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The Yankton to Marty Trail

By Bernie Hunhoff

South Dakota Magazine intern Ava Brandt met Digger at Mensch’s Greenhouse in Avon.

A golden dog named Digger met us at the door of Mensch’s Greenhouse, his tail wagging like a windshield wiper. Two cats lolled on a flower worktable and a dozen colorful cockatiels chirped from two cages near the petunias.

Any traveler will crack a smile at Mensch’s Greenhouse in Avon — and that’s fortunate because for the most part this Yankton-to-Marty loop can be a solitary journey, even though it visits seven small towns in South Dakota’s populated southeast corner.

We began the loop early in the morning because of a tip that the Tyndall Bakery has amazing donuts and pastries, and some days they sell out. We had two stops to make before the bakery.

The Lakeport Church in rural Yankton County dates to 1884.

Chalkstone Church

We drove 8 miles west of Yankton on Highway 50 to 431st Avenue, then turned right to the Bruce and Donna Schwarz farm. Drive slowly through the farmyard — the Schwarzes don’t mind — and you come to a small church built of the yellow chalkstone found along stretches of the nearby Missouri. Neighbors keep up the church and mow the cemetery, which features Czech surnames still common in the area. This is Czech country, settled by pioneers from Bohemia and Moravia who began to arrive in 1869. Their first settlement was Lakeport; only the little yellow church, constructed in 1884, has survived.

A wooden church is among the historic buildings preserved at the park in Tabor.

TABOR: CZECH CAPITAL

A few miles further along Highway 50 is the town of Tabor (pop. 405), founded in 1872. Tabor is famous for its annual Czech Days celebration in June. Parking is more plentiful on the other 362 days of the year, so stop on Main Street and stretch your legs by walking through the quaint pioneer village which includes a tiny wood church that was built at Lakeport even before the chalkstone church. Now it is well-kept in the Czech Preservation Society’s heritage park along with several other antiquated structures.

Magazine interns Rose Lane (left) and Ava Brandt at Tyndall’s Eiffel Tower, a fancy flagpole that measures 100 feet.

TYNDALL’S TOWER

One wonders if Gustave Eiffel, engineer and namesake of the tallest structure in Paris, would be flattered to see the imitation in Tyndall.

Tyndall’s”Eiffel” is more than 1,000 feet shorter than Gustave’s, but nearly as old. It was constructed in 1898, just nine years after the original was completed to honor the centennial of the French revolution.

The replica stands on the lawn of the county courthouse, west of downtown on 18th Avenue. But before you visit the tower, stop at the Radack family’s bakery. We dilly-dallied too long, and the cases were nearly empty, so we missed out on the Tyndall Roll, a Bismarck-like pastry filled with white cream and topped with crushed peanuts. No one knows when the legendary roll was created, but the bakery traces its history to 1905.

Carol and Vern Tolsma at their Avon greenhouse.

AVON’S GREENHOUSE

Feeling lonely in southeast South Dakota? Just visit Vern and Carol Tolsma’s Mensch Greenhouse and Flower Shop along Highway 50 in Avon.

Carol’s grandmother, Ada Mensch, started the greenhouse in 1957. Imagine how many flowers have bloomed, thanks to Ada, in 67 years. And how many people have enjoyed the garden bounty that took root here.

The flowers and plants come with free advice. Did you know you should only water tomato plants when absolutely necessary? Vern says a thirsty plant sends roots deep into the soil, making it strong and adding taste to the fruit.

Digger, the greenhouse dog, wags and nuzzles anyone who’ll take the time. Cats and cockatiels also share the space. The cockatiels are orphans who lost their owners and found refuge here.

The Tolsmas tend a 2-acre garden near the shop, and they sell produce, canned goods and amazing pickles. They occasionally set out a table of freebies that need a home.

Some days, Vern wears a blue t-shirt that says it all:”I Love Gardening From My Head to My Tomatoes.”

Richard Langdeaux helps keep Wagner’s park looking beautiful.

A WALK IN THE WAGNER PARK

Follow Highway 50 northwest. South Dakota’s Czech heritage extends into Charles Mix County and the city of Wagner (pop. 1,603), the largest town on this loop tour. Wagner has all the amenities you might want — a coffee shop, restaurants and a grocery store.

On the west side of town, near Highway 50, lies a little lake and park that would be the envy of any city in America. The lake was created when a dam and rock structures were built in the 1930s by WPA workers. Today the park includes two walking bridges, flower gardens, trails and even a small waterfall. This is the best opportunity of the day for a walk.

Richard Langdeaux, a Santa Claus look-alike who was collecting trash in the park, told us that the stone buildings along the lake were once a Scout camp. Artesian springs keep the lake full year-round.

Wagner also offers an impressive museum, operated by the Charles Mix County Historical Society. The collection is known for its Czech exhibits, as well as artifacts from the Yankton Sioux culture that predates the pioneers.

Michael Rouse helps maintain the ground around Marty’s St. Paul Catholic Church.

MARTY’S AMAZING CHURCH

Drive west of Wagner for 6 miles to 388th Avenue and turn south for another 6 miles to Marty. The one and only enterprise is a boarding school started by the Benedictines in 1924 and now operated by the Yankton Sioux Tribe.

Alongside the school is St. Paul Catholic Church, built by volunteers — Indians and non-Indians — in the early 1940s of Indiana sandstone, mined from a quarry near St. Meinrad Archabbey, which founded St. Paul’s.

The steepled church (167 feet!) is surrounded by tall trees and other structures, so it’s hard to appreciate from afar. Exit your car and walk about the churchyard, where there are statues of Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, and St. Theresa, patroness of missions. On most days, the church doors are open; inside, St. Paul’s looks like something you might see in a European city except that the murals, stained glass and other art are rich in Native American themes.

The tallest stone in Greenwood Presbyterian Cemetery marks the grave of Struck by the Ree.

STRUCK BY THE REE

Follow the road south of Marty for about 7 miles and a few curves. You’ll come to Greenwood Presbyterian Cemetery, where the tallest stone marks the grave of Struck By The Ree, a maligned and misunderstood leader of the Nakota. He was born in 1804, as Lewis and Clark came through the river valley. Legend says the explorers wrapped the baby in an American flag and proclaimed he’d be a great leader.

Struck By The Ree did grow to be a wise chief — an environmentalist, a feminist and a peacemaker. He urged pioneers to preserve the timber resources of the river valley. He pleaded that both Nakota and white men respect the Native women. And though he first fought the intrusion of the white civilization, he eventually recognized that it could not be stopped (ìthey are like maggots Ö”). He became a lead negotiator in the 1858 Treaty. Decades later, after the treaty was broken and his people found themselves hungry and hopeless, he was often persecuted; his cabin was burned, and his horses were stolen.

A tall memorial near Greenwood commemorates the 1858 Treaty.

Treaty Memorial

Continue south and you’ll soon come to another memorial, erected to honor Struck By The Ree and seven other Native American signers of the 1858 Treaty, which gave the government more than 11 million acres for $1.6 million and established a reservation for the Nakota.

The monument was constructed in 1907, topped with an obelisk. A few decades ago, vandals toppled the obelisk — a posthumous insult to Struck By The Ree, a century after his death in 1888. It has since been restored.

Springfield sits above a growing delta in the Missouri River.

A MISSOURI RIVER DELTA TOWN

Drive south from the treaty marker and you’ll come to the tiny community of Greenwood, once the hub of the Yankton Sioux Tribe. At Greenwood, if you are not in a hurry, turn right and follow the river for a mile or two for scenic views. Then return and continue east along the Missouri.

Eventually you’ll come to 312th Street, and then to Highway 37 which will lead you to Springfield, once South Dakota’s smallest college town. Thirty years ago, the University of South Dakota/Springfield was closed, despite furious opposition, and the campus was converted to a prison.

Townspeople feared that the prison would be the ruin of Springfield, but it has persevered. Norm’s, once a favorite hangout for collegians, still serves burgers and beer. A company known as Mr. Golf Car parks more than 200 golf carts along Main Street. A museum keeps the history of the college alive, and anglers come to fish the river.

