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Stopping the Green Glacier

By John Andrews

Cedar tree encroachment is becoming a problem in the Missouri River valley, choking out native species and reducing available forage for cattle.

WE STOOD HIGH ATOP a ridge on Rich and Sara Grim’s ranch in Gregory County. The Missouri River below looked like a wide blue ribbon stretching from horizon to horizon. A gentle northwest breeze made the afternoon’s 91 degrees feel like 75. Cattle stood on a point along the river munching prairie grass, surrounded by the remnants of a thick grove of cedar trees.

“My nemesis,” Sara Grim said as she grabbed the soft branch of a cedar and began picking at its prickly needles.

She’s not the only rancher who’s grown to despise these hardy trees. Landowners along the Missouri River — especially in the four south central counties of Gregory, Charles Mix, Lyman and Brule — have slowly watched valuable pastureland succumb to eastern redcedars, which have fruitfully multiplied for decades, marching steadily north from Texas, through Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, and now South Dakota. Farmers and ranchers in those southern states have long fought a losing battle against cedars, but many experts see South Dakota as the cedar frontier, the place where maybe the encroachment can finally be stopped. But to do so, landowners are having to get out of their comfort zones and reclaim acres through a force we’ve all been taught to fear — fire.

*****

HOMESTEADERS WHO POPULATED the central Plains in the 1800s were awestruck by the lack of trees. But in ravines and other protected areas stood eastern redcedars. A member of the juniper family, eastern redcedars are native to much of the eastern United States. In poor soil, they may never grow larger than a bush, but under ideal conditions they can reach 30 or 40 feet.

Sara Grim has become a staunch supporter of prescribed burning to control cedar tree encroachment.

They are drought tolerant and among the most important windbreak species on the Plains, qualities that eventually made cedars ideal for planting in shelterbelts. They can also reproduce prolifically, thanks to the birds and other small animals that ingest the tiny blue berries that sprout from a cedar’s branches. Studies have shown that the seeds pass through a bird’s digestive tract in 30 minutes, leading trees to sprout near their parent trees or along fence lines where birds might perch. Years of unchecked reproduction have led to cedar groves with canopies so thick that no vegetation can grow beneath. That decrease in forage worries cattle ranchers.

Sean Kelly, a South Dakota State University Extension Range Management Field Specialist based in Winner, says that every 1 percent increase in tree cover leads to a 1 percent loss in forage production.”It’s just a slow green glacier moving north,” Kelly says.”You see one or two out there in your pasture, and then five years later it’s 15 or 20. Before you know it, you’re trying to catch up and stay ahead of the curve. It’s hard for a rancher to stay in business very long if all they have is cedar forest and no grazing opportunities. And it can really start to snowball. If you’re not adjusting your stocking rates accordingly, it starts to spiral.”

Landowners began to act in 2011 when Doug Feltman asked the Natural Resources Conservation Service to survey his ranch south of Chamberlain to determine the impact of cedar trees. Using a series of five photographs of a north facing slope taken between 1981 and 2011, researchers determined that an area that once supported 10 cows could now barely support three. Feltman’s productive potential had decreased 70 percent due to cedar encroachment.

The NRCS then looked at neighboring Gregory County. Through aerial photography, maps, GPS and field work, researchers confirmed that 30 percent of the county was covered with a heavy to medium encroachment of cedar trees, judging by average trunk diameters.

A survey of 109 Gregory County landowners revealed that 80 percent were concerned about cedar encroachment. It also indicated that they were interested in learning more about prescribed burning.”Fire is the most economical way of controlling cedars, especially if you don’t have thick encroachment yet,” Kelly says.”When it was Native Americans and buffalo out here, natural wildfires kept invasive species like this at bay. Without that element of fire, they’ve been able to take over and keep spreading. That’s why we’re trying to reintroduce prescribed fire.”

Members of the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association create a fire line to help keep a burn under control.

After a series of meetings that began in the spring of 2012, the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association (MMRPBA) was officially incorporated in 2016. The organization is landowner-driven and governed by a seven-member board, all of whom own land within its four-county coverage area. Integrating guidelines from several government agencies and university experts, the association established a lengthy and detailed protocol that dictates precisely when and how they will initiate a burn.

“It’s a 15-page burn plan,” says Kelly, who also serves as vice president of the MMRPBA.”On a new burn unit, it’s easily a yearlong process.”

Every burn begins with an initial meeting between one or two board members and the landowner, who also must join the association and attend a prescribed burn on another member’s property before receiving burn services on his or her ranch. The group conducts four or five field visits throughout the year to determine the severity of cedar encroachment and identify other factors that will affect a potential burn: Where can they create fire breaks? Is any shearing needed? Are there hazards, such as power lines? Can safe escape routes be planned?

Once those questions are answered, work begins on the ignition plan. They determine how large the crew should be and what equipment will be needed. If possible, they try to incorporate one or two other landowners to utilize natural fire breaks. If a burn is planned all the way to the river, they work with the Department of Game, Fish and Parks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Then it’s a matter of waiting for the right weather. Kelly says they generally follow the 80-20-20 rule, which calls for temperatures no hotter than 80 degrees, at least 20 percent humidity and wind under 20 miles an hour. Those parameters mean that March, April and May are prime burning months, followed by a few opportunities in the fall.

