to Joukkuri’s admonition, but proceeded on his way, and the guard followed him. They exchanged blows and grappled, both going to the ground. Joukkuri stated that Conheeney had the better of him in the encounter, and attempted to choke him; that they got to their feet and Conheeney struck him with a bottle of liquor which he carried, landing a blow on the side of the guard’s head.”

In Joukkuri’s trial it would emerge that the liquor was for Conheeney’s wife, Mary, intended for medicinal use.

Joukkuri told police he ran for help after the struggle. George Hart, watchman and boiler engineer, added that Joukkuri bolted into his boiler room off the tunnel with a bloodied head and torn clothing. Hart couldn’t make out what Joukkuri told him, he explained, because working close to Homestake’s stamp mill left him a bit deaf. But Joukkuri’s condition certainly communicated trouble. Hart and Joukkuri stepped into the tunnel, Hart going first, and they spotted Conheeney. Hart said Conheeney threw a rock their direction, then charged toward Joukkuri. Hart claimed he tried grabbing Conheeney but missed.

Joukkuri, revolver in hand, fired two shots. One, Lead police determined, missed. The other hit Conheeney in the left temple and he fell against the tunnel wall and into a sitting position, dead.

The newspaper reported all this in great detail within hours, but there was more that the public didn’t learn for a while. Conheeney was 33, married with a young son and daughter, and had another baby on the way. At Joukkuri’s trial it was established that Conheeney was taking liquor to his wife, and witnesses from the Lead saloon where he bought the spirits said he left sober. Joukkuri’s shooting of an unarmed man didn’t sit well with the jury. It convicted the guard of manslaughter and sentenced him to hard labor at the state penitentiary.

Court records and press reports referred to Joukkuri as Finnish and Conheeney as Irish (both, in fact, were immigrants) and there’s been speculation that the references implied ethnic tension between those groups. But historian Paananen says identifying residents in remarkably cosmopolitan Lead by nationality was common practice during those years, even in Homestake employee records, and in this case probably implied nothing. It’s worth noting the family that first came to Conheeney’s widow’s aid that tragic night was Finnish (the Macki family).

Jim Dunn, former Homestake employee and state legislator, has taken interest in the case for reasons revealed later in this article. He thinks the tragedy resulted simply because of”an overzealous guard and a man who stubbornly insisted he was going home as quickly as possible to his sick wife.”

The widow, Mary Conheeney, took her three children (including a daughter her husband never met) home to Ireland in 1919. She had to wait for the war’s end before it was safe to cross Atlantic waters. Her middle child, Nora, was six in 1919 and would recall a rough crossing and terrible seasickness.

Seventy-five years passed. The tram system for hauling ore through the mountain ceased operation and pedestrians had the Terraville tunnel all to themselves for several years. Eventually sections of the tunnel were filled in, or lost to the expanding Homestake open cut mine. The open cut wiped away Terraville, too.

Then in 1994 Deadwood Mayor Bruce Oberlander received a strange letter. It came addressed to the”Lord Mayor, Deadwood City,” definitely a first. It bore an Athlone, Ireland postmark, and asked about”Lead City.” The letter-writer’s last name, written in pen, was hard to make out. It appeared perhaps to be Ryan. The first name, though, was unmistakable: Nora.

Nora Conheeney Ryan was in good spirits when she returned to the Black Hills, 77 years after her father’s murder.

That’s where Jim Dunn and his wife, Betty, entered the story. The mayor’s wife, Mary Ann, knew the Dunns had traveled in Ireland. Perhaps, she thought, they’d know Athlone’s location. As it turned out Jim and Betty had stayed in an Athlone bed and breakfast and knew the owner. In a plot development that would be laughed out of any fiction piece, the Dunns called their Athlone friend. She told them Nora Ryan lived less than a mile up the road. This was Nora Conheeney Ryan, Martin and Mary’s middle child. At age 81 she had decided it was time to return to the Black Hills, and maybe arrange for a new headstone for her father’s grave.