Springfield still has a post office, bank and library — plus several eateries. On its eastern edge is a veteran’s memorial with a panoramic view of the river.

The highway sign lists the population at 834. That doesn’t count the 1,200 prisoners who live there.

Six unknown soldiers of Lt. Col. George Custer’s 7th Cavalry are buried in the Bon Homme Cemetery.

APPLE TREE ROAD

For a final treat on your loop, turn east onto Apple Tree Road (a mile north of Springfield).

A few miles down the road is a spot known as Apple Tree (though the state Game, Fish and Parks Department calls it Sand Creek). It consists of a campground and cabins, a boat dock and a little peninsula where you can walk out among the reeds and see where the invasive delta ends and Lewis and Clark Lake’s open water begins.

This was once a delightful place to enjoy the bellowing of giant bullfrogs. They were silent on our stop. Perhaps they dislike the phragmites, an invasive wetland plant that is taking over.

Continue east on Apple Tree Road and you’ll soon pass the tidy Bon Homme Cemetery where a large stone memorial marks the graves of six soldiers who traveled with Lt. Col. George Custer and his 7th Cavalry in 1873.

As Custer’s entourage camped at the nearby town of Bon Homme for four days, six became ill and died. Historians speculate that they contracted typhoid fever. The six were initially entombed at Snatch Creek and then reburied at the cemetery in 1893. In 1922 the large marker was built in the cemetery to give some measure of respect to the nameless six, who might otherwise have perished at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

A replica log schoolhouse stands near the Bon Homme townsite.

BON HOMME WAS A TOWN

Continue south on Apple Tree Road and you soon come to a curve near the old community of Bon Homme. At the curve is a monument to the first schoolhouse in the Dakotas. A small replica of the 1860 log schoolhouse was erected in 1910 by pioneers, and it remains there today. Care to skip a rock in the river (or fish or launch a boat)? Just follow the gravel road south at the curve for less than a mile and you’ll drive right up to the water’s edge and a sandy beach.

Back at the curve, head north to Highway 52. It will lead you east to Highway 50, which takes you past the chalkstone church and on to Yankton.

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

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The Violinist and the Sculptor

By Paul Higbee

Ruth Ann Karlen has traveled across the country to research and preserve the nearly-forgotten history of a woman who contributed greatly to the Crazy Horse carving.

Rapid City’s Ruth Ann Karlen believes Dorothy Comstock Ziolkowski Moreton fell through the cracks of Black Hills history.

The two women never met, but Karlen sometimes feels as though Dorothy is sitting in the room with her as she reads decades-old letters. She routinely calls her research subject by her first name. She describes a woman who was an accomplished violinist, writer, world traveler, and force behind the establishment of Crazy Horse Memorial.

“Dorothy was the first wife of Crazy Horse mountain sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski,” says Karlen, who believes the world’s biggest carving might not exist without Dorothy’s early efforts. Karlen can paint a detailed life story, in part because Dorothy’s cousin turned over to her photographs, writings and other documents.

“I would have been happy with a shoebox of materials,” Karlen laughs.”Instead, I got the jackpot.”

And eventually more. Karlen’s investigation has taken her coast to coast, spurred by a graduate history course that she took in 2005 while working as a Rapid City public school librarian. The class stressed how educators can uncover significant history by seeking out primary sources. Karlen’s travels included Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where Dorothy graduated in 1919, and the campus chapel where Dorothy and Korczak exchanged wedding vows in 1934.

Like most women at Vassar a century ago (the all-female school wasn’t yet coed), Dorothy came from East Coast social standing and wealth. Her father was a highly respected surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, and in 1905 he took his family on an ocean liner to the Far East — an incredibly rare travel opportunity. The trip was only part of Dorothy’s early international experiences. She lived in England for five years with her family, and after attending Vassar she moved to Paris to study violin with the renowned George Enescu.

Her trek into the interior of the American continent — specifically the Black Hills — can be traced to an encounter in Massachusetts after returning from France. She met Boston sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, several years her junior, who later told Dorothy he was sometimes his own worst enemy because of his brash, gruff manner. Dorothy experienced that immediately. Trying to make small talk by telling Korczak she admired two New York sculptors, she heard Korczak scoff, saying that most sculptors he liked were dead, artists of previous centuries who cut images from stone rather than molding clay for bronze statues, as Dorothy’s New York artists did.

Korczak revealed great admiration for one contemporary American sculptor: Gutzon Borglum, who at the time was carving presidential likenesses from hard mountain granite in South Dakota.

Despite Korczak’s antisocial ways, and possibly somewhat because of them, too, Dorothy found herself in love with the young sculptor. The attraction proved mutual, and the president of Vassar himself participated in their wedding because of his friendship with Dorothy. She was 36, Korczak 26, both driven by artistic spirits. Dorothy would play with the Boston Symphony. Korczak always called her Dorrie.

“She was very much an East Coast, proper lady,” Karlen notes.”I’m not sure she owned a pair of slacks.”

Korczak Ziolkowski and Dorothy Comstock were married in 1934. They adopted a daughter, Anne, and moved with Dorothy’s mother, Bertha Comstock, to the Black Hills in 1948 as Ziolkowski prepared to begin work on Crazy Horse Memorial. The family is pictured above in January 1944.

An East Coast lady, perhaps, only because she hadn’t yet experienced the American West. But five years after the wedding a dream position opened for Korczak: assistant sculptor under Borglum at Mount Rushmore for the 1939 carving season. Traveling to South Dakota by automobile in that year, of course, didn’t compare to steaming to Asia in 1905, but to some Easterners the adventure didn’t fall short by much. Dorothy’s writing documented the journey.

She described crossing South Dakota east to west — early summer croplands East River that looked like they could use rain, eerily fascinating Badlands and, finally, the splendor of the Black Hills, where they drove”up, up, up endlessly, into the dark pines which had been the sacred temples of the Sioux.” Dorothy called the Black Hills”mystic,” a region where,”anything might happen except the expected — and strange events lost their strangeness.”

For example, Dorothy and Korczak loved the area’s songbirds. Always attuned to classical music, Dorothy identified one”that repeated deliciously the theme of a Schubert Rondo!”

“We led the life of pioneers in Dakota,” Dorothy wrote to former Vassar classmates,”in a log cabin with porcupines, mountain lions, elk and rattlesnakes for company! Every day Korczak worked on the Mount Rushmore Memorial, as Borglum’s only sculptor assistant, and I spent all my dimes in telescopes, watching my only husband dangle on a tiny cable over the cliffs. In the studio below, I did publicity for Borglum, and I wrote a pageant, which was given there for the Golden Jubilee of the State of South Dakota.”

Dorothy’s pageant commemorating 50 years of statehood was part of the Theodore Roosevelt head dedication (each of the four Rushmore figures had its own dedication over the years).”Held on a Sunday evening, it was by far the best attended of all the Rushmore dedications,” wrote historian Rex Alan Smith in his 1984 book, The Carving of Mount Rushmore. Three thousand cars carrying 12,000 people showed up, and that number was dwarfed by a national CBS radio audience listening live.

While Smith wrote glowingly of Dorothy’s efforts at Rushmore, he did not mention her by name in the book — only as”Ziolkowski’s wife.” Researchers today won’t find Dorothy’s name in an anonymous Wikipedia article about Korczak, although the story makes clear he had two wives, the second of whom is named. Those kinds of omissions triggered Karlen’s thinking decades later about what sometimes happens to women in history, especially those from an era when no wife kept her original surname after marriage and often lost even her first name in newspaper accounts.

Before coming to South Dakota, Ziolkowski carved likenesses of great leaders in history. He and Dorothy (pictured) gifted this statue of Noah Webster to the city of West Hartford, Connecticut.

