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Clamming on the James

Clams once thrived in the clean, steady waters of the James River

By John Andrews

Clamming pioneer “Fisher Bill” Richards spent most of his life digging clams and living in a tent along the James River.

Clams still lie in the beds of some South Dakota rivers and lakes, but 100 years ago they filled the James River and created a thriving business. People from Mitchell to Yankton spent summers prying the mussels from the muddy river bottom and then sent the shells east to become pearl buttons.

Families set up summertime clamming camps along the river. A hub developed near Tuscan, a water station about four miles southwest of Menno in Hutchinson County where the river and railroad met. Trains got water for the steam engines and clammers loaded their harvest into railcars, which took them to button factories in towns along the Mississippi River like Muscatine (the Pearl Button Capital of the World), Davenport and Guttenberg in Iowa.

Clammers were busy on other area waters, like the Vermillion and the Minnesota River across the border in Yellow Medicine County, Minn., but the demand for clamshells and the abundance of mussels in the James River made Tuscan the”Mother of Pearl Capital of the World” by the 1890s. Trains regularly left Tuscan loaded with clamshells. Once the Hutchinson Herald reported a train headed east with 17 boxcars full of shells, worth $35 per ton.

The murky Missouri River held few clams.”At one time the Missouri River was the ‘Big Muddy,'” says Doug Backlund, a wildlife biologist with the state Game, Fish and Parks department’s Natural Heritage Program.”It was a big, turbid river with a shifting bottom. That’s not a good habitat for clams. Clams like clear streams with a fairly firm substrate that doesn’t shift around a lot.” Hundreds of years ago, the Missouri’s tributaries in southeastern South Dakota — the James, Vermillion and Big Sioux rivers — were cleaner and more stable, providing prime habitats for clams that arrived attached to fish and then burrowed into the river bottom.

Robert Coker and John Southall, working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, explored the James River’s mussel beds from its source in North Dakota to its mouth southeast of Yankton in the summer of 1913. They found few decent shells until they reached Riverside, near Mitchell, where they discovered a large commercial shelling operation. A pair of fishermen there took 20 tons of shells from the river. Three miles downstream another man had harvested 15 tons. The busiest stretch of the river was from Milltown to Yankton, where clammers dug 400 tons of shells by the time Coker and Southall visited late in the season.

Arnold Diede built boats (top) for he and his wife, Evelyn, to use during clamming expeditions near Menno, South Dakota. After cleaning clams, they piled shells at their camp near Milltown (bottom) before trains carried them East to button factories.

Arnold and Evelyn Diede were newlyweds when they began clamming near Menno in 1929. That spring Arnold built a boat using the engine from a Ford car. He fashioned a digger out of a 2×4, an iron shovel and a hand-woven basket that could hold 100 pounds of clams. The Diedes attached the digger to the front of the boat and Arnold pried clams from the mud while Evelyn drove.

“Arnold would drop the digger to the bottom of the river, the power of the motor pulling the digger along on the bottom of the river as we rode over the clam bed,” Evelyn wrote in a family history book years later.”By holding the handle Arnold could feel what sort of clam bed it was, how long and wide, also how deep. When the basket was full, he would tell me to turn around on the river and as I did so, it aided Arnold in lifting up the full basket. He then would dump the clams onto the boat and lower the basket again and I would follow the same line we had taken before and repeat the whole process.”

Another method was used for clams in shallow water. The Diedes ran a small boat and dug them out by hand.”We used to wade in mud 4 to 6 inches deep,” Evelyn recalled.”It seemed we always had clothes hanging on the line.”

When the boat was fully loaded they returned to their riverside camp. The Diedes used a homemade cooker placed over an 18-inch deep pit near the riverbank to steam the clams open. Then they removed the meat and threw the shells in a pile. Farmers used the discarded meat as pig feed, while rotten meat became catfish bait. Buyers paid the Diedes $25 to $35 per ton for their clamshells, depending on the quality.

Clamming attracted unique characters. Bill Richards, a clamming pioneer, spent much of his life in a tent by the river west of Menno. Known as”Fisher Bill,” Richards lived a rough life before moving to Tuscan. Originally from New York, he spent his early years in an Illinois orphanage. He ran away at age 14 and found work with a railroad crew at Council Bluffs, Iowa. One day a prairie fire burned him so badly his co-workers thought he was dead. He crawled to the Missouri River where a settler found him and cared for him until he regained his strength. Fisher Bill then went to Tuscan, where he spent years clamming and living year-round in the tent. When Bill was 80, townspeople convinced him to move the tent into Menno. He lived behind the funeral home, where a small creek and wooded area replicated his longtime home along the James. He died in 1954 at age 92.

