Tag: cemetery

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Aberdeen’s Graveyard Girl

By Bernie Hunhoff

Tasha Tietz, like all nurses, has a caring soul. She believes people should be remembered even after they’re gone.

Walk through a cemetery with Tasha Westby Tietz and you soon learn that tombstones represent life.

The same happens when you visit Tietz’s Facebook page. Watch her YouTube channel. Catch one of her talks or peruse her research on websites like Find a Grave and Ancestry.com. Tietz considers herself”a loner,” but the vivacious Aberdeen nurse is quickly becoming recognized as an authority on cemeteries. She even has an online persona,”Graveyard Girl,” though she shares the moniker with a rap musician and a fashion and beauty YouTuber — interesting company for the introverted daughter of an Aberdeen bricklayer and a beautician.

“I couldn’t even speak at my own wedding,” she laughs,”but I just spoke at the genealogy society and at the Aberdeen library. I can’t believe all that is happening.”

Tietz’s interest in the deceased began when she was working as a nurse’s aide at Mother Joseph Manor, an Aberdeen nursing home. She soon grew to love the Presentation sisters, and she worried that they might be forgotten when they die because they don’t have children and spouses. Even to this day, one of her favorite cemetery walks is a section of Sacred Heart Cemetery in Aberdeen devoted to deceased Presentations.

But it wasn’t long before she took an interest in more grave sites: those of other patients at the nursing home, her own ancestors and eventually perfect strangers.

“There is a quote that says a person is truly forgotten when their name is spoken for the last time,” she says.”That makes me believe that every person should be remembered and one way to do that is to be sure they have a tombstone.”

And in today’s online world, every tombstone should be searchable. Seven years ago, she began to enter tombstone photos on Find a Grave; today she is among its busiest contributors. She has posted more than 2,400 memorials and obituaries and 5,000 photos.

Aberdeen’s four cemeteries are her favorite places. She has documented many of their markers on Find a Grave.

Her paternal ancestors are buried at Claire City and Sisseton, so she has also visited them for years.”I try to take a bouquet to all my direct grandparents on Memorial Day,” she says.”I like to go to Claire City in September and visit the graves at Sica Hollow.”

In 2021, she found three tombstones of the Roy family, some of the first white settlers, among the autumn foliage of Sica Hollow. Most of her explorations have been in northeast South Dakota, but she has also roamed cemeteries as far away as Washington, D.C., Canada, Arizona and Texas.

She includes”graving trips” on family vacations when her husband, John, and their three daughters — Chloe, Claire and Charlotte — are willing.”The girls are not super-impressed yet,” she says.”John is also not a fan, but he’ll take me. We went to the Black Hills last summer and we explored Mountain View Cemetery at Keystone. I picked it because some of the Mount Rushmore carvers are buried there, and the actor Bobby Buntrock died and was buried there. There is also a Native leader, a medicine man, an artist and some kind of a wild Old West guy. It’s the only cemetery with a view of Mount Rushmore.”

She recently visited the De Smet cemetery where Charles and Caroline Ingalls are buried, along with their daughters Mary, Grace and Carrie.

Her social media posts also include information she gathers from other sources, including a recent bit about the Jewish custom of placing stones rather than flowers on tombstones. She also spotlighted a report of an Iowa cemetery that features three pyramids, built by the local newspaper editor who planned to be buried in one of them.

Graveyard Girl’s Facebook page now has more than 6,000 followers. Her sites have grown so much that they earn her small amounts of money, some of which she has used to help pay for gravestones on unmarked graves. If the revenues continue to grow, she plans to also invest in camera equipment and research materials for the ever-growing avocation.

She finds genealogy research the most rewarding aspect of being Graveyard Girl. People from across the nation have sent her notes of appreciation for her assistance in finding the graves of their ancestors.

