Ryan Clayton, Rapid City, shared these recent photos from Custer State Park. The Black Hills received record high temps on February 6 and Clayton says the buffalo were giving free car washes. “It might have been a while since they’d seen traffic,” Clayton says. “They were in a hurry, running to greet me and lick the salt off my car. They all seemed to still have their full winter coats so we might be in for a bit more winter. ”
See more of Clayton’s work at facebook.com/imagesbyryan.
Have you ever gone on vacation and thought, “It would be fun to buy a cabin here?” Or maybe it was a houseboat or villa. Closer to home, have you thought about owning a Victorian mansion, a cafe in a Black Hills mountain town or renovating a 1930s apartment building?
One of our magazine’s popular new departments is built around such dreams. So we named it “South Dakota Dreaming,” and in each issue we write about a place for sale that make us imagine, “what if?”
Our first dream-worthy property was Olive Place, an 1887 Queen Anne Victorian mansion just north of Watertown. It has three fireplaces, 14 stained glass windows and three chandeliers. The house was built for local banker Homer D. Walrath and his wife Emma. Constructed for $15,000, it was once called the finest house in South Dakota. In 1966 the house was moved from its historic location to an intersection just outside town. The property is edged with pines and lilacs and current owners, Mike and Darlene Gudmunson, planted lindens, maples, birch, ash, elm and locust. A four-stall heated garage sits behind the house.
While touring the home, we saw ornate woodwork, including hardwood floors with parquet borders, three granite fireplaces and a curved cherry wood stairway. The house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms. There are even maid’s quarters, which were built for the Walraths’ faithful employee, Tina Olson.
Three hundred miles or more west of Watertown, we found a little Black Hills cafe called the Wrangler that inspired our next “dreaming” story. It sits on Mount Rushmore Road in the little city of Custer. We envisioned rising early each crisp mountain morning to start coffee. We’d fry some eggs and chat with regulars for a few hours. Walk to the bank with a deposit during the lull after breakfast, and return to help staff with the noon rush. Then spend the afternoon hiking or trout fishing in a clear mountain stream.
A visit to the cafe revealed our dream wasn’t too far off the mark. The Wrangler does a bustling business, full of regulars and tourists. It is one of Custer’s oldest eateries, dating back to the 1950s. Owners Steve and Amanda Blume serve over 100,000 meals a year at the cafe — leaving little time for trout fishing. He and Amanda’s two children are regulars at the cafe. Their son Connor, 7, draws pictures and sells them to customers for a quarter (the cost of a gumball from the machine).
Steve says that after 24 years at the Wrangler, and with two small children to raise, it’s time for a change. So they listed the Wrangler for sale with a local realtor. But Steve is attached to the place and says he may even work for the new owners. “It’s rewarding to serve good food and to know that people enjoy it,” he says.
Our current “dreaming” features a 1930s luxury apartment house in Yankton that has fallen on hard times. The Hudson has seen better days — and hopefully there are better years ahead — but through its ups and downs the big brick structure in Yankton’s historic residential district has always had benefactors who’ve kept the roof from leaking.
Our new feature might sound like we’re in the real estate business but nothing could be further from the truth. We are doing it purely for entertainment value, and we would never accept any monetary benefits from sales of properties we feature.
If you find yourself dreaming about a South Dakota property as you’re traveling our state, give us a call. All we’re looking for is something with a price tag and an interesting story.
Nov. 15 was a special day. The whole state was blanketed in snow from an early winter snowfall. I happened to book a stay at Custer State Park that weekend. As it turned out, the day was magical. A snow day with no wind in the southern Black Hills is a photographer’s paradise.
I got on the road in the morning twilight. The snow had begun falling the night before, and the pines already had a nice covering. Just a few miles west on Highway 16A I spotted a pair of white-tailed deer hunkered down in the snow, side by side. Either these deer were used to traffic or frozen in the frigid temperatures, because the pair allowed me to photograph them without much trouble.