The Dunns promised to help any way they could. It was, says Betty, the beginning of a friendship that would shortly feel like a family relationship — and would continue feeling that way over the years. On Aug. 22, 1994, Nora landed at Rapid City Regional Airport and raised her hands in triumph. Two daughters, a son-in-law, and a friend from California accompanied her.

“I shall never forget my trip to South Dakota,” Nora later wrote.”It was the most challenging and wonderful thing I ever did. With Jim’s help, finding my father’s grave was the greatest moment of my life.”

Former state legislator Jim Dunn (pictured with his wife, Betty, at Martin Conheeney’s grave) believes the tragedy resulted from “an overzealous guard and a man who stubbornly insisted he was going home to his sick wife.”

They found it in South Lead Cemetery. Nora didn’t have to arrange for a headstone. The original stood in beautiful condition.

That wasn’t all Nora found. The Dunns made phone calls and the past 75 years melted away. Hubert McGrath stopped by with a photo of his parents, John and Margaret McGrath, who were Nora’s godparents when she was baptized at Lead’s St. Patrick Catholic Church. Nora recognized the faces in the photo immediately. She brought some pictures of her own, including that of a house between Deadwood and Spearfish. It once belonged to her father’s cousin and Nora recalled spending pleasant summer days there. Jim called Spearfish historian Linfred Schuttler, who in turn pulled Jim Riggs into the search.”Jim knew right away where the house was, north and east of the Spearfish airport,” Linfred recalls.”It had been a stagecoach stop on the old Spearfish to Whitewood line.” Nora visited the home and recognized it right away as she approached–right down to the trees in the yard.

“She sure had a memory,” Betty Dunn says.”What do I remember from when I was four years old? She remembered everything — sights, smells, sounds.”

And tastes. Betty was able to fulfill a menu request that Nora associated with her Black Hills childhood: corn on the cob and watermelon.

Joukkuri’s trial records surfaced easily. The Lawrence County courthouse had just been refurbished and the city of Deadwood took possession of its historical documents. The records held a surprise. Joukkuri appealed his manslaughter conviction, claiming self-defense, and won.

“He walked away from that sentence,” says Jim Dunn.”Nora didn’t know that and it was the only sour note on her whole trip, finding out he’d been released. But she wasn’t bitter. She said, ëWhat is done is done.'”

Of course, just as Black Hills life moved along with twists and turns for 75 years, so did Nora’s life across the sea. Her mother actually planned to return and raise her children in South Dakota after the 1919 trip home. But Mary Conheeney ended up staying in Ireland where she was embraced by a loving, supportive extended family. Nora became a teacher, married fellow teacher Martin Ryan, and raised a family of six. Late in life, after her husband’s death, Nora hoped to see the Black Hills again. She no longer knew anyone there, however. Deeply religious, she told God the trip would be possible only if he designated South Dakota friends and guides. That’s what happened, and she later reflected that the trip helped her understand a sadness she carried her entire life.

Nora returned to Ireland after a week, lived another 12 years, and took special delight in Jim and Betty’s visits to Athlone. From afar she kept an eye on the Black Hills.”Everyone appreciates an honest man,” she observed when Jim won another term in the state senate. In 2001, after the mine that employed her father closed, she wrote,”Farewell Homestake — it gave us lots of headaches.” Read into that what you will, but she probably referred to the same pounding stamp mill noise that hurt George Hart’s hearing.

What most impressed Nora’s South Dakota friends was that she didn’t want to forget the Black Hills after the family tragedy, but hoped to embrace her childhood home. And it wasn’t just a gravestone, house, and corn-on-the-cob she sought, but people.

“She could imagine making those kinds of connections in Ireland, but not in the United States, because America is so very vast,” says Tina Burke, one of Nora’s daughters who flew with her to South Dakota.”When she first thought about the trip, she believed it was unlikely she could even find the grave.”

Adds Jim Dunn,”There are very few strong ties these days, even among families. People are always moving around, cutting ties. Who could ever have guessed that looking for that grave would result in the close tie we have with Nora’s family?”