Still, her favorite part of being Graveyard Girl is the time spent in cemeteries.”I like to be out in nature, and I am pretty much a loner. I think I’m also an old soul. I’m happiest when I’m with my family, outdoors in a beautiful cemetery.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Stories Beneath the Stones

By Paul Higbee

Black Hills National Cemetery near Sturgis is the largest national cemetery in South Dakota. Photo by Buck Lovell.

Seventy years ago, sailor Daniel Baughman sent a letter home to his family and it has never been opened. Baughman, who was serving on a submarine during World War II, presumably wrote another of his typically upbeat letters. He was safe. Don’t worry.

Military personnel arrived at the sailor’s house ahead of the letter. He was lost at sea, they said. He wouldn’t be coming home. Later, the postman delivered the letter.

Only the family knows why the letter was never unsealed.

Maybe the pain of reading the young sailor’s optimistic words while knowing his true fate simply felt overwhelming. Or maybe preserving an object as he last saw it, un-torn, brought comfort and froze an earlier moment in time. Whatever the case, the letter is a personal memorial to one soldier, and there are hundreds more across the state in the form of carefully kept letters, photos and dog tags. Wherever the American military has engaged in combat or peacekeeping the past 120 years, South Dakotans have served — sometimes in numbers that lead all other states per capita.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs provides the stark white gravestones emblematic of national cemeteries. Photo by Ryan Clayton.

Public memorials have been constructed in many South Dakota towns, including the state capitol grounds in Pierre where life-size statues represent all branches of the military. Thousands of grateful people will visit those locations to remember fallen and surviving soldiers this Veterans Day, and many will also gather in western South Dakota’s five national cemeteries. Most veterans laid to rest in those cemeteries were not combat casualties. Most left the service, entered professions, raised families and lived many more years as former soldiers than enlisted soldiers.

But there’s something powerful about committing a deceased family member back to the ranks of the military, back to the beautiful straight lines and uniformity that mark national cemeteries, back to military precision.

Visitors to our national cemeteries might wonder how western South Dakota got five when there are entire states with none. Our state’s impressive per capita enlistment rate hardly seems to justify five national cemeteries in a state with fewer than a million residents.

South Dakota’s frontier military history, along with astute national politicians and Native people who seized a 2006 ruling that allows tribal governments to establish national cemeteries, all contribute to the state’s surprising number. Yet visitors to any of the five might simply conclude that beautiful landscapes, starry black skies far from urban lights and an overall sense of tranquility make West River South Dakota an unparalleled location for memorial grounds.

The national cemetery movement took root during the Civil War. Proponents believed that the federal government owed deceased soldiers a place of eternal rest. In 1862, the war’s second year, Congress authorized President Abraham Lincoln to set aside lands for burials for Union veterans. Tragically, because the war was so horrific, these cemeteries quickly grew to great size. In the East they became prominent landscape features, instantly recognizable.

No part of the federal bureaucracy was more eloquently defined than national cemeteries, thanks to language President Lincoln used in November of 1863 when he dedicated the burial grounds at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s description of hallowed ground consecrated by the blood of soldiers, living and dead, still resonates — as does his call for Americans who visit to”resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” Inscriptions of the Gettysburg Address are standard features of national cemetery designs.

Only a few burials have occurred at a new 18-acre cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation near Kyle.

South Dakota’s biggest, Black Hills National Cemetery, sits at the eastern edge of the Hills near Sturgis. It turns 70 years old in 2018 and continues to expand, with more than 650 burials annually. Views combine the dark ridge of the Black Hills, rugged foothills and Bear Butte rising to the east. U.S. Senator Francis Case, who led the way to secure the cemetery and was himself a World War I veteran, is buried there.

Two national cemeteries categorized as historic, no longer open to burials, are at Hot Springs — longtime site of state and federal medical and residential services for veterans — and at Fort Meade outside Sturgis. Veterans as far back as the Civil War and Army campaigns against American Indians were laid to rest at the two historic graveyards. Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Charles L. Russell is buried at Hot Springs. The New York state soldier was recognized for gallantry during the bloody battle of Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia, and later he headed west.