After years of preparing, perfect weather arrived in April of 2016. The association was ready for its first prescribed burn on the Grim ranch.

*****

SARA GRIM WAS A girl on horseback, helping her father move cattle through the river breaks of the family ranch. When they came to a grove of cedars, she got off and led the horse through. That’s when a cedar branch caught on the saddle horn and broke the latigo.

“Now that’s a memory,” she laughs.”I haven’t thought about that in years. I don’t remember how he dealt with that. We had bad cedar trees back then and the cattle would get in them. It was hard to get them out; we had to crawl or lead the horse through. My father was noticing a problem with cedar trees, but nobody knew what to do. We all hoped it would just go away on its own, but it didn’t.”

An aerial photograph shows the darkened patches of the Grim ranch treated by prescribed burn in May of 2023.

Grim’s grandfather, William Sutton, arrived on this patch of land in 1929. He was working for the Yeoman Mutual Life Insurance Company, which had ended up with the ranch after its original owners, the Jackson brothers (also owners of the vast Mulehead Ranch), went under. Sutton came from Iowa and within a couple years purchased the ranch from the insurance company. His ranch brand became the Y-S, for Yeoman and Sutton.

When Grim’s father Billie Sutton, a popular local politician, died in a farm accident in 1982, Grim and her brother came home to help their mother manage the ranch. Eventually they decided to split it in half. Grim and her husband work about 3,600 acres of rough river break country mostly dedicated to cattle that have slowly seen their grass get choked out by cedars.

About 10 years ago, the Grims began working with David Steffen, a retired NRCS employee living in Burke, on a Conservation Stewardship Program that focused on grassland management. The program included the idea of cedar control through burning.

Grim was still working in the county treasurer’s office, where she spent 27 years.”One day, Dave came into the courthouse and said, ëSara, what are we going to do about this green glacier?'” she recalls. He had brought an overlay showing the cedar encroachment in Gregory County. The Grims had helped develop the county landowner survey along with Steffen and were interested in prescribed burning, so they got involved.

They quickly learned that education is paramount.”I’ve talked to so many people who are just unaware. They look at those trees growing in the river hills, and they think it’s beautiful, but there’s nothing growing underneath. There’s no grass, no feed, and we’re losing ground.”

The association identified a section of the Grim ranch and formulated a burn plan. The Grims participated in a few controlled burns with local fire departments to prepare.”They were small experimental burns, and we were scared out of our minds,” she says.”I didn’t sleep for a week. It was very scary. For years if anyone saw a fire you put it out.”

But when they dropped the match on that April day, the association was in complete control. Flames roared and smoke billowed high into the sky. When it was all over, 340 acres of thick cedar forest had burned. Just as importantly, the blaze sparked confidence in the volunteers who were learning to manage such a destructive force.”You have to respect it, but you don’t have to fear it like you used to,” Grim says.

*****

PETE BAUMAN HAS been helping people get comfortable with fire for nearly 25 years. When he began, the focus was on using fire to help manage land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. After he started working for SDSU in 2012, his efforts shifted to working with multiple organizations on creating classes where landowners could be introduced to fire.

Cedars produce thousands of berries that are dispersed by birds and other animals.

“There was just this general idea that South Dakotans had a fear of fire,” Bauman says.”But over the years, it became very clear that people didn’t have a fear of fire, they had a disconnect with fire. There was no innate fear. It was more like we forgot how to understand it.”

Bauman says the prairie evolved with three things: fire, grazing and climate. Indigenous people recognized the value of fires and ignited them to stimulate the regrowth of native grasses that would, in turn, attract the great bison herds.”It’s nature’s wonderful reset button,” Bauman says.”Healthy prairies really are not damaged by fire at any time of the year because native plants come back. Fire stimulates native plant growth, it recycles nutrients, it definitely stimulates total production, seed production and seed viability. Pollinator plants thrive post-fire, which then creates insect habitat. They utilize that smorgasbord of nectar that’s been created. When that all functions well, you’ve got the foraging animals. Those benefits just build up the line. It’s when we throw exotic species into the mix that makes the timing of fire so much more important.”

He says the goals of fire today are to control, reduce or eliminate exotic species like brome, bluegrass, Canada thistle and sweet clover.”Now we have to look at fire as a specific tool that has to do with timing, intensity and duration, very much like grazing. We have to apply fire not as a hammer but sometimes as a scalpel and understand what the objective is of each individual fire, and that’s different than it would have been 250 years ago.”

For the past three years, landowners have received hands-on training at fire schools that Bauman has supervised throughout eastern South Dakota. Bauman serves as the”burn boss” while attendees assume other leadership roles that a prescribed burn would require.”The coolest thing about prescribed fire is we’re in control,” he says.”We don’t ever have to drop the match. From the moment we start to the moment we stop, it’s about control, control, control, which makes the fire the tool. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. Our mantra is that we want you to be bored on your fire. If you’re bored, your fire is doing exactly what it should do. We don’t want the amped up, excited chaos associated with fire response. We want clear thinking, well planned, well executed, boring fires.”