One lane of Highway 87 heading south was plowed, so I took it. When I got to the southern boundary of Custer State Park, I realized that my favorite county road (Highland Ridge Road) that runs through northern Wind Cave National Park might be too full of snow for my crossover vehicle to handle. But just as I wondered if I should take a chance, a large four wheel drive drove out from the east. I decided to follow its tracks. Highland Ridge Road and the Red Valley Road are both great places to spy elk and bison. This snow day was no exception.
The north end of the Red Valley Road connects to the southeast corner of Custer State Park’s Wildlife Loop. After spotting sharp-tail grouse roosting in a roadside bush, I came across a large bison herd licking salt left by the plow along the curves of the Wildlife Loop Road. I also spied a small group of pronghorn males walking on the far side of a draw. I got out and hunkered down to take some photos. Luckily they walked right by me, which provided some interesting close-up opportunities.
My next destination was Iron Mountain Road in northeastern Custer State Park. From there you can loop back to Highway 16A using the Black Hills Playhouse Road. It’s blacktop, but on this particular morning it was not plowed. I was the only one making tracks. While shooting a really nice 5X5 white-tail as he courted a shy doe, I was serenaded by a small group of chickadees and white and red-breasted nuthatches. I had unknowingly hidden behind the tree that was their winter residence.
About an hour before sunset, the sky cleared and the first yellow light spilled across the Southern Hills. I glimpsed the new light from the lookout at Coolidge Ridge and around Stockade Lake. The lake had frozen over except for a small patch in the middle where a lone bald eagle held court, perched high on a ponderosa pine.
Finally I made it to the Sylvan Lake area using Highway 89 out of Custer to watch one of the more spectacular winter sunsets I had witnessed in quite some time. As I shot these last scenes, about a dozen deer made their way up the slope as if I was not there. It was a splendid end to a perfect day. It goes to show that school kids are still right — snow days are the best days!
Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.
The 49th annual Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup took place last Friday in the southern Black Hills. Photos by James Costanzo. See more of his work at facebook.com/Costanzophotos.
Landmark moments in American history include the arrival of the Mayflower, the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Louisiana Purchase. For the Dakotas, a definitive moment was the Custer Expedition of 1874. That brief exploration of the Black Hills was a final chapter in western expansion and forever changed life on the plains.
For nearly 15 years, photographer Paul Horsted has documented and photographed the Expedition route. In 2002, Horsted and co-author Ernie Grafe published Exploring with Custer: The 1874 Black Hills Expedition. The book focused on photo sites, the gold discovery and the Expedition trail within the Black Hills. Then in 2009, Horsted and Grafe, along with historian Jon Nelson, compiled Crossing the Plains with Custer, which follows the Expedition as it traveled from Fort Lincoln in North Dakota to the Black Hills, and the return trip just three weeks later.
That path across the plains has never been officially marked or explored since Custer’s journey. To find the correct passage, the authors started with a map drawn by the Expedition’s chief engineer, Col. William Ludlow. Horsted found the map, part of a rare copy of the official U.S. Government report of the 1874 Expedition, at a bookstore in Rapid City. After scanning the map, he used mapping software to make it transparent and placed it on top of a modern satellite image showing area landmarks. That made it possible to develop GPS coordinates for numerous places where modern roads and other public areas cross the trail used by Custer’s 110 wagons.
“We’ve found it to be remarkably accurate, considering the vast distances they covered,” Horsted says. The route to the Black Hills was 310 miles long, while a different return trail was 355 miles, according to Expedition documents. Both trails pass through the Cave Hills area of northwestern South Dakota.
The path, they discovered, is almost entirely on private land, so Horsted and Nelson knocked on over 50 doors to ask permission to investigate. One landowner was rancher and pilot Lex Burghduff, who has a 12,000-acre ranch near the Cave Hills. The authors deduced that the Expedition camped on his land July 11, 1874.
Burghduff was aware that his land holds rich history.”We’ve found pieces of old harnesses and some casings that were fired by the cavalry,” says Burghduff.”We find arrowheads on a daily basis.” A friend and local historian named Bob Kriege, who recently died, taught Burghduff much of the area’s history. Kriege said Native Americans would winter near the Cave Hills after summering in the Fort Pierre area. They were following game that spent winter months on the south and east side of the Hills.
Horsted is the first person to ask Burghduff for permission to explore his land because of the Expedition. Burghduff took him on a plane ride to look for ruts made by the Expedition’s wagons.