By contrast the two newest national cemeteries in the state are on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations. Sicangu Akicita Owicahe Veterans Cemetery (Rosebud) and Akicita Owicahe Lakota Freedom Veterans Cemetery (Pine Ridge) came about after the U.S. Veterans Administration opened its cemetery grants to tribal governments. The VA recognized that Native people have long enlisted in numbers exceeding the national average, and that many reservations in the West are a long drive from other VA cemeteries. Rosebud’s tribal government was the first to apply, won a $7 million grant, and opened its cemetery in 2013. The grant was the first of its kind awarded to a sovereign tribal nation and resulted in a unique, turtle-shaped cemetery layout. Turtles, in Lakota tradition, represent longevity and fortitude.

Pine Ridge wasn’t far behind its neighbor reservation, and its national cemetery occupying 18 acres opened in 2014 east of Kyle. Both reservation cemeteries honor those interred as United States soldiers and Lakota warriors. United States, tribal and POW/MIA flags fly in the prairie winds.

A handful of national cemeteries operate under the auspices of the Army (Arlington outside Washington, D.C., for example) or National Park Service (Custer National Cemetery at Little Bighorn Battlefield in our region). But most, including all five in South Dakota, are part of the VA’s National Cemetery Administration.

About the same time the National Cemetery Administration decided to support new reservation burial grounds, its leaders began thinking about what they call”stories beneath the stones,” some of them along the lines of the submariner’s unopened letter. Or, just as important, stories about what veterans who survived their service did with the rest of their lives.

The NCA selected three universities nationally to research those stories, including Black Hills State University in Spearfish.”This is a phenomenal way for our students to look at big national history through intimate, local stories,” says Kelly Kirk, a history instructor at BHSU and the project’s coordinator. Much of the initial research was done this past summer.”Once the community realized we were doing veteran research, they reached out to undergraduates,” Kirk says.

The concept of national cemeteries came during the Civil War. Veterans of that conflict are buried at Fort Meade. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

Student researcher Sidney May appreciated”the incredible connections I was able to make with people,” and the details families shared. She emailed back and forth with the Huntsville, Alabama family of Andy Andrews — and learned he earned his wings as an Air Force jet pilot before age 18, flew in Korea, and built a distinguished military resume that made him eligible for interment at Arlington National Cemetery had his family wished it. Red Pesek’s family told May that he fought German troops in Europe and also read Mein Kampf to better understand his enemy. Andrews and Pesek are buried at Black Hills National Cemetery.

Recent graduate Courtney Buck met a woman with an unusual set of World War II letters written by her parents, Patrick and Shirley O’Leary, when Patrick was stationed in Europe. Shirley kept not only Patrick’s letters but also her own, so that”we were able to see directly into the world of a soldier and his family statewide,” Buck says.”These letters are very rare because it’s hard to find someone who copied their letters before they were sent overseas.” The O’Learys are interred at Black Hills National Cemetery, and their story led Buck to the story of Daniel Baughman, the submariner lost at sea who wrote the never-opened letter. He was Shirley’s brother.

Buck also delved into the past of John Bear King. Buried at Black Hills National Cemetery, he was a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who served as a World War II code talker. She was struck by a historic irony.”John Bear King was able to use his native language of Lakota to pass on messages and information from their reconnaissance missions that the Japanese were unable to decode,” Buck says.”At one time the United States government tried to wipe out the Native American languages, then in World War II they were using it to their advantage, and it became a crucial part of communication.”

