Tag: dakota territory

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Dakota’s Bullwhackeress

By Chuck Cecil

Emma Buckingham (center), at 37, and her freighting family, including husband Emmond Knutson, whose head can be seen in front of the wagon at left, and their son, Charlie, far right. All three are carrying their bullwhips.

Alice Ivers excelled at poker, while Martha Jane Cannary shot straight and drank with dispatch. Nineteenth century journalists extolled the talents of those Black Hills women but little attention was paid to Emma Buckingham, who could make a bullwhip crack as loudly and accurately as Calamity Jane’s pistol and pivot a 20-head bull train on a Poker Alice silver dollar.

Buckingham was among thousands of rough and tough-talking Black Hills bullwhackers who ate dust and beans on the grimy Sidney, Cheyenne, Bismarck, Chamberlain and Fort Pierre wagon trails, hauling tons of necessities into the busy Black Hills gold towns.

For a couple of decades before railroads nudged aside the massive animal-powered freight trains in the late 1880s, the Black Hills was a contentious, bustling place. All three women were born in the 1850s and moved to the Hills during those booming times after Lt. Col. George Custer’s 1874 exploration discovered gold.

There was great need for goods and machinery for a flourishing population and burgeoning industry. Deadwood was the most populous city in what would become South Dakota. The closest railroads — the Union Pacific to the south at Sidney, Nebraska, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Northern Pacific at Bismarck to the north — carried everything as far as rails would allow. Then bull trains, with faster mule and horse teams added to the mix, hauled goods by the ton at 2 miles an hour into the gold fields.

Much of the freight traveled the shorter route to the Black Hills from Fort Pierre. The Chicago & North Western line had barely reached Brookings County by then, so steamships fishtailed upstream to the rescue, hauling goods from Yankton and Sioux City to Missouri River docks at Chamberlain for a time, but mostly at Fort Pierre. From there, bull trains — three wagons powered by 10 pair of yoked oxen — plodded the 200 miles to Rapid City and Deadwood.

Black Hills towns and the mines and mills they served needed everything from bank vaults, water pipes, hammer mills, roofing nails, shovels, coat buttons, pool tables, placer pans, door hinges, mining monstrosities and more. The bull and mule trains (and teams of horses for special, faster deliveries) lugged millions of pounds across the prairie each year, bringing a modicum of civilization to the Black Hills. Most of what rolled overland, often in mile-long caravans of dozens of teams of oxen, didn’t need leather harness or iron shoe, and could eat what nature provided along the way.

Emma Buckingham, before her bullwhacking days took their toll.

Doing her part in urging the oxen on their prairie junkets was Emma Knutson Buckingham, who was the only known”bullwhackeress” in all of Dakota Territory. She made the three-week bull train runs from Fort Pierre to the Hills and also plied the routes from Belle Fourche to Valentine, Nebraska, with stops in between.

The woman with the whip soon became well known. In 1887, Deadwood’s Black Hills Daily Times opined,”the most industrious man in the Dakota Territory was a woman.”

The Deadwood newspaper on May 11, 1887, waxed poetic about her visit.”She was in town yesterday with a string of critters as long as Main Street and as scraggy as Old Rip’s Snyder, and yet she engineered the outfit though the city with ability, unloaded with alacrity and retired with dexterity.”

A few months later, on Nov. 11, 1887, the Sturgis Record reported on a picture that local photographer John Grabill displayed in the window of his photo studio of,”the lady familiarly known as the bullwhackeress.”

“In the operation of cutting an ox in two with a whip,” the Record reported,”this woman’s name is Knudson or Canuteson. She is married, her husband driving a ten-yoke team of bulls (oxen), and they both have been on the road between Pierre and the Black Hills for six or seven months. The couple drive their own teams, about 15-yoke of cattle with five or six wagons, and are reputed to be worth some little money.”

Emma Buckingham was born Ingeborg Botne in Vinge, Norway, in 1856. She came to America in 1873, settling in Minnesota. Nine years later, as Emma Botne, she moved to the Black Hills and married Emmond Knutson, also a native of Norway. The couple started a successful freighting business before they parted ways in 1888.

Emma married another bull train operator, George Buckingham, in 1889. They retired from the freight business after rail lines finally reached the Black Hills, and she and George took up ranching near Tilford a few miles north of Rapid City.

The Rapid City Journal‘s front-page obituary on Sept. 4, 1902, told of her death from cancer at age 46.”Thus passes away one of the characteristic pioneers of the Hills. In the days of freighting to the Hills she evinced her sturdy independence by driving her own outfit across the plains, and wherever she went she won the respect of all who met her.

“She it was who safely landed The Journal‘s cylinder press at its destination on Main Street in 1885. When the days of freighting ceased she took up ranching, showing the same independence and good judgment she had previously shown …

“But withal she was a womanly woman and her pleasant word and cheery smile will be missed by her friends, of whom she had many, and her passing away will be deeply regretted.”

Emma Knutson Buckingham, Dakota’s famous bullwhackeress, is buried in Rapid City’s Mountain View Cemetery.

This story is revised from the March/April 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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George Kingsbury: Eyewitness to History

By Roger Holtzmann

George Kingsbury is considered the Father of Journalism in South Dakota. He published the Yankton Press and Dakotan for 40 years and authored the impressive History of Dakota Territory.

George Washington Kingsbury stepped off the Marsh & Rustin stagecoach at Yankton, Dakota Territory, on March 17, 1862. The muddy little river town was then only three years old. Kingsbury, a journeyman printer, planned to work there for a few months, then return home to Kansas and get on with his life.