“What Paul is doing is preserving history. I think it’s just really something overlooked in schools. We weren’t taught local history,” Burghduff says.”I’ve got two boys, Hazer and Jake, and I show them pictures that Paul sends me and the artifacts we found. We hunt for arrowheads and beads and pottery. It could easily be forgotten.”
Once Horsted and his co-authors pinpointed where they thought a camp was, they were usually within about a mile’s range of the right spot. They used metal detectors to look for artifacts Custer’s men left behind to verify the accuracy of sites shown on the map.
“Metal detecting is a lot of work, but fun,” Horsted says.”We spent hundreds of hours in heat or snow trying to pursue this and you don’t just stop, you have to go until you have a breakthrough and find an artifact that you recognize from the era when the Expedition passed.
“There was a time when I thought it was fantastic to find a square nail,” he says,”but now I’ve found buttons, tin cans with lead seals that were used in that period of history, a nickel from 1867. The most exciting thing I found was a military type spur. But coins are great because they give us a solid date.”
Horsted, Nelson and Grafe are intrigued with the era.”I’m living in the Black Hills because of what happened at that point in history,” Horsted says.”I’m no big fan of Custer. We admire the way Custer led the expedition, because not anyone could have led it in a successful way, but that came at a cost to the Lakota and Cheyenne and other tribes.”
The official expedition photographer, William H. Illingworth, took abundant photos documenting the Black Hills. In his first book, Horsted re-photographed Illingworth’s photos. Some scenes looked identical, while others showed the dramatic development of the century — especially in the Rapid City area. Even within the last 10 years, Horsted has noticed changes.”There are entire places where homes have been built where there was an empty field just years before,” he notes.
Illingworth took only eight shots between the Hills and Fort Lincoln. Because Horsted didn’t have an abundance of photos to use for comparison, he relied heavily on journal entries, newspaper stories from the five journalists traveling with the group, and Ludlow’s official government report to guide him in photographing scenes Custer’s men encountered. Those first-hand accounts accompany Horsted’s photos in the book.”Day by day as they travel you can read what the newspapers say happened, then what an Army private said and he might have a completely different point of view from the officers who recorded the same event,” Horsted says.
Ernie Grafe’s role was to compile those accounts from all available sources. Originally from upstate New York, Grafe moved to the Black Hills 35 years ago. He immediately fell in love with the area and started learning the history. He researched Custer’s trail, started hiking it himself and met others with the same interest, including Horsted.
Despite Grafe’s extensive research for the first Custer book, he still ran into surprises while working on Crossing the Plains. One of the biggest, says Grafe, was finding that George Bird Grinnell, the Expedition’s paleontologist, uncovered a dinosaur bone just southwest of Buffalo. It was the first to be found in the Hell Creek formation, which since has produced several dinosaur discoveries, and perhaps the first dinosaur bone unearthed in Dakota Territory.
Written accounts of the trip are strikingly different on the way to the Black Hills compared to those written on the way home. As the Expedition travels to the Hills, the journals are full of anticipation and speculation about what will be found. On the way home, when the route crossed hundreds of square miles that had been burned off by prairie fire, there is less excitement and a real desire to reach their destination, especially when some of the soldiers are forced to start shooting their horses because of the lack of grazing available on the burned prairie.
“We get to tell the ‘rest of the story’ in Crossing the Plains,” says Horsted. “I’ve been really inspired photographing the places we know they passed through, standing on top of the same buttes they climbed, walking the same Badlands they crossed.”
By comparing Illingworth’s photos with Horsted’s, we can gauge both natural and manmade changes occurring in the last 135 years. Perhaps after another 100 years, Horsted’s photos will be used to gauge changes that lie ahead for the plains and the Black Hills.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
Bonny Fleming shared these photos of spring at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. See or purchase more of her work at bonzeye.asiostudio.com.