It’s an ending to the tragedy that reporters couldn’t have imagined as they studied grim police and coroner reports in 1917.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Sun Dance and Maka Waconi: Circle of Life

Story and Photography by Michael Randall

A small village of tipis rises beyond the trees and boulders at the sacred Sun Dance site.

Early on a sunny June afternoon I turn from Highway 71 onto a gravel road and enter the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary south of Hot Springs. Within a mile, I see the hand-lettered”Sun Dance — Please Respect This Sacred Land.”

A dusty track leads higher into remote hills adorned with pine and cedar. Emerald green carpets the piedmont, and a warm breeze tugs at the brome, wild mustard and cheat grass. Patches of sweet clover bloom yellow and the air is thick with the piquant scent of sage.

In 1883, the U.S. government outlawed the Sun Dance, and Catholic and Episcopalian missionaries discouraged it. In his book The Lakota Way, Joseph M. Marshall III, wrote that the dance was characterized as”uncivilized and barbaric.”

They failed or chose not to see the ceremony for what it was: a symbolic act of sacrifice performed so that the people might live. Native Americans went underground with the Sun Dance until 1978, when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act legalized it.

Far back in the hills I pass a small herd of wild Sorraia Mustangs grazing beneath a stand of ponderosas on the sanctuary. Over another hill, the Cheyenne River runs high and muddy from recent rains. Along its bottom cottonwood leaves turn their silvery undersides to the breeze.

Passing through a livestock gate, I stop at another hand-lettered”Security” sign. Two Lakota men sit beneath a shade arbor next to a tipi. They welcome me, but also remind me that no recording devices or cameras are allowed.

It was one of many Sun Dances celebrated in summer on the Indian reservations of South Dakota, but the only one undertaken in the Black Hills. I was invited by Vic Glover, a former U.S. Army medic who flew helicopter medevac missions in Vietnam. A former journalist, he is author of the book Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge. A practitioner of traditional native spirituality, he is also a student of Buddhism and Christianity. Glover went to Asia several years ago as a volunteer after the huge Indian Ocean tsunami, and now lives much of the time in Thailand. He returns home each year to fulfill his pledge to take part in the Sun Dance.

I drive another half-mile to the dance site, where six poles fly American flags above MIA-POW flags. Just beyond, a forked cottonwood trunk stands 40 feet high in the center of a great circle. Colored cloth banners (red, green, blue, yellow) adorn its heights, flapping in the breeze. Other banners hang further down, as well as eagle feathers. Small”tobacco tie” prayer offerings to Tunkashila (God, the grandfather) wrap the entire trunk from top to bottom. Beyond, a fire pit heats rocks for sweat lodges bordering one side of the sacred dance site.

I park by other dusty cars and trucks and campers with license plates from Connecticut to California. Men and women nod or smile, though I am both a stranger walking into their most sacred ceremony and a wasicu (white guy). While some Sun Dances’ organizers do not allow non-native people to attend, others welcome people of different faiths and backgrounds. A third of the people at this Sun Dance appear to be non-native.

Several Sun Dances are celebrated on South Dakota’s Indian reservation every summer, but this was the only dance held in the Black Hills.

Father William Stolzman, a Jesuit priest, spent years on the Rosebud Reservation. For six years he convened bi-weekly meetings with other priests and Lakota medicine men to discuss Christianity and traditional Lakota spirituality. His meetings resulted in his 1986 book The Pipe and Christ, which describes similarities and differences between Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples’ traditional spiritual practices and Christian religious practices.

The book shows our shared humanity, but also the gulf between the ways two cultures see the world in general, and American popular culture in particular. At Stolzman’s meetings between priests and medicine men, the priests — curates of a religious culture full of complex doctrine and righteous certainty — spoke quickly and confidently and asked pointed questions of the medicine men.

The Lakotas were often upset by this bluntness of manners. Careful and slow to speak, they came to any topic indirectly, then spoke for longer periods. About some wakan (sacred) matters they were reluctant to speak at all, considering that disrespectful.

