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In Search of the Fairburn Agate

By John Andrews

Fairburn agates can be found in several locations in southwestern South Dakota, but the most popular spot might be the Kern agate beds east of Fairburn.

It was barely past 9 a.m. and sweat already soaked our shirts. The forecast called for highs in the 90s, but as the sun baked the hardened gumbo and reflected off rocks strewn throughout the Kern agate beds east of Fairburn we could feel the midday heat about six hours early.

We had met Don Bahr, a retired law enforcement officer and rock hound, in Rapid City at 7:30 that morning and headed south toward Fairburn in search of Fairburn agates, perhaps the most sought after gemstone in South Dakota.”I can’t guarantee anything,” Bahr had cautioned us several times in the preceding months as we planned our trip, knowing that people have spent days scraping and turning rocks only to leave with nothing. We told him that we understood; we didn’t really expect to find anything. We just wanted an inside look at this rare and valuable gem that beckons to rock hounds far and wide, who venture far off the beaten path hoping to find a Fairburn — or even a piece of a Fairburn — even though at the end of the day all they have are a backache and a sweat-soaked shirt.

***

Fairburn Agates hold a curious power over collectors who scour the Black Hills and Badlands for them. Various types of agates — colorful gemstones formed millions of years ago inside sedimentary rock — are found all around the world. The Lake Superior Agate, found along the shores of its namesake lake, is highly prized in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Even in western South Dakota, rock hounds discover water agates, lace agates, bubble gum agates, prairie agates and several other varieties that feature interesting shapes and patterns inside. But the Fairburn remains elusive and highly prized. It is only found in the Black Hills and surrounding badlands and grasslands of southwest South Dakota and northwest Nebraska. Its outer shell — often a chocolate or sandy brown coating called the matrix — is not necessarily impressive, but its bright, concentric inner rings of red, orange, yellow, pink, blue, green or even black and incredibly tight banding can be mesmerizing. They are unlike any other gem on earth; collectors pay hundreds of dollars (and sometimes more than $1,000) for particularly good specimens.

Fairburn agates, the official state gemstone of South Dakota, are recognizable by their bright colors and tight banding. Photo by Thomas P. Shearer.

Roger Clark was already a rock hound, but on a trip to the Badlands in the early 1970s he bought a book called Midwest Gem Trails by June Culp Zeitner, one of South Dakota’s pre-eminent amateur geologists and rock hounds. That’s how Clark, a lawyer practicing in Appleton, Wisconsin, discovered Fairburn agates. He knew immediately that he had to find one.

“It was kind of like a small, obsessive compulsive disorder,” he says with a chuckle.”And the longer it went on, the more the obsession grew.”

Three to five times a year, Clark made time for hunting trips to South Dakota.”I was so obsessed that I would leave work on Wednesday afternoon and drive to Sioux Falls. I’d get up in the morning and I could be out in the Badlands that afternoon. I could hunt for two days, and then I’d drive 14 hours back and go to work on Monday. It’s ridiculous to talk about it now, but you just get obsessed with these things.”

He searched for two years and never found a Fairburn. Then he met Art and Ann Bruce, veteran rock hunters from Hot Springs who were nearly 80 but still quite active. The Bruces agreed to take Clark and his wife, Mary Jane, to the agate beds and teach them. One day, on a trip to the Nebraska grasslands just south of Ardmore, Clark found his first Fairburn.”It was just happenstance,” he says.”I just happened to turn over the right rock.”

Today, Clark has around 1,000 Fairburn agates in his collection, and he’s bought and sold many more. But his first agate remains on a shelf in his home office.”It’s red, and then clear, and then pink. Those are the predominant colors. It’s not a spectacular agate, but it’s just one of those moments that you remember.”

***

Not much was known about Fairburn agates when Clark started hunting them. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1930s and 1940s that interest in Fairburn agates began to sweep across the rock collecting community.”The longer I went on, the more I realized that I had to figure out where these things came from,” he says.”They don’t just appear in the Badlands. It didn’t make sense to me that nobody had followed that geologic course to find out where they originated.”

June Culp Zeitner was among the first to write extensively about Fairburns. Zeitner was born in Michigan in 1916, but her family eventually settled in Aberdeen. She graduated from Northern State University and took a job teaching in Mission, on the Rosebud Reservation. That’s where she met Albert Zeitner, whose family ran a hardware store and oversaw a small museum and rock shop. The two became acquainted, and for their first date Zeitner drove them to a remote location in the Badlands. He stopped the car, got out and disappeared over a hill. Soon she heard him shouting,”Fairburn! Fairburn!” She thought some sort of accident had befallen him and he was being burned, but her beau had actually found an agate. The experience not only created a memorable first date, but it launched June on a completely new trajectory and introduced her to a hobby that occupied much of her life.

The Zeitners traveled throughout North America from the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring mines and learning about the rocks and minerals they found. June wrote several books, more than 1,000 magazine articles and served as an assistant editor of Lapidary Journal, a periodical devoted to mineralogy. Perhaps her most important book, the one Clark bought on his trip to the Badlands, was Midwest Gem Trails, a field guide for rock and fossil hunters originally published in 1964.

Zeitner also created the State Stone Program, which allows each state to select an official state gem, fossil, mineral or rock. The South Dakota legislature officially designated the Fairburn agate as its state gemstone in 1966. When Zeitner died in Rapid City in 2009 at the age of 93, she was known far and wide as the First Lady of Gems.

During the decades Zeitner was writing about Fairburn agates, several theories explained their origin. Some people thought they had formed through ancient volcanic activity in the Badlands. Others proposed they had been eroded and somehow swept east when the Rocky Mountains formed.

A wrinkle in those ideas came when agates that looked almost exactly like Fairburns were discovered in Teepee Canyon, about 14 miles west of Custer and nearly 60 miles from the agate beds east of Fairburn. They appeared to be emerging from a layer of limestone, and they had the same bright patterns and banding as the Badlands agates. Zeitner suggested that maybe they were related, and even that Fairburn agates could have originated in the Black Hills. But other longtime collectors, including the Bruces of Hot Springs, refused to acknowledge any possible connection between Teepee Canyon agates and Fairburn agates.