Things didn’t work out quite that way.

Kingsbury arrived at a historic moment. Gov. William Jayne had that very day convened Dakota’s first legislature in the rude settlement’s log-walled Episcopal church; its members were charged to lay the foundation of,”a government that would endure for all time,” Kingsbury wrote in his History of Dakota Territory.”[Their] duty was a sacred one.”

Which the delegates put off until they’d done a lot of logrolling and selected a permanent capital city. Vermillion and Yankton were the main contenders, but the latter’s supporters thought they had things buttoned up thanks to a back-channel bargain. They supported John Shober and George Pinney for council president and Speaker of the House; in return, the pair from Bon Homme was supposed to back Yankton’s bid.

Pinney was a man of no small ability,”the peer of any other member,” wrote Kingsbury, but he was also an inveterate schemer and”inclined to be erratic.” His fellow legislators watched him,”with constant apprehension of mischief … a harmless motion to adjourn from him would be accepted by half the members as portending a plot.” Pinney was elected Speaker, then promptly reneged on his deal with the Yankton delegation; he didn’t stay bought, as historian Doane Robinson put it, which set off days of parliamentary wrangling.

Excitement was”at a fever-heat” and spectators thronged the lobby when the capital bill came up for consideration, wrote Kingsbury. Suddenly, troops of the Dakota Cavalry, with bayonets fixed, marched into the legislative chamber and surrounded the Speaker’s podium. Pinney had secretly asked Gov. Jayne to dispatch the soldiers, either to quash a rumored conspiracy to have him replaced as Speaker or as part of a convoluted intrigue to embarrass the governor, but all the maneuver did was”arouse great indignation” among the membership. They demanded an explanation and Pinney’s scheme”went to pieces in an hour.”

Pinney was forced to resign and Yankton won the prize, but settling the matter didn’t calm the waters. John Boyle of Vermillion and Enos Stutsman of Yankton”had some hot words” over dinner at the Ash Hotel, wrote Kingsbury, and matters soon escalated.”Boyle seized the ketchup bottle and flung it at Stutsman’s head, narrowly missing him. ‘Stuts’ retaliated with a fusillade of tumblers, cups and the skeleton of a fowl that had contributed to the feast. The combatants then flung themselves … across the table for a finish fight,” that might have resulted in serious injuries had not friends of the two men intervened.

Lawmaking on the frontier was proving to be a less than genteel affair, which did not come as a surprise to the delegates. Jim Somers, the House of Representatives’ Sergeant-at-Arms, was a burly ex-lumberjack with a violent streak; he later shot a sheriff and was himself killed in a shootout near Chamberlain. This preference for solving problems with his fists or worse was common knowledge before he was appointed; the legislators apparently considered this a recommendation for the job of keeping order in the House.

Somers and a group of lawmakers were drinking one evening in Antoine Robeare’s saloon, the legislature’s second home, when Pinney came in the front door.”Suddenly the window … flew up and Speaker Pinney popped out,” wrote Kingsbury. Somers appeared at the window, grinning, as another legislator and Robeare took after the fleeing Pinney — a chase that ended when the ex-speaker drew a pistol and his pursuers'”belligerent ardor moderated.”

By the time the legislative session ended in May the members had managed to discharge their sacred duty despite all the side shows. Kingsbury, meanwhile, reconsidered his plans. Like many a young man in those years, he had headed west in search of adventure and opportunity. He found both in Yankton. There was no need to look any farther.

*****

George W. Kingsbury was born in 1837, on a farm in upstate New York. He learned the printing trade as an apprentice at the Utica Daily Evening Telegraph, but at age 18,”[he] removed to Wisconsin to work with civil engineers on the Watertown & Madison Railroad,” wrote Kingsbury in an autobiographical sketch he penned for History of Dakota Territory. When the Panic of 1857 brought construction on that line to a halt he drifted west, from newspaper to newspaper, eventually reaching Leavenworth, Kansas Territory.

The Territorial Capitol at Yankton, photographed in the early 1860s.

Fort Leavenworth was a staging point for army supply trains on the Santa Fe Trail in the late 1850s. Kingsbury decided this made for an opportunity,”to see the western country at government expense by signing on as a driver,” a plan he soon laid aside after he saw how much grueling work it took to yoke a dozen oxen to each wagon, never mind manhandle it across the prairie. He returned to town and found a position with the Leavenworth Daily Ledger.

Kansas entered the Union in 1861, and opportunity drew Kingsbury to Topeka, the new state’s capital. There he met Josiah Trask, who had parlayed his political connections into a contract as the official public printer for both Kansas and Dakota Territory, which came into being in March of that year. Trask hired Kingsbury to do the actual printing work in Dakota while he stayed in Kansas, a decision that had tragic consequences for him. Trask, a man of strong abolitionist beliefs, was among those killed when the infamous Confederate raider William Quantrill attacked Lawrence, Kansas, a hotbed of the anti-slavery cause.

Kingsbury had been in Dakota barely two months before he went from itinerant printer to publisher and co-owner of the Weekly Dakotian. Frank Ziebach and William Freney had started the paper in 1861 to help a third partner, Capt. John Todd, become the first territorial delegate; once Todd was elected, the Dakotian faded away. By the time Ziebach and Kingsbury revived what had been a Democratic paper the territory’s political winds had shifted, wrote Kingsbury,”and prudence suggested the formation of the partnership [in the name of Kingsbury], a Republican.”

