Tag: deadwood

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Always on Our Minds

By John Andrews

A marker to Jack McCall stands in Yankton’s Sacred Heart Cemetery, but does not mark his actual grave. That remains one of many mysteries that still surrounds the man who famously killed Wild Bill Hickok in 1876.

A LEDGER BOOK is tucked away in the archives of the Mead Cultural Education Center, headquarters of the Yankton County Historical Society. Local historians have requested it often enough that museum staff have marked four pages with thin strips of white paper.”JAIL” is written in bold pencil across the top of one.

The book measures maybe 12 by 18 inches, contains some 600 pages and weighs about as much as a cinder block. Its first entry is dated Oct. 23, 1862 and is signed by George Pinney, the second United States Marshal in Dakota Territory. What follows are entries from each succeeding marshal — ranging from correspondence to reporting day-to-day activities of the office — ending on May 10, 1877.

Much of the reading is mundane, unless you’re captivated by expense reports, requests for 2-cent stamps, expense reports, applications for vacation time and expense reports. But there are a few needle-in-a-haystack nuggets that have consistently caught the attention of Yankton historians.

We first learned of the book’s existence from Bob Hanson, a tireless preserver of Yankton history until his death in 2018 and the man responsible for those bookmarks. Hanson was intensely interested in the story of Jack McCall, the man who killed Wild Bill Hickok in a Deadwood saloon, stood trial in Yankton and was executed just north of town. That sad and final chapter of McCall’s life spanned just seven months in 1876 and 1877, but its details have spawned nearly a century and a half of conjecture and speculation. What was McCall’s true motive? Was the crime a power play by territorial and federal politicians seeking a way to finally and firmly assert authority over the Black Hills? And where are Jack McCall’s remains today?

Hanson believed answers — or clues, at the very least — might be found in this book, hence his repeated visits to the Mead. But there’s another twist: two pages that would have contained official correspondence between Marshal J.H. Burdick and officials in Washington, D.C., between April 3 and 9, 1877 — just a month after McCall was hanged — are missing. To Hanson, they were akin to the 18 minutes of missing tape in the Watergate era.

Did the pages simply break free of their brittle binding and become lost among countless other documents? Or were they intentionally removed to forever obscure an incriminating piece of information? Most likely we’ll never know, but it hasn’t stopped people from asking questions. Nearly 150 years after his death, Jack McCall remains very much on many people’s minds.

***

WE KNOW VERY little about Jack McCall’s life prior to Aug. 2, 1876. Historians believe he was born in 1852 or 1853 in Louisville, Kentucky. He arrived in the Black Hills during the gold rush. One story contends that he entered the Hills as a wagon train driver for”Colorado Charlie” Utter, whose party also included the famed lawman Wild Bill Hickok, drawing the two figures of Western lore together for the first time.

Jack McCall.

Whether that actually happened is its own mystery, but we know McCall and Hickok were in Nuttall and Mann’s Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood on Aug. 2, 1876. Hickok was in the midst of a poker game when McCall approached him from behind, leveled a revolver at his head and pulled the trigger. Hickok died instantly and McCall fled down an alley, only to be apprehended later by a crowd of townspeople.

Since no established court had yet asserted jurisdiction over the Black Hills, crimes were often settled in miners’ courts in which a hastily assembled jury of locals convened to determine the fate of the accused. Such was the scene that awaited McCall the following afternoon in James McDaniels’ Deadwood Theatre. McCall claimed his deadly deed was vengeance because Wild Bill had murdered his brother in Kansas. The jury sympathized (or was swayed by a bribe of gold dust, as prosecutor George May surmised) and found McCall not guilty after a two-hour deliberation.

Believing he’d gotten away with murder, McCall fled for Laramie, Wyoming, where he seemed to relish in telling others that he was the man who had killed Wild Bill. Territorial authorities knew about the notorious crime and believed that McCall’s Deadwood trial held no legal standing. One day May, who had followed McCall to Laramie with Deputy U.S. Marshal Saint Andre Durand Balcombe, overheard McCall’s boasting. Balcombe arrested McCall on August 29 and escorted him to Yankton, Dakota Territory’s capital city.

As he awaited trial, McCall spent the next three months in jail. His cell mate was Jerry McCarty, who had been arrested for the murder of John Hinch in the Black Hills the day before the Hickok killing. The two hatched a daring and almost successful escape in early November. J.B. Robinson, the jailer, was preparing to lock them in their cells for the night when McCarty overpowered him and held him by the throat. McCall then beat him until he was nearly unconscious. They stole his keys, broke their shackles and were stepping out the door when they came face to face with Marshal Burdick and James Bennett, one of his assistants. As Yankton’s Daily Press and Dakotaian reported, in the wonderful language of 19th century journalism,”Marshal Burdick immediately comprehended the situation and placed the business end of his revolver in unpleasant proximity to the heads of the escaping murderers,” who were escorted without incident back to their cells.