Clark immersed himself in this world of conflicting theories. He studied Zeitner and the writings of other scholars and rock hounds and compared them with his own experience in the field. By 1998, he’d accumulated enough knowledge to present his own Fairburn agate origin story in a book called South Dakota’s Fairburn Agate, which includes diagrams and beautiful agate photography by his wife, Mary Jane. It is still available in certain museums and rock shops in the Hills.

His idea coincides with those of several other Black Hills geologists, and has come to be widely accepted. Fairburn agates were created between 250 million and 300 million years ago within the Minnelusa Formation, a layer of limestone that ranges from 75 to 1,300 feet thick and encircles the Black Hills. During the Black Hills uplift, between 35 million and 70 million years ago, around 400 square miles of the Minnelusa Formation was eroded — along with the agates it contained — and swept east into the Badlands. The agates were buried and are now slowly being revealed.

Some agate hunters still drew a firm line between Teepee Canyon agates and Fairburn agates, so Clark’s book was skeptically received. But in August of 2000 the Jasper Fire burned more than 85,000 acres of the Black Hills, including Teepee Canyon.”That location had been hunted for years, but when that fire burned, it burned off 8 or 10 miles of forest north of that Teepee Canyon area,” Clark says.”It was a very hot fire and it burned right down to the dirt. Afterwards, you’d see agates everywhere peeking out at you. That’s when we were really able to nail down the origin as the Minnelusa Formation.”

Exactly how Fairburn agates form remains somewhat mysterious. During the age in which they were created, far western South Dakota lay at the bottom of a vast ocean. Some geologists say that water rich in silica slowly trickled through passageways in the rock, and over time silica accumulated inside tiny pockets, creating an agate. Other compounds in the water, such as iron oxide (red) and manganese oxide (black), created the various colors.

Based on research conducted since the first printing of his book, Clark now believes that agates formed through a replacement process. Those pockets were originally filled with calcite, which dissolved when silica came into contact with it. And there is still debate over what causes the tight banding.”There are things that we still don’t understand,” Clark says.”It’s still a mysterious process. I’m 77 now, and I don’t think I’ll know in my lifetime, but that’s okay.”

***

“It’s like walking on the moon out here,” Bahr said as his gray 4×4 Jeep slowly navigated the heavily rutted path leading to the Kern agate beds.

The beds lie about 14 miles east of Fairburn, a tiny town of fewer than 100 people in Custer County that was settled in 1879. Its name –“Fair,” for pleasant and”burn,” the Scottish term for a stream or brook — is a nod to the winding French Creek, which flows just south of town.

Armed with a three-tined garden rake and a spray bottle of water, Don Bahr searches for elusive Fairburn agates.

We followed French Creek Road, a well maintained gravel route that passes several large ranches. As we turned north just beyond an old 4-H campground, the terrain grew rough. Bahr’s Jeep shook and rattled as we crossed the bone-dry bed of French Creek (“You do see a muffler lying on the ground out here once in a while,” he joked) and began the slight ascent into a landscape that did indeed look otherworldly.

Rocky hills rolled as far as the eye could see, covering thousands of acres. Maps often show the Fairburn agate beds as an elliptical belt stretching from near Creston in Pennington County to Orella in Sioux County, Nebraska. The beds vary in width, but the widest expanse covers about 15 miles near Red Shirt.

As we drove into the hills, we passed vehicles bearing license plates from Wyoming, Minnesota and New York — proof that hunters from near and far are welcome to scour the beds as long as they have the means to get there. That was not always the case.

An old widow that most agate hunters today know only as Grandma Kern may have been among the first people to realize what treasures could be found on her ranch land. Zeitner recounted the story of Jack Zasadil of Hermosa, who went agate hunting for the first time on the Kern ranch sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, only to be chased off by Grandma Kern and her shotgun. But as word spread and more rock hunters began showing up at Grandma Kern’s house, she started following them around the agate beds with coins in her apron pockets, hoping to buy what they found. Her cooperation may have been hastened by her ever-worsening blindness, which meant she could no longer find for herself the agates she grew to love.

Today there is no sign that anyone ever lived in these hills. A visitor might wonder if it would even be possible.

Bahr reminded us to keep our eyes on the ground the moment we stepped out of the Jeep. Fairburn agates aren’t found just on the hillsides. They can be hidden in patches of grass or even lying along the road. It’s also important to watch for rattlesnakes that occasionally come out to sun themselves on the rocky ground.

Our tools for the day were simple: a three-tined garden fork and a spray bottle of water. As we climbed the hills, Bahr scraped his rake through the top layer of rocks.”My theory is that there are all sorts of agates, just beneath the surface, or just barely poking out,” he says.”It’s just a stroke of luck to find one, because they’re not always just lying on the surface.”

Bahr has been a recreational rock hunter for 14 years. His first trip to the Kern beds offered a lesson in perseverance.”When you’re out here, you find these agates that look like Fairburns, but they’re prairie or water agates,” he says.”That first day I thought I was loaded. My pockets were bulging. But I didn’t have a single Fairburn.”

It took some time to learn the telltale attributes of a Fairburn. Now, as we scraped, kicked and dug our way up and down the hills, turning as many rocks as we could, hoping to see the bright colors and banding, Bahr simply said,”If you have to ask if it’s a Fairburn, it’s not.”

Still, we were unsure. Bahr had told us what to look for in the matrix — that brownish-gray outer shell — but the rocks began to look alike.”You could spend a week out here and not find a thing,” he gently reminded us.

He was in the middle of explaining the differences between volcanic and sedimentary agates when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence.”There’s Fairburn right there!” he said, hardly able to disguise his disbelief.

Our Fairburn agate, as we discovered it.

Could it be, that after no more than 20 minutes of searching, we had found what eludes other hunters for days, weeks, months and longer? We crouched to get a closer look, and though we’d never seen a Fairburn agate in person we recognized it immediately. Lying among white quartz, rose quartz, petrified wood and a multitude of other rocks was a tiny stone with blue, brown, yellow and red layers. A few sprays of water accentuated the colors and made the banding appear even more pronounced. It was less than an inch long — most likely a fragment from a much larger agate — but there was no mistaking that it was a Fairburn.

“There could be more right around here,” Bahr said,”but there are stories of people finding a piece like this, and somebody else finds one a mile away, and they fit together.”