Pat Baird had houseguests during the 2011 Black Hills Stock Show when she became sick with the flu.”My husband got the company out of the house for the day and I went to bed. Around midafternoon I came downstairs and looked at my computer,” Baird remembers.”There was an email that said, ‘Watch the Oprah Show today. There’s a young couple from South Dakota who will be on. The husband was severely injured in the war.'” Baird checked the clock. The show started in 1 minute so she pushed record and went back to bed. A few days later they watched the episode featuring Yankton’s Corey Briest, a soldier gravely wounded while serving in Iraq.”Heart strings were tugged and we said, ‘Wow. We’ve got to do something,'” Baird says.
The couple, both retired military, soon founded Operation Black Hills Cabin. The non-profit organization provides a free, or nearly free, weeklong vacation to qualifying combat-wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families. OBHC hosted its first family June 2011 in a borrowed cabin, but coordinating donated time-shares was difficult. An OBHC board member suggested purchasing a Governor’s House after the city of Custer donated land on the edge of town.
“It took us six months to order the house because we were so scared of this huge bill,” Baird says. But the group fundraised enough to dissuade fears and ordered a three-bedroom house built by prisoners at Springfield’s Mike Durfee State Prison.”They don’t even build the three-bedroom house anymore, but they did that just for us,” says Ione Fejfar, a board member also from Custer.”Then they contacted all of their normal suppliers and said, ‘This is what we’re doing. Can you help us?'”
Many businesses were inspired by their mission and donated upgrades like a fireplace, sprinkler system, vaulted ceilings and air conditioning. Patriot Guard Riders escorted the 1,200-square-foot, handicapped accessible home to Custer in March 2013.
Board members expected to write a large check upon arrival but found they owed nothing.”The house was granted to us by the governor through the South Dakota Housing Authority,” says Carol Johnson, a board member who helps remotely from Watertown.”Then the furniture was donated and then the window treatments were donated. It’s incredible how anybody who hears about the cabin is inspired by it. It really is South Dakota’s thank you gift to our wounded veterans.”
Contributions have come from across the state for upkeep, insurance, taxes and snacks for each family. Local quilters provide a Quilt of Valor and Black Hills attractions donate free admission and meals. But guests don’t have to sight-see. They can just relax, Baird says.”We had a quadriplegic from New Orleans come up. He said that as he was sitting on the deck and listening to the pine trees that this was the first time he had peace since he came back from the war.”
The most recent donation is the Healing Hike planned by volunteers from Ellsworth Air Force Base and the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology Veterans Club. They’ll build a path behind the cabin this spring with inspirational messages, a wheelchair accessible picnic table and benches.
And remember that email Baird received telling her to watch the Oprah Winfrey Show? Baird couldn’t remember who sent it, so she went back to check and couldn’t find it.”There was no email,” Baird says.”Everything with this project has fallen into place like that.”
Update 07/31/15: Operation Black Hills Cabin welcomed its first South Dakota family in June. Jason Meyer, an Iraq War veteran, visited the cabin with his wife Amanda and their two daughers. The organization hopes to serve more South Dakota families in the near future.
Operation Black Hills Cabin is open May 1 through September 30. For more information or to download an application for consideration, visit www.operationblackhillscabin.org.
Update 07/31/15: Operation Black Hills Cabin welcomed its first South Dakota family in June. Jason Meyer, an Iraq War veteran, visited the cabin with his wife Amanda and their two daughers. The organization hopes to serve more South Dakota families in the near future.
Here where I live, 25 miles south of the second largest town in South Dakota, I enjoy walking visitors outside at night. If they insist on taking a flashlight, I pocket it. They look up, gasp, and tell me they have never seen so many stars.
I may remind them the same stars light their sky.
We walk easily in darkness as visitors learn that tall prairie grasses seem to gather luminance from the stars, sprinkling it around our feet. With snow on the ground, the night is so bright we could run, or read a newspaper.
I’ve spent my happiest daylight hours on the prairie, working while surrounded by the unique native grasses, flowers, birds and wildlife. Night is a spiritual event, a pilgrimage to the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies.