Another BHSU student, Katie Haigh, researched 19th century veterans whom no one alive remembers, relying primarily on newspaper archives. She studied the stories of two Medal of Honor recipients laid to rest at Fort Meade National Cemetery. Albert Knaak was a long-serving ordnance sergeant when he died at the fort in 1897, and it appears he never told anyone in South Dakota that he won the prestigious medal for actions in Arizona Territory. His grave marker made no mention of the honor, and the fact was buried with him for 79 years, until a study during the United States Bicentennial revealed the truth. Abram Brant was all set to receive his Medal of Honor at Fort Meade in 1878, two years after he risked his life carrying water for fellow soldiers at Little Bighorn. The night before the ceremony, apparently while engaged in drunken tomfoolery, he accidentally shot himself and died.

Less dramatic but just as significant, Kirk says, are stories that explain why men or women entered a certain branch of the service, where their enlistment took them, what brought them back to South Dakota and how their experiences shaped their post-military careers. About 25 students are conducting research, and what they discover will be made public in online documents and as part of materials prepared for school use.

Whether inspirational, ironic or profoundly sad, the soldiers’ stories add power to the already poignant sight of white markers gleaming under wide Dakota skies in five national cemeteries.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Stories Beneath the Stones

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

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Bon Homme County’s Oldest Mystery

Our November/December issue includes a story on six members of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry interred in the Bon Homme Cemetery. An inscription on their tombstone reads,”In memory of six unknown soldiers.” John Andrews visited the area to see if he could reveal their identities. Here are some of the photos we gathered that didn’t make the magazine.

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A Walk in the Cemetery

The Yankton Community Library and the Dakota Territorial Museum hosted their annual Cemetery Walk through the Yankton Municipal Cemetery Tuesday night. The tour included stops at the graves of six characters from Yankton’s history, where re-enactors shared biographical details and anecdotes from their lives on the frontier. The walk is a fundraiser for the museum. Photos by John Andrews.

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Sacred Ground

By Katie Hunhoff

We thought we’d broached every possible topic in 30 years of publishing South Dakota Magazine, but we found an altogether new subject for our September/October issue. Where are the burial sites of the great Indian leaders of the 19th century?

Paul Higbee, a Spearfish writer, led our effort to find the graves. He also wrote about the history and tradition of Indian burials. We discovered that the graves generally lie in Christian cemeteries because many Lakota and Dakota people converted to Christianity. But elements of traditional religion were still practiced, including a”release of the soul” rite which occurs a year after death.

Indian country cemeteries don’t always have the manicured appearance that you might see in other communities. Sometimes the grass is long, the stones are leaning and the road is rutted. The difference is partly because traditional Native American culture calls for remembering the dead through ceremony, not at a physical place.

However, many of the Lakota and Dakota leaders’ graves are within sight of the Missouri River. And there is a feeling of reverence and solemnity at every site, no matter the height of the grass.

Sitting Bull’s grave, just west of Mobridge, is perhaps the most picturesque. A bust created by Crazy Horse sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski marks the site, which is high above the Missouri River.

The graves of Struck-by-the Ree, Iron Nation and Gall are also near the Missouri. Struck-by-the-Ree is buried south of Marty on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Gall, a contemporary of Sitting Bull who fought with him at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, is also buried west of Mobridge.

Spotted Tail was a Sicangu leader famous for his wit. He complained on one occasion about the constant relocations of his community, telling authorities,”I think you had better put the Indians on wheels and then you can run them about wherever you wish.” His gravesite is near Rosebud.

Red Cloud’s grave is near the Red Cloud School, west of Pine Ridge. A Catholic church and a cultural center also share space on the beautiful campus built by Jesuit missionaries in the 1880s. Red Cloud led a deadly campaign to burn military posts, but he eventually realized that U.S. forces were too strong to overcome. After that, he accepted the reservation life while continually fighting federal efforts to reduce tribal lands.”Red Cloud lived to age 88, dying in 1909 when the Indian wars had been romanticized in American memory,” writes Higbee.”Yet his name still sent shivers down the spines of some elderly Army veterans.”

We also traveled to Manderson, home of the Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery, across the highway from St. Agnes Church. A deeply rutted road leads to the fenced, hilltop cemetery. Waist-high prairie grasses make it difficult to find the simple black marker. Sage, a purifying herb in Lakota culture, grows atop the grave.