We’ll probably never know where the rest of our agate lies. We searched the hills for another 90 minutes but found nothing more.

Do we attribute our discovery to beginner’s luck? Perhaps, but maybe we owed Mother Nature a debt of gratitude, as well. The night before our visit, the area around Fairburn received about an inch of rain, which helped wash away the top layer of rocks, exposing new stones that are slowly but constantly rising to the surface.

When Roger Clark began hunting agates more than 40 years ago, old timers like Art Bruce told him there was no point in visiting the Kern beds.”He was very clear that the agates had all been picked up,” Clark recalls.”They were gone. There was no use looking out in the Badlands anymore. People had just kind of given up. Now we know that it’s just a matter of time. Agates are washing out all the time in the Badlands.”

***

Fairburn agate hunting continues to evolve. Hunters still frequent the Kern beds and other hot spots in the Black Hills and Badlands, but today agates can just as easily be found in the middle of Rapid City. Landscape rock and other fill material often comes from gravel pits along the Cheyenne River. The pits are typically on private land and collectors need permission before exploring them, but the large piles of fresh material have often yielded beautiful agates. We heard of Fairburns being found in the parking lots at Walmart, K-Mart and even the roof of the Custer County jail.

Trade shows are still popular gathering places for rock hounds, but there is also a busy Facebook page called Fairburn Agate Hunter, where more than 2,200 people share their finds and stories.

It’s a passion that not everyone shares, but for those who do, the sweat, dirt and pain are all worth it.”In order to find a Fairburn, you may have to slide onto a cactus as I did,” June Culp Zeitner once wrote.”You may wear holes in your jeans rubbing the dust off stones to look for signs of fortifications. You may stare holes through your glasses. You may let out a yelp at a discarded rattlesnake skin, and get lost in a ravine.

“There’s something about it all that makes a real rockhound consider this fun. He wouldn’t work as hard for anyone for even the best wages, but to do it for fun — that’s different.”

Our hot day in the agate beds was just as she described. The working conditions might not sound good on a job advertisement — heat, isolation, random success and rattlesnakes — but the search gets in your blood.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Beauty That is Hermosa

By Paul Higbee

Barrel racer Autumn Garcia exercises her horse, Bee, at the arena in Hermosa.

Hermosa is Spanish for beauty, a fancy name for a working man’s town of 400 people on the eastern slope of the Black Hills where the most noticeable architectural feature is the county fairgrounds.

The town was named by railroaders who loved the mountain views to the west, as well as grassland vistas to the south, east and north. Those natural charms haven’t faded in the 134 years since the naming, and the town has developed a richness of character that now befits its name.

The natural setting has been barely compromised by commercialization and urbanization. Strip malls, office suites, corporate fast-food stops and the busy streets that connect them are 15 miles north in Rapid City, where Hermosans go to shop and where most teenagers attend high school. Hermosa’s modest business district — most of it stretching along U.S. Highway 79 — only adds to the town’s personality.

One of the Black Hills’ best-loved pizzerias is Lintz Brothers, started by Brian and Kristy Lintz in the Mount Rushmore Telephone Company building. They perfected a special crust recipe that came from Charlie Decker, an old family friend.

When the business was just beginning, a telephone work crew came to eat.”We’re hungry,” said the crew leader.”Fix us anything!”

An ornamental garden at the Hermosa Arts and History Association honors Doug Hesnard, a community booster who died in 2012.

Taking that as a challenge, Lintz concocted a hearty pizza with Canadian bacon, sausage, pineapple, sauerkraut and jalapenos. He called it the Flaming German Samoan, and it quickly became a customer favorite. Other standards are the Oriental Texas Tornado and the Big Fat Greek Pizza.”We like to show people that there’s more to pizza than just pepperoni,” he says.

The pizzeria and phone company shop burned in 2015, but a new building was soon constructed for both at the juncture of Highways 79 and 36.”Today we pull 65 percent of our business out of Rapid City,” says Lintz.”It’s a nice drive on a four-lane highway and we’ve become a destination restaurant.”

Despite its close proximity to the Black Hills and Rapid City, Hermosa is not a touristy town. Still, it’s a place where you can visit any summer evening for a pizza dinner and a show because just a mile from Lintz’s is Roy’s Drive-in, which features the world’s largest movie screen. Two of them, actually.

Roy Reitenbaugh of Hot Springs started the theater in 2012, just as the movie industry was going digital. The 15-acre project became an $800,000 investment. Today, he and his daughter Correna show movies seven nights a week throughout the summer. Three hundred cars can park in front of each 80-foot digital screen.

“There used to be three outdoor theaters in Rapid City,” Reitenbaugh says.”Now there are none. We were going to put ours there but they didn’t want us. Hermosa welcomed us with open arms.”

Reitenbaugh says movie-watchers like his small-town setting.”It’s really strange, but we get people from all over. Last summer, in five days I met people from France, Finland, England, Australia and Canada.”

Hermosa has always attracted interesting and entertaining people. The musical Bower family came in the 1880s, settling near Battle Creek. Their pioneer story was told in a 1968 Disney movie titled The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. Gutzon Borglum and his wife Mary moved onto a Hermosa area ranch while Gutzon blasted Mount Rushmore National Memorial from central Black Hills granite in the 1920s and’30s.

The town still gets notable guests and residents. Successful rodeo cowboys like steer wrestler Todd Suhn, roper Jess Tierney and pick-up man Tyler Robertson have Hermosa addresses. Robertson, who was nominated as one of the PRCA’s top pick-up men in 2019, was among a group of ranchers who gave beef to the Hermosa school this year to promote the concept of local foods.

Linda Hasselstrom, one of the West’s best-known rancher/writers, lives on the family ranch south of town, where she hosts writing retreats. Hermosa is also home to Rick Mills, a historian, author and director of the South Dakota State Railroad Museum in nearby Hill City.

The Hermosa Arts and History Association’s brand exhibit features the heart-reverse-heart marking belonging to Linda Hasselstrom and her family.

Mills says that in addition to naming Hermosa, the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad made a decision that saved the town decades later. As the company built its rails north from Nebraska in 1885 and 1886, it decided its line would benefit by a bit more elevation over the spot where a stagecoach station sat near Battle Creek. Hermosa was platted a mile from the stagecoach stop.”That saved us twice during floods of 1972 and 2007,” Mills says.”There was never a grain elevator here, but the railroad moved a lot of beef cattle to market.”