The year 1939 was significant for Dorothy and Korczak for reasons beyond Mount Rushmore. Korczak’s sculpture of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a musician and Prime Minister of Poland, won first place in a New York World’s Fair competition. Korczak suddenly had the international arts community’s attention. But the summer didn’t end well. Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon’s son and a key part of the Rushmore project, got into a fistfight with Korczak. Lincoln and Korczak made up quickly and, Dorothy later wrote, the pair”are good friends.” But Gutzon decided the men couldn’t work together and dismissed Korczak. The Ziolkowskis left the Hills, not certain they would see them again, and certainly not guessing that the Paderewski sculpture would aid in their return.

Back East, in Connecticut, the two immersed themselves in the lifestyles of professional artists.”Korczak has had no vacation since I have known him,” Dorothy wrote to her Vassar friends.”One piece follows another without so much as a half-day’s interim. We don’t even take weekends off. While he works, I fiddle, for there seems to be a lot of programs to be given.”

Music of another style came into their lives when they formed a patriotic drum and fife corps that performed as New England soldiers and sailors deployed for World War II service. Dorothy’s widowed mother, Bertha Comstock, lived with the couple and crafted authentic-looking colonial costumes.

Korczak himself left for the Army in 1943 and hit the bloody beaches of Normandy in 1944. Dorothy noted that war changed Korczak — made the hardened man harder still. Korczak railed against”what he called the veneer of civilization,” Dorothy wrote, and”was much more intolerant of people in general.” Karlen thinks Dorothy’s ability, well-practiced, to stand as a buffer between Korczak and others was a key to his acceptance in the Black Hills in the late 1940s.

His post-war vision of himself and his family was life in South Dakota or Wyoming; he had accepted Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear’s invitation to create a mountain carving honoring American Indians. Standing Bear had been impressed by Korczak’s World’s Fair accomplishment, and his time in the Black Hills was a plus. The Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming were considered as a site, but South Dakota’s quality granite won out. Korczak selected Thunderhead Mountain near Custer and declared he would shape it into Crazy Horse astride a horse. The land and mineral rights were purchased in 1947. The same year, Korczak built an on-site house, and his family followed him West — Dorothy, Bertha and a little girl, Anne, adopted by the Ziolkowskis (Standing Bear called her Maiden of the Dawn). They were prepared to live in the Black Hills for as long as it would take to complete a mountain sculpture considerably bigger than Mount Rushmore.

Also arriving from Connecticut were half a dozen young women who would volunteer at Crazy Horse Memorial. The drums and fifes and costumes came West, too, for occasional Black Hills performances but, of course, the focus was the mountain. A dynamite blast in June 1948 was a baby step in removing rock to reach carving surfaces — a process that continues 73 years later.

But in 1949, for reasons known only to the couple, the Ziolkowski marriage ended. A year later, Korczak married Ruth Ross, one of the young volunteers from Connecticut. Certainly, there were those who guessed the recently arrived Dorothy would return to New England, but she didn’t. She, her mother and Anne set themselves up in a little house on Franklin Street in Rapid City. Dorothy went to work as a Rapid City Journal writer. She also joined other Rapid City musicians as violinist in a small orchestra and endured an unhappy second marriage.

Divorce from Korczak didn’t mean complete separation from Crazy Horse Memorial. Dorothy watched its development, believed in it fully, and sent encouraging letters to Korczak. Two years before her death she mailed a note to Korczak, saying:”I am always extremely interested and stimulated as I hear of the tremendous progress for which you alone are responsible, and which is your gift to a world in need.” Considering both the sculpture and sculptor to be of permanent historical importance, Dorothy penned a 300-page Korczak Ziolkowski biography (never published).

The Ziolkowskis created a patriotic fife and drum corps while living in New England. The group came with them to South Dakota and is pictured with Henry Standing Bear, the man who convinced Ziolkowski to create a mountain carving in the Black Hills that honored all American Indians.

When it was time for Anne to go to college, she looked west, not east, and selected the University of Arizona. Dorothy and Bertha moved to Tucson with her in 1960. Dorothy played with the Tucson Symphony and gave violin lessons. Bertha died in 1961 and Anne sadly followed in 1968 after developing leukemia. Dorothy passed away in 1978 and Korczak in 1982.

Twenty-seven years after Dorothy’s death, Karlen took that history course and was advised by her neighbor, who had known Dorothy slightly, that the sculptor’s wife for so many years might make a good subject for a paper. Karlen found Dorothy’s obituary and noticed a cousin in Tucson listed as a survivor.

“Nobody’s ever asked about her before,” said Lenci Loring of her accomplished cousin when Karlen phoned out of the blue. She invited Karlen to Thanksgiving in Tucson in 2005. The women spent the holiday going through boxes Dorothy left behind — content Loring later gifted to Karlen.

Back home, Karlen looked up people who had known Dorothy and Korczak as a couple, including journalist Bob Lee. Lee gave Karlen a 1948 Rapid City Journal feature he wrote that mentioned Dorothy’s own artistry and credited much of the Crazy Horse project’s”super-salesmanship” to Dorothy and Bertha, who”showed hospitality-wise westerners how to entertain in a grandiose style.” In 2018 Karlen flew to Vassar, where no one in the alumni office or library knew who Dorothy was.”But they were mesmerized by her story when we talked,” Karlen says. Vassar staff helped her search registrar files and the library to find transcripts and the newsy letters Dorothy wrote to her class of 1919 friends (“Dear 1919,” each begins). Karlen had enough information and perspectives to do occasional history talks in Rapid City and typically found audiences no less mesmerized than the Vassar staff. Now and then, however, she met people who told her she had to be mistaken about Dorothy’s very existence.

She fully understood the confusion. Two generations of South Dakotans knew the second Mrs. Ziolkowski — Ruth Ross Ziolkowski, mother to Korczak’s 10 children, and the iconic leader who stepped up after Korczak’s death to take Crazy Horse Memorial into the 21st century. Ruth can be credited for the decision to complete Crazy Horse’s face, handled millions of visitors from around the world, and fulfilled an educational mission.

“She did a wonderful job,” says Karlen, who met the second Mrs. Ziolkowski a few times before her 2014 death.

But Karlen is making it her task to remind South Dakotans of Dorothy, remarkable in her own right and certainly deserving of a recognized place in state history.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2021 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 Mysterious Custer Graves

By John Andrews

A stone in the Bon Homme Cemetery marks the graves of six unknown men believed to be members of the Seventh Cavalry. Legend says they died while marching through Dakota Territory in 1873.

There’s a mystery along the Apple Tree Road in Bon Homme County that has stumped local historians for decades: the identities of six soldiers buried in the Bon Homme Cemetery, said to be members of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry who died while passing through Dakota Territory in 1873.

Custer and his men arrived on the outskirts of Yankton in early April and set up camp west of town near the present-day stockyards. They were embarking on a 400-mile march from Sioux City to Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory. Fort Rice was to be the launching point for a summer expedition along the Yellowstone River.

The Seventh intended to stay no more than a few days, but even in 1873 the locals knew not to trust the weather in early spring. A severe blizzard that came to be known as the Custer Blizzard blew through town and delayed their departure until early May.

The unexpected layover in Yankton allowed the men to explore the young town and gave us stories that are still told today. One regards the local bandleader who assembled a group of musicians to play at a ball that town leaders hosted for the Seventh. Custer was so impressed with his musical abilities that he invited him to join the cavalry as its chief musician on the journey to Fort Rice. Felix Vinatieri accepted, and led a 16-member band as the cavalry paraded out of town on May 7. Fortunately, the band was left behind as Custer and his men trudged off to the ill-fated Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. If they’d gone along, the world may never have known Adam Vinatieri, Felix’s great-great-grandson and one of the greatest kickers the National Football League has ever seen.

Custer and his men didn’t march very far before they were delayed once again. Rapid snowmelt flooded both Emanuel and Chouteau creeks in western Bon Homme County. They encamped along Snatch Creek while a detachment went ahead to bridge the waterways.

The Seventh stayed four days, during which time Custer and several officers took meals at the nearby Cogan House, a hotel in the village of Bon Homme run by Bridget Cole Cogan, an Irish immigrant. It was during this short encampment that legend says six soldiers became ill, perhaps from typhoid fever, and died. Graves were quickly and quietly dug along the western bank of Snatch Creek. The men were buried there until 1893, when they were moved to the Bon Homme Cemetery. In 1922, a local stonemason crafted the large tombstone that marks the graves today.