However, Bauman says a boring fire isn’t enough for cedar infestations.”What those folks need to do to save their ranches requires a higher level of risk and coordination and fire intensity,” Bauman says.”The schools that we do help lay the foundation for those folks to build their skills, because it’s a different kind of fire. If you have a boring fire trying to kill cedar trees, you’re probably not going to kill many trees.”

*****

WE SPENT TWO HOURS traversing the vast Grim ranch by UTV. The gray skeletons of cedars burned in that first fire in 2016 are finally beginning to fall. Charred trunks and trees that sport splashes of brown amongst the green branches show evidence of the 530-acre burn they held on their West River pasture in May of 2023.

Native plants such as snow-on-the-mountain have begun to re-emerge on patches of land treated by prescribed fire.

“Oh, look at that switchgrass,” Sara Grim said, stopping the side-by-side so we could examine the new shoots already emerging, just three months after their most recent burn. Big bluestem waved in the breeze. The white flowers of snow-on-the-mountain contrasted against the blackened trunks of cedars that will eventually topple over.

That spring burn had been planned for seven years. In the meantime, the MMRPBA has kept busy with other fires. The group burned 688 acres in 2017, 271 acres in 2018 and 314 acres in 2020. Covid, drought and other hiccups put a hold on burning for a few years, but in 2023 they rebounded by burning roughly 6,000 acres. There are 10,940 acres on the books for prescribed burning in 2024.

Grim’s ranch is very near the heart of South Dakota’s cedar encroachment, but Kelly says the spread is evident, especially along the Little White River in Todd and Mellette counties and the Cheyenne and James River valleys. Its leading edge seems to be along Interstate 90, where groups are already experimenting with prescribed burns and working to form burn associations.

Sheldon Fletcher, with the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s Environmental Protection Office, has begun holding meetings and oversaw a 30-acre prescribed burn after traveling to watch the MMRPBA in action. Rod Voss, a Rangeland Management Specialist for NRCS based out of Mitchell, has helped with two prescribed burns along the James River.”We’re at a stage here where it would be fairly easy to stop if we can just get our people educated,” Voss says.”A lot of people are recognizing the production impacts, but it’s a hard thing to educate people that a tree can be a bad thing. Out here on the prairie, people like their trees, but a tree in the wrong place is simply a weed.”

That’s something the ranchers of south central South Dakota know all too well. Kelly hopes people in other parts of the state begin to see the benefits of fighting with fire.”It’s not an easy sell, especially in some of these areas where the encroachment is just starting and they’re not really sure if it’s a problem that’s worth spending any time on yet,” he says.”I can understand that, but if you don’t believe me come down and take a look at Gregory County, because this is what you might look like in 40 or 50 years. We’ve got a real opportunity to stop it.”

If they succeed, then South Dakota can be something that Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska could not: the cedar’s final frontier.

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

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Before the Oasis

By John Andrews

It seems that whenever East River friends plan a trip to the Black Hills, they are obliged to take a break from the I-90 monotony at Al’s Oasis in Oacoma. Al’s is a historic business that we’ll write more about when this series gets to Lyman County. But travelers could just as easily stop at Chamberlain, on the east side of the Missouri River. Or Kimball. Or Pukwana. In fact, you could spend a few hours exploring Brule County, home to lawnmower races, popcorn balls and biological and geological diversity found in few other places.

Let’s start in Kimball, the first city you reach on eastbound I-90. Most South Dakotans might know the place as home to the Original Kimball Popcorn Ball, which humbly began in a local gas station. Over the years, they got more and more requests to mail the balls out of town. After a lot of research, David Olson and his partners in popcorn, business owners Eric Pulse, Lee Pulse and Scott Handel, decided to take the risk. In August of 2009, they sold their first popcorn balls from their new factory, a small building that was once a convenience store.

Kimball’s popcorn balls began humbly, but are now sold throughout the Midwest.

Because of the company’s size, production is done on a relatively small scale, with plenty of human involvement. They pop corn daily in a 48-ounce popper, averaging 50-60 batches a day. Each batch makes 47 or 48 balls. The marshmallow slurry used to bind the balls doesn’t pour easily into a hopper, so workers load the factory’s popcorn ball machine by hand to create 4-ounce popcorn balls that are sold in stores throughout South Dakota and several other states.

The residents of Kimball also eat well at the Back Forty, a coffee house, restaurant and bar where Keke Leiferman gives traditional sandwiches a gourmet twist. You can also explore the South Dakota Tractor Museum, a campus that includes old machinery and other pioneer tools.

Keke Leiferman serves sandwiches and other treats at the Back 40.

About 10 miles further west on the north side of the interstate is Pukwana, famous for its lawnmower races held every other Saturday night during the summer. The races got their start more than 10 years ago, when locals watched a lawnmower competition on ESPN. They laid out a track next to the Puk-U Bar and Grill, added bleachers and hay bales and had their own race.

Mowers are divided into three classes: stock, modified and outlaw. Races draw dozens of drivers and hundreds of spectators to Pukwana from May to September.

Take a break from I-90 and head south out of Pukwana on Highway 50 to the Bijou Hills. Capped with quartzite and containing unique fossils and fauna, the hills have been explored by biologists, archaeologists and naturalists. The hills jut 400 feet above surrounding corn and hay fields. Cattle keep the grass low, showing some of the quartzite exposed 10,000 years ago by melting snow from the last glacier.