At the sun dance site, a huge circular dance area is marked off by a two-foot high fence of willow switches painted bright red around half of the circle, and bright blue around the other half. The base of each vertically arrayed willow switch has been buried and it forms one fragile stick of the fence that demarcates the sacred dance area. Near the top of each of the hundreds of willow switches that formed the circle, a small tobacco tie is knotted, alternating in the sacred colors of the four compass directions: red, yellow, black, white. They are offerings of tobacco to each of the 405 spirits that have something to do with humans.

Four openings in the great circle mark the four directions. Surrounding the entire circular site a vast brush arbor was constructed, consisting of forked pine tree trunks perhaps four inches in diameter. The base of each is now buried into the ground so that each trunk stands vertically. Lashed atop their forks, and crisscrossed in a rough lattice on top, tree limbs have been tied in place with cord or wire. Shaded beneath the arbor are some 50 spectators, plus three bands of drummers and singers who sit in circles around their drums.

Within the dance circle itself, perhaps 60 men and women in traditional Lakota garb dance in the day’s third of four dances. The men, naked from the waist up, are attired in ankle length wraps of red or blue cloth. Some carry eagle wing fans and their personal or family canupas (pipes made of traditional pipestone –“peace pipes” as we wasicus have called them).

Many men wear two standing eagle feathers attached within a thick cylinder of sage wrapped in spirals of red cloth and worn around their heads like a crown. Tufts of sage hang from the front over their brows. Sage cleanses a person’s body and spirit, and perhaps in wearing it this way the sage precedes the wearer on his path to cleanse him as he moves forward in the dance — just as in life.

Some male dancers bear healed scars in their chests and backs from past years’ piercings. Several others have fresh wounds from the morning’s dances, when some men were pierced with scalpels and lashed to the great tree by buffalo hide or plain manila ropes. One man has dabs of shredded tobacco stuck like a poultice to his still-raw wounds.

Beneath the brush arbor, I ask around and finally locate Vic Glover resting and talking with five other male dancers in one of the tipis. We’ve corresponded via e-mail for the last year, yet until today have never met face-to-face. He introduces me to each of the men and they greet me politely and bring me into their conversation.

After a time, I step outside as they prepare for the day’s fourth and last dance. The dance ensues, and at its conclusion all the young and old spectators, myself included, step outside the arbor’s shade. We stand side by side as the long line of dancers passes slowly. Each dancer looks into our eyes and acknowledges each of us, pausing to purify us with smoldering sage, or grace our shoulders and hands by a touch of their pipes, or stroke us all around with eagle wing fans.

Each dancer, whether pierced or un-pierced, is a person who pledged to dance long ago, then prepared a year or more for these four days of fasting and dancing. And now, after his or her exertions and personal sacrifice, each pointedly blesses each of us.

Then, one dancer looks at me as he touches his pipe and eagle wing to my shoulders, forehead and hips. He says firmly,”Take off your glasses. Don’t wear glasses while you’re being blessed.” I feel a rush of irritability, for no one in the long line of dancers that preceded him complained about my eyeglasses. In an instant, though, I make a decision to treat his words as education rather than insult; I remove my glasses and thank him. He nods and moves on to bless the next person. (Later, I learn that he serves as one of the Sun Dance’s overseers.)

The twisting Cheyenne River runs high and muddy, and the land beyond is a carpet of green from spring rains.

Afterward, Glover invites me to eat at the main camp with the other spectators, though he and other dancers will remain in the tipis at the dance site for four days, fasting and praying and resting between dances. I drive down to the camp beside the Cheyenne River. On a beach in the river bend a sweat lodge has been erected and above it on the meadowed bench of matted grass is a small village of tents and tipis.

The sinking sun lingers, its light falling yellow-green on the small camp and the nearby sandstone cliffs. I walk to the cliffs and examine a wide wall of petroglyphs that have been scored into the sandstone over millennia. Beside this ancient artwork, listening to the children’s laughter in the tipi camp, I place my palm on the glyph of what looks like a mammoth, extinct now for thousands of years.