Another clam fisherman was known as Swede Al. He worked the James River from its mouth to Mission Hill. Longtime Yankton County resident Paul Nelson remembered that Swede Al’s territory was limited because his big houseboat couldn’t fit under the railroad bridge west of town.

Nelson, born in 1915, grew up in a”tar paper shack” along the James River. He saw many clam boats, but Swede Al had the biggest operation.”Other people used to fish for clams, but not like he did,” Nelson said when South Dakota Magazine visited him before he died in 2009.”That was his life.”

Some clammers worked solely to find pearls. Fisher Bill found and sold a few pearls, as did the Diedes. One pearl looked like a strawberry and brought them $15. Evelyn had two silver rings made with small pearls. Nelson’s uncle and aunt, Matthew and Nancy Seddon, bought clam meat and pearls from Swede Al. Men searching for pearls on the Vermillion River at Centerville found $500 worth by the time Coker and Southall arrived.

But most Dakota pearls were poor.”They weren’t shaped well and they were colored,” Nelson told us.”They weren’t like the pearls that were on the market from oysters, but you could make a pretty good necklace.” Two-thirds of the pearls in the Riverside fisherman’s 20-ton haul were worthless. Evelyn Diede thought it was because valuable pearls are found in clearer water, and”Jim River water was always dirty and muddy,” she wrote.

Clamming boomed from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. Over harvesting and environmental changes nearly wiped out the James River’s clams by the 1940s. The railroad left and Tuscan disappeared. And the emergence of plastic buttons brought an end to the American clamshell button industry. In 2002 Backlund and Keith Perkins, a biology professor at the University of Sioux Falls, studied the James River’s mussel population. It was the first scientific study of its clams since Coker and Southall’s nearly 90 years earlier. They found live clams, but only a handful for every hour of searching, and many long dead shells, indicating their former abundance. Today one of the best places to find clams is in the Missouri River below Gavins Point Dam. The firm bottom and clean, warm water the dam releases create a perfect habitat.”The Big Muddy is now the nice, clear river with a good habitat for clams, and the Jim River and Big Sioux River have become turbid and muddy,” Backlund says.”There are still some species that thrive there, but not the same ones that used to be there.”

Though clamming on the James ended in the 1930s, artifacts from the era can still be found. The Menno Heritage Museum has a clamshell button display along with an old rake used for clam digging. Elmer Mueller, who lives southwest of Menno a quarter mile from the James River, has a few clamshells. He also found a clam rake along the riverbank near his home. And the Diedes’ granddaughter, Debbie Palmer, has a small jar of pearls Arnold and Evelyn found during their clamming summers. They’re all reminders of an era when people living in the James River valley could make money off corn, cattle or clams.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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King Ziegler’s Car Farm

By Bernie Hunhoff

People came from miles around to search for treasures in Alfred Ziegler’s salvage yard near Scotland, South Dakota.

Auto junkyards were once a staple for a town. The carcasses of cars and trucks were kept in rows on the outskirts of town, where one or two grease monkeys made a decent living by selling parts.

Today’s salvage yards have more in common with K-mart than with the junkyards of yesterday. Vehicles are stripped of radios, rims, alternators and everything else of value. The parts are checked, cleaned, inventoried and available to buyers across the USA thanks to the Internet.

It’s a very efficient system of recycling, but something is missing from the business model practiced by King Ziegler, who ran a junkyard near Scotland in the 1990s. When South Dakota Magazine visited him in 1996, King was earning a living from a crop of rusted iron and nostalgia. People came from miles around — some from as far away as Europe and Asia — to search for treasure in his 30-acre field of cars.

His real name was Alfred. But if you asked for Alfred Ziegler at a cafe in his Bon Homme County town the locals would look puzzled until you added that he is the guy with all the old cars.

“Oh, you mean King,” everyone would say in unison.”King Ziegler.”

King ran a place some people would call an auto junkyard. In the phone book, it was called King Ziegler Salvage. So you’d expect to arrive and find workers removing parts from car carcasses. Grease. Oil. Sweat. Noise.