Every other Saturday night during summer is lawnmower racing night in Pukwana.

Tens of centuries later, the towns of Granville, Eagle and Bijou Hills were started below the hills. Now, only the latter survives. Bijou Hills had just three residents when we visited in 2007 — Wayne and Pat Surat and Wayne’s mother, Ruth.”Somebody will drive by here in 40 years and it will be a cornfield,” said Wayne.”I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s just the way it is.”

Two hundred years ago, the hills were on a route for migratory buffalo. Because of them, the Dakota Indians also became frequent visitors, building ceremonial pillars on the hilltops and fashioning arrows and other tools from the quartzite.

White explorers were attracted to the prairie promontories, beginning with French traders and continuing with Lewis and Clark, John Fremont and artist George Catlin, who collected stone samples and was enthralled by the area’s antelope, buffalo and prairie dogs in 1832.

Catlin called the hills by their current name, which has been traced to French fur trader Louis Bissonet, known in his native St. Louis as”Mr. Bijou.” Bissonet operated a post by the river in 1812 and traded with the Dakota Indians and white trappers.

The Bijou Hills are a geologic and social curiosity in southern Brule County.

In the 1880s, homesteaders moved in. Their farmsteads soon circled the base of the hills, but even so, all the towns but Bijou Hills quickly declined.

Natural disasters included the usual grasshopper plagues, fires and tornadoes. A gravestone in the nearby Union Cemetery memorializes the destruction of May 27, 1899, when a twister struck the Peterson farmstead, killing the father and six of his eight children. Neighbors rushed to the scene and found Mrs. Peterson in a muddy field, dazed and badly injured. At first sight, they thought she was an animal of some sort. Eleven-year-old Earl was found a half-mile away, also alive but pinned in mud by a stick that had driven through his clothing. Another son, Alvah, had ducked in the storm cellar and survived the storm while crouched in the dark hole with a big bull snake.

Another search had a sad ending. Harvey Burr disappeared from his farm near town in November of 1951. His bloodied body was found days later in a haystack. Burr’s murderer, a young man from Mitchell, was a distant relative who had kidnapped and raped a country schoolteacher, and then abducted and killed Burr and wrote checks on his bank account. Though it happened over 60 years ago, old timers in the hills remember every detail.

Red Lake was designated a National Natural Landmark because of its waterfowl habitat.

The Bijou Hills have the distinction of being one of 13 sites in South Dakota that have been designated National Natural Landmarks. The federal program highlights places that feature unique biological and geological diversity. Another landmark — Red Lake — can be found in Brule County just south of Pukwana. The shallow pond was added to the list because of its waterfowl nesting and breeding areas.

Head back to the interstate and drive west into Chamberlain, a city that has embraced its proximity to the Missouri River with summertime speedboat races. You’ll also find the South Dakota Hall of Fame not far from the river. The Hall was established in 1974 and for years was housed in an old log cabin in Fort Pierre. The grand museum in Chamberlain was finished in 2000. More than 500 South Dakotans have been enshrined.

The Akta Lakota Museum houses art and artifacts celebrating Lakota culture.

Another unique repository of culture is the Akta Lakota Museum, and arm of the nearby St. Joseph’s Indian School. The museum’s collection features art, artifacts and educational displays that depict the heritage of the Lakota people. Though Brule County contains no reservation land, the Crow Creek Reservation lies just across the border to the north and the Lower Brule Reservation is across the river to the northwest. Upon its creation in 1875, the county was named for the Brule, or Burned Thigh, band of Teton Sioux.

Now that your exploration of Brule County is over, you can cross the river on the historic Chamberlain Bridge, originally finished in 1925 to carry traffic on old Highway 16. When the new Fort Randall Dam created Lake Francis Case in 1953, the old Wheeler Bridge was floated upriver and the two were joined to span the wide, new lake. A more modern bridge a mile to the south follows the main path of Interstate 90.

You can still stop at Al’s Oasis, just across the river. No trip across South Dakota would be complete without it. Maybe you can talk about the things you found in Brule County over a cup of coffee. I hear it’s good and cheap.

Editor’s Note: This is the 12th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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South Dakota Road Adventures

By Katie Hunhoff

We have a feature in our current South Dakota Magazine (July/August) on traveling Old Highway 16. At first I wanted to title it “Highway 16: The Perfect S.D. Road Trip” but my fellow editors talked me out of that. It sounds like the perfect road trip to me, but probably isn’t for those who don’t want to go off-roading for a few miles here or there. Our photographer nearly collided with a longhorn cow in Haakon County.

Luckily, we have several other summer travel recommendations for those who like their roads more civilized. Here are some basic recommendations for road-tripping 16, and a few other highlights from our summer travel issue.

Highway 16 covers a 400-mile stretch between our east and west borders, connecting Sioux Falls with Rapid City and several smaller communities along the way. It was part of a 1,600-mile passage between Detroit and Yellowstone National Park that was linked nearly a century ago. A group formed in 1919 to promote the journey in South Dakota, which intersected at times with Highways 14 and 20.