It also moved ore — not the Black Hills’ famous gold ore, but tin from Hermosa area mines. The same year that locomotives first steamed into Hermosa, a school welcomed its first children. Today the town’s K-8 elementary school provides a small-town style of education that appeals to many parents.

Mills credits his Hermosa schooling for stoking his interest in Black Hills history. For example, in the 1970s, he and classmates rode bicycles 4 miles into the countryside to visit the Council Oak, a tree (still very much alive) that marks the site of a peace council between the Lakota people and the Utes.

A former elementary school house is still helping kids — and adults — understand local history, even though the structure was condemned 94 years ago. The big, two-story building replaced an 1886 school in 1889, served students for 27 years, then began frightening teachers and parents because of a structural problem. The building and its bell tower sometimes swayed so that the bell rang spontaneously, according to a presentation by Linda Hasselstrom in 2019, based on research by Geraldine Hesnard Evans. That prompted condemnation in 1926, but the local Masons bought the building, moved it and secured it structurally. As Hermosa’s Masonic Lodge, the transformed school hosted Masons and Eastern Star meetings, community dances and other functions. When the Masons moved into a modern hall immediately next door in 2000, the Hermosa Arts and History Association stepped in to once again transform the old school building and rebrand it as a museum, arts venue and community events center.

The history and arts group’s acronym, HAHA, hints that much of what it does is just for fun, and that there’s room for occasional levity in history. Development of the museum is ongoing but there are already items in place, including”brand boards” with brands from area ranches burned into them, and artifacts representing the Bower Family Band.

Rick Mills, South Dakota’s premier railroad historian, credits his passion for all things trains to his Hermosa upbringing.

Open range cowboys who trailed cattle to the Hermosa railhead in the 1890s were key players in building the American beef industry. In 1919, with the opening of Custer State Park (a 72,000-acre wilderness that surpasses many national parks in natural splendor and outdoor recreation) Hermosa became something of an eastern gateway to the Black Hills. In fact, in 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge made the park their summer retreat for three months, they traveled into Hermosa on Sunday mornings to attend church. That same building, today the United Church of Christ, stands just a block from the HAHA building.

Hermosa played a role in Cold War history in the early 1960s, with the installation of a Titan missile silo 5 miles south of town. Ellsworth Air Force Base crews staffed it. Today, the missiles and soldiers are gone but it’s easy to find the site because Missile Road is more nicely paved than most country roads in Custer County.

Nineteenth-century weaponry can be found at Highland Park Cemetery on the west edge of town. Two cannons that stood on the Dry Tortugas — an archipelago of small islands several sea miles west of Key West, Florida — now point toward Hermosa. The Dry Tortugas were ideal for housing dangerous criminals, including Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was accused of aiding President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Apparently, the cannons were positioned within view of Mudd’s cell. In 1901 the federal government gifted the cannons to Hermosa’s William Stanley, a Union Civil War veteran. Stanley was highly regarded for organizing posts of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternity of former Civil War soldiers, across South Dakota.

Highland Park Cemetery is aptly named; the gravestones sit on a rise that offers a wide vista of the Black Hills’ front range. It is the final resting place for 23 Civil War veterans, Union and Confederate alike. That surprises people because the war was fought a decade before white settlement in the Black Hills. The veterans’ graves are testimony to how many ex-soldiers were motivated to escape the blood-stained East and South for the cattle trails, gold fields and homesteads of the West.

There’s a quieter form of history, significant in its own right, that Linda Hasselstrom wants to see archived at the HAHA museum. In town, and on far-flung ranches and farms, many people kept journals that documented daily life — weather, wildfires, agricultural yields, and family joys and heartaches.”We’re finding people we had no idea might be journaling were doing so for years,” she says.”Many were women, and it’s good to gain those points of view.”

A historic tree called the Council Oak grows in a ditch along Highway 40 west of Hermosa. The tree, estimated to be 400 years old, was a gathering place for Native American tribes.

Mills believes a pride in local heritage has served Hermosa well. He points to the town’s 1986 centennial celebration that brought about HAHA, and says the event spurred regional attention about what makes Hermosa unique. It’s probably no coincidence that the centennial marked the approximate beginning of young families moving in — enough to trigger a school enrollment boom. Lintz, the pizzeria owner, says it’s possible that continued population growth could even lead to a new high school.

His family has ranched and run businesses in the area for 120 years.”There’s a strong sense of community here, and the people that move in here seem to appreciate that,” he says.”It’s nice to see the growth, and yet we’ve maintained the feeling of a small town.”

Hermosa is not for everyone; it’s a town for those who love the idea of seeing their kids immersed in nature regularly, signed up for 4-H and learning to ride and rope at the big arena just east of the railroad tracks on the Custer County Fairgrounds. Hermosa seems to suit South Dakotans who want to be close to urban amenities, and perhaps even the business and career opportunities, of Rapid City but who also like to escape the claustrophobia of highways, high-rises and even high mountains.

Gates swing two ways. Hermosa is not only a gateway to the Black Hills, but also to South Dakota’s wide-open spaces.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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South Dakota’s Sledding Hills

Local youth take to their sleds at Yankton’s Morgen Park. Photo by Bernie Hunhoff.

By Bernie Hunhoff

South Dakota’s reputation for geographic diversity holds true when it comes to snow sledding. Some of our eastern cities are too flat, and the slopes in some of our mountain towns are too rugged, steep and rocky.

In Aberdeen, where the terrain has been described as”flat as a barn door,” city leaders manufactured a 25′ hill so kids could enjoy winter. However, we discovered that most communities have a natural hill that becomes a hot spot when it snows.

Pack your sleds as you travel this winter because there are plenty of hills to explore. Most of the snow hills are unsupervised, so adults should be ready to act if they see something dangerous — a heavy toboggan sled, for example, that could carom out of control and hurt someone, or a motorized vehicle on the slopes. Sledding has long been a favorite winter tradition, even for our flatland friends. Let’s keep it alive.

Here’s our list of city slopes. Tell us what we’re missing. We’d also like to know where to find the closest and richest hot chocolate after a day on the slopes.