Ambling through the dark, I hear the song of ancient grasses, redtop and big bluestem whispering to the stars that have shone here for millennia. Inhaling clean air, I exhale the day’s tensions. In summer, the rich ooze from a pond teases my nose with bouquets of growth and decay, flowers and mud. A duck squawks and splashes, perhaps escaping a prowling badger. Some nights, I can smell the badger’s musk as he lumbers along, swinging his head, sniffing for mice. His whistled signal to other badgers may set off a sleepy refrain from meadowlarks or redwing blackbirds, rippling through the dark. This is South Dakota, not the Serengeti; I know a mountain lion might hunt this darkness, and trust her instincts lead her to smaller prey.
Coyotes howl; a great horned owl hoots from the juniper trees, freezing a rabbit under a bush. A flock of grouse chuckles, alarmed. A deer flings her head up, her eyes like small moons, her soft ears swiveling to scoop sound from the air. When she leaps the fence, the top wire twangs against her hooves.
Looking up, I feel star heat, like a hand lightly brushing my forehead in blessing. On the prairie at night, who could doubt that the Creator of all this wonder is watching over us?
To the north, though, it looks as if each of Rapid City’s 70,000 citizens has a personal spotlight trained on the sky. Instead of directing light to the spots where visibility is needed at specific times, city street lights blaze upward all night long, wasting light and energy, interrupting the natural lives of animals, and profaning this cathedral of darkness.
West of my house stands a subdivision where families moved to escape the noise and bustle of the city, to enjoy the freedom, independence and beauty of country life. Each house is announced by its”security light.” If we look at those lights from a mile away, we are night-blinded.
As I give thanks for the life that makes my darkness pulsate with life, I feel sorry for the subdivision residents. Surely they moved here to love what I love, to experience the real prairie, yet all I can see is their fear. Properly directed and timed lighting could deter both thievery and the few dangerous animals, like mountain lions, which prowl past. Instead the misdirected lights create deep shadows where any predator could hide. Their security lights signal:”Hey! Here we are, rich enough to waste money on unnecessary lighting. The nearest law enforcement agency is thirty-five miles away on a winding road. Help yourself!”
We still have choices. If I hear suspicious noises, I switch on floodlights positioned to throw light where a predator might hide. When I turn them off again, the blessed darkness flows back.
Editor’s Note: Linda M. Hasselstrom lives and writes at Windbreak House near Hermosa. This story first appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 1-800-456-5117.
THEY CALLED HIM “The Man Who Hates Everything,” and no one ever did more to deserve their reputation. H.L. Mencken, writer, social critic and professional deflator popular during the 1920s, made a living lambasting ministers, doctors, Southerners, teachers, his fellow newspaperman and just about everyone else in the country. So when he took aim at President Calvin Coolidge no one was likely very surprised at what came from his toxic typewriter. “Coolidge’s chief feat,” wrote Mencken, “was to sleep more than any other president.” Not only was he lazy, but the President’s perpetually dour expression seemed to indicate he had been “weaned on a pickle.”
People expected that from Mencken. But it was difficult to find anybody who had really good things to say about President Coolidge. “In appearance he was stupendously null,” remembered one of his neighbors, “as if he was lacking in red corpuscles.” Shy, lacking in social graces, almost totally devoid of wit — Coolidge was all of those, and less. To the people at large he was Silent Cal, a stern, no nonsense Vermont Yankee who spoke as if he expected to live 100 years, but feared he had mistakenly been given only enough words to last half that long. Among the nation’s opinion makers he was considered an incredible dullard, if not a fool. He was popular with the business community, but that was chiefly for his stolid determination not to do anything that might rock the economy; he was a chief executive, said one congressman “who raised inertia almost to the level of a way of life.” But it fell to Dorothy Parker’s acid tongue to deliver the unkindest cut of all. In 1933, when she was informed that the ex-president was dead, her response was, “How do they know?”
Obvious though his shortcomings might be, he was still the President of the United States. Which meant newspapers took note of whatever he was doing and wherever he was doing it. And that gave some people from South Dakota an idea. Looking for a way to publicize the Black Hills nationally, Sen. Peter Norbeck and a number of others hit upon the idea of inviting President Coolidge for a visit. And by a fortuitous combination of circumstances, Silent Cal accepted.