Take time to travel the back roads that are now Highway 16 and you’ll find many remnants of its heyday, including places that made the transition to Interstate 90 such as Wall Drug, the Pioneer Auto Show in Murdo and Reptile Gardens. There are also some great restaurants, like Al’s Oasis, Hutch’s in Presho and the Back 40 near Kimball, a renovated Highway 16 gas station.

For a complete guide to 16, see our July/August issue. Or, like the article’s author, you can play it by ear and see if you can piece together the old roadway on your own. Old 16 enters South Dakota from Minnesota as 262nd Street at Valley Springs, just east of Sioux Falls. The highway is easier to find on the other side of the state because it is still known as U.S. Highway 16.

Our current issue also highlights our state’s 13 National Natural Landmarks, any of which would make a great summer road trip. The U.S. Interior Department began the program in 1962 to highlight our country’s biological and geological diversity. “The sites help tell the story of our nation’s natural heritage through representations of different features,” says Heather Eggleston, a regional National Natural Landmark coordinator. “Those included in the program are the best examples of those features still in existence.”

South Dakotas 13 designations include glacial lakes and sloughs, timeworn buttes and prehistoric rock. Some of the 13 landmarks are well known, such as Bear Butte, and others were a surprise even to our staff, such as Red Lake (Brule County), Buffalo Slough (Lake County) and Snake Butte (Jackson County).

Snake Butte is 23 miles south of Interior on the Pine Ridge Reservation. It features one of the world’s best collections of sand calcite crystals. In fact, South Dakota is one of only a few places on the globe where the crystals are found. They form when water containing dissolved calcite seeps through sand beds. Over time, the calcite forms crystals that surround the sand, between 15 to 20 inches in length. The butte is located in a beautiful sloping and wide-open area of the Pine Ridge, which is worth the drive itself.

South Dakota sweeping landscapes, amazing geological diversity and friendly communities make it an ideal place to get on the road and see what adventures you’ll find. We hope our summer road recommendations inspire you to hit the road — but if it’s Highway 16, be sure to yield to the longhorn cattle.

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One Man Towns

By Katie Hunhoff

Some Black Hills tourist promoters began to market Trojan as a ghost town in 1959, ignoring the fact that Alvin Carlson still lived there. Trojan was once a prosperous Black Hills mining town that lost population due to mine consolidations. Most residents moved to Deadwood or Lead to work for Homestake.

When Trojan was declared a ghost town, travelers began to stop and take photos. Some even walked into Carlson’s house without knocking. “I went down to the Chamber of Commerce and told those people if they didn’t stop tellin’ folks this was ghost town that this old ghost was gonna start shootin’ at a few people,” Carlson told a South Dakota Magazine writer in 1999. “They’d come in here with out of state license plates, walk in, snoop through my stuff and just take it. I come unglued when people take my stuff and that’s when I decided to move it back down the road a ways.”

Yes, in the 1970s, Carlson did just that: he moved the town’s buildings to a spot less than a mile away. He and his brother-in-law used a heavy-duty truck and a cable and dolly system to jack up each structure.

Trojan held almost all of Carlson’s memories. He went to school there, made friends there, married and worked there. Even without the people who made the memories, Trojan was still his home. But in 1998, Wharf Mining Company purchased the land under Trojan’s new town site. At age 74, he wasn’t up to the task of relocating the town a second time.

Several other South Dakota towns are one-man or one-house towns. Pat and Wayne Surat are the only residents left in the southeastern South Dakota town of Bijou Hills. It, like Trojan, was once a booming town home to a bank, newspaper, blacksmith shop, Ford dealership, soda fountain, churches and a grocery store. Unlike the slow decline suffered by most towns, Bijou Hills disappeared a building at a time because an eccentric farmer from nearby Academy bought them and moved them onto his farm. So although the Surats still live in town, the rest of the town has moved except for their house, Wayne’s mother’s house and a church.

Philip O’Connor, the last man living in the small town of Capa, was interviewed in 2009 for a BBC documentary about the Dirty Thirties. A crew arrived to film the town’s remaining buildings: a hotel, a barn, some houses, a school and church. The town was brought to life in 1906 when the railroad reached town. The Capa Hotel piped in mineral water from a nearby artesian well and became well known for its mineral bath treatments. The Great Depression greatly contributed to the town’s demise. Phil lives in the house his grandparents and parents occupied. He taught school for two decades in the surrounding counties.

What motivates a man or a woman to stay in a town long after the other people, and maybe even the buildings, of the past are gone? Perhaps Carlson said it best when he contemplated moving from Trojan: “I could go to Florida or Alabama where I have family, but it’s too hot down there,” he said. “I’m only satisfied here. As soon as I get to Boulder Canyon I start to feel better. The closer I come to Trojan the better I feel. I’ll find a place in the hills not too far away.”

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The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball

By Laura Johnson Andrews

If you’ve ever fished a round, hard popcorn ball out of the bottom of your Halloween treat bag, you’ll marvel at the popcorn treats produced in Kimball. The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball is soft and easy to pull apart, sweet but not sticky. (It is possible, for example, to jam a bunch of kernels in one’s mouth while typing and not worry about gumming up one’s keyboard.) David Olson, general manager and part owner of The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball, LLC, says the secret is in the slurry.”Most popcorn balls are made of more of a sugar-water slurry. Our popcorn balls use a soft, slightly sweet marshmallow blend.”