None of the above. Blackbirds sang in a nearby cornfield. A herd of sheep grazed between rusting automobiles. A rooster crowed on a nearby farm and a donkey brayed in reply. That’s about as noisy as it got at King Ziegler Salvage.

“When he went into business, everybody thought ‘How do you make any money on this junk?'” said Wilbur Foss who ran a hardware store in Scotland for 17 years.”He’s one of a kind. He built a reputation far and wide. Everybody likes him and he likes everybody.”

If that’s true, it’s not because he was so accommodating. King didn’t remove parts from the cars. That was understandable when we met him in 1996 because he was 79 years of age. But he never did believe in removing parts before they were needed.”I have the customer take the parts off. I tell them if they take if off, they’ll know how to put it on,” he told us.

That might seem quaint to big-city salvage yards with rows and rows of Chevy transmissions, shelves full of GM radios and boxes of Ford alternators.

Real steel builds lasting memories. And the proof is at King Ziegler’s car farm.

King’s self-serve salvage wasn’t tailored to the customer in a hurry. He didn’t have an inventory of the cars in his field. They were not inventoried on a computer. They were not even logged on a yellow pad. And he didn’t pretend to remember what’s available.”Just go take a look,” he advised. Customers seemed to like that attitude. It would never work for Wal-mart — but King Ziegler Salvage was as different from chain store retailing as a whale is different from an ocean liner.

A business school grad might think the Scotland salvage yard needed more modern management. But after spending an afternoon at King’s field, you’d start to wonder if maybe the rest of the world has gone overboard on organization.

After all, his system worked splendidly. He spent nothing on advertising, yet customers came from all over the world. He had only an eighth grade education, yet he made a good living without getting any grease in his fingernails.

He had no labor costs. No labor worries. No stress. No office expenses. No signs. The 1950 Chevrolet wrecker he used to hoist or haul cars had a phone number painted on the side. But it was not his phone number.

He spent nothing on mowing. Instead, he invited a good friend, Elmer Brandt, to bring a herd of sheep to the field every summer.”I guess I could run sheep myself but then I’d have to put up hay to feed them in the winter,” he said.

He closed when the weather was bad. He closed for much of the winter. Customers could call him in an emergency. But it’s hard to imagine why there would be a critical need for a 1949 Studebaker carburetor.

King Ziegler didn’t start out in the car business. He was raised on a farm near Tripp, where he had a stud horse called King (that’s where his buddies found his nickname). After service in World War II, he was in the oil business at Kaylor.”I bought cars to fix them up and all of a sudden I got into this business,” he remembered with a wry grin in 1996.

He didn’t have time to repair all the fixer-uppers he was buying so he started to park them in the field at his farm near Scotland. He bought most of the cars for $25 to $100. Sometimes, dealers sold him used cars they couldn’t move. He also attended farm auctions. And he bought many privately.”People even tried to give me cars but I always paid something. I wanted to be fair.”

At first, he put the cars in neat rows. But as the field began to fill, he squeezed the last few hundred in wherever they would fit. An open path meandered between the cars but it got narrow at some points — barely wide enough to squeeze King’s two-passenger three-wheeler motorcycle through.

King continued to operate his Kaylor company until 1972, when he sold it and moved to Scotland to run the salvage yard full time. He quit buying cars years in the 1970s, when the lot filled up. He estimated there were about 1,500 cars and pickup trucks in the field, as well as dozens of old tractors, grain threshers and other farm equipment. King Ziegler was one of the last people on earth who could still sell a manifold for a Cockshutt tractor.

Most of his collection dated back to the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Twenty years ago, there were lots of salvage yards with cars of similar vintage. But when iron prices increased and machines became available to crush cars, many dealers”recycled” their older models.

For sentimental reasons — and because it seemed like a waste of good parts — King never sold to the scrap dealers.”I just didn’t care to crush my cars. I thought they might be useful to somebody someday.”

It was a good business instinct.”I had people here from Sweden last week looking for Pontiac and Buick parts,” he told South Dakota Magazine. “We had somebody here today from California.” They came from all parts of Europe and Asia as well.

Most customers had so much fun looking around the field that King joked about charging admission. But he never would have done so. He made his money from the parts they hauled away. A man with an armful of chrome from an old Pontiac wrote a check for $35.”I’m not trying to get rich on anybody,” King said.”At least I’ve got something to do and I get to visit with a lot of people.”

Most of his visitors were professional car restorers. Others had an old car or two at home.”Most are fixing up a car like the first one they ever owned in their youth.”