Thus began what historian Bob Karolevitz called”a game of journalistic musical chairs” that went on for years. Newspapers in Yankton combined and split, opened and folded and opened again with different owners; opponents in one election cycle might be partners in the next. Kingsbury’s tenure at the Weekly Dakotian lasted until he fell out with Dr. Walter Burleigh, who had purchased a piece of the paper to promote his campaign for territorial delegate. Kingsbury and Moses K. Armstrong then started a new publication, the Dakota Union, and”fought a glorious fight” against the good doctor, as an admirer put it. Burleigh, the resident Indian agent who set a standard for corruption that was never bettered in Dakota, triumphed despite their opposition, and in the election’s wake the two warring newspapers merged to form the Union and Dakotaian.

Toward the end of his first decade in Dakota, Kingsbury purchased a state-of-the-art steam-powered press, the first in Dakota Territory, and used it to churn out the news under various banners. In 1875 he founded the Black Hiller, aimed at the gold seekers flooding into town. It proved so financially successful that it enabled Kingsbury and Wheeler Bowen to begin publishing the Press & Dakotaian, a daily newspaper that first appeared on April 26 of that year and is still publishing five editions a week in an era when many small daily papers have turned off their presses and closed their doors.

*****

George Kingsbury wrote hundreds of thousands of words in his career, but next to nothing about his personal life. His autobiographical sketch in History of Dakota Territory is sparse and devoid of any sense of the man.”On the 20th of September, 1864,” he wrote,”George W. Kingsbury, of Yankton, and Lydia Maria Stone, daughter of Nathan and Laura Stone, of Lawrence, Kansas, were married at the home of the bride’s mother.”

Lydia and George returned to Yankton and settled down to raise three sons, George, Theodore and Charles. Lydia’s passing evoked the only morsel of emotion in the essay, and that sounded oddly stilted:”Lydia, the wife and mother, died February 1, 1898, and after a few years the little family was broken up, the home practically abandoned.”

George Kingsbury (back row, left) was honored as a pioneer of Dakota Territory during its 50th anniversary in 1911. Other honorees included C.J. Holman (back right) and (front row, from left) Horace Bailey, John Shober, William Jayne and Joseph Hanson.

Kingsbury spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Yankton, which afforded him a front row seat as the territory’s history unfolded, but he was more than an observer. When the territorial legislature convened for its second session in 1863 Kingsbury took a seat in the upper house as a delegate from Yankton, one of many public and private offices he held through the years. He sat on Yankton’s first city commission, was secretary of the corporation that launched the Dakota Southern Railroad and served as the territory’s assessor of internal revenue; he also captained one of Yankton’s two polo teams and produced a traveling play,”The Chaperones.”

When statehood arrived in 1889 Kingsbury served a term in the new legislature and was later appointed to the State Board of Charities and Corrections by Gov. Andrew Lee. On the journalism front, he found himself covering a familiar story. South Dakota’s voters were to select a new capital in the first statewide election of 1890, and the contending cities’ tactics often landed”within the boundaries of criminality,” the old-timer wrote.”[Their] unbecoming and disgraceful conduct cast a shadow upon the fair name and fame of the young state.”

Kingsbury sold his publishing interests in 1902 and began work on History of Dakota Territory, a project he was uniquely qualified to undertake. Modern readers may find fault with some of Kingsbury’s attitudes, his absolute belief in the superiority of white culture over that of the indigenous”savages” among them, but none can say he didn’t do a thorough job. History’s five ponderous volumes, bursting with original documents and encyclopedic detail, dealing with every major and many minor matters of the era, constitute an invaluable resource. Scholars and students of history alike are in his debt.

*****

Yankton’s business community had dreamed of a bridge across the Missouri River since the settlement’s earliest days, the better to draw trade from Nebraska. Financial and technical problems sidelined various schemes through the years; in the meantime, a ferry launched in 1870, and a pontoon bridge followed 20 years after that. This had to be dismantled and reassembled twice a year, however, so it was clearly only a stopgap measure.

Kingsbury had seen a number of bridge schemes up close over the years, and he was on hand when one finally succeeded in spanning the Missouri. E.J. Dowling and an informal group of Yankton’s leading citizens known as the Monday Evening Club resolved that the only way to ensure a bridge was built was to build it themselves.”Their spirit served as midwife to the project,” wrote Kingsbury in a special edition of his newspaper published when steel reached Nebraska.

When the Meridian Highway Bridge formally opened on October 11, 1924, the 87-year-old George Kingsbury rode across as an honored pioneer. It was one of his last public appearances. He grew more and more feeble and slipped away on January 28, 1925, leaving a legacy in South Dakota history and journalism that few scribes will ever match.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Historical Treasure Hunt

By John Andrews

Sarah Hanson-Pareek, the Curator of Digital Projects and Photographs for the Archives and Special Collections at USD, is digitizing the long-lost 1st Dakota Cavalry ledger, which dates to 1862.

WHEN ABNER M. ENGLISH wrote a history of the 1st Dakota Cavalry — the first military regiment ever assembled in Dakota Territory — his time in that unit was nearly 35 years behind him. Still, he remembered with remarkable clarity several stories from the cavalry’s three years of active duty — from their training days in Yankton, to the mundane everyday occurrences of a soldier’s life to their pursuit of Native Americans as part of General Alfred Sully’s campaign in northern Dakota.