ABERDEEN — God created most of South Dakota’s hills and mountains, but man assisted with the modest slope in Baird Park (1715 24th Avenue NE), the most popular sledding spot in the Hub City. City officials created the gentle 25-foot just for kids.

BELLE FOURCHE — Slopes behind the Tri-State Museum (415 5th Avenue) are a favorite, though they may be too fast for younger kids and there is a walking path at the foot of the hill so watch for pedestrians.

CUSTER — Pageant Hill has been touted as one of the finest family sledding spots in the Black Hills. It may be too steep and long for younger kids, but you don’t have to descend from the very top. The hill is the summit of beautiful Big Rock Park, which also includes hiking trails and a disc golf course. It rises above the city’s south side.

HOT SPRINGS — Southern Hills Golf Course (1130 Clubhouse Drive) is fun and scenic.

HURON — Toboggan Hill (6th Street & Lawnridge Avenue), aka Slide Hill, is a bluff above the Jim River valley on Huron’s east side.

LEMMON — The ever-resourceful people of Lemmon discovered years ago that it was less expensive to build a small hill for their new water storage rather than just build a taller tower. Then someone got the great idea or also making it into a sledding slope with a warming shack. Tank Hill is quite easy to spot on the city’s west side. Many years ago, when the water tower developed a leak during a cold spell, kids were able to slide on the ice flow all the way downtown.

PIERRE — The slopes above the soccer fields in Hilger’s Gulch are popular. The gulch is a scenic valley just north of the State Capitol building.

RAPID CITY — Meadowbrook School Hill (3125 W. Flormann Street) is a good spot, as well as the Civic Center hill that rises above the Holiday Inn Rushmore Plaza parking lot downtown.

SIOUX FALLS — Tuthill Park in southeast Sioux Falls is the site of weddings and parties in the summer months, but when the snow falls it becomes the domain of well-bundled children with sleds. Spellerberg Park (2299 W. 22nd Street), closer to the city center, also has a fair slope. Great Bear Ski Valley welcomes snow tubers, who get to ride the ski lifts.

SPEARFISH — Hills behind the Donald E. Young Center on the Black Hills State University campus are fast and fun.

STURGIS — Lions Club Park (off Lazelle Street) is a good place for younger kids, and Strong Field Hill on Ballpark Road is fun for older youth.

WATERTOWN — St. Ann’s Hill, a sledder’s delight, is so named because St. Ann’s was the original name of the nearby Prairie Lakes Hospital. Take Highway 20 to 10th Avenue and turn uphill.

WESSINGTON SPRINGS — It’s worth a drive to experience Ski Hill on the west edge of Wessington Springs. The natural setting in the Wessington Hills is idyllic, but the real attraction is an old, homemade invention with an electric motor that powers a 1,200-foot rope lift. Jokingly called the”Rube Goldberg ski lift,” the simple equipment has been lovingly cared for by handy volunteers, including Lloyd Marken, 85, who helped to build it in 1956.

YANKTON — Morgen Park (1200 Green Street) is the go-to sledding hill in town, however kids also like to slide down the earthen slope of Gavins Point Dam, where it rises above Pierson Ranch Recreation Area west of Yankton.

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The Luckiest Rockhound

By John Andrews

Fairburn agates, found in southwestern South Dakota, are prized finds among rock hounds.

When I was a kid, I spent hours looking through a box of rocks. They weren’t ordinary stones like you might find in your driveway or on the gravel road out to Grandma’s. This box included specimens that were downright exotic to a young South Dakotan: pyrite, obsidian, quartz, talc and schist. It’s where I first learned that rocks weren’t just rocks. There were sedimentary and igneous and metamorphic rocks. There were minerals and gemstones, and different regions of the world were famous for producing specific kinds.

South Dakota is known in the rock hounding world for Fairburn agates, which are among the most elusive stones on earth. They are found in only a few spots in southwestern South Dakota, chiefly in agate beds near Fairburn in Custer County (hence the name). Geologists are still unsure how they form. During the age in which they were created, 250 million to 350 million years ago, western South Dakota lay beneath a vast ocean. Some geologists believe that water rich in silica slowly trickled through passageways in the rock. Over time, that silica accumulated inside tiny pockets, creating an agate. Other compounds in the water, such as iron oxide (red) and manganese oxide (black) created the Fairburn’s tight banding and brilliant colors, characteristics that are unlike any other gemstone in the world.

During the Black Hills uplift, between 35 million and 70 million years ago, around 400 square miles of the agate-rich Minnilusa Formation — the limestone ring that encircles the Black Hills — was eroded and swept east into the Badlands. Today, hunters from around the world descend upon these agate beds hoping to find a rare Fairburn, or even a piece of a Fairburn.

I decided to try my luck. I met Don Bahr, a veteran West River rockhound, in Rapid City and we headed south down Highway 79 toward Fairburn. The agate beds are about 14 miles east of town. Clouds of dust billowed behind Bahr’s Jeep as we sped down the gravel. Fording French Creek proved no problem; it was a dry summer, and nary a trickle flowed through the stream bed at the rough entrance to the agate beds.

We stepped out onto a moonscape. It was barely 9 a.m., but already the gumbo hills had been baked by the hot morning sun. The hills were strewn with stones: white and rose quartz, tiny pieces of petrified wood and a multitude of others.

Our hunting tools were simple: a three-tined garden rake and a spray bottle of water. Bahr ran the rake over the top layer of stones, hoping to turn over a Fairburn or reveal one that might barely be exposed. A spritz of water would accentuate the colors and signature tight banding.

In the months leading up to our trip, Bahr had reminded me that people spend days scouring the hills for Fairburns and leave empty handed. They might find a similar agate — a water agate, prairie agate, or bubblegum agate, to name a few of the many varieties — but Fairburns are the prize. He was explaining the difference between the many agates when he stopped mid-sentence.”There’s Fairburn right there!” he said, barely able to contain his disbelief.

Within our first 20 minutes, we had discovered a fragment of a Fairburn agate. It’s outer matrix was chocolatey-brown, but inside we saw tight bands and blue, brown, red and yellow layers.”There could be more right around here,” he said, so we scraped and kicked at the surface rocks. We searched for another 90 minutes, but came away with nothing more.