King’s collection was especially well-stocked with Pontiac and Buick parts. That’s because Bon Homme County residents loyally supported the late Frank Pillar, who sold those name brands for decades at his lot in Scotland.

“Frank was one of the top-selling small town dealers in the United States,” said Wilbur Foss.”People in these parts were very loyal to him and he was loyal to them. He took care of their car problems, even if it had to come out of his own pocket.”

Frank’s brother, Ed, ran a Ford dealership in Scotland and many of his vehicles are also in the lot. Pillar decals can still be found on many vehicles.

Some insightful people, realizing King had a good thing going, have offered to buy the place. But how do you put a price on a business that markets rusted iron, chrome and nostalgia?

Besides, if an appraiser did a true inventory, Ziegler’s collection would have cost more money than most buyers would have available.”Some people tell me there’s a million dollars worth of cars out here,” says King.”I don’t think so.”

King lived modestly for a paper millionaire. A lifelong bachelor, he rented an apartment above Scotland’s main street and ate most of his meals at a local cafÈ.

He drove a 1980 Ford pickup. He also owned a fully-restored 1959 Ford convertible that he drove in local parades.

His business headquarters was a small, wooden building at the entrance of the field of cars. Inside, a girl-in-a-bikini calendar from an auto parts store stood out as the most colorful decoration. The office was full of reading material that he enjoyed between customers.

Like many entrepreneurs, King Ziegler was the first to admit that he sort of stumbled into success. Who would have dreamed that the cars he collected would be such prizes in the 1990s?

Which brings one to wonder whether today’s Tauruses, Intrepids and Escorts will be as popular in 50 years as the Studebakers, Mercuries and ’57 Chevies of yesterday? Should someone be saving today’s discards?

King had his doubts.”They make pretty light stuff these days,” he said.”They’re like a pop can. With all the salt on the roads I don’t know how long they’ll last. Years ago these cars weren’t exposed to all that salt. That’s why Minnesotans are always coming up here to buy parts. They used more salt.”

Besides that, he said, today’s cars have so many plastic and fiberglass parts that they aren’t likely to hold up long enough to become collectors’ items. People don’t tend to have fond memories of cars that are cracking and falling apart, he said.

Real steel builds lasting memories. And the proof is at King Ziegler’s car farm.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the Nov/Dec 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. King Ziegler died a few years later. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Pettigrew’s Redemption

Might a sculptor vindicate Sioux Falls’ forgotten father?

By John Andrews

Darwin Wolf (above) wanted to honor Sioux Falls city father Richard Pettigrew through sculpture, but his project soon became a way to vindicate the reviled businessman and politician.

Richard Pettigrew sat at his writing desk in the second-floor study of his home at Eighth and Duluth in Sioux Falls and penned a letter to the city’s leaders. The town he helped build was quickly becoming South Dakota’s urban giant, but Pettigrew urged them to leave a strip of land near the falls of the Big Sioux River undeveloped. He believed it should become a park.

But by then, Pettigrew, one of the fathers of Sioux Falls and South Dakota’s first full-term United States Senator, was a washed up politician known for unpopular stances, failed businesses and crazy ideas. City leaders ignored his advice. Soon a salvage yard, warehouse and railroad moved in. The buildings remained hollow shells long after the businesses themselves left, and since the early 1990s, the city has been transforming that land into a park as part of its multi-million-dollar Phillips to the Falls project.

Pettigrew’s concern for preserving the river environment contradicted ideas he had held as a young businessman. Years earlier, he led a group of investors in building a stockyard and meat packing plant along the Big Sioux River in south Sioux Falls. They had a plan for everything except removing waste, so they simply dumped it into the water. Townspeople obtained a court injunction closing the plant, and Pettigrew and his investors lost over $1 million.

So was Pettigrew a visionary or a scoundrel? A bona-fide town builder or self-serving politician? Was he a Republican, Populist, Democrat, Socialist or Communist? At times in his life he was all of the above.

One thing is certain: following his death in 1926 many in Sioux Falls chose to forget rather than memorialize the polarizing Pettigrew. Darwin Wolf hopes a sculpture will change the city’s attitude toward its long-forgotten pioneer. In 2003 Wolf began planning a larger-than-life Pettigrew bronze.”How many great cities in the country have sculptures of their pioneers somewhere in the community, and we don’t have a Pettigrew,” Wolf says.”It began more out of my love for Sioux Falls than Pettigrew. It just seemed like there was a hole in Sioux Falls.”