He tried to recall the names of all his comrades in Company A, a task that would have been much easier had he been able to find the company’s descriptive book, which contained a full roster of the soldiers who joined along with some scant biographical data. However, English believed the book had been lost, and for decades historians of Dakota Territory and South Dakota — as well as descendants of our first military men and other ardent genealogists — also assumed that was the case. But what was lost is now found and will soon be available to anyone in the world with a computer and access to the internet.

The book is fragile — not surprising considering it is 160 years old. It contains a dozen pages of written names, ages, heights and hometowns or countries. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a list, but it has the potential to unlock countless stories that can tell us much more about the early days of Dakota Territory.

*****

AMONG JAMES BUCHANAN’S final acts as president of the United States was signing the document officially creating Dakota Territory on March 2, 1861, two days before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. That fall, the War Department authorized Gov. William Jayne (Lincoln’s personal physician from Springfield, Illinois and political appointee) to raise two companies of cavalry. As new states and territories were created, they were authorized under the Militia Act of 1792 to raise military units.

Kurt Hackemer, a history professor at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion who researches the Civil War era in Dakota, says those units were raised for varying purposes, largely depending upon geography.”In the South you have militias before the Civil War because of the threat of slave rebellion,” Hackemer says.”As you get into the Industrial Age, in parts of the Northeast and Midwest, militias exist in response to industrial violence. In Dakota Territory, when our militia is founded, it’s for protection because there’s contested land between the incoming settlers and the indigenous population.”

Recruiting stations were set up at Yankton, Vermillion and Bon Homme. As volunteers reported to each community, their vital information was recorded in a descriptive book: name, age, height, complexion, eye and hair color, home state or country, occupation and enlistment date. Company A of the 1st Dakota Cavalry officially mustered into service on April 30, 1862. (Company B, also known as the Dakota Rangers, mustered in at Sioux City on March 31, 1863.)

English, a 25-year-old carpenter from Vermont when he joined, later recalled the first weeks of the Dakota Cavalry’s existence. His reminiscence was serialized in 1900 and 1901 in the Monthly South Dakotan, state historian Doane Robinson’s turn-of-the-century version of a magazine devoted to history and culture. It was republished in its entirety in 1918 in the historical society’s South Dakota Historical Collections. English said the men trained under a regular army soldier named Frederick Plughoff, a 36-year-old from Germany.”His strict discipline was quite irksome but we had enlisted to become soldiers and to serve under the flag of our country and we obeyed all orders and soon became quite proficient in drill and discipline,” English wrote.

He said soldiers were issued old Hall’s carbines, French revolvers and a regulation cavalry saber.”The carbine and revolvers were miserable arms,” English wrote,”the men being in about as much danger in the rear as the enemy in front.” They were soon replaced with Sharp’s carbines and Colt revolvers.

Nelson Miner served as captain of the 1st Dakota. Company A’s original roster book remained in his family until the 1980s.

Although the Civil War was raging in the East and cavalry units from surrounding states were called to help fortify Union forces, much of the 1st Dakota Cavalry’s early actions took place close to home.”There’s an interesting misnomer that the Civil War was fought on the Union side by the U.S. Army, and it really wasn’t,” Hackemer says.”There are Army units, but the vast majority of forces raised during the Civil War are state-level units called volunteers in federal service. They are units that are under the authority of state governments who then sign up to serve in federal service, and that’s what the Dakota Cavalry is. They could have been sent east, in theory, to serve in Civil War battles like the 1st Nebraska Cavalry was, but they were kept here for local service because of the threat posed by the 1862 Dakota War.”

That conflict between the U.S. Army and the Santee erupted in violence in Minnesota in August of 1862 and spilled over into Dakota and Nebraska. English recalled that a detachment of 15 soldiers chased several Native Americans on horseback near Sioux Falls in the weeks before Judge Joseph B. Amidon and his son Willie were killed while cutting hay on a homestead claim on August 25. Soldiers and Indians actually fired upon each other in a skirmish near the James River east of Yankton. When rumors began circulating that the Yankton Sioux Tribe planned to join the Santee in war in southeastern Dakota, many residents of the new communities of Yankton, Vermillion and Bon Homme fled to Sioux City. Dakota Cavalry soldiers then helped build the Yankton Stockade, a 450-foot square fortification surrounding roughly a quarter of each block at the corner of Broadway and Third Street (historical markers still note the placement of the four sod and lumber walls).

Soldiers from Company A were also dispatched to Nebraska in July of 1863 following the murders of the five children of Henson and Phoebe Wiseman, who lived on a homestead in the Missouri River foothills south of Meckling. Henson was travelling through Dakota with Company I of the 2nd Nebraska Cavalry, which was under the command of Gen. Alfred Sully and ordered to push the Santee fleeing from Minnesota further west. Phoebe had traveled to Yankton to purchase supplies. She returned home and found her children — ages 16, 14, 9, 8 and 4 — dead or dying. The Yankton and Santee were blamed for the killings, though it was never proven.

In 1864, the 1st Dakota accompanied Gen. Alfred Sully on a campaign up the Missouri River into northern Dakota Territory. They saw action at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain in July, in which Sully’s force of 2,200 soldiers defeated roughly 1,600 Lakota, Yanktonai and Santee under the leadership of Gall, Sitting Bull and Inkpaduta. In August of 1865, a detachment of 24 soldiers from Company B took part in the Battle of Bone Pile Creek near present-day Wright, Wyoming. Privates Anthony Nelson and John Rouse were killed, the only combat deaths the 1st Dakota ever experienced.