Higbee notes that only a few people know the story behind Crazy Horse’s burial. After he was fatally bayonetted at Camp Robinson in Nebraska, family members took the body.”Certain people are aware of his remains,” says Donovin Sprague, a descendent and author.”It’s a very guarded secret and no one would ever reveal anything.”

Check out the magazine article for more history, photos and directions to the graves. Higbee also offers tips on cemetery etiquette.

We know we missed the burial sites of some important Native American leaders. We’ll keep looking and learning. That’s the whole idea behind publishing South Dakota Magazine.

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Atop Rose Hill

By Paul Higbee

It’s a steady climb, more than half a mile, from downtown Spearfish to the top of Rose Hill. I make the walk now and then for exercise. One day this summer I got up there just as the sun broke through clouds, illuminating Lookout Mountain to the northeast in a shaft of light. To the west Crow Peak loomed against spectacular, purplish cloud formations, and to the south Spearfish Canyon’s wide mouth gaped.

Had someone built a luxury hotel atop Rose Hill, those views alone would justify tacking $50 a night to room charges. Home lots up here? They’d be as expensive as any in the Black Hills and they’d all sell. But long ago Spearfish put Rose Hill to another use. Since November 1876, this has been the town’s cemetery. For a long time I thought it unbelievably ironic that the first person buried here, a Mr. Blizzard, actually died in a blizzard. It reminded me of the stale, dark joke about how strange it was that Lou Gehrig died of the very disease that bore his name. As readers swifter on the uptake than I may have guessed, this is what happened: a stranger carrying no identification perished in a snowstorm near Spearfish. The tombstone bore witness to the manner and date of his death. Local folks called the unfortunate drifter Levi Blizzard, which leads me to believe he was found wearing Levi Strauss denim, produced beginning in 1873.

Levi Blizzard is one of only a few strangers buried at Rose Hill. You know a community is your hometown when you can’t walk 50 steps through the cemetery without anecdotes and emotions of every variety flooding your mind. My teachers, the first two businessmen who offered me employment, and the minister at my wedding are interred here. So are schoolmates who died young and tragically, kids I thought I could never possibly forget but almost have.

You find yourself doing a lot of math in your local cemetery, often with surprising results. I happened upon the graves of two men I thought were old codgers when I was a teenager and discovered each was in his 50s during those years — which gives me a clear idea of how teens view me today. On the other hand, not long ago I used to enjoy talking to a gentleman who lived on my street. Earlier this year I heard a story I knew he’d enjoy but I never got around to calling him. At Rose Hill I learned he died in 1999 — and that he would have turned 100 in 2011. He was my peer, never an old man, and I still can’t figure out how it’s been more than a decade since we spoke.

I’m not implying anything spooky or otherworldly when I say I hear voices in the older cemetery sections. It’s just that these are the graves of historical personalities I’ve studied in-depth the past couple decades, and I know their written words and adventures well. Daniel Toomey (1852–1941), a Brooklyn-born buffalo hunter, stood on this very hill in May 1876 and described what he saw below as”a pretty picture,” with”no sign of settlement, only a light fringe of oaks, ash, and elm with a few cottonwoods bordering the stream.” Toomey’s mortal remains now lie here, as do those of Irish-born Robert Evans (1840–1929), who wrote of traveling stealthily across Montana in”the year Custer was killed and we were continually looking for trouble.” Evans transformed the view Toomey described, turning Spearfish into a garden by digging a web of irrigation channels that still carry water today. Rose Hill is the final resting place for Mary Kercheval (1833–1921), who historians believe was George Custer’s personal cook when he rode to Dakota, and for Harvey Fellows (1845–1929), the classically stoic stagecoach driver renowned throughout the West for adeptly handling the steepest trail grades and never injuring a passenger.