Few lifelong Sioux Falls residents would have shared Wolf’s opinion, but the sculptor is an outsider. Born in Doland, he grew up in Aberdeen and studied art at Northern State University. He worked at Stein Sign Display there for five years after graduation, doing sculpture on the side, but soon realized he needed a more stable job to support his growing family. In 1988 he moved to Sioux Falls and spent the next 15 years in sales and marketing.

In 2003 St. Therese Catholic Church commissioned him to sculpt”St. Therese and Admirers,” for the church’s rose garden. About the same time, he won a competition to do a bronze for Avera Health. The projects led him back into a full-time art career. East River South Dakotans may recognize his work. His bronze of Monsignor John McEneaney stands at McEneaney Field. St. Joseph and two children are at St. Joseph Indian School in Chamberlain.

Wolf researches each subject before he ever picks up a knife in order to sculpt an appropriate likeness. When South Dakota Magazine visited his home studio in 2010, a pile of Pettigrew photographs sat atop his table. Wolf used one to shape the eyes, another the nose, a third the forehead and so on. When finished, the bronze will depict Pettigrew as an elder statesman. Dressed in a full suit, his left hand is clenched tightly around his lapel, symbolic of his fight for agrarian interests in the Senate. His right hand clutches the letter he wrote about preserving land along the river.

But Wolf’s research on Pettigrew has gone beyond a pile of photos and a few biographical tidbits.”It really sucked me in,” he says.”The more I learned, the more I found that I liked and disliked. There’s always another story about him, and it’s tough to figure out what’s true and what’s not. He was such a tenacious fighter and did so many good things for Sioux Falls, the monument evolved into being a project for some redemption. His aggression and passion for Sioux Falls and South Dakota cost him dearly.”

So was Pettigrew a visionary or a scoundrel? A bona-fide town builder or self-serving politician? Was he a Republican, Populist, Democrat, Socialist or Communist? At times in his life he was all of the above.

Sioux Falls was beginning its second life when Pettigrew arrived with a surveying crew in 1869. Founded a decade earlier, settlers abandoned the town site during the Sioux Wars of the early 1860s. They returned after the U.S. Army established Fort Dakota (along today’s Phillips Avenue between Seventh and Eighth streets) to protect pioneers from Indian attacks. Pettigrew claimed 160 acres and returned permanently the following year, intent on making the village of Sioux Falls succeed.

Sometimes his ambition trumped compliance with the law. In 1870, already with an eye on politics, he told people living within Fort Dakota that they could claim land within its boundaries as soon as the land was surveyed. Pettigrew and Nyrum Phillips circulated a petition asking Congress to open the reservation, but too few people lived within Minnehaha County to sign it. So the two added names of men they thought would soon settle in the county, and sent it to Washington. Congress soon complied.

Shady actions clouded his first successful run for the territorial House of Representatives. Before the election, Pettigrew destroyed a number of ballots that had omitted his name and sent a new batch to some northern counties. As it happened, many of Pettigrew’s votes came from non-resident railroad workers laying track into the new town of Gary. Pettigrew was never charged and took his seat in the House, but the”Deuel County Fraud” accusations haunted him the rest of his life.

While in the legislature, he helped make Sioux Falls the seat of Minnehaha County and wrote a bill creating Lake and Moody counties. To his own benefit, Pettigrew ensured that Flandreau became the Moody County seat. He and his brother, Fred, owned large tracts of land there. He later served a term as Dakota Territory’s delegate to Congress in the early 1880s, where he helped secure funds to build the state penitentiary.

Pettigrew was also a strong proponent of division of Dakota Territory and statehood for the southern half, a cause that endeared him to people living south of the 46th parallel (roughly today’s North Dakota/South Dakota border). When South Dakota gained state-hood in 1889, the legislature elected the Republican Pettigrew the state’s first full-term U.S. Senator.

In that role, Pettigrew secured funding for some of Sioux Falls’ landmark buildings, including the federal courthouse and post office building (which he insisted be built from native Sioux quartzite) at 12th Street and Phillips Avenue. He also balanced business with his political life. He helped bring five railroad lines into Sioux Falls and formed a railroad and trolley company with his brother. His biggest dream was creating a transcontinental railroad running from Sioux Falls to Seattle.