Two other soldiers, James Cummings and John McBee, died from illness at the Fort Randall hospital. John Tallman died during the winter of 1864-65 when he crossed the Missouri River south of Vermillion to hunt deer and never returned. A settler found his frozen body lying on the ground and wrapped in a blanket. He was given a military funeral and buried in an unmarked grave on a bluff near Vermillion.

The rest of the 1st Dakota spent that winter in Vermillion, as well. When spring arrived, English wrote,”We rejoiced over the surrender of Lee and were depressed by the news of Lincoln’s death, but our spirits were soon revived by information that we would be mustered out on May 9.” Capt. Hugh Theaker of the regular army arrived to conduct the ceremony.”Then came the last roll call, the usual farewells, and the members of A company were out of the United States service, never as an organization to meet again.”

*****

YANKTON HISTORIAN Bob Hanson was always proud of his family’s long history in Dakota. His great-grandfather, Amund Hanson, immigrated from Eide, Norway, and was among the first settlers in Clay County in the early 1860s. He donated a portion of his land to build the Hanson School, among the first schools in the new Dakota Territory, and in 1862 he joined Company A of the 1st Dakota Cavalry as its bugler. That family connection to Dakota’s first volunteer soldiers fueled Bob’s passion for finding the long-lost ledger.

1st Dakota soldiers helped build the first school in Dakota Territory in Vermillion. The road in the photo is today’s Dakota Street. A monument along the road below the bluff marks the spot.

An introductory note to the 1918 republishing of English’s memoir reports that the descriptive book and roster for Company B was donated to the state historical society by the widow of Uriah Wood, a former soldier who had kept the book as”his most precious relic,” but on his deathbed in 1916 insisted it be turned over to the state. The note also laments the loss of Company A’s descriptive book. Historians apparently contacted the War Department in Washington, D.C., but the adjutant general replied that there was no record of it.

Fortunately, a historical treasure hunt was exactly what Bob Hanson loved. He worked diligently in the 1990s to locate the unmarked grave of John Tallman and place a stone there. Though he believed he knew where the soldier was buried, a stone never came to fruition before his death in 2018. He was successful in Yankton, however, where the final resting place of Pierre Dorion, an early explorer and interpreter for Lewis and Clark, is memorialized with a large boulder at West Second Street and Riverside Drive.

We’ll never know how many letters Bob wrote, phone calls he placed or visits he made to others who were connected to the early days of Dakota. But his daughter, Sarah Hanson-Pareek, recalls a conversation with him shortly after she went to work in the archives of the I.D. Weeks Library at the University of South Dakota.”He asked if we still had Grace Beede’s hat box,” Sarah remembers.”He said the missing ledger was in there and not to let anyone know we had it. I think he was afraid that some government archive might ask for it. He thought it belonged here because it was so important to our history.”

Discovering the book in the Beede collection allowed historians to construct its possible life story. It begins with Nelson Miner, the 36-year-old lawyer from Ohio who became Company A’s first captain. Miner was born in 1827 and came to Dakota Territory with his wife, Cordelia, in 1860. When the War Department authorized raising the 1st Dakota, Miner became the recruiting officer at the Vermillion station. After ably leading the cavalry for three years, he was appointed registrar of the U.S. Land Office in Vermillion. Miner also owned the St. Nicholas Hotel and was elected to the territorial legislature in 1872, 1876 and 1878, but died in October of 1879 before his final term expired.

Just as Uriah Wood kept the roster for Company B, it seems Miner held on to its counterpart from Company A as his own”precious relic.” It passed through the family until it ended up with Grace Beede, his great-granddaughter. Beede, born in 1905, earned a bachelor’s degree at USD in 1926 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1936. She joined the faculty at USD in 1928 and taught classics there until 1970. She donated the Beede Family Papers to the USD Archives in 1985, five years before she died. Today’s Coyotes might better recognize her as the namesake of Beede Hall, a girls’ dormitory within the campus’ North Complex along Cherry Street.

*****

KEEPING THE LEDGER’S location a secret was never a top priority for campus librarians, but Bob Hanson’s rediscovery of it in the late 1980s certainly didn’t make a lot of headlines, either. Still, knowing the artifact is right across campus opens a lot of doors for historians like Kurt Hackemer.

ìHaving it here is pretty exciting,” he says.”At first glance, things like rosters look pretty boring. But the real value of a roster like this is when you see who is serving in a military unit you can then find those names in other records, and you can start building a story about the 1st Dakota Cavalry that is far more than just what the unit did.”

Among those records Hackemer hopes to utilize is a special 1885 census. Congress offered to pay half the costs of conducting an off-cycle census, but only a few states and territories accepted, including Dakota Territory. While debating its structure, territorial legislators created a special schedule within the census to catalog veterans.”They specifically wanted those settlers to be remembered for posterity’s sake. That was their goal,” Hackemer says.”It is the only census of its kind that you can find at a state or territorial level anywhere in the United States. When I’ve taken my research about this to national conferences, historians are floored. There is literally nothing like it anywhere else in the United States.”

The ledger contains a dozen handwritten pages that record the names, ages, heights and hometowns or countries of the 1st Dakota soldiers.