Local historians have tried for decades with no luck to determine the names of the long-lost men. Regimental records indicate no deaths during May of 1873, and no mention is made of such an occurrence in the many memoirs written by participants in the journey or in contemporary newspaper accounts penned by journalists accompanying the Seventh.

We traveled to the old Bon Homme village site and met Greg McCann, who knows the legends better than most. He is Bridget Cole Cogan’s great-nephew and operates his modern-day Cogan House — a bed and breakfast along the banks of the Missouri River — not far from where the original once stood. He showed us depressions in the ground believed to mark the spot where Custer himself camped, chosen because of its ideal view of the river, the nearby military trail and Bon Homme.

McCann says he believes the widely held theory that the deaths were kept quiet because if word that such a contagious disease was spreading among the Seventh, the cooperation Custer so heavily needed from communities and Indian tribes along the route to Fort Rice would be jeopardized.

We published a story on the Custer graves in the fall of 2016 and made it available on our website several months later. Recently, a reader commented that an ancestor of hers fought with Custer, supposedly at the Little Bighorn, but never returned. She wondered if perhaps he died much earlier and lies in one of the graves.

For decades, paper trails have gone cold. Someday one is bound to warm up.

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Who Lies in the Custer Graves?

By John Andrews

Six members of the Seventh Cavalry, dead since 1873, lie in the Bon Homme Cemetery, though their identities and their exact connection to the Seventh remains a mystery.

On a summer’s evening in 2011, a retired stonemason from Yankton toiled on his hands and knees in the Bon Homme Cemetery. Behind him stood a cracked granite tombstone marking the graves of six men whose brief sojourn through Dakota Territory in the spring of 1873 gave rise to legend and mystery.

The men are said to be soldiers from Lt. Col. George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, who passed through Dakota on a 400-mile march from Sioux City to Fort Rice, south of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. An inscription on the stone reads,”In memory of six unknown soldiers,” because the men were apparently hastily buried and left with no indication of who they were.

After the cracks on the gravestone were repaired, we began to think more about the men buried in its shadow. It seems a cruel fate to lie anonymously for nearly 150 years in a prairie cemetery far from your home and family. Because of Custer’s ignominious end at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, and his regiment’s later presence at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, he and the Seventh are among the most researched and written about soldiers in the United States. Could it be possible to find mention of the six men who died along Snatch Creek and end their century and a half of anonymity? As it happens, we aren’t the first to try.

Our search began at the University of South Dakota’s I.D. Weeks library. The second floor houses microfilmed rolls of the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan, which began publication in June of 1861, making it the oldest newspaper in the Dakotas. A weekly paper in 1873, its April 16 issue included an announcement of the Seventh Cavalry’s arrival on the outskirts of town beginning April 9.

The Seventh had been created during an Army reorganization after the Civil War and tasked with protecting settlers, travelers and railroads as they filtered into the Great Plains. George Armstrong Custer, still known throughout the country for his heroics at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, was chosen to be its lieutenant colonel. The new unit was based at Fort Riley, Kansas, and while it had been designed to be a peacekeeping force, the Seventh became embroiled in more than 40 fights with Indian tribes in the three decades after its inception, including the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn in June of 1876 that decimated the Seventh and killed Custer.

In 1873, the Seventh was reassigned to the Army’s Department of Dakota, with orders to depart Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory on an expedition along the Yellowstone River during the summer. The War Department began planning the Seventh’s springtime route from the southern United States to Fort Rice. It included an encampment of several weeks either in Sioux City, Iowa, or Yankton to allow time for prairie grasses to grow enough to feed the livestock.

Yanktonians can thank Walter Burleigh, the town booster and often-unscrupulous politician and businessman, for bringing Custer their way. Burleigh was a Pennsylvania native and a Republican who helped Abraham Lincoln win the state in the election of 1860. As a result of his new connections in Washington, D.C., Lincoln appointed Burleigh to be the Indian agent for the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory.

He used his position to line his pockets whenever possible, and that remained true in 1873. Burleigh had purchased a steamboat, the Miner, several years earlier, and stood to profit nicely if he could convince the War Department to use his boat to carry supplies for the Seventh up the Missouri River from Yankton to Fort Rice. He also owned land east of Yankton near Rhine Creek (today called Marne Creek) that would support a spacious campsite for the regiment’s 800 soldiers, 40 laundresses, 700 horses and 200 mules. Burleigh successfully lobbied military brass all the way up to General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri. When the final plans were revealed, they included a stay at Yankton.

Yankton’s Third Street, pictured in 1875, appeared much as it had when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry paraded through two years earlier. The Seventh spent nearly a month encamped east of Yankton on its way to Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory. Photo courtesy of the Dakota Territorial Museum.

In the days after the Seventh arrived, a city of tents sprang up on the prairie about a mile east of Yankton, just across Rhine Creek. The camp had barely taken shape when a severe spring blizzard (still known as the Custer Blizzard), nearly buried it under several feet of snow.

Several soldiers made it into Yankton before conditions worsened. They sought shelter for their horses, then found their way into the saloons and hotels along Third Street. But there were many other soldiers, wives and laundresses who hunkered down under blankets as the snow slowly weighed down their canvas tents. Custer and his wife endured the storm inside a log cabin, which they had rented from a local upon their arrival.

The storm slowed business to a trickle for several days and pushed the Seventh’s scheduled departure into early May, as they waited for the snow to melt and the grass to turn green. The delay allowed the citizens of Yankton to host a ball for Custer and his officers on the second floor of Stone’s Hall at Third and Capital. Felix Vinatieri, Yankton’s town bandmaster, assembled a group of musicians to provide entertainment. The talented Vinatieri, a graduate of the music school at the University of Naples in Italy, played every instrument except piano. Custer noticed his vivacity, and asked if he would serve as the Seventh’s chief musician on their journey to Fort Rice.

Vinatieri accepted, and when the Seventh finally departed on May 7, he led a 16-member band as the cavalry paraded from their campsite down Third Street and west out of Yankton along the Sioux City to Fort Randall Military Trail. Burleigh’s Miner was loaded with the regiment’s supplies and followed the column upriver.

The Press & Dakotan reported that the first day’s march took them to Lakeport. The second day, the regiment advanced to Owen’s Ranch along Snatch Creek, 19 miles from Yankton. But flooding had swelled both Emanuel Creek and Chouteau Creek farther west. Custer sent soldiers ahead to bridge both waterways, and the Seventh was delayed.

Soldiers tried to make the best of the delay. Local women brought fresh bread and kolaches, a traditional dessert from their native Czechoslovakia. Soldiers and their wives spent time aboard the Miner, which anchored along the riverbank not far from camp each night. Custer and his wife, along with several officers, took meals daily at the Cogan House, a hotel in the village of Bon Homme run by Bridget Cole Cogan, an Irish immigrant.

Finally, after four days, the regiment continued its 400-mile march to Fort Rice. What they left along Snatch Creek became a local legend and a mystery that remains unsolved.

Greg McCann’s Cogan House overlooks the Missouri River not far from where his great-aunt, Bridget Cogan, housed Custer and his officers.

Greg McCann is the great-nephew of Bridget Cogan. Her hotel and restaurant stood just a few hundred yards northeast of the current Cogan House, a bed-and-breakfast and hunting lodge that McCann and his late wife, Diana, built along a Missouri River bluff in 2008.

His riverfront property has seen plenty of history over the last 225 years. Lewis and Clark paddled past in 1804. Private Shannon, a member of their Corps of Discovery, famously became lost a short distance downstream and was reunited with the group near the mouth of the Niobrara River. Several years later, trappers like Jim Bridger and Hugh Glass followed the same path, as the Missouri River became a highway of sorts.