Kimball’s journey on the road to sweet success started when a few locals began selling popcorn balls out of a local gas station. Over the years, they got more and more requests to mail the balls out of town.”Finally, we got a call from a gal in Utah or Nevada. She had an ill family member in the hospital. She asked, ‘What can I get for you?’ and the person requested our Kimball popcorn ball. We felt that was a sign from above that we should get the courage and try to pursue this thing,” said David Olson, general manager and part owner of The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball, LLC.

After a lot of research, Olson and his partners in popcorn, business owners Eric Pulse, Lee Pulse and Scott Handel, decided to take the risk. In August of 2009, they sold their first popcorn balls from their new factory, a small building that was once a convenience store.

The little factory has five part-time employees, but because the owners believe in buying local, Kimball’s treat has a broader impact.”We try to involve as many people as we can,” Olson said. Lakota Foods provides the popcorn, Fatland Honey flavors the honey popcorn ball, and the butter’s bought in bulk at the local grocery store. Even the gas flush, which pushes oxygen out of the packaging to keep the popcorn balls fresh, is procured from the local gas supply company.”We’re just trying to be an important part of Kimball and of the state of South Dakota,” Olson said.

Because of the company’s size, production is done on a relatively small scale, with plenty of human involvement. They pop corn daily in a 48 oz. popper, averaging 50-60 batches a day. Each batch makes 47 or 48 balls. The marshmallow slurry used to bind the balls doesn’t pour easily into a hopper, so workers load the factory’s popcorn ball machine by hand to create 4 oz. popcorn balls in two flavors: original and honey. A new flavor, caramel, should be available in 3 or 4 weeks.

Kimball popcorn balls are available at retail locations in 20 different states and on their website, www.kimballpopcornball.com. The owners are currently investigating the possibility of selling internationally, and hope to someday expand their business to offer smaller popcorn balls.”That is something that some of the big, big buyers want,” Olson said.

One of the biggest obstacles to Kimball’s domination of the popcorn ball world is the perception that popcorn balls are just for Halloween and Christmas. Olson said,”We’re trying to get rid of the bias that popcorn balls are a seasonal item. That’s been a tremendous hurdle to overcome.” But the determined folks in Kimball can do it. It just takes time, hard work, hometown pride and a lot of marshmallow slurry.

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The Winds of Destruction

By Katie Hunhoff

Sharon Weron was riding a horse home from a neighboring farm near Bowdle in 1955 when she got caught in the middle of a tornado. She heard a noise like an oncoming train and her horse began to run in panic.

Sharon doesn’t remember much after that, but neighbors reported that the tornado lifted Sharon and the horse off the ground and she was found in a ditch one thousand feet away. She was remarkably unharmed, except for some bruises and swollen ears, but she didn’t speak for several days. The horse survived, too, and both were fast celebrities. News people came from across the country to write the story. Sharon even became the star of a film that re-enacted her wild ride for a British cable TV channel. “It’s shown every tornado season,” she told South Dakota Magazine a few years ago.

Sharon’s impromptu tornado ride also garnered her the bragging rights for being transported the longest distance by a tornado by the Guinness Book of World Records. That lasted until 2006 when a teenage boy in Missouri was sucked out of a mobile home and propelled over 1,300 feet.

Tornadoes are not far from most South Dakotans’ minds whenever our summer days turn dark. On average there are 28 tornados per year in our state. The most tornadoes reported in a single day happened on June 24, 2003 when 67 funnels blew across our prairies in an eight-hour period. South Dakotans remember the record-breaking day as Tornado Tuesday.

The Fujita scale estimates the strength of a tornado based on damage wreaked by the storm. Most of the tornadoes that day in 2003 were weak, ranking as F0 to F1 on the F0-F5 scale. But one registered as an F4 and demolished Manchester, a tiny Kingsbury County town. Luckily there were no casualties.

Another storm in 1992 hit the tiny town of Chester. Citizens were evacuated for 19 hours after a tornado with winds measuring 113 and 157 mph damaged infrastructure, including a 12,000-gallon ammonia tank. Residents returned home after the gas dissipated.

The devastating May 1998 twister that leveled the town of Spencer and killed six people was one of the deadliest our state has endured. One hundred and fifty people were injured.

A June 17, 1944 Wilmot tornado claimed 8 lives, and injured 43. That storm is not listed on official records but is the deadliest in South Dakota history.

Seven died, all in the same home, on May 27, 1899 near Bijou Hills. A twister struck the Peterson farm, killing the father and six of the eight Peterson children. Neighbors rushed to help and found Mrs. Peterson in a muddy field, confused and injured. At first sight, rescuers thought she was an animal of some sort. Eleven-year-old Earl Peterson was found a half-mile away, alive but pinned in mud by a stick that had pierced through his clothing. Another son, Alvah, survived by seeking shelter in the storm cellar, huddling alongside a huge bull snake.