Comparing the 1st Dakota roster to that census and subsequent counts could lead to countless research projects, articles and books.”I learn a lot more about the men who made up that unit and it lets me ask interesting questions,” Hackemer says.”Who felt compelled to volunteer for military service and why? Who thinks they have a stake in this? There are both native born American citizens and immigrants living in Dakota Territory at the time. Is one group more or less likely to volunteer and why? It can help tell you a lot about the creation and the early years of the territory, and for a historian, that’s exciting. There are a lot more stories to be told there.”

When Bob Hanson located the ledger, he had it photographed for preservation. This past summer, his daughter Sarah — the Curator of Digital Projects and Photographs for the Archives and Special Collections at USD — photographed it again to the highest standards of digital preservation in the country. The archives was awarded a CARES Act grant of $193,000 to purchase new equipment to help make primary source and collection materials available to a larger global audience.”Because of COVID and the inability for researchers to travel as easily, there really is this increased need to get materials online for distance researchers,” Hanson-Pareek says.

The new equipment allows archivists at USD to digitize documents, archival manuscript materials, bound volumes, maps, oversize materials, film and glass plate negatives and two-dimensional artworks at standards that comply with FADGI, the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, a collaborative effort launched in 2007 to establish common practices and guidelines for digitization.”We’ve never had the equipment to do it justice,” Hanson-Pareek says of the ledger.”But with this grant funding, we have a camera with significant resolution and power to digitize it.”

The cavalry ledger is among the first historic documents to be digitized with the new equipment, along with a scrapbook belonging to John Blair Smith Todd and a ledger from Cuthbert DuCharme’s trading post. All will be available to researchers online this fall, but for historians curious to see the real thing, the USD Archives — after a long closure due to the pandemic and an extensive renovation project — plans a full reopening in October. Sarah Hanson-Pareek will be there, and her father will be in spirit.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Lasting Legacy

Our July/August issue includes a story by John Andrews on Joseph Ward. Ward came to Yankton in the late 1860s to spread congregationalism, but his legacy in South Dakota extends far beyond the church. Andrews collected several photos from the Yankton College archives for the feature. Here are some that we couldn’t fit into the magazine.

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Who Was Peter Shannon?

By John Andrews

Lost among the Democratic and Republican hurrahs and disappointments of the Nov. 4 election was an interesting development on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Residents there voted overwhelmingly to change the name of Shannon County, the entirety of which includes the reservation, to Oglala Lakota County.

The final tally was 2,161-526; the 80.4 percent of votes in favor of the change far exceeded the two-thirds necessary. There’s still some political rigmarole that must transpire before the change becomes official. Once all provisional ballots have been certified, the county commissioners must notify the governor. The governor then relays the name change to the Legislature in January. After the Legislature passes a joint resolution, the governor can officially issue a proclamation recognizing the change. Shannon County becomes Oglala Lakota County on the first day of the month following the proclamation.

There are 66 counties in South Dakota, many of which are named after territorial founders or prominent 19th century national politicians. Shannon County’s name comes from Peter C. Shannon, chief justice of the Dakota Territorial Supreme Court from 1873 to 1881. But it’s Shannon’s role in obtaining land from the Lakota that led to his name’s ouster 130 years later.

Shannon was a Pennsylvania native who practiced law in Pittsburgh. After his defeat for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1852 as a Democrat, he was appointed president judge of the local district court. He later became a Republican and a supporter of Abraham Lincoln. He helped escort Lincoln through Pennsylvania en route to the new president’s first inauguration in 1861. He served two terms in the Pennsylvania House and raised a regiment called The Irish Dragoons during the Civil War.

After the war Shannon practiced law until President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him chief justice of the Dakota Territorial Supreme Court. He presided over several trials in Yankton, but the most famous was surely the trial of Jack McCall for the August 1876 murder of Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood.

During his time on the bench he became close allies with Gov. Nehemiah Ordway, a somewhat dictatorial figure who presided over the relocation of the capital from Yankton to Bismarck, earning the scorn of southern Dakotans. Shannon also fell out of favor with territorial lawyers who successfully blocked his application for reappointment in 1881.

George Kingsbury described the situation in scathing eloquence in his 1915 History of Dakota Territory:”His second term had not been marked by that friendliness, respect and confidence that should exist between the presiding judge and the members of the bar practicing in his court, but on the contrary, there had grown up a feeling of distrust toward the judge, and an entire and a total lack of confidence in his official integrity.”

Dakota Territorial lawyers wrote a list of grievances against Shannon and approved them on March 25, 1881. The charges were:

insulting attorneys and parties in open court;

offensive partisanship in criminal cases;

has endeavored by threats and other coercive means to secure endorsement of attorneys for reappointment;

has been publicly intoxicated, and the habit has grown on him;

with writing fictitious letters.

Instead Alonzo Edgerton, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota, was appointed to fill the chief justice position and began in January 1882. Shannon found his way onto a committee with former Gov. Newton Edmunds and James Teller, of Ohio, to negotiate land sales with tribes on the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri River.

They endeavored to acquire 11 million acres. In return the government promised 25,000 cows and 1,000 bulls to be divided across the remaining reservation land.

“The commission had to obtain 3/4 of adult male signatures per tribe,” says Jesse Short Bull, an organizer behind the name change.”It was not a popular concept. The interpreter, Samuel D. Hinman, was accused of intimidating people to sign or face military removal. Hinman also acquired signatures from children as young as five years old at area day schools on the Pine Ridge Agency.”