McCann also knows well the story of the Seventh Cavalry’s visit. He says during their delay, Custer and his officers entertained the people of Bon Homme with shooting contests (they were reportedly good shots). According to his family’s oral history, a depression in the earth just a few paces from the modern day Cogan House marks the site where Custer himself camped, chosen because of its ideal views of the river, the military trail and the village of Bon Homme.

As a caretaker of the Bon Homme Cemetery, he also knows the story of the six soldiers who supposedly contracted typhoid fever and died at the regiment’s main encampment along Snatch Creek. According to local legend, two graves were quickly and quietly dug on the creek’s western bank. Six of the men were buried in one and an officer named Abraham Hirsch was supposedly placed in the other. The regiment moved north the next day, and the bodies remained there until 1893, when they were disinterred and moved to the Bon Homme Cemetery. In 1922, William Thomas Harrison crafted the large tombstone that was carefully repaired in 2011 by Yankton brickmason and historian Bob Hanson and his friends.

The identities ó and even the correct number ó of the soldiers interred there have stumped historians for decades. For years, Abraham Hirsch was believed to have been an officer in the Seventh Cavalry. But Mark Chapman, of the Seventh United States Cavalry Association, says no Abraham Hirsch is listed in the regimental records. Similar searches by historians in the National Archives also come up empty.

When South Dakota historian Herbert Hoover wrote his history of Bon Homme County, he found paperwork that showed $6 paid for a coffin for A. Hirsch, but the date was April 17, 1873, nearly a month before the soldiers died at Snatch Creek. Given the evidence, it seems likely that even though Hirsch has long been associated with Custer’s soldiers, he was not part of the Seventh.

As for the other six, the only accounts of their deaths seem to be in the stories that have been passed down through the generations. Chapman says there are no deaths recorded in the May 1873 regimental record (although it does note 46 desertions). Only five fatalities were noted during the months in which the Seventh was transferred from the South and sent to Fort Rice: one in Charlotte, North Carolina; two en route from Memphis to Cairo, Illinois; one between Louisville, Kentucky, and Cairo; and one on May 4, when Private William Donovan of B Troop drowned.

Retired Yankton stonemason Bob Hanson repaired the worn and cracked Custer tombstone in 2011.

Contemporary accounts are equally fruitless. The Press & Dakotan reported on such details as the songs played during the grand ball in downtown Yankton, but after the regiment moved out information grew scarce. The newspaper told readers about the delay along Snatch Creek, but said nothing about the deaths of six soldiers. Its final mention of the Seventh came on June 18, with a report that the regiment had safely reached Fort Rice.

Custer’s wife, Elizabeth, wrote about the trip through Dakota in her memoir called Boots and Saddles. Her chapter describing the march out of Yankton focused on subjects such as the cold weather, wildlife, food preparation and sleeping accommodations. Second Lieutenant Charles Larned wrote regular letters home to his mother during the journey from Sioux City to Fort Rice and provided articles for the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Neither penned a word about any soldiers dying.

So if other deaths were reported in the regimental record, why the secrecy surrounding the men who died along Snatch Creek? McCann was always told Custer wanted the deaths kept quiet because if word leaked that he had lost six men, it would reflect poorly on his leadership. Another argument is that medical records were only sporadically updated while the regiment was on the move. For example, in their new book called Health of the Seventh Cavalry, P. Willey and Douglas Scott note that the number of men who suffered frostbite and endured subsequent amputations during the Custer Blizzard at Yankton was far more than what the record actually reveals. Several soldiers in the early stages of frostbite stumbled into the Custer cabin, where Elizabeth Custer helped treat them, yet those and other cases are absent from the official record.

But the most widely accepted theory is that Custer did indeed want the deaths kept secret, though for a different reason. The regiment relied heavily on cooperation from local settlements throughout the journey to Fort Rice. Custer was concerned that if word of a contagious disease such as typhoid fever within the Seventh became public, friendly relations with both Indians and non-Indians could be compromised. It seems the success of the march took precedence over the memories of six soldiers.

Bon Homme Cemetery lies along the bluffs of the Missouri River, on a county thoroughfare quaintly named Apple Tree Road. It was established in 1859 and is the final resting place of several Czechoslovakian pioneers who began trickling into southeastern Dakota Territory in the 1860s.

Local families keep the grounds and the graves well tended ó including the anonymous Custer six. McCann believes if they can confirm that the men belonged to the Seventh Cavalry, federal funds may be available to help maintain the cemetery, but so far all paper trails have gone cold. And it’s not as though no one has tried. Hazel Belle Abbott, a Bon Homme County native who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University, spent her last years compiling a history of the county and tried earnestly to uncover more information about the Custer soldiers, but could never identify them. She died in 1971, and her research is housed in the state archives in Pierre, waiting for someone else to build upon it.

Perhaps somewhere a family diary notes a son or brother who marched off with the Seventh and never returned. But for the citizens of Bon Homme County, the six bouquets of flowers and American flags that decorate each grave have always been ó and may continue to be ó”in memory of six unknown soldiers.”

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

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Reminders of Our Outlaw Days

By Katie Hunhoff

Cuthbert DuCharme’s cabin stands in a Geddes city park.

People who ventured into Dakota Territory during the 1800s were either bravely adventurous or very desperate. The faint of heart did not leave family, friends and comforts of home for a dangerous and uncertain existence. South Dakota remains the center of the American frontier, where remnants and reminders of territorial history still surround us.

Furthermore, descendants of some of our most colorful characters still live here. Several years ago, South Dakota Magazine featured an article on outlaws. We wrote about a man who had lured investors to the Hills by switching mineral samples. The suckers realized they had been duped when miners processed 3,000 tons of ore and extracted only $5 in gold. It’s a good story, but one of our readers took offense. “My grandfather was not a crook!” wrote a nice lady from West River. It turns out her ancestor was also a pillar of the Rapid City community.

Other reminders of our outlaw past remain in every corner of the state. In Geddes the cabin of fur trader Cuthbert DuCharme sits in the city park. DuCharme, called “Old Papineau” because of a talent for making whiskey (Papineau is French for pap water, or whiskey), lived along the banks of the Missouri River. His roadhouse boomed when Fort Randall was established, and wild parties were held every night.

On the other side of the state, a tree used to hang three accused horse thieves still stands on Skyline Drive in Rapid City. The tree died long ago, but the trunk is now embedded in concrete, a grey reminder of an era when hangings were punishment for a crime that might not merit a prison sentence today.

One of those killed that night was a teenager. His two traveling companions admitted their guilt, but declared to the very end that the boy was innocent. Some Rapid Citians felt there was a curse on their city because of the boy’s hanging.

Yes, our past is hard to escape. A new gravestone now marks the Gregory County burial site of Jack Sully, the famous Robin Hood of the Rosebud country. The shackles worn by Lame Johnny on his last stagecoach ride (vigilantes stopped the coach and hanged him) are now split between the State Historical Society in Pierre and the 1881 Custer Courthouse Museum. Potato Creek Johnny’s 7.75 ounce gold nugget can be seen at the Adams Museum in Deadwood. And you can still sleep at Poker Alice’s house in Sturgis.

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Old Highway 16

By Bernie Hunhoff

A stretch of Old Highway 16 east of the Black Hills is now Highway 14/16.

Can you buy the idea that a highway is a community? A long and narrow one-street town that connects places and people, good and bad happenings and a crazy conglomeration of dogs, deer and duck ponds? If a road is a community, then imagine South Dakota’s U.S. Highway 16 in its heyday. Gutzon Borglum was traveling 16 while carving Mount Rushmore. Korczak Ziolkowski helped him for a time before eyeing his own Crazy Horse carving just down the same road. Dorothy and Ted Hustead were nailing wood signs to fence posts, hoping to attract motorists to their Wall drug store. George McGovern was a shy student at Mitchell High School until he discovered a passion for debate, and motored up and down the highway attending tournaments. Sparky Anderson, the Hall of Fame baseball manager, was learning balls and strikes in Bridgewater, where businessmen promoted their stretch of 16 as Cornhusker Highway in honor of the local baseball league.