In the days before air conditioning, summer reminded residents of Washington, D.C., that their city had been built on a swamp. It was usually hot, muggy and uncomfortable. Everyone who could left town for as much of the season as possible. Coolidge, whose bronchitis was aggravated by these conditions, suffered more than most. In 1925 he had escaped to the Massachusetts shore; the following year found him in New York’s Adirondack Mountains; for the summer of 1927 he resolved to vacation somewhere “west of the Allegheny’s and east of the Rockies.”
That was South Dakota’s signal to launch an all-out offensive aimed at convincing Coolidge to choose the Black Hills. The state Legislature passed a resolution formally inviting the president on Jan. 7, 1927, and in the words of Rex Alan Smith, ”they spared no adjectives when drafting it, and indulged in no false modesty.” There was mention of lofty peaks, magnificent forests, sparkling streams and an “ideal” climate, of course, but also, “splendid fishing, golf, polo and tennis.” To tie it all up neatly the Legislature sought to assure Coolidge that the stories of gunslingers and ladies of the evening were all in the Black Hills’ past. “The population in and about the mountains,” they declared, “is intelligent and moral.”
When Sen. Norbeck delivered the invitation, Coolidge was suitably impressed, resulting in one of the few instances of wit recorded during his administration. “Senator,” he observed dryly, “I can’t tell whether this is a chapter from Revelations or Mohammed’s idea of the seventh heaven.” True to his nature, though, the president said nothing further that day.
His frustrating silence continued for two months. In the spring, one of South Dakota’s two congressmen, William Williamson, met with the president to present the state’s case yet again.
“How are the flies and mosquitoes out there?” Coolidge asked.
“In the mountains proper, few or none,” replied Williamson.
“That’s good,” said Coolidge. “Last place I went they nearly pestered me to death.”
It seems the Legislature should have dispensed with all that chatter about scenery in their invitation and concentrated on the insects. Another advantage that they neglected to mention was the relative lack of people in the Hills. Coolidge had been annoyed on other trips by crowds who gathered to gawk at him. He was pleased that Rapid City, population 8,000 and the only town of any size in the area, was a considerable train and automobile ride from where he was going to be staying.
Before the final decision was made, Coolidge dispatched Colonel Edward Starling, head of the White House Secret Service detail, to inspect the facilities. Starling left the state after two days without a clue as to what he thought of the place, and once again the White House was silent.
For the next month there were almost daily news stories speculating on whether or not the president was actually coming. There wasn’t a word from Washington until May 27, when Colonel Starling and several assistants arrived unannounced at the Rapid City train station. Later that day every major newspaper in the state received a telegram from Sen. Norbeck’s office; in their next editions, using type generally reserved for a declaration of war or the seventh game of the World Series, the headlines blared, “President Coolidge To Arrive June 16!”
Preparations for the president’s visit had started long before anyone knew if he was even coming for sure. Now that it was confirmed, things went into high gear. Coolidge’s home while in South Dakota was to be the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park. The president and his wife would stay in the Governor’s Suite, which was a bedroom and private sitting room, with a bathroom down the hall. A new coat of paint was applied inside and out, and a sawmill on the grounds was moved two miles over the hill so as not to spoil the presidential view. Extra lines were strung to handle the increased telephone traffic, the lodge was primped and swept one last time, and everyone hoped that nothing had been forgotten. Colonel Starling pronounced himself satisfied.
Coolidge traveled with his wife Grace, staff members, Secret Service agents, three dozen or so newspaper reporters, the first family’s two collies, Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, and Mrs. Coolidge’s pet raccoon, Rebecca, who lived in a wicker basket. As the train passed into the state at Elkton, the party was joined by Sen. Norbeck and as many other local notables as could wrangle an invitation. An elderly gentleman, not part of the official delegation, climbed aboard in Lake Preston to pay his respects and the train pulled out of the station before anyone noticed.
After yet another formal reception in Pierre with Gov. Bulow and friends, the Coolidges arrived at Rapid City late in the afternoon. The local National Guard band played “Hail to the Chief,” probably the first and only time it ever rendered that particular tune, while artillery on the Box Elder firing range thundered a 21-gun salute. There was a dance at the Alfalfa Palace that evening, but Cal and Grace had a quiet supper of elk steak at the lodge and then retired.