Unfortunately, most of his business investments happened during the economically turbulent 1890s. The trolley went bankrupt and the rail line to the West Coast fell through. It marked the beginning of a drastic change in Pettigrew. He began to question capitalism and lost trust in the country’s business leaders, many of whom comprised the core of the Republican Party. Pettigrew saw a solution to the country’s economic woes in the free and unlimited coinage of silver, and in 1896 he bolted the Republican Party to become a Silver Republican and, eventually, a Populist.

The move put him at odds with President William McKinley. Pettigrew was a vocal opponent of the Spanish-American War, despite strong support across the country. He was also an outspoken anti-imperialist, opposing the United States’ annexation of the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands. Pettigrew openly criticized the president and U.S. military leaders. He called the American flag a”rag,” a comment not well received in South Dakota. Pettigrew became such a thorn in McKinley’s side that Ohio Sen. Marc Hanna, McKinley’s presidential campaign manager in 1900, said he had two goals that year: to re-elect McKinley and defeat Pettigrew,”and I did not know which I wanted worst.” He got both. A well-organized fund-raising drive within the national Republican Party pumped nearly $500,000 into the South Dakota campaign, and Pettigrew lost his bid for re-election.

Pettigrew joined the Democratic Party and split time between Sioux Falls and New York City. In 1912, he supported the Progressives and their presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. After Roosevelt’s defeat, Pettigrew’s politics became even more radical. He flirted with Socialism and Communism and wrote two books ó a collection of his Senate speeches called The Course of Empire, and Imperial Washington, praised by Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. He died at his home in Sioux Falls on Oct. 5, 1926, and was entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Pettigrew lost favor with nearly every influential business and political leader in Sioux Falls. Negative stories persisted for decades. The only physical reminder of Pettigrew was his home and museum, which he willed to the city, and even that was nothing more than a hodgepodge of artifacts with no interpretation, remembers Wayne Fanebust, Pettigrew’s biographer.

Fanebust grew up in Sioux Falls during the 1940s and ’50s, when no one talked about Pettigrew.”Had there not been the Pettigrew home and museum, I would have known nothing about Pettigrew, and no one else would have known anything,” Fanebust says.”He wanted to be remembered, and until the professionals at the Siouxland Heritage Museums took control, it was a pretty sad affair. It was like an old curiosity shop. It really didn’t explain his life at all. He was lost to the community for a long time after his death.”

But Fanebust rediscovered Pettigrew in California. After graduating from Sioux Falls Washington High School in 1959, he moved to Los Angeles, studied history at UCLA and got a law degree. He was an attorney in San Diego for 13 years, but his interest in history and Dakota Territory never waned. His first book, a history of Minnehaha County called Where the Sioux River Bends, was published in 1985.

Fanebust paged through hundreds of old newspapers during his research and noticed Pettigrew’s name appeared often. He learned more about Pettigrew’s rise to prominence and decided to pursue a biography. His first step was visiting the Pettigrew House, where the senator’s personal papers were locked away.

ìWhen I went there to ask to see his papers, I could tell I had asked the wrong question,” he says.”They weren’t interested. She reluctantly let me in there, but I couldn’t take any notes. It seemed silly to me that it was kept under lock and key the way it was.”

Fortunately for Fanebust, Augustana College’s Center for Western Studies had put Pettigrew’s papers on microfilm in 1974. He spent four years researching and writing every evening from 10 p.m. to midnight. His book, Echoes of November, debuted in 1997.

Fanebust says his work was better received outside of South Dakota than locally. But Sioux Falls attorney Dennis McFarland and Second Circuit Court Judge Bill Srstka read it, and it inspired them to help rebuild Pettigrew’s reputation.

McFarland first encountered Pettigrew while researching Blood Run, a large Indian village outside of Sioux Falls along the South Dakota-Iowa border. The first white men known to visit the site were Pettigrew and his brother, both amateur archaeologists. McFarland became interested and read Fanebust’s book. Then he passed it to Srstka, an old high school classmate. Both have become amateur Pettigrew scholars, and believe his ideas and contributions to Sioux Falls are often overlooked. Srstka keeps a”Pettigrew file” in his sixth floor office at the Minnehaha County courthouse and uses it to craft presentations for local service clubs.

ìOf all the founding fathers of South Dakota, he towers above everyone in terms of his personality, what he did and who he was,” Srstka says.”Unfortunately, along the way he made an enemy with everyone.”