People continue to pull up in cars and pickups and vans from the dusty gravel track that leads about a mile from the hilltop Sun Dance site. Some crank up their Coleman stoves or campfires, though many converge on the cook tent and brush arbor where a group of women have been preparing food. Kids yell and play and rush around while the adults, from vigorous young to frail elders, laugh and greet one another with smiles and hugs.

Watching such camaraderie with its warm and cheery flavor of a homecoming of relatives — and as welcome as these folks have helped me feel — I still feel strangely shy and a bit overwhelmed so I start my car and steal away.

The next day, I arrive at the dance site in early afternoon, just before the beginning of the third dance. One young man from Glover’s tipi has two new wounds in his chest — the marks of selflessness and sacrifice.

This day’s third dance begins. Men and women dancers move into the circle to the drummers’ and singers’ song. The dance lasts a long time, and though finally the dancers stop, the drummers and singers continue, and one of the ceremony’s overseers brings a tanned buffalo hide to the great tree and unfolds it on the ground.

Now, another young man will be pierced, a fulfillment of his vow to willingly suffer so that his people might be relieved of their afflictions. Sun Dance sponsors and dance leaders Tom and Loretta Cook of Chadron, Neb., lay the volunteer dancer down on the buffalo hide with the help of two other dancers. One of the assistants is the former Army medic, Vic Glover.

We watch from the shade beneath the brush arbor as Tom Cook pierces the man’s chest with a scalpel and inserts bone or hardwood skewers on left and right above his nipples, then ties buffalo hide ropes to the awls. Finally, Glover and Cook help the man to his feet and he begins to dance. The far end of the long rope is looped over a cross bar high on the tree, and two other male dancers take up that end of the rope.

The high cross bar becomes a rough pulley, so that when the men who hold the rope dance away from the tree the rope becomes taut and pulls the pierced dancer’s muscles so tight that they are drawn out from his chest, a great agony. Blood streams down his belly as, arms spread wide, he waves his two eagle wing fans and looks toward the sky and sun, beseeching Tunkashila and praying for his people.

The two dancers opposite the circle pull their rope harder and the man lifts into the air, spinning, hanging by the bone skewers hooked through his chest muscles until finally, from the weight of his suspended body, the two skewers rip through his chest muscles and come free. He spins to the ground where the assistants instantly provide support. For long seconds the man stands, resting shakily with their help.

Gathering himself, he raises his eagle wing fans, spreads his arms and dances around the circle. Cook and Glover go along to attend him, glancing repeatedly at his face as he progresses. As he arrives at each of the four openings in the circle, the pierced dancer turns and raises his arms toward God and the sun.

When the three men finally stop by the great tree, other dancers and members of the dancer’s family approach him, placing hands on him in gratitude and praying for him and for the community. His torn muscles still extend an inch or more through the two holes in his chest, though gradually they will withdraw back within his twin wounds.

In The Pipe and Christ Stotzman wrote,”Some people have great difficulty understanding and appreciating the tearing of flesh that takes place in the Sun Dance. Many cannot understand that there are higher values for which health is to be sacrificed. Modern Christians generally have little appreciation for the early Christian’s eagerness and joy in material penances, persecution, and martyrdom.”

Stolzman interviewed young men who had been pierced and tethered in the Sun Dance. Some told him that they identified”with Christ, asking Him for strengthÖ They gave themselves completely, body and soul, to God in ways they had never done before. They recognized their failings and their weaknesses Ö their limitations and their strengths. They discovered the love they had for their God and their people.”

The hilltop ceremony will last two more days, but in late afternoon I leave for home. At a rocky promontory nearby, I pull off the dusty track, shut off my car’s engine and step outside. My eyes drift down the bouldered scarp to the distant river bottom where, far below, seven huge white pelicans slowly flap along the winding Cheyenne, casting dark shadows on its muddy waters. Beyond, the rim rock mesas glow red and tan and the firmament above shimmers cobalt blue. Far to the north, evening thunderheads are blooming above the Black Hills.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Crawling a Cave

By Don Kopp

Hair thin gypsum strings, a rare formation, wave slightly in a gentle breeze deep within Jewel Cave.