I attribute the find to beginner’s luck with a little help from Mother Nature. The night before our search, about an inch of rain had fallen on the agate beds. Bahr believed that helped expose new stones that had lain just beneath the surface.

Later that evening at a Rapid City restaurant, I called my wife to tell her about the agate hunting trip. When I got off the phone, a waiter stopped at my table.”Did you say you found a Fairburn?” he asked.

He stared in awe when I showed him the photo on my phone. Yes, South Dakota’s Fairburn agates are a prize to behold, and the search for them does get in your blood.

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From Nature to Your Home

By Emily VanDerhule

Jeremy Schmidt was on his tractor when a tire blew. The culprit? A deer shed. He hung on to the antler, hoping to make a bottle opener out of it. The shed proved too small, so he made a coffee scoop instead. That became the start of SoDak Honest, the business Jeremy and his wife Bobbi operate from their farm near Custer. Along with naturally shed antlers, the Schmidts use scrap metal, downed cottonwoods and other items found in nature to create household products.

“I like to know what the things in my house are made of, where they came from, and I want to be able to shake the hand of the person who made it,” Bobbi says.

The Schmidts do custom work, like a 7-foot bench so solid even the blustery winds atop a Missouri River bluff wouldn’t move it. Barnwood tables can be made to fit any space.”We also make small items like jewelry,” Bobbi says.”The natural oils from a person’s hands keep our rings from drying out.”

Jeremy is mostly self-taught aside from a few classes in high school.”There’s a lot of math involved. I use the Pythagorean theorem more than I ever thought I would,” he jokes.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Oddities and Fun

By Katie Hunhoff

“I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel,” wrote children’s author E.B. White. Colorful games and rides, people of all ages spending time together, laughing, eating, chatting with neighbors. Fairs are exhibits of our culture at its finest.

Late summer gatherings date back to the early years of our United States. Eventually the fairs evolved and became more elaborate. But they’ve always symbolized a last hurrah before school begins and winter comes.

One of our favorites is the Turner County Fair in Parker (Aug. 15-18). This year the fair turns 136, making it the oldest in South Dakota. Once inside the gates (free admission, by the way) you’ll find a fun little pioneer town to tour known as Heritage Park. It has a general store, church, school and millinery. Each is furnished with antiques and open to the public. Outside you’ll find a shaded stage which hosts non-stop music and entertainment throughout the four-day spectacle. If you’re wondering about food, you’re in for a treat. Local beef and pork producers run dueling booths that garner long lines at dinner, but another popular choice is a chislic booth organized by sheep farmer Bill Aeschlimann and some friends way back in 1983. Turner and Hutchinson counties are known as the home of chislic — a Russian tradition of beef, lamb or pork seasoned and grilled over an open fire. (Or, here in America, deep fat fried as we also do with Oreos and cupcakes.)

Other fairs are known for fun and games. The Potter County Fair (Aug. 6-9) in Gettysburg features Cow Patty Bingo. An open patch of grass at the fairgrounds is divided into squares, each of which is for sale. Once the squares are sold, a cow is turned loose on the grass. The owner of the square where the cow first leaves her mark wins the jackpot.

In Aberdeen, at the Brown County Fair (Aug. 15-21), a fair staffer goes out early every morning to hide a stuffed monkey named Casey. The first kid to find Casey wins carnival tickets or another fair prize.

Visit the Corson County Fair in McIntosh (Aug. 12-14) to view turtle races — prizes go to both the fastest and slowest racers. Here’s a hint: painted turtles are faster than mud turtles, in case you didn’t know. Here’s another hint: snapping turtles can be dangerous.

Food competitions are popular attractions at our local fairs. Often attendees get to taste the results. The Custer County Fair (Aug. 11-14) in Hermosa features an ice cream crank-off. Power models are forbidden, guaranteeing an old-fashioned experience for kids who have never had an opportunity to make their own. A chili cook-off is one of the highlights of the Sully County Fair (Aug. 11-14) in Onida. The public can sample all the chili they can eat after the contest, for only $5.

Fairs are a fine way to celebrate our communities, but the food, games and exhibits aren’t as meaningful if people don’t show up to enjoy them. We hope you take the time to visit one of the dozens of fairs in South Dakota this summer.

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Dinosaurs and Big Art

By Paul Higbee

Bison roam freely inside Wind Cave National Park.

Just after dawn I hit the Nebraska-South Dakota line, moving north on U.S. Highway 385. I had a hundred bucks in my pocket and lots to see and do along this incredible road, leading 122 miles from the state line to Deadwood. It would be a good day.

For the next 25 miles I drove through southwestern South Dakota’s beautiful grasslands. Most people, though, think of Highway 385 in this state as a way to experience the heart of the Black Hills, and the Hills were my destination. First I wanted to visit a favorite place that bills itself as a”transition zone between ponderosa pine woodlands of the Black Hills and the mixed grass prairie of the northern plains.” I spotted my turn-off at Wallygator’s Bait and Tackle and in five minutes sat sipping coffee from a Thermos, watching the full morning break over big Angostura Reservoir — a damming of the Cheyenne River. While the Black Hills stand within view of Angostura, the lake feels more attuned to the prairie. Pronghorns bounded through lush grass just yards from the water.

Twelve miles later I arrived in Hot Springs and felt fully enveloped by the Hills. The town is home to plenty of attractions: Evans Plunge, the Mammoth Site, lodging and dining in historic sandstone structures. But this morning I sought the Black Hills’ heartiest breakfast. That’s the liver and onion breakfast served on two platters, with eggs and potatoes and toast, at the All Star Bar and Grill right on 385. Usually I’m not much for big breakfasts, but something about spending a full day in the Hills suggested that one was in order.

Janell Andis (center) has been serving Spudburgers for 20 years at Custer Crossing, a Highway 385 pit stop enjoyed by locals and tourists.

After devouring the liver and onion specialty, a traveler may feel a walk is needed before climbing back into the car. There’s an excellent urban hike through downtown and up old slab stone steps to the hilltop 1893 schoolhouse. These days the four-story sandstone school, now the Pioneer Museum, puts every square foot to work interpreting the history of the Southern Hills. The grounds offer a pretty view of the town below. This is the first of many museums along the state’s stretch of 385.