Pettigrew saw issues in black and white, and was unwilling to comprise or concede a point, McFarland says. Time, however, has proven Pettigrew right on many of his unpopular positions, including his opposition to the Spanish-American War and American expansion.”The anti-imperialists had it right,” Fanebust says.”It’s hypocritical for a country to believe in self-determination for its own people and yet interfere and meddle in the affairs of other countries for the purpose of conquering them. Pettigrew was right. I don’t think you’ll find anyone now who would take the imperialists’ side.”

Pettigrew also finds more support in the 21st century for comments against World War I that almost landed him in jail. In 1917, during an interview with a reporter from the Argus Leader, he said the war was simply a capitalist scheme to make the rich even richer, and he urged young men to avoid the draft. The Argus editors passed the comments to the U.S. Attorney, who charged Pettigrew with violating the Espionage Act, a measure that outlawed even the most faintly critical comments about the war.

Pettigrew faced a stiff penalty. Socialist leader Eugene Debs, indicted and convicted under the Espionage Act, served three years of a 10-year prison sentence. Pettigrew assembled a legal team headlined by good friend Clarence Darrow, but delays kept the case out of court, and eventually the charges were dropped.

Fanebust thinks the indictment helped usher in America’s modern civil liberties movement. Pettigrew was proud of his defiance. He framed the indictment and hung it next to the Declaration of Independence in his home, where it remains today.

Time has also helped disprove the most popular urban legend about Pettigrew ó that he dammed the Big Sioux River to build the Queen Bee Mill, another failed venture whose ruins still stand along the river. Pettigrew was instrumental in building the state-of-the-art, seven-story flourmill in 1881, but he and his partners soon realized there wouldn’t be enough waterpower or wheat to keep it running. He convinced wealthy New York financier George Seney to invest in the project. Legend says that to impress Seney, Pettigrew dammed the river, then released a rush of water as Seney toured the site. Fanebust is convinced it never happened.”There’s no evidence that Seney was even here,” he says.”If a man like George Seney had come to Sioux Falls, it would have been all over the local papers. He was one of the richest men in New York. When people like that came out, they attracted attention. That’s why I’m sure he was never here in the first place.”

When Fanebust began writing Pettigrew’s biography, he was surprised to discover nothing in Sioux Falls, except his home and museum, bore the senator’s name. Only recently has that begun to change. The neighborhood near Pettigrew’s home is now known as Pettigrew Heights and R.F. Pettigrew Elementary School opened on the city’s southwest side in 2009.

ìHe was a rough-and-tumble person in a rough-and-tumble era,” Srstka says.”All the good things he did ó bringing the railroad, building this and founding that ó there’s no color in that. There’s honor in it, but there’s no color. In history, unless you do something absolutely huge, we’ll remember more of the colorful things. Abraham Lincoln did a lot of tremendously bad things, but we don’t remember that because of his stature.”

Maybe Sioux Falls residents will remember Pettigrew for his role in building their city and state when Wolf’s sculpture is placed downtown. The project began as one artist’s idea, but others have become involved. The Minnehaha County Historical Society now leads the project and continues to seek donations. Contributions from private individuals and businesses have helped work continue. Wolf has also taken the Pettigrew sculpture to schools, service clubs and organizational meetings as part of the South Dakota Arts Council’s Artists in Schools and Communities program.

And if vindication is Wolf’s goal for the project, the final step might ensure it. The 10-foot bronze Pettigrew will be placed atop a five-foot granite pedestal at the corner of Fifth and Phillips, near the Phillips to the Falls archway, overlooking the very land he sought to keep undisturbed.”He was right about so many things ó women’s suffrage, the misguided zeal of imperialism, and the value of this plot of ground,” Wolf says.”It’s sort of a final ëI told you so.'”

Pettigrew wouldn’t want it any other way.

Pettigrew the Collector

Brothers Richard and Fred Pettigrew, in addition to being surveyors and town builders, were also amateur archaeologists. They excavated nearby Indian mounds, and Richard collected artifacts from around the world during his two terms as a U.S. Senator. His vast collection is displayed at the Pettigrew House and Museum in Sioux Falls. Inside you’ll find Indian artifacts, guns, a piece of the Great Pyramid and a bottle of water collected from the Jordan River. Pettigrew also collected canes; one was a gift from Queen Liliuokalani, the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands before the U.S. annexed them. To arrange a tour, call (605) 367-7097.

EDITOR’S NOTE ñ This story is revised from the Sept/Oct 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.