My friend Ken Gartzke and I were on our way to do some exploring inside one of the earth’s greatest caves — Jewel Cave. With more than 160 miles of mapped cave it ranks as the second longest in the world, and it is thought that less than 3 percent has been discovered.

It was a great day to go caving; on the ground it was windy and cold, about 15 degrees. But most caves in the Black hills remain a constant 51 degrees year-round, and the humid air feels warm — unless, of course, you sit around for very long.

Gartzke and I were experienced cavers; not only did we explore wild caves in the Black Hills, we also mapped them, thousands of feet of uncharted passageways and chimneys of various lengths and dimensions. During the early to mid 1970s, Gartzke and I explored Wind Cave. At that time the known cave contained about 50 miles of multi-dimensional passageways, chimneys and vertical descents. Wind Cave is not necessarily a pretty cave with a lot of beautiful formations like Jewel.

Rangers lead regular tours through Jewel Cave, where the temperature remains a constant 49 degrees.

Today Wind Cave is recognized as the fifth-longest cave in the world, with more than 130 miles of known passageways. It is also known as the densest (most passage volume per cubic mile) cave system in the world. I describe crawling around in Wind Cave as being inside a huge sponge made of limestone, definitely not a place where you want to get lost.

Jewel and Wind are barometric caves, meaning they exhale air when the outside air pressure decreases and they inhale when the outside air pressure increases. Total cave volume is estimated by measuring the amount of air the cave exhales when the outside air pressure drops, and inhales when the outside air pressure rises. Thus, 97 percent of all the air moving out of, or into the cave represents areas yet to be explored, since we know how much air volume is contained in the mapped cave area.

Gartzke and I would be exploring with world-renowned cave explorers Herb and Jan Conn. We had been working with”Herby,” as Jan always called him, for several months in Jewel Cave, but were especially excited to be accompanying them on a crawl into Metrecal Cavern, named by Herb because of the four long arduous hours of crawling just to get into Metrecal, a huge beautiful cavern decorated with aragonite crystal. Beyond Metrecal were miles of unexplored cave.

Before starting out for Metrecal, one must first be able to successfully wiggle through test blocks outside the cave. This is to make sure a caver isn’t too big to make the four-hour belly crawl through the infamous”Miseries,” 500 yards of squirming and squeezing through a tiny passageway with an average ceiling height of only 9 inches.

Herb and Jan Conn spent decades exploring Jewel Cave and eventually wrote a book about their discoveries.

The trip from the cave entrance (known as the target room) to where the Miseries starts takes about an hour of scrambling up and over huge masses of breakdown which, over the centuries, came from large portions of the cave ceiling and walls that have collapsed onto the cave floor. Most of this breakdown occurred when water was still actively coursing through the cave passageways. Some of these piles are so large that climbing gear is needed to either climb over or rappel down.

As we climbed up and over, or around and under the never-ending piles of breakdown, we passed through rooms with names like the Delicate Arch Room, and the Humdinger, finally ending up at the Whistle Stop. Because of the huge amounts of air moving into, or out of the cave, places like the Humdinger would make an eerie humming sound, while the Whistle Stop, a small hole coming into the main passageway, would occasionally produce a low sounding whistle. Winds blowing through the Whistle Stop have measured as high as 35 mph.

The easy part of the trip was now over. There would be no more walking or crawling on our knees. We had arrived at the entrance to the Miseries. For the next four hours we crawled on our bellies with the ceiling scraping our backs.

Herb finally announced,”Around this corner and we are out of the Miseries.” With anticipation I wiggled around the corner only to find the tiny crawlway getting smaller and tighter. It dropped down at a steep angle with a very tight turn at the bottom. In order to negotiate the turn, one had to lie on as much of his side as he could so he could make the bend. This was no easy task since the ceiling was just barely high enough to accommodate part of your shoulder. Gartzke was a little bigger than me and I had to push him, while Herby pulled him from the other side until he popped through.