Ten miles beyond Hot Springs I entered Wind Cave National Park, established in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Immediately inside the park a sign read, BUFFALO ARE DANGEROUS, DO NOT APPROACH.

“It’s a deal,” I thought.”I won’t.”

But moments later a buffalo bull approached me. I pulled off the road and sat in my car, lost in notes for this article, writing about the view at the park’s south entrance: a mountain prairie dotted here and there by pines, with the Central Hills’ high peaks serving as a backdrop. Suddenly a great shadow darkened my paper and there the bull stood, right up against my car. I was glad I had been too lazy to follow through on my original plan of getting out of the car, sitting on the hood, and incorporating the scent of the summer morning in my notes.

Wind Cave National Park is home to this free-roaming bison herd, 30 miles of hiking trails, camping and the famous cave that spouts air. Park staff lead tours through the cave, officially the world’s fifth longest. But people in Hot Springs and Custer scoff at that designation. Most believe Wind Cave and nearby Jewel Cave, a national monument ranked as the world’s third largest cave, are one and the same. If passages connecting Wind Cave and Jewel Cave are ever mapped, the cave is the biggest on the planet.

North of the park the highway ran through a section of forest devastated by a 2012 fire, and beyond that point I saw increasing evidence of mountain pine beetle disease. As beetles kill trees, pine needles turn the color of dried blood. Those trees are widespread throughout areas of the Central Hills especially.

Approaching the town of Pringle, outcrops of granite began to appear as the highway entered a rocky zone beloved by climbers and sculptors. Pringle boasts two pieces of roadside art that by no means are the most famous along this highway. But I like them and always keep an eye peeled for them: the sculpted mountain lion slinking atop the Pringle Mercantile bar, and an unusual bicycle creation right next to 385 (left side when traveling north). Dozens of bicycles — some rusted, some gleaming and all with histories — cling together to make a curious geometric formation that glitters in the sun. This is serious bicycle country. The 109-mile Mickelson cycling and hiking trail runs close, and sometimes immediately adjacent to, Highway 385 for many miles toward Custer and Hill City.

Hill City is home to Prairie Berry winery, where travelers are welcome to stop for a tasting.

The outcrops towered taller and the great granite peaks loomed closer as I put Pringle behind me. The land is a mix of forest and clearings with homes, barns and horses, along with evidence of sawmilling and other entrepreneurial endeavors. The town of Custer announced itself boldly with billboards, and the community definitely has a whimsical side. Where else would I find a shrine to Fred and Wilma Flintstone, complete with a full-size replica of Bedrock City? The town has preserved the handiwork and legend of Wilber Todd, builder of Custer’s first stone jail. He used the money paid him for the construction to get drunk and rowdy and became his jail’s first occupant. Like Hot Springs, Custer turned a big public building, the 1881 Custer County Courthouse, into a history museum. Some visitors know the courthouse made significant history itself in 1973, when law enforcement and the American Indian Movement clashed there — a precursor to the Wounded Knee occupation.

My reason for stopping in Custer today, however, was to experience one of Claude and Christie Smith’s burgers. It seems that by consensus two years ago the Black Hills decided their just-opened Black Hills Burger and Bun Co. served the region’s best hamburgers. That’s high praise in beef country. Friends had told me that the little diner on 385 would be packed regardless of when I visited. It was. Two bites into the Hot Granny burger (with bacon, cream cheese, fresh jalapeÒos and sweet jalapeÒo sauce) I decided I would join the chorus of Smith burger boosters. Christie told me she and Claude formerly ran an Iowa grocery store, then moved west with their kids after several Black Hills vacations, looking for a better lifestyle.

“We found a lot of local support here,” she said. They stay busy. Claude starts with whole chuck roasts and grinds the meat daily. Buns, potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans and a range of desserts are also prepared fresh every day.

As the Smiths get up every morning and grind beef, just up 385 to the north the Ziolkowskis prepare to blast granite. They’re creating Highway 385’s most famous piece of roadside art, the world’s largest mountain sculpture, recognized worldwide. The great carving of Crazy Horse is clearly visible from the highway, but turning into the grounds is well worth the admission fee. Mary Bordeaux, from Pine Ridge, is the new curator of the huge Indian Museum of North America below the sculpture, and she’s the site’s cultural coordinator, organizing artists-in-residence, performers, and lecturers.”We hope people will view the sculpture and then also interact with the museum collection,” she said.”For those hoping to buy art, here’s a chance to meet the artist, to have a connection with the artist.”

Paleontologist Pete Larson and his brother, Neal, founded the Black Hills Institute of Geology at Hill City.

As a kid I knew Hill City as a place of hard working loggers, a summer excursion train and mysterious Goodhaven,”the house of many doors.” It’s hard to think that any small town in America has transformed itself more completely than Hill City. The development of fine art galleries, including Jon Crane’s, has been well publicized, as has the arrival of wineries. The old city auditorium became a museum that never ceases to amaze, reminding visitors that South Dakota is prime dinosaur country. In addition to running this museum, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research continues to dig for fossils and is a resource for science centers around the world. Probably this Hill City museum’s star attraction, although he has considerable competition, is Stan, a T-rex excavated by the institute in Harding County in 1992.

I visited Stan and his prehistoric peers, then went up the road to see a new museum in the back of the chamber of commerce building that documents the Civilian Conservation Corps’ work in South Dakota during the 1930s. The steam powered excursion train of my youth, the 1880 Train, still makes its scenic runs, and for the past five years it has shared a parking lot with the fine South Dakota State Railroad Museum. As I talked to museum director Rick Mills, author of several books about railroading, it struck me that there’s tremendous expertise along 385 in many fields. And every expert I’d talked to on this trip seemed to have all the time in the world for me.

I’m happy to say Goodhaven still stands, although it goes by another name now. In 1894 husband and wife John and Kit Good built a one-story house in the Black Hills town of Sheridan. Kit had survived a terrifying house fire and wanted a home with doors leading directly outside from every room. The”house of many doors” — 11 to be exact — won Black Hills fame because of its unusual look. It drew even more attention when it was moved to Hill City in 1944, right next to the highway. In 2003 David and Dawna Kruse bought Goodhaven and turned it into a unique bed and breakfast. They renamed it Holly House because of Dawna’s love of Christmas and flair for decorating for the holidays.”We still have seven of the 11 doors leading out,” she told me. But I had been told earlier that when visitors speak of Holly House these days, the doors rank second to another asset: Dawna’s breakfasts.”When I say I serve a full breakfast, I mean a full breakfast where everything’s homemade,” she said.”We offer a Mexican breakfast, and breads and casseroles, and biscuits and gravy and lots more.”