Russ Madison, one of the founders of modern-day rodeo, trailed wild broncs and bulls up and down 16 when it was dirt and gravel. Earl Brockelsby, a Black Hills kid with a fascination for snakes and reptiles, was pleased to discover that Highway 16 travelers would pull off the road and pay admission to see his collection. Alex Johnson, a railroader from Chicago, came to Rapid City to build a grand hotel for passersby; showing no modesty, he named it The Alex Johnson.

All that and a thousand more lesser-known stories along an east-west hodgepodge of dirt and gravel roads linked not only in South Dakota but across five states. The 1,600-mile journey was configured from Detroit to Yellowstone National Park, crossing Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Wyoming. Highway 16 was a central segment of several routes to the Black Hills and Yellowstone Park called the Black and Yellow Trail. An association formed in Huron in 1919 to promote the corridors, which also included parts of Highways 14 and 20 in South Dakota. Wood fence posts were painted black and yellow every mile or so to reassure tourists that they were still on track.

At first, Highway 16 was nothing more than a dirt trail. Model T wheels dug deep ruts during wet periods. In West River country, perhaps a car or two would pass down the road every hour on summer days — far fewer at night and in winter. At New Underwood, the road veered to either side of a giant cottonwood tree. Further east at Wicksville, W.H. Wolfenberger attracted travelers to his little store by leashing a pet coyote in the front yard. The store shelves were sparsely stocked with candy and staples, but rumors were that Wolfenberger sold moonshine under the counter.

Highway 16 bordered the north edge of Jack Brainard’s family ranch in eastern Pennington County.”We called it the Black and Yellow Trail, and before that they called it the Custer Battlefield Highway,” he says. It was also called”Fourteen” locally, because Highways 16 and 14 merged through much of West River.

Brainard parlayed his Dakota ranch childhood into a distinguished career as a horseman. Now 94 and living in Whitesboro, Texas, he still remembers a particular day when he saw a cloud of dust on the road to Wasta.”Russ Madison was driving his horses to Wasta for a rodeo, and running in the front was the first palomino I ever saw and I thought it was the prettiest horse I ever saw.”

A dinosaur looms over today’s Interstate 90 near wall. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

The travel industry soon followed in the path of that palomino. Henry Ford’s new Model A debuted in 1928; it and other car models offered more comfortable and dependable transportation. Mount Rushmore was emerging on the mountain west of Rapid City as a new attraction, along with a buffalo herd at Custer State Park. Soon a wave of hotels, restaurants, gas stations and automobile shops were built to serve the motorists.

The federal government helped gravel the route, providing jobs through the Works Progress Administration in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Workers often hauled the gravel by horse and wagon, and emptied the loads by shovel and muscle. One wagonload graveled about three feet of the roadbed.

The 400-mile stretch of Highway 16 in South Dakota connected Sioux Falls and Rapid City, the state’s two largest cities, along with several dozen smaller towns. Highway 16’s original route connected the main streets of most communities. In the 1940s and 1950s, bypasses were built on the edges of the towns, creating a second wave of motel and gas station construction.

A third wave came in the 1970s when Interstate 90 was constructed in a near-parallel route to Highway 16 across South Dakota, but even further from the local communities. Once again, new service stations, hotels, motels, rock shops and eateries were constructed.

Some travelers bemoan Interstate 90 as monotonous and sterile. Every ditch is mowed and every fence is straight. Highway beauty is in the eye of the beholder behind the wheel. Those who see boredom in the standardization of the federal four-lane — and who aren’t in a hurry to cross the state in 6 hours or less — will enjoy a nostalgic journey down the original 16.

Old trucks at Quinn.

Phil and JoAnn Stark have observed life in”the slow lane” for most of the last 30 years at Cottonwood, where they ran a bar and store called JoAnn’s Trading Post.”People think nobody lives here,” says Phil,”but Philip and Quinn and Wall are all one big community.” And in the summer, motorcyclists and other travelers who like to venture off the interstate become part of the mix.”They liked the sawdust on the floor, or the idea that they could just pitch a tent out back if they wanted,” says Phil.”Sometimes we’d have a dance the Saturday before the (Sturgis) rally, and the music would just keep going until morning and I don’t remember anyone ever getting in a fight. The people who like the two-lane are peaceful folks who just aren’t in a big hurry.”

South Dakota’s biggest car nut agrees.”People who like the back roads are our kind of people,” says Dave Geisler of the Pioneer Auto Show in Murdo, a sprawling indoor/outdoor museum of collectible cars, motorcycles, tractors, toys and Western memorabilia.

Geisler says Murdo changed with each of the three highway waves.”The old Highway 16 ran right into downtown on Second Street,” he says, on a tour of the town.”Here was a Mobil station. There was the Red Top Cabins. This was Young’s Cabin Park. That was a gas station. Here was Weber’s Deluxe Cabin Court. There was a Skelly’s station. Gas was 25 cents a gallon. Up here was the Conoco station. Nobody could have made much money but they all got along.”

Plenty of daring thinkers and doers populated the Highway 16 community in the middle of the 20th century. Many of their dreams remain intact at Wall Drug, Al’s Oasis, the Murdo auto museum and other lesser-known places. New promoters are also showing up. At the Community Pharmacy in Presho, a small sign boasts of the”Best Coffee Between Sioux Falls and Rapid City.” Further east at Kimball, Keke Leiferman remodeled an old Highway 16 gas station into an eatery and entertainment spot called The Back Forty.”I look at Interstate 90 as my community,” she admits. But the shop sits a half-mile from I-90 on Old 16.

If roads are communities, then I-90 is Sioux Falls on wheels — smooth and speedy — while Old Highway 16 is New Underwood without the cottonwood tree.

Most of Old 16 is still intact and passable. Here’s a guide to the 1950s-era corridor for those who might like to experience the slow lane for at least one nostalgic trip across South Dakota.

Minnesota Border to Bridgewater

Doug and Brenda Deffenbaugh run a honey stand on the honor system near Wall Lake. Brenda (pictured with her son, Drayden) says customers are almost always honest.

Old 16 enters South Dakota from Minnesota on 262nd Street, which skirts Valley Springs and the south side of Brandon. Just south of Brandon, take a right turn on Madison Street and enter Sioux Falls. Take a left on Sycamore, then a right onto 10th Street and follow it past the backside of Michelangelo’s David statue. The road runs through the heart of Sioux Falls, exiting the city as Hwy 42. Wave goodbye to suburbia because you’ll see little of that for the next 350 miles. You’ll drive past Wall Lake, through the East Vermillion River valley and into the heart of East River farming country on your way to Bridgewater, where Sparky Anderson played baseball as a child before becoming the first Major League manager to win a World Series in both leagues.

Bridgewater to Mitchell

Mitchell’s Corn Palace is just a few blocks north of Old Highway 16. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

Leave Hwy 42 at Bridgewater and drive northeast on SD Hwy 262 to Alexandria, then north on 421st Avenue. Cross I-90 and you’ll come to Hwy 38. Take it west across the Jim River and Firesteel Creek and enter Mitchell. Watch for a big fiberglass Hereford bull, the trademark for Chef Louie’s. Perhaps the oldest steakhouse on the route, it dates to the 1930s. Hwy 38 becomes Havens Avenue through the city. The famous Corn Palace is just a few blocks north.

Mitchell to White Lake

Bob and Edith Zoon are the longtime proprietors of the A-Bar-Z Motel in White Lake.

Continue on Hwy 38 past Mount Vernon, home of Minnesota Vikings star linebacker Chad Greenway. As you enter Aurora County, Hwy 38 is still posted as Hwy 16 for a stretch. You’ll drive past Gordy’s Campground in Plankinton. See the war memorials indoors and outdoors at the county courthouse. West of Plankinton the roadbed roughens, the shoulder is gravel and you begin to see less cropland and more grass. You’re now driving between the 99th and 100th meridians, a north-south stretch called America’s”middle border” by some agrarian-minded historians who believe the big difference in rainfall amounts east and west of those imaginary lines affected the settlement of the region.

White Lake to Kimball

The Back Forty in Kimball grew from an old gas station.