The editor of the Chamberlain Register wrote that seeing the wagons loaded with coffins on the day of the Peterson funerals “made even the most hardened persons contemplate the uncertainty of life, and the certainty of death” in South Dakota.

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The Everlasting Bijou Hills

Story and Photography by Bernie Hunhoff

Midway between Chamberlain and Platte, the Bijou Hills rise 400 feet above the prairie.

Three square miles of hills make just another landscape in western South Dakota and in many locales around the United States, but the Bijou Hills are a geologic and social curiosity on the flatlands east of the Missouri River in Brule County.

Capped with quartzite and containing unique fossils and fauna, the hills have been explored by biologists, archaeologists and naturalists. Adventure and drama have also visited the Bijou Hills — specifically a kidnapping, murder, bank robbery (if retrieving your own money is a crime) and other craziness.

The hills jut 400 feet above surrounding corn and hay fields. Cattle keep the grass low, showing some of the quartzite exposed 10,000 years ago by melting snow from the last glacier.

Tens of centuries later, the towns of Granville, Eagle and Bijou Hills were started below the hills. Now, only the latter survives. Bijou Hills had just three residents when we visited in 2007 — Wayne and Pat Surat and Wayne’s mother, Ruth.”Somebody will drive by here in 40 years and it will be a cornfield,” said Wayne.”I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s just the way it is.”

He knows Bijou history well enough to understand that change is a surety. Two hundred years ago, the hills were on a route for migratory buffalo. Because of them, the Dakota Indians also became frequent visitors, building ceremonial pillars on the hilltops and fashioning arrows and other tools from the quartzite.

White explorers were naturally attracted to the prairie promontories, beginning with French traders and continuing with Lewis and Clark, John Fremont and artist George Catlin, who collected stone samples and was enthralled by the area’s antelope, buffalo and prairie dogs in 1832.

Catlin called the hills by their current name, which has been traced to French fur trader Louis Bissonet, known in his native St. Louis as”Mr. Bijou.” Bissonet operated a post by the river in 1812 and traded with the Dakota Indians and white trappers.

Ruth Surat, Bijou Hills’ historian.

In the 1880s, homesteaders moved in. Their farmsteads soon circled the base of the hills, but even so, all the towns but Bijou Hills quickly declined.”The heyday for Bijou Hills was in the 1920s before the bank closed,” remembered Ruth Surat, Wayne’s mother, who moved there at the age of three when her mother bought the store. Photographs in her family album show a town that looked like an Old West movie set with horses, wagons and humble wood storefronts. Well versed in local lore, she even recalled old-timers who talked of Custer and his Seventh Cavalry visiting the region in 1873.

Mrs. Surat had lived the town’s history.”On Wednesday and Saturday nights you could hardly park your car on Main Street. The barber had to hire another barber in the pool hall to keep up,” she said. Her brother, Floyd Houska, ran the city bar.”He had to break up fights every once in a while.”

Natural disasters included the usual grasshopper plagues, fires and tornadoes. A gravestone in the nearby Union Cemetery memorializes the destruction of May 27, 1899, when a twister struck the Peterson farmstead, killing the father and six of his eight children. Neighbors rushed to the scene and found Mrs. Peterson in a muddy field, dazed and badly injured. At first sight, they thought she was an animal of some sort. Eleven-year-old Earl was found a half-mile away, also alive but pinned in mud by a stick that had driven through his clothing. Another son, Alvah, had ducked in the storm cellar and survived the storm while crouched in the dark hole with a big bull snake.

A few days later, the editor of the Chamberlain Register wrote that the sight of two wagonloads of coffins parked by the undertaker’s establishment,”made even the most hardened persons contemplate the uncertainty of life, and the certainty of death.”

Tragedy has visited the hill country throughout white man’s recorded history. Dozens of families lost their life savings when the Bijou Hills bank closed in 1926. Mrs. Surat told us one man made a final withdrawal.”He took a gun and went to the bank and said ‘It’s either you or my money,'” she said.”He got his money but nobody else did.”

She also remembered the day her elderly grandmother became lost in a snowstorm in the Bijou Hills.”The whole town went out after dark looking for her. Everyone turned our lights on so she might see them. All she was wearing was a light sweater, and we thought she probably walked up into the hills. When you get in the hills in a storm you can’t see anything.” The searchers couldn’t find Grandma Novak, but later that evening she walked in the front door of her own house. She said the fuss over her absence was”greatly inflated.”

Another search had a sad ending. Harvey Burr disappeared from his farm near town in November of 1951. His bloodied body was found days later in a haystack. Burr’s murderer, a young man from Mitchell, was a distant relative who had kidnapped and raped a country schoolteacher, and then abducted and killed Burr and wrote checks on his bank account. Though it happened over 60 years ago, old timers in the hills remember every detail.

Bijou Hills residents Pat and Wayne Surat started their own vineyard.

Crimes, hard times and disasters hardly define the day-to-day history of the hills, however. As a kid growing up in the town of Bijou Hills, Wayne Surat remembers rabbit hunts, ball games, picnics and sledding. He moved to the West Coast and married Pat, a Californian, but they returned in 1969 to raise their family even though the town was rapidly losing its population. Unlike the slow decline suffered by most towns, Bijou Hills disappeared a house at a time because an eccentric farmer from Academy bought them and moved them to his farm.”He even bought the church parsonage,” Wayne said.”He put them up on blocks and they were all rotting out there and falling down the last I saw of them.”