It took the efforts of two more commissions before the signatures were finally obtained and the land transferred. Short Bull says it seems like Shannon was the odd man out on the commission, but he nevertheless played a role in shaping Lakota life.”When you think of the line of incompetent military officers to ill prepared Indian agents that the tribes had to deal with, Shannon was not in their category. He was a smart man, and vowed no wrong doing on his part when the Edmunds Commission was being questioned. With that being said, he was still part of the driving force that changed the course of history for the tribes and everything that came with that — the breakdown of Lakota culture and the introduction to a new way of life.”

Shannon lived somewhat quietly until poor health led to his move to San Diego in the late 1890s. On April 13, 1899, he boarded a carriage en route to Point Loma. Shortly after departure the driver lost control of the horses, which swerved toward the sidewalk and struck a telegraph pole. Shannon was thrown from the carriage and died later that night from internal injuries.

He was buried at Calvary Cemetery in San Diego, but over time the cemetery fell into disrepair. Headstones were removed, and over time the area became Calvary Memorial Pioneer Park. Today the only traces of Shannon are his name on a brass plaque in San Diego and his county in South Dakota, although that will soon be removed by the people he helped to remove 130 years ago.

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Remembering Amanda

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

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Our Forgotten First Lady

Here at South Dakota Magazine, we’ve always felt at affinity for Amanda Pennington. She helped her husband, John, built the big brick house that has been our publishing headquarters since 1987. She cooked here, raised children here. Gazed out the same windows that we do.

She was sad here, we know that. And she was sickly. But we hope she also had good times.

She and her husband John lost two of their five children in Alabama. They headed to Dakota Territory when he was named territorial governor in 1874. The Penningtons started a new life in Yankton, raising their three surviving children while John became immersed in controversial issues like gold in the Black Hills, development of the railroads and establishing counties and cities.

They built a big brick house and several smaller houses at 3rd and Pearl in downtown Yankton. When John left the governorship, he also constructed a commercial structure on Third Street and started a weekly newspaper.

But Amanda grew ill and died in the winter of 1884. She was just 47.”She conversed freely with her husband and children up to within a few hours of her death, expressing willingness to go and her unswerving confidence in blessed immortality,” according to the obituary in the Yankton Press & Dakotian. “The few intimate friends present were deeply moved by her perfect resignation and her expressions of hope for the life to come.”

A final wish was that she be buried beside the two little children who’d preceded her in death. The family had bought six plots in the Yankton Cemetery, and she was buried there. But no marker was put up, probably because her husband intended to respect his wife’s wishes and eventually return the body to Alabama.

John Pennington remained in Yankton for seven more years before returning to the South. He was buried in Oxford Memorial Gardens Cemetery at Oxford, Alabama upon his death in 1901.

Mrs. Pennington, first lady of the Dakota Territory, remains in the Yankton Cemetery in an unmarked grave. But that will change on Wednesday (Sept. 10) when local citizens plan to unveil a new gravestone designed and donated by Luken Memorials of Yankton.

Rt. Rev. John Tarrant, the Episcopal Bishop of South Dakota, will preside at a dedication service, assisted by Father Jim Pearson, pastor of the very same Episcopal Church in Yankton that was attended by the Penningtons and in which her funeral was held 130 years ago.

The public is invited to attend the brief service at the gravesite in Yankton Cemetery. It starts at 3 p.m. Immediately following the service, everyone is invited to the Pennington house for refreshments and a short discussion with local historians about the Pennington family.

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First Lady of Territory Deserves Better

By Katie Hunhoff

Amanda Kate Pennington left the two small graves of her children Willie and Kate in Alabama when she came to Yankton, Dakota Territory in 1874 with her husband, John, who was named Territorial Governor by President Ulysses S. Grant. They had three other children, however, and so she adjusted to life as an active and enthusiastic Dakotan.

But the Penningtons suffered anew when Amanda grew ill and died in 1884 at her home, an Italianate-style brick home at Third and Pearl in downtown Yankton. Since 1987, the Pennington House has been the headquarters for South Dakota Magazine.

John Pennington was a Southern newspaperman during the Civil War. He gained General Ulysses S. Grant’s trust and attention by editorializing that the South was paying too great a price and should consider surrender. When Grant became president, he awarded Pennington the governorship of Dakota Territory.

Pennington survived as governor for four years (1874-1878), double the tenure of most territorial leaders. He was sympathetic to the concerns of farmers and Native Americans and considered a capable fellow, but he became identified with the infamous”Yankton Ring” that mastered the spoils system. For example, when Pennington County was created in 1875, the governor named Yanktonians to serve as county officers. His friends collected salaries without moving west to perform their duties.

After leaving office, Pennington remained in Yankton. He published a weekly newspaper and built a substantial commercial building downtown. He became a full-fledged South Dakotan after serving as territorial governor.

Sioux Falls historian Gary Conradi recently completed a search for all of our governors’ graves. He assumed that Mrs. Pennington was buried in Alabama, but when he found six Pennington grave lots in the Yankton Cemetery, he searched the Yankton Press and Dakotan archives for her obituary. It noted that she was indeed buried in the Yankton Cemetery, though the family intended to move the grave home to Alabama so she could rest alongside her deceased children. But it was not easy to move a loved one’s remains in the 1880s, and it never happened. Eventually her husband and three surviving children, Lulu, Mary and John Jr., left without her. Of the six Pennington plots in the Yankton Cemetery, only one was ever used. Amanda rests there alone today, without a stone or any recognition.