Rescue packs are left at the entrance to Metrecal Cavern in the event of a deep underground emergency.

After taking about 10 minutes to wiggle through, sweat pouring down my dirty face, I said to Herb,”I thought we were out of the Miseries.” He smiled and replied,”Yup, we are now in the Mini-Miseries and that place you just wiggled through is called the Calorie Counter.” It was aptly named since the ceiling height at the counter has been measured at 7 1/2 inches.

We finally emerged from the Mini-Miseries into Metrecal cavern. Metrecal, as I remember, is an average size room about 300 feet from end to end and filled with amazing decorations, some of which are found in no other cave in the world. Some of the more exciting sights in Metrecal are spectacular displays of gypsum and needle crystals. Beards of angel hair drape the walls and ceiling, gently flowing with the air coursing through the room. In a nearby passageway called Wildflower Walk, gypsum flowers grow so profusely from the floor that one has to step carefully to keep from crushing them. Sadly enough, only a handful of cavers a year experience Metrecal because of the difficulty getting there and then, of course, there is only one way to go back.

Dan Austin wriggles through the Funny Little Hole en route to Metrecal Cavern.

Jewel Cave is filled with wondrous decorations, from gypsum beards to bottlebrushes, rare hydromagnesite balloons and huge onyx flukes. And someone who is musically inclined, as Jan Conn is, could actually play a tune on the many flow stone riblets coming off the ceiling and walls. Stalactites, stalagmites, helictites, dogtooth spar and copious amounts of popcorn crystal adorn the walls, ceiling and floor of Jewel. There are ponds of water so crystal clear and still that you will walk right into them if you aren’t paying attention. One room known as King Kong’s Cage is more than 120 feet high, while Shady Acres covers an area of several acres in size. And as Jan said,”It’s always shady there.”

Jewel Cave, besides having regular tours, also offers an”off the path spelunkers tour” for the adventuresome. There is also a candlelight tour that starts from the original cave opening and follows along the first explored portions of the cave. Only physically fit and highly experienced cavers are allowed, for obvious reasons, to venture into the beautiful, surreal world of Metrecal Cavern.

I never returned to Metrecal. My climbing experiences inside Black Hills caves led me to rock climbing in the sunshine. However, my first and only journey into Metrecal is a trip I will forever cherish in my caving memories.

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

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Mount Roosevelt and Friendship Tower

Seth Bullock met Theodore Roosevelt during Roosevelt’s years on a North Dakota Ranch. The two remained friends during his presidency and Roosevelt appointed Bullock U.S. Marshall. Shortly after Roosevelt’s death in 1919, Bullock and the Society of the Black Hills Pioneers built Friendship Tower on what’s now known as Mount Roosevelt as a memorial to his friend. You can find the trailhead leading to the 31-foot tower on the north edge of Deadwood. Head out of town on Highway 85, take a left on Mount Roosevelt Road and follow it for about 2 1/2 miles to the trailhead, parking lot and picnic area. Photos by Ryan Clayton, Rapid City. See more of his work at www.facebook.com/imagesbyryan.

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A Toast to Charlie Collins

By Bob Karolevitz

If South Dakota Irishmen are looking for someone to toast this St. Patrick’s Day, they might consider Charlie Collins, the most irrepressible wearer of the green ever to swing an editorial shillelagh in the territory.

Sioux Indians and Britishers are excused from the party, though, because Collins certainly would never qualify as their most lovable character. Charlie, you understand, was a newspaperman and an unmitigated promoter who wouldn’t have won any prize for veracity or humility. He could stretch the truth like a giant rubber band; and pure, unadulterated blarney was his stock in trade.

He claimed to have established 113 newspapers throughout the West. Not true! He bragged that he had begun the first daily in every territory in the Union except Montana. Not true! What he did do, however, was launch a flamboyant campaign to open the Black Hills to gold miners — Indian treaties be damned! — and as a result he was largely responsible for the heated jurisdictional problem which has nagged Congress, tribal leaders and private citizens ever since.