The A-Bar-Z Store & Hotel was built in White Lake along U.S. Hwy 16 several years before President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Construction Act. Thirty years later, Bob and Edith Zoon were”just friends” when they arrived in 1985 from New Jersey to visit relatives.”We came out and fell in love with the area,” explained Bob. And with each other. They took a trip to the Aurora County Courthouse in Plankinton, where Bob asked,”What does it take to get married here?” The sheriff and his secretary served as witnesses. Then they bought the six-room hotel and gas station on Old 16 and renamed it A-Bar-Z.

As you leave White Lake, local Hwy 16 crosses to the south of Ike’s concrete legacy and you find yourself on 252nd Street. About 12 miles later, you approach Kimball and the South Dakota Tractor Museum. You pass by a tiny Frosty King ice cream shack and then, a half-mile west, a funky coffeehouse, restaurant and bar known as The Back Forty, where proprietor Keke Leiferman gives traditional South Dakota sandwiches a gourmet twist. A mile down the road, you drive beneath an underpass and find yourself on the south side of I-90 once again, going west on what’s now called 251st Street.

Kimball to Chamberlain

Hillside Motel in Chamberlain survived the decommissioning of Highway 16. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

Eleven miles after leaving Kimball, you pull up to a stop sign for Hwy 50. To the west is a big body of water known as Red Lake. Take Hwy 50 north across I-90 and head for nearby Pukwana, lawn mower racing capital of the Northern Plains. Leave Pukwana on 249th Street going west and you’ll soon rejoin Hwy 50 as it enters Chamberlain, descending into the wide valley of the Missouri River. Spend some time in Chamberlain, a little city with a one-way Main Street that includes a movie theater, restaurants and a bakery called Indulge. Just to the west of Main Street, River Street leads to a shoreline park and walking paths, good opportunities to stretch your legs or enjoy the sweets from the bakery.

Chamberlain to Kennebec

The Lyman County courthouse at Kennebec.

You’ll cross the Missouri — the USA’s longest river — on an old steel bridge that transformed travel on Hwy 16 when it was finished in September of 1925. The two-way bridge became too narrow for modern cars and trucks. When construction of the Fort Randall Dam expanded the river’s width, an identical bridge at nearby Wheeler was declared surplus and floated upriver. The old bridge became the west lane and the Wheeler bridge is the east lane yet today. Cross the bridge into West River and you’ll drive past Oacoma and Al’s Oasis, a grocery store and highway restaurant made famous by the Mueller family. The old highway ends and you have no choice but to take I-90 for about nine miles, but then you can rejoin Old 16 by turning north on Hwy 47 at Exit 251. Take Hwy 47 northwest into Reliance and then onto Kennebec, where the Lyman County courthouse serves as the bastion of government for 3,700 citizens.

Kennebec to Kadoka

Dave Geisler entertains travelers at the Pioneer Auto Museum in Murdo.

Now you embark on a long stretch of Old 16 known as Hwy 248 that closely parallels I-90, which is usually within a rifle’s shot. Hwy 248 leads you through eight more little West River towns, in this order: Kennebec, Presho, Vivian, Draper, Murdo, Okaton, Belvidere and Kadoka. Some look like ghost towns at first blush, while others are busier than their modest populations would suggest.

When Highway 16 was in its prime, Keith Patrick’s repair shop at Vivian was a Ford dealership and gas station. Today, pilots occasionally land small planes on the road without fear of hitting a motorist. Patrick fixes anything from cars and tractors to”lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners and eye glasses.” He and his brother, Kevin, display old pictures and memorabilia of Vivian in the shop.

Fading wood gas stations, motels, shops and restaurants are scattered around Draper, pop. 82. Gene Cressy remembers when Highway 16 was constructed in the 1940s, south of the railroad tracks.”The speed limit was 45, 25 on the curves because they were 90-degree curves.” Neighboring schools borrowed the road’s nickname when they organized the Custer Battlefield Conference for sports teams. The conference still exists.

Gurney Seed & Nursery of Yankton started a chain of rural gas stations in the 1930s. Vivian’s station is preserved at Pioneer Auto Museum in Murdo. Dave Geisler has an eclectic collection of 275 old automobiles (including the Dukes of Hazzard’s General Lee) and 30 buildings stocked with Old West and pioneer memorabilia. It grew from a Highway 16 gas station and Chevy dealership started by Dave’s father in the early 1950s.

Check out the dollar bills pinned all over the Reliance Bar, and the Lyman County Courthouse in Kennebec, built in 1925 when Henry Ford was still making Model Ts. In Presho you drive past a sprawling indoor/outdoor museum and Hutch’s, a restaurant and cafe built in the early 1950s that locals love for the hot beef sandwiches.

Kadoka to Cottonwood

A longhorn cow roams the quiet roadway west of Philip Junction.

The Kadoka to Wall route is not for everybody, or every car. The Old 16 roadbed is still passable, but at times it becomes a West River back road seldom used even by local ranchers.

The stretch begins nicely. You travel east of Kadoka for 7 miles along the same old Hwy 248 until you reach what’s known as Seven Mile Corner. Then Old 16 runs north (now Highway 73) toward Philip. In a dozen or so miles (before arriving in the city of Philip), you drop into a valley called Philip Junction. Notice a family farm in the valley; the building closest to the highway is landscaped with old auto memorabilia. Turn west on a forgotten road that once was U.S. Highway 16, the grandest route from Detroit to Yellowstone. Today, the little asphalt that remains is cracked and dry. It looks like a road from an apocalypse movie.

The path (now 237th Street) is still marked as a”principal route” on many maps and atlases, but they are mistaken. Ruts and holes make it barely passable on a dry summer’s day, and a bad idea on a wet day. This is Jackson County, population 3,200, one of the poorest places in the United States. Little money is available for road maintenance.

You’ll travel 10 slow miles along 237th Street, mostly past pastures and grasslands. You cross two creeks, one called the South Fork Bad River, which flows northward to the Bad River, which flows into the mighty Missouri at Fort Pierre.

Bridges on the creeks seem scary, but they hold a car.

Cottonwood to Wall

Pavement is gone from the road east of Wall.

The apocalyptic segment runs onto Hwy 14 just east of the tiny town of Cottonwood. Highways 14 and 16 once joined there and continued together to Rapid City. Enjoy the next 10 miles on the smooth and solid Hwy 14 to Quinn, past Wall Drug signs advertising jackalopes, donuts and a 6-foot rabbit.

At Quinn, you face another test. You can continue along Hwy 14, a newer route for Hwy 16, or you can once again”rough it” on the original roadbed to Wall. To find the old road, drive into Quinn and look just south of the railroad tracks for a road marked as Old Hwy 16 & Quinn Road, and take it west.

At first you’ll be on a dirt path, heading past a cattle ranch. Again, this is only for adventurous souls on dry days. The asphalt has all but disappeared. At times, you’ll be on a one-lane path and at one point you’ll even need to enter the ditch to avoid a washout.

Unlike the first stretch of rough road, which is over-promised on most maps, this brief 5-mile path from Quinn to Wall is not even shown on the official state map. Keep driving west and you’ll be rewarded by a scenic jaunt past some swampy land and small bumps, precursors to the big Badlands to the south. You’ll see gnarled old wood posts along the way, and it takes only a little imagination to picture a young Ted Hustead nailing”Free Ice Water” signs on them to attract Model A drivers to stop at his now-famous Wall Drug Store.

Wall to Wasta

The owner of the old Packard Cafe and Motel in Wasta borrowed the name from the luxurious automobile of the 1930s and ’40s. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

We would be remiss as travel guides if we didn’t recommend a stop at Wall Drug — still owned and operated by the Hustead family — for a buffalo burger, the crispy-soft chocolate doughnuts, 5-cent coffee and free admission to one of the West’s amazing art collections.