In this 125th birthday year for South Dakota, a group of Yanktonians and state historians intend to right an old wrong by placing a headstone on Amanda’s grave befitting a first lady of the territory. It will include the names of her five beloved children. A memorial service will be held at the grave on Sept. 10 with Episcopalian Bishop John Tarrant presiding.

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Lalla Rookh Reverie

By John Andrews

About 6 percent of people living in Yankton County trace their primary heritage to Ireland. Perhaps some of them can credit John Pope Hodnett with bringing their families here, even if his planned Irish community north of Yankton never materialized.

Hodnett was a native of Ireland who settled with his family in Chicago. By the late 1860s he had become a national spokesman for the Irish Republicans, an organization he helped create in July 1868.”Prior to the Civil War it was rarely one met an Irishman who was not a Democrat,” wrote George Kingsbury in his History of Dakota Territory.”They seemed to find a congenial political brotherhood in that party, and it was a general belief that this was largely due to the influence thrown around them in the city of New York upon their reaching this country from their native land.”

But here was Hodnett, actively stumping for presidential Ulysses S. Grant and other Republicans during the summer of 1868. At speeches in Illinois and Missouri he implored his fellow Irishmen that the Republican Party held the greatest hope for their future prosperity in America. His argument was often met with violence from Democratic Irishmen. A mob nearly destroyed the house where he was staying during a speech in Decatur, Ill., and he survived an assassination attempt in Chicago.

When Grant was elected president in November, he rewarded loyalty to his campaign and party through political appointments. John Pope Hodnett became the assessor of internal revenue for Dakota Territory. He came to Yankton in April 1869, and that summer he filed a claim on a piece of land about 7 miles north of town.

Hodnett’s arrival coincided with a push among Dakota Territorial leaders to recruit settlers, so Gov. Burbank appointed him to be an immigration official. He was aware that Irishmen were migrating west out of big eastern cities, so he devised a plan to bring them to Dakota and build a sprawling Irish colony.

He marketed his new homeland masterfully. Hodnett bragged about its beautiful groves, waving grain fields and brilliant gardens. He even had a little body of water he called Lake Lalla Rookh, taken from the title of a romantic poem written by Thomas Moore in 1817. He helped file claims around his homestead for at least eight wealthy businessmen from New York and Virginia.

But those would-be settlers soon lost interest in a new life in Dakota. Hodnett even lost his little lake to a summer drought. A handful of Irish families did settle in Yankton County and some traces of Irish life exist today, but it’s certainly not the hub John Pope Hodnett hoped it would someday become.

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Freedom in Sully County

By John Andrews

February is Black History Month. Every Tuesday this month, we’ll introduce you to black pioneers and leaders who helped shape South Dakota. Today we feature the Norvel Blair family and the Sully County Colored Colony.

The Sully County Colored Colony became a haven for African-Americans seeking a road out of the racially oppressive Deep South in the late 1800s. Credit for the thriving rural neighborhood goes largely to Norvel Blair and his family.

Blair was born into slavery in Tennessee. Records are sketchy; some indicate he was born in 1825, others in 1814. Nevertheless, he was emancipated in 1863, and after the Civil War he reunited with his wife and their seven children on a farm in Illinois. The Blairs became prosperous, but in 1880 a mob burglarized their home and riddled it with bullets. Not long after, his attorney and a judge swindled him out of some property. He presented his case in a memoir called Book for the People! To Be Read by All Voters, Black and White, with Thrilling Events of the Life of Norvel Blair. He decided to move his family west after local officials barred him from a polling place while he tried to vote in an election.

Blair’s sons Benjamin and Patrick arrived in Dakota Territory to scout land in 1882. They settled near the town of Fairbank, one of several towns to emerge in Sully County after its official opening for settlement in 1883. Norvel, his wife Mary, and their other children soon followed.

Fairbank thrived until it was bypassed as the county seat and the railroad chose Pierre for its Missouri River crossing. The town disappeared almost overnight, but the Blairs were unaffected. They had built a successful farming operation that didn’t depend upon the strength of the town. Blair had brought a string of Morgan horses from his farm in Illinois, and he became a renowned breeder of racehorses. One horse named Johnny Bee was listed as the fastest horse in the state from 1907 to 1909.”Racing horses is a fine sport for any man as it teaches him how to be a good winner and a good loser,” Blair said,”and if you can’t be both you should never race horses.”

The Blairs wanted to share their freedom with other African-Americans. In 1906, Ben Blair and others met in Yankton and created the Northwestern Homestead Movement, designed to relocate blacks from Southern states to farms in South Dakota and around the Upper Midwest. The Blair family even pledged 1,700 acres upon which to build an agricultural college.

The group considered colony locations in four counties but only Sully County’s became successful, thanks to Norvel’s daughter Betty. She worked for a real estate company in Iowa and is credited with selling much of the land.”Like most land agents she was pretty good at embellishing a tale,” recalled Fern Barber, who taught rural school in the area in the 1950s.”She went back east to recruit buyers and even got them to believe there weren’t any flies in South Dakota.”

The Sully County Colored Colony had as many as 200 members. It was a bustling community for over 50 years, with locally prominent families like the McGruders (who bought a 1,200-acre ranch from Betty Blair in 1905), the Days and the Figgins. But hard times in the 1930s drove many to larger cities like Huron, Pierre and Minneapolis. By the 1950s only a handful of bachelors and a few members of the McGruder family still lived in the area. Today only scattered buildings and the Blairs, resting in their family cemetery, remain as a reminder of the refuge Sully County became for men and women seeking freedom.