Born in Ireland in the mid-1830s, Collins gave his age as 35 in 1870 when he appeared in Sioux City as the new owner of the Weekly Times. A natural tub-thumper, he couldn’t wait to tell the world that the Iowa river port on the fringe of Dakota Territory was the ideal outfitting point for the argonauts and other adventurers whom he stirred up with his unrelenting publicity — true or otherwise.

When Father Pierre Jean DeSmet passed through Sioux City in 1871, Collins interviewed him, and the peripatetic priest confirmed the promoter’s belief that the Black Hills would be America’s next great bonanzaland.

With unbounded energy and glowing editorials, he championed the cause of invasion of the treaty forbidden land.

Early in 1872 he organized the Black Hills Mining and Exploring Association of Sioux City with himself as president. It was to become the sponsor of the historic Collins-Russell Expedition (also known as the Gordon Expedition) of 1874, which sneaked into the Hills and established the Gordon Stockade near present-day Custer. Annie Tallent, the first white woman to enter the region, was in the party of 28 — but Charlie Collins stayed safely behind to stir up more gold fever in the columns of the Times.

Meanwhile, unknown to many of his readers, the Irish schemer had another even more grandiose dream. He was an avid member of the Fenian Society, the organization of militant Sons of St. Pat pledged to restore the freedom of Ireland and to bedevil the British wherever and whenever possible.

He envisioned the establishment of an Irish colony on the Missouri across from the mouth of the White River (not far from today’s Chamberlain.) As he told fellow Fenians at a convention in St. Louis, the settlement would become the headquarters for a patriotic army of Irishmen that would invade Canada when the appropriate opportunity came.

In the meantime, Brule City could also be a key part of the Sioux City route to the Hills where miners would switch from steamboats to wagons for the final overland leg of their journey to riches. (Collins just happened to control a major share of the best building lots in the proposed town.)

History tells us, of course, that the wild Irishman’s pipedream to drive the hated British out of the continent was never realized. On the other hand, his persistent efforts to open the Black Hills eventually paid off. Even though the Army removed the”sooners” at the Gordon stockade, he and other boomers kept the pressure on until the military and the federal government simply gave up and permitted the tidal wave of incursion to begin.

Collins himself didn’t immediately join the Gold Rush of ’76. Instead he went to the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that year with a plan for escorting European visitors on a tour, which included Sioux City, Brule City and the Black Hills. No doubt he also was hoping for lots of Irish recruits in the process.

That was another idea that fell through, though, and Collins returned to the Midwest, acquired another printing outfit (he had sold the Times before he went East) and followed the crowd to Deadwood Gulch where he established the Black Hills Champion at Central City.

Inveterate promoter that he was, he soon came out with The History and Directory of the Black Hills, the first book published in the gold country. Strangely, though, the opening of the Dakota El Dorado seemed to come as an anti-climax for him. Could it have been that the challenge meant more to him than the realization?

After brief appearances in Sturgis and Bison, he turned again to his ultimate dream in Brule City. With renewed fervor, he left the Hills and announced plans for the publication of the Brule City Times. In typical fashion, Collins issued an advance prospectus, proclaiming that the Times would begin with a million copies in its first issue — the largest paper in the United States or Europe!

How he proposed to achieve such a volume production with the limited and generally crude equipment of the era apparently was known only to the garrulous publisher himself. The same was true of the 125,000 firm subscription orders he purported to have in hand.

Needless to say, his gigantic bubble finally burst. The Times, with a limited circulation, existed only briefly. The Irish Army never materialized, and Collins set off for California, where it is said that he made a fortune in real estate ventures before fading into the cobwebs of history.

As it turned out, Charlie Collins doesn’t exactly go down in the history books as one of South Dakota’s greatest citizens. But — sure and begorra! — when the Irishmen among us raise their glasses this March 17, his memory might just be a good excuse for an extra tipple or two.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March 1986 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.