According to legend, Hustead actually traveled to Wasta to get water for his customers. If that story is true, then he surely made the drive by heading west on Fourth Avenue. You can do the same, but then the exact route of Old 16 is a mystery. Most likely, today’s I-90 was built over some of the original roadbed. Our recommendation is to take I-90 to Wasta, but then drive into Wasta, where you’ll easily find traces of Hwy 16 on the north side of town. It soon dead-ends if you turn west, but go east a mile and you’ll be rewarded with a better look at the Cheyenne River valley than I-90 travelers enjoy. Park your car and take pictures of the Old 16 car bridge and the nearby railroad bridge, both still in service.

The nearby town of Owanka died due to lack of water.”If they did find water, it had a high sulfur content and they couldn’t drink it,” says Jack Brainard.”They shipped water in on the train.” The name Wasta came from the Lakota name for the springs, mini wasta, or”water good.” When Highway 16 was routed to the north side of town, hotels and restaurants were opened like the Redwood, where motel scenes for the movie Thunderheart were filmed in 1991.

Wasta to Rapid City

Margaret Larson, Alice Richter, Janice Jensen and Joyce Wolken play cards at BJ’s Country Store in New Underwood.

Return to I-90 and head west for just a few miles, then take Exit 90 and go south on 173rd Avenue to the Wicksville Community Church, where services are held on the second, third and fourth Sundays of every month — leaving travelers to wonder what happens on the first Saturday that carries into Sunday morning? At the church corner, you’ll find an old stretch of the original highway that leads east but dead-ends a mile down the road. Head west and you’ll once again be on Old 16, but it’s diplomatically called Hwy 14/16 these days. The Black Hills are now visible on the horizon, just two towns away.

The first is New Underwood, Margaret Larsen’s home for 86 years. Most mornings she can be found at BJ’s Country Store, playing cards with friends. They cheerfully interrupted the game long enough to share stories.”Before the interstate we had a lot more stores — two grocery stores and a lumberyard,” says Larsen.”We still have plenty of bars.”

The next town is Box Elder, home to Ellsworth Air Force Base and one of the Dakotas’ boomtowns of the last 50 years. Box Elder was a tiny place in the heyday of Old 16, but nearly 10,000 people now live there. Hwy 14/16 skirts an old part of the boomtown and enters Rapid City.

Rapid City to Custer

Buffalo graze west of Custer.

No longer do you need much guidance, because you’re now driving the lone surviving stretch of U.S. Hwy 16. It starts out in downtown Rapid City as Mount Rushmore Road. You’ll climb out of Rapid City and into the mountains on a highway made to accommodate the two million people per year who visit Mount Rushmore. You drive past the Brockelsby family’s Reptile Gardens, Bear Country USA, Fort Hays Old West Town and numerous other visitor attractions.

You skirt the old mining community of Keystone, which sits at the foot of Mount Rushmore, and then follow the old highway as it cuts right through Hill City. There are many interesting stops in the little town, ranging from the century-old Hill City Cafe that remains as unpretentious as the small town eateries you might have enjoyed 200 miles to the east in farming country to an 1880 excursion train and the popular Prairie Berry Winery.

A dozen miles south, you’ll find the Ziolkowski family’s Crazy Horse mountain carving, and then dip down into the city of Custer. Black Hills Burger & Bun Co. is on the west side of the highway as you arrive downtown, one of 35 restaurants in a city of only 2,000 people.

Custer to the Wyoming Border

Three scenic paths wind through Jewel Cave National Park.

As the elevation climbs you rise beyond all the manmade accouterments that you’ve enjoyed between Rapid City and Custer. Now it’s just you and the forest and the highway, until you reach Jewel Cave National Monument. Want some strenuous exercise? Two unusual trails descend into Hell’s Canyon. This is a rare opportunity for a wilderness walk into one of the Black Hills’ deepest canyons. You’ll likely see birds and wildlife, and feel blasts of cold air as you poke your head into caves that connect to the 170-mile maze that comprises Jewel Cave.

It’s a short drive down the mountain. You enter private rangeland as you reach Wyoming. There’s no official”Welcome to Wyoming” sign, but the border is just a short distance west of the ruins of an abandoned cowboy bar and cafe. U.S. Hwy 16 continues on to Yellowstone, the original destination when federal road planners created this east-west route nearly a century ago.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Custer’s Trail Today

Story by Katie Hunhoff

Photography by Paul Horsted

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.

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Dakota Territory’s “Most Interesting Man”

By John Andrews

Surely you’ve seen the television commercials for Dos Equis featuring”the most interesting man in the world.” The pitchman for the Mexican beer claims to have been involved in various adventurous escapades (cliff diving in Acapulco or splash landing in a space capsule) and is afforded unique opportunities (at art museums, he’s the only person allowed to touch the paintings).

I was reminded of those commercials recently as I paged through a book called The Last Frontier, by Zack Sutley. Written in 1930, just before Sutley died, the book is a memoir of his 17 years (1867 to 1884) spent as an adventurer on the Plains. The yarns he spins within its covers make him an obvious candidate for Dakota Territory’s Most Interesting Man.

He hunted with Buffalo Bill and explored with Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and Brigham Young. He guided George Custer on an expedition from Fort Abraham Lincoln through the Black Hills. He happened to be in Northfield, Minn., when Frank and Jesse James robbed the First National Bank. Two days later, while camping back in Dakota, he unwittingly encountered the James brothers during their escape. He was also in Yankton when Jack McCall was hanged. Sutley writes that General William Henry Harrison Beadle (McCall’s defense attorney) asked him to speak with the condemned man just days before the execution on March 1, 1877,”but McCall would tell me nothing that we could use in his favor,” Sutley reports.

It seems remarkable that the stars would align such that one man would meet all these historical figures and become involved in so many of the West’s most famous events. The note inside the front cover claims that Sutley”tells his story without embellishment,” but I think some of his tales must be read with a grain of salt. In his chapter on the hanging of famed Black Hills outlaw Lame Johnny, Sutley describes that particular trip to the Hills and recounts how he endured a ferocious blizzard. After the storm, he took his horse to a creek in a valley for water. As they came back up the hill, he heard the Cheyenne to Deadwood stage rumbling along the frozen path. Then vigilantes stopped the coach, removed Lame Johnny and hung him from a nearby elm tree.

It’s a good story, but Lame Johnny was hanged in July. Black Hills weather can be fickle, but that’s surely too late for a snowstorm. At any rate, Sutley’s memoir is worth perusing, especially for his descriptions of early Yankton, other Dakota towns and general life on the frontier. And maybe the marketers at Dos Equis will find new fodder for commercials.

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No Gold In Those Hills

By John Andrews

Sorry, treasure hunters. We’re about to burst your bubble.

Our blog last week about the South Dakota guidebook written in the 1930s prompted a note from Custer, South Dakota photographer Paul Horsted. He’s been trying to correct a myth that’s been circulating ever since the book appeared.

Apparently the writer was told a tall tale about buried treasure. The story says that as Custer and his men were leaving the Black Hills following their 1874 expedition, they buried a large cache of arms, ammunition, gold and whiskey at their campsite where Box Elder Creek meets Bogus Jim Creek.

Horsted has done two books that retrace the Custer Expedition’s trail, so he has spent hours digging through old accounts of the trip. He regularly receives inquiries about this stash because the story appears on numerous treasure hunting websites, and he’s eager to set the record straight.

Here’s why Horsted believes the story is garbage: “No one has ever been able to explain why Custer would bury anything. They were about to re-cross Indian territory and would want all their guns. Based on accounts, the whiskey was being consumed in large enough quantities that burying it would make no sense at this point. as they were heading home. There’s no discussion in the accounts of enough gold being found to bury any of it due to weight. They had over 100 wagons to carry supplies, many of which would have been quite empty by this part of the expedition.”

And here’s what Horsted says really happened: “A wagon (possibly carrying a Gatling gun) and apparently some other wagons tipped over on a rough section of trail. The gun was recovered but parts of the wrecked carriage it was on may have been left behind. This somehow turned into ‘buried guns’ and then ‘buried gold’ and the rest over time. Great story, but there is absolutely no mention of anything like that in the 15 first-hand eyewitness accounts of this expedition which we have researched for our books. (If there was, I’d be out there looking myself!)”