When we visited in 2007, the town consisted of Ruth’s house, Wayne and Pat’s place and the long-closed Bijou Hills Congregational Church. West of the church is a tidy grape vineyard, planted by the Surats with assistance from the nearby Platte Hutterite Colony.

The farms and towns are changing, decaying and disappearing, but the hills look much the same as when Indians gathered on them for ceremonies, or when the 19th century explorers passed by on journeys along the Missouri. The town of Bijou Hills may follow Granville and Eagle into obscurity, but its people’s stories, whether remembered or forgotten, are as much a part of the place as the eternal stones and boulders.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2007 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.


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Cities at the Crossroads

By Paul Higbee

Photography by Chad Coppess


Thirty-some years ago I drove across South Dakota on an autumn evening. Baseball season was over but the AM radio airwaves crackled with news about New York Yankees manager Billy Martin. He had been involved in an ugly incident or offended someone with a remark, and rumors swirled that Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was about to give him the axe — again.

I spent that night in a Chamberlain motel, heard Martin discussed some more on an early morning TV show, then drove a couple miles across the Missouri River to Oacoma for breakfast at Al’s Oasis. Sitting a couple tables away was none other than Billy Martin, no worse for wear despite the public beating he was taking. He laughed with some pals, all of them dressed for hunting. I took Martin’s example to heart: if the manager of the New York Yankees could escape job pressures and grant himself a respite on the prairies and river bluffs of central South Dakota now and then, so should I.

Oddly enough I wasn’t that surprised to encounter Martin at Al’s Oasis. South Dakotans have grown accustomed to running into most anyone there. Know how to tell the difference between a South Dakotan and, say, an Iowan or Californian at Al’s? Watch the eyes. Upon entering the big dining area a South Dakotan will be scanning the room for acquaintances.

If ever there was a state crossroads, Al’s is it, and by extension so are all of Chamberlain and Oacoma. No South Dakotan needs to be reminded where these twin communities lie. Perhaps no other spot on I-90’s 412-mile stretch across the state grabs your attention quite like this one, where the highway drops into the Missouri River valley. Chamberlain, home to St. Joseph’s Indian School and the South Dakota Hall of Fame, sits on the east bank. Oacoma on the west side is smaller, yet holds its own with Cedar Shore Resort and the iconic Al’s Oasis, established in the 1950s when Al Mueller moved his family’s 30-year-old Oacoma grocery business toward the highway.

Hunting and fishing trips beyond count have been planned and later critiqued at Al’s. Boat trailers, as well as pickups transporting hunters, display license plates from across South Dakota and surrounding states. But unlike visitors, many of Chamberlain and Oacoma’s own people see river country recreation as much more than an occasional adventure. It’s central to a local lifestyle that makes leaving hard to imagine.

“I’m a river person,” said Richard Kirkpatrick, who’s also a National Guard recruiter living in Oacoma and working in Chamberlain. Over the years he and his wife Tina, and their three children, have hit the river in the family’s boat for water skiing or just escaping summer’s heat. They’ve fished for walleye and catfish, Kirkpatrick says,”or anything that bites. I like shore fishing, too, just sitting and enjoying the day. There’s always wildlife along the river to watch if you’re not catching fish.”

Pay a Visit to Our Crossroad Cities

Akta Lakota Museum & Cultural Center houses a renowned collection of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota art.


Visitors and residents tend to zip between Chamberlain and Oacoma in a couple minutes via the four-lane, 1970s era interstate highway bridge. Next time you’re traveling down I-90, take a few minutes to enjoy the scenery, grab a piece of pie at Al’s and take in some of the local attractions.

  • Locals never stop thinking up new ways to put their impressive stretch of water to recreational use, like River City Racin’, an annual hydroplane race, and the Chamberlain-Oacoma Chamber of Commerce‘s ice fishing tournament.
  • Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery made camp along the river just below the future Oacoma town site in September 1804. Chamberlain’s I-90 rest stop at mile marker 264 offers museum-quality displays interpreting Lewis and Clark’s visit, and sits atop a bluff with a stunning view of the river and the location of the Corps’ campsite on the other side.
  • The pretty school grounds of St. Joseph’s Indian School, site of the excellent Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center, are another major destination. Don’t miss Our Lady of the Sioux Chapel, where Oscar Howe’s powerful Indian Christ tapestry hangs.
  • Located on the Missouri River, Oacoma’s Cedar Shore Resort was bound to be a great destination for boaters, fishermen, and hunters. What’s more, it’s gained popularity as a centrally located place to rendezvous for meetings and conventions, regularly drawing conferences of 1,000 or so.
  • The South Dakota Hall of Fame in Chamberlain honors South Dakotans who made national or international names for themselves in politics, sports, entertainment, journalism and other fields. It also includes men and women whose fame never extended much beyond their hometowns, but whose lifetime work permanently enhanced those communities and improved the lives of future generations. There’s something wonderfully South Dakotan about this hall: an acknowledgement that greatness can take you far away or keep you close and devoted to home.


Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.