Early the next morning Coolidge prepared to set out for his summer office in Rapid City. Some South Dakotans who hoped to establish the Black Hills as a fishing haven intercepted him, and they had made their plans well. Though the president was reluctant at first they convinced him to try his luck in Squaw Creek. Wearing a suit and straw boater, no angler in history ever looked the part less, or had a better chance to catch fish. His hosts did everything but throw the trout in his basket for him.
About a mile above and below the lodge park officials had installed fishnets across the creek. Into this pen they had dumped more than 2,000 trout from the state fish hatchery in Spearfish. These were not small fry, either. They were “tired old breeding trout … (that) the hatchery had been planning to gel rid of anyway,” wrote Rex Alan Smith. “Years of lazy living on ground liver and horsemeat had left them fat and flabby. But they were big, fearless and eminently catchable.”
Gov. Bulow, who was in on the plan from the very beginning, would pay for his sins. He and his wife were invited to the lodge for supper one evening and the main course was trout, which, the president proudly explained, he had caught in the creek. “(From) the first bite I took,” Bulow recalled, “I could taste the liver and horsemeat on which that trout had lived for years ….” President Coolidge did not seem to mind, though, and the fishing was a good part of why his planned three-week vacation in South Dakota ended up lasting three months.
There was one other person in the Hills that summer who was scheming to use the president’s presence for his own purposes, and that was Gutzon Borglum. Rushmore’s sculptor was well aware of how the publicity surrounding a presidential visit could help his project; it might even push Coolidge to endorse the idea of appropriating federal funds for the carving, which Borglum hoped would free him from his perpetual need to raise money.
Borglum decided to hold a dedication ceremony on Aug. 10. He had already dedicated the mountain in 1925, but Borglum never let logic get in the way of a good time. It was typical of him that he scheduled the event before asking the guest of honor to attend. It probably did not occur to him that the President of the United States might have something to do other than attend a Borglum event. He was not even deterred by the fact that Coolidge had repeatedly let it be known he did not wish to make any formal public appearances while on vacation.
Borglum’s opening shot was dramatic, romantic, slightly foolish, dangerous and couldnít have been more ill-timed. He hired Clyde Ice, the famous barnstorming pilot from Spearfish, to fly him over the lodge at low altitude; at the appropriate moment Borglum pitched a large flower wreath from the open cockpit onto the lawn. “Greetings from Mount Rushmore to Mount Coolidge!” announced the card that accompanied this sky borne bouquet.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the ideal time. President Coolidge had summoned General Leonard Wood, governor-general of the Philippines, to South Dakota for consultations. At the very moment Borglum came roaring overhead the general and his commander-in- chief were seated on the verandah discussing the possibility that an insurrection could flare up in the islands. History has not recorded Coolidge’s reaction, though it is unlikely the strait-laced president appreciated being bombed with flowers during an important meeting.
Coolidge eventually consented to attend the dedication ceremony. The last mile up to Rushmore at the time was little more than a muddy trail, and on the day of the ceremony one of the autos became impossibly stuck, blocking the way. President Coolidge was forced to use alternate transportation, and so, wearing a business suit, a 10-gallon cowboy hat and fringed, white leather gloves, he arrived for the ceremony on horseback. The assembled citizens loved it, as did their president.
Silent Cal and Grace left town a month later, with rather less ceremony than when they arrived. As it turned out, the single biggest news of the summer turned out to be something Coolidge decided not to do. Around 30 newspaper reporters comprised the White House press corps, and by Aug. 2 they were frankly bored with Rapid City. When Coolidge invited them all into his office, their curiosity was aroused. As soon as they were all present Coolidge handed each of them a slip of paper, on which was typed a single line. “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty-eight.” For a moment the group was shocked into silence. No one in the entire country had expected such an announcement. Finally someone asked the President of the United States if he had anything else to add.
“No,” he replied. And having said that, he left.
Editorís Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1996 issue of† South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.
The Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup was held Friday, September 27th. Over 1,000 bison were rounded up by horseback riders to be vaccinated, branded and sorted for auction. Those sold generate money for park operations. An estimated 14,000 attended this 48th annual event.
Photos by Deborah Eich. View more of her work at lifescapephotos.blogspot.com.