My favorite Rose Hill personality, though, is Fayette Cook (1850–1922). He stepped off a stagecoach in Spearfish in 1885, charged with building a viable institution of higher learning in a rough and tumble mining district. Within hours the Minnesotan feared school boosters had bamboozled him into coming west. Cook found the only campus structure to be”the poorest excuse for a schoolhouse, dugouts or sod houses excepted, that I ever saw. It was evidently planned, if indeed there ever was a plan, by someone quite unfamiliar with school architecture, but having some knowledge of stampmills.”

Still, Cook didn’t board the next stagecoach and return east. He went to work building a school that today is the state’s third largest university, and lived in Spearfish the rest of his life. Toomey, Evans, Kercheval and Fellows — all drifters and professional itinerants in one way or another — obviously stayed, too. Standing atop Rose Hill, taking in the vistas, you don’t have to wonder why.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Remembering Amanda

130 years after her death, a First Lady of Dakota Territory was remembered Wednesday (Sept. 10) at the Yankton Cemetery. Amanda Pennington had been buried in an unmarked grave since her death at age 47 in 1884. Amanda’s husband John served as territorial governor from 1874 to 1878 and remained in Yankton as an active citizen for years. Photos by Bernie Hunhoff.

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Guarded by Ghosts, Revealed by Angels

By Lee Schoenbeck

There are a lot of hiking trails in the Black Hills that take some local knowledge to enjoy. White Rocks is one of them. Former Deadwood resident Tony Tuscano of Texas suggested that the climb to White Rocks was worth the work. He was right. He described it as “the best view of Deadwood … the dominant hill over lower Deadwood.” Tony’s description was enough to get the hike on my bucket list.

Getting by the Ghosts

The directions to White Rocks involve the local cemetery, Mount Moriah. You need to go outside the cemetery proper and follow a trail described as”quite steep” for 750 feet to the grave of Seth Bullock. Up the hill and beyond the grave is a utility trail, and you keep following that to the top.

The ladies at the cemetery toll booth (you know you are amongst famous ghosts when people pay to get admitted) were helpful. The first volunteered, as she shook her head, that it was”really steep” to get to White Rocks. The other lady assured us that it was”a great view.” Both were exceptionally correct.

The Top is Right Above You

A strange thing about that trail is that you can see the white rocks as soon as you leave the cemetery, and they look about two miles away — straight up. There were a few people on top that we could barely distinguish, which makes you brace for a very long hike. But it’s a lot more like climbing a ladder. It is steep, but not long, which must create an optical illusion — or maybe I was passing out from a lack of oxygen.

Standing With the Angels

The hike is probably only twenty minutes each way, but worth it. When you climb up on the top of the rocks — which truly are white — you have a commanding view of Deadwood and the region. The devastation of the Grizzly Gulch fire remains immediately behind you. The logs are laying side by side along the humps of the lower mountains in a pattern that looks like fur on an animal’s back. The ladies at the booth said we could see four states, but until they do a better job of spray painting those state lines, who am I to say?

No Mountain Goats, But….

I was zoomed by some kind of a bird, saw turkey vultures circling (maybe looking for fallen hikers) and one family that climbed the rocks like mountain goats, but no dangerous wildlife. After we got down and had the mandatory engine-fueling ice cream, the lady serving us claimed a mountain lion lived up there! But she hadn’t been there for four years — I bet the ghosts got him.

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


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Memories Atop Rose Hill

By Paul Higbee

It’s a steady climb, more than half a mile, from downtown Spearfish to the top of Rose Hill. I make the walk now and then for exercise. One day I got up there just as the sun broke through clouds, illuminating Lookout Mountain to the northeast in a shaft of light. To the west, Crow Peak loomed against spectacular, purplish cloud formations, and to the south Spearfish Canyon’s wide mouth gaped.