It’s an increasingly rare Highway 385 traveler who makes it out of Hill City to the north without being lured into Prairie Berry Winery for free wine sampling. I joined in and got personal instruction from my server about which foods go well with the wines I selected. She suggested asparagus with my dry Phat Hogg, and roast duck with my sweet Calamity Jane. Actually Prairie Berry is becoming a wine and beer campus, with a new events center next to the main building, and Black Hills Miner Brewing Co., the winery’s beer making arm, right across the parking lot. Sandi Vojta is the company’s award-winning winemaker, and she brews the beer, too.

Black Hills Burger and Bun’s crew includes (from left) Jessica Smith, Lindsay Percival and owners Christie and Claude Smith.

North of Hill City a sign told me to watch out for bighorn sheep, and immediately I spotted three. It appeared that they saw me, too, and watched me pass from a safe distance off the road. I thought they demonstrated more sophistication about traffic than lots of domestic animals I’ve known. Then Sheridan Lake came into view. A man fishing from shore reported trout were shy this afternoon but crappies were hitting his bait in a frenzy. I got back in the car and in no time came to spectacular Pactola Lake, the Black Hills’ biggest. Sheridan and Pactola are actually manmade reservoirs, products of 1940s era reclamation (as is Angostura). It surprises visitors who regularly bring boats, water skis and lake fishing gear to the Black Hills to learn the region was shortchanged when it came to natural lakes. Both Sheridan and Pactola are named for towns that surrendered the ghost to rising waters. It’s why Goodhaven ended up in Hill City.

Beyond the lakes the highway made a final 25-mile sprint to Deadwood. It’s the home stretch not only for South Dakota’s 122-mile section of the highway, but for all of U.S. 385, which begins at Big Bend National Park in Texas and extends north through Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, and of course South Dakota, for 1,206 miles. Old-timers sometimes called the route the Potash Highway, after a form of fertilizer that transformed big sections of the Great Plains. The road is one of South Dakota’s Blue Star Memorial Highways, honoring the Armed Forces, and it has also been called the George Hearst Memorial Highway, recognizing the man whose investment brought Homestake Gold Mine to full production.

The road climbed and dropped over several ridges. Pines closed in at points, then opened up to reveal draws, meadows with grazing cattle, and Custer Peak with a summit so pointed it resembled an upside down V. And then, amid pastoral scenery, things almost surreal popped into view, like a Ferris wheel in the middle of the Hills, and the World’s Largest Log Chair. How large? About 34 feet high with a seat so big that a family and several friends could picnic up there. Why? That’s a harder question to answer. I stopped by the Sugar Shack, within view of the chair, and the best answer I got was,”Well, there are lots of logs out here.” Plus, of course, no one does anything small along 385. The Sugar Shack, incidentally, is a cozy old diner with a long wooden lunch counter, behind which are prepared huge and excellent burgers. It should be noted plenty of Northern Hills partisans consider these the best Black Hills hamburgers. Evidence that the Sugar Shack has topped public polls to that effect is posted in the diner.

Twelve miles north, the Ferris wheel stood at Brownsville, long ago a busy logging and sawmilling town and now sometimes called”50s Town.” That’s because of Boondocks, a roadside business that celebrates all things 1950s — Elvis, cars, food. The centerpiece is an authentic Valentine diner shipped in more than 60 years ago and still serving up sandwiches, milkshakes, apple pie and more.

I knew I was nearing Deadwood when I spotted the Tomahawk golf course. Then I made a steep climb and descent over Strawberry Hill, coasting past a runaway truck ramp and under hills left bare by a great 2002 forest fire. I breezed through the little town of Pluma and then … well, Highway 385 just ended. Abruptly and without ceremony.

I could turn left and drive on to Lead, Terry Peak, and Spearfish Canyon. Or I could go right, into the heart of Deadwood with its entertainment, casinos and dining. It wasn’t a bad place to be, stared in the face by attractive options the northern Black Hills offer. But I wished for a sign saying, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE COMPLETED A TRULY CLASSIC AMERICAN DRIVE.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Rifleman

By John Andrews

Hugh Toenjes of Custer is one of the country’s only builders of Kentucky long rifles. He was a 12-year-old growing up in Minnesota when he became fascinated by the historic weapons and their role in shaping the American frontier. Toenjes later decided to collect them, but the hobby was too expensive for a man with a mortgage and a family in the early 1970s. He found a kit and decided to make one.”I swore I would never do a kit again,” Toenjes says.”I told myself that I could do a whole lot better than this kit.” Toenjes sold the rifle, bought raw materials and made his first long rifle from scratch.

He starts with a block of curly maple imported from Pennsylvania (the birthplace of the Kentucky long rifle) and an assortment of metal. His process remains simple, much like the methods gunsmiths used 200 years ago. Walk into his sunlit studio on Medicine Mountain Road and you’ll see his two favorite tools: a file and a hacksaw. There’s no lathe, milling machine or stock duplicator. In fact, Toenjes has either made or greatly modified many of the tools he uses. Carving, engraving and decorative work is all done by hand. That attention to detail meant it took 3,000 hours to make his most recent presentation-grade long rifle, and another 3,000 to build the case, accompanying pistols and accessories.

Toenjes also restores historic guns. He’s currently working on a long rifle made in 1778 and used during the Revolutionary War.

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

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Wildlife and Wildfires

Smoke from an out-of-control prescribed burn at Wind Cave hung in the air when Joel Schwader visited Custer State Park last week. “It was so smoky when I first got there,” Schwader says. “You could barely drive in it. I found it amazing how the animals seemed to adjust so well to it.”

Rain helped firefighters contain much of the blaze by April 16. Wind is to blame for pushing the fire outside of planned boundaries. Much of South Dakota remains under high to extreme grassland fire danger due to gusty winds and low moisture. The conditions have prompted several counties to issue burn bans this spring.
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A Toast to Charlie Collins

By Bob Karolevitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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