Had someone built a luxury hotel atop Rose Hill, those views alone would justify tacking $50 a night to room charges. Home lots up here? They’d be as expensive as any in the Black Hills and they’d all sell, even in this economy. But long ago Spearfish put Rose Hill to another use. Since November 1876, this has been the town’s cemetery.

For a long time I thought it unbelievably ironic that the first person buried here, a Mr. Blizzard, actually died in a blizzard. It reminded me of the stale, dark joke about how strange it was that Lou Gehrig died of the very disease that bore his name.

As readers swifter on the uptake than I may have guessed, this is what happened: a stranger carrying no identification perished in a snowstorm near Spearfish. The tombstone bore witness to the manner and date of his death. Local folks called the unfortunate drifter Levi Blizzard, which leads me to believe he was wearing Levi Strauss denim, produced beginning in 1873.

Levi Blizzard is one of only a few strangers buried at Rose Hill. You know a community is your hometown when you can’t walk 50 steps through the cemetery without anecdotes and emotions of every variety flooding your mind. My teachers, the first two businessmen who offered me employment, and the minister at my wedding are interred here. So are schoolmates who died young and tragically, kids I thought I could never possibly forget but almost have.

You find yourself doing a lot of math in your local cemetery, often with surprising results. I happened upon the graves to two men I thought were old codgers when I was a teenager and discovered each was in his 50s during those years — which gives me a clear idea of how teens view me today. On the other hand, I used to enjoy talking to a gentleman who lived on my street. A few years ago, I heard a story I knew he’d enjoy but I never got around to calling him. At Rose Hill I learned he died in 1999 — and that he would’ve turned 100 in 2011. He was my peer, never an old man, and I still can’t figure out how it’s been more than a decade since we spoke.

You know a community is your hometown when you can’t walk 50 steps through the cemetery without anecdotes and emotions of every variety flooding your mind.

I’m not implying anything spooky or otherworldly when I say I hear voices in the older cemetery sections. It’s just that these are the graves of historical personalities I’ve studied in depth the past couple decades, and I know their written words and adventures well. Daniel Toomey (1852-1941), a Brooklyn-born buffalo hunter, stood on this very hill in May 1876 and described what he saw below as”a pretty picture,” with”no sign of settlement, only a light fringe of oaks, ash, and elm with a few cottonwoods bordering the stream.” Toomey’s mortal remains now lie here, as do those of Irish-born Robert Evans (1840-1929), who wrote of traveling stealthily across Montana in”the year Custer was killed and we were continually looking for trouble.” Evans transformed the view Toomey described, turning Spearfish into a garden by digging a web of irrigation channels that still carry water today.

Rose Hill is the final resting place for Mary Kercheval (1833-1921), who historians believe was George Custer’s personal cook when he rode to Dakota, and for Harvey Fellows (1845-1929), the classically stoic stagecoach driver renowned throughout the West for adeptly handling the steepest trail grades and never injuring a passenger.

My favorite Rose Hill personality, though, is Fayette Cook (1850-1922). He stepped off a stagecoach in Spearfish in 1885, charged with building a viable institution of higher learning in a rough and tumble mining district. Within hours the Minnesotan feared school boosters had bamboozled him into coming west. Cook found the only campus structure to be”the poorest excuse for a schoolhouse, dugouts or sod houses excepted, that I ever saw. It was evidently planned, if indeed there ever was a plan, by someone quite unfamiliar with school architecture, but having some knowledge of stampmills.”

Still, Cook didn’t board the next stagecoach and return east. He went to work building a school that today is the state’s third largest university, and lived in Spearfish the rest of his life. Toomey, Evans, Kercheval and Fellows –all drifters and professional itinerants in one way or another — obviously stayed, too. Standing atop Rose Hill, taking in the vistas, you don’t have to wonder why.

Editor’s Note: Paul Higbee has written regularly for South Dakota Magazine since 1991, serving as the Black Hills correspondent. This column appeared in our September/October 2010 issue. To order a copy or to subscribe, call us at 800-456-5117.