McCall’s trial began on December 5, with Judge Peter Shannon presiding. Appointed to defend McCall were Oliver Shannon and William Henry Harrison Beadle, the man perhaps best known in Dakota history for his passionate defense of school lands. When Marshal Burdick escorted McCall into the courtroom, the Press and Dakotaian correspondent described him as”an evil looking man young in years but apparently old in sin.”

Townspeople filled the courtroom to hear testimony and closing arguments, which concluded after noon on December 6. George Shingle, Carl Mann and William Massie — all of whom were inside the No. 10 Saloon when Hickok was killed — identified McCall as the lone gunman. (According to legend, Massie still held the bullet that killed Hickok. After passing through Wild Bill’s head, it tore into Massie’s wrist where it remained until he died and was buried with it in 1910.)

The defense’s main argument was that Dakota Territory didn’t have jurisdiction over the Black Hills because it was still part of the Great Sioux Reservation, the boundaries of which had been established under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The jury of 12 men disagreed and found McCall guilty. He was sentenced to hang on March 1. (Curiously, six months after the trial, the Press and Dakotaian reported on a new map drawn of the Black Hills region which placed Deadwood squarely in Dakota Territory. The map caused controversy among those who attempted to claim that Deadwood was actually part of Wyoming. Territorial leaders sought advice from Beadle, the defense lawyer who at one time was also a surveyor in Dakota. He said he was convinced that Deadwood was part of Dakota Territory.)

Longtime Yankton historian Bob Hanson was a tireless researcher of the McCall case.

McCall languished in jail for another two months. During his time in Yankton, his story kept changing. At one point he claimed he’d been drunk. Later, he said a man named John Varnes paid him to kill Hickok. Varnes held a grudge over a disputed poker game, he said.

A few days before the scheduled execution, the marshal’s office received a letter from a Mary McCall in Kentucky asking if the prisoner was her brother.”There was a young man of the name John McCall left here about six years ago, who has not been heard from for the last three years,” she wrote.”He has a father, mother, and three sisters living here in Louisville, who are very uneasy about him since they heard about the murder of Wild Bill.”

The letter seemed to unnerve McCall and may have prompted him to get rid of a document that could have shed more light on the Hickok murder. McCall had been preparing a written statement and asked the Press and Dakotaian to publish it after his death. But the night before the execution he destroyed it.

March 1 was a cold and drizzly day in Yankton. By 9:30 in the morning, a large crowd had gathered outside the jail at Fifth and Douglas. They watched as McCall climbed into a carriage with Father John Daxacher, a Catholic priest, and Phil Faulk, a Press and Dakotaian correspondent.”This mournful train, bearing its living victim to the grave, was preceded and followed by a long line of vehicles of every description, with hundreds on horseback and on foot, all leading north, out through Broadway,” Faulk wrote.”The rain which was falling had moistened the earth and deadened the sound of the carriage wheels. Not a word was spoken during the ride two miles to the school section north of the Catholic cemetery. McCall still continued to bear up bravely, even after the gallows loomed in full view.”

The wooden gallows had been constructed so that the throngs of people who attended could watch as McCall ascended the steps and Burdick placed the noose around his neck. But when the floor beneath his feet disappeared, McCall plunged into a boarded-up enclosure that prevented witnesses from watching the condemned man struggle to his final breath.

Twelve minutes later, two doctors pronounced McCall dead. His body was placed in a walnut coffin and buried very nearly on the spot. Jack McCall’s life ended, but his legend in Yankton was only beginning.

***

A WEEK BEFORE we examined the U.S. marshal’s ledger book, Jim Lane visited the Mead museum to do the same thing. Lane is a local historian who has doggedly researched the Hickok killing and McCall’s time in Yankton.”I’ve got a book written,” he says.”But it’s all in my head.”

A sign proclaiming Yankton’s role in the saga of Jack McCall stood along Highway 81 before finding a home with the Yankton County Historical Society, headquartered at the Mead Cultural Heritage Center, where local historian Jim Lane researches McCall’s time in Yankton.

Lane’s interest in the ledger book centers more on the scruples of Marshal Burdick, the man in charge of the McCall execution, than any nefarious actions on the part of territorial politicians.”We don’t have a really good accounting on the McCall thing,” Lane says.”Burdick was a real reluctant guy. U.S. marshals weren’t Matt Dillon. They were political guys who took these jobs because it was a good way to make money on the frontier. He came under some fire and there was an investigation into his spending, right around that time frame.”

Hanson’s suspicions ran deeper. He believed there may have been a plan to kill Wild Bill Hickok so that federal marshals could swoop into the Hills, arrest the murderer and conduct the trial in territorial court, firmly establishing influence over the Black Hills. He turned to the book hoping to find clues.”Bob loved a good story, and he had a lot of fun with it. He kind of pushed the conspiracy theory,” Lane says.”When they hauled McCall back to Yankton, the territorial capital established legal authority over the Black Hills. That’s the case that does it. That’s when they say that if there’s going to be a trial out here, it’s going to be decided by Dakota Territory. Bob was a little bit right with the theory that they wanted this to happen. But I don’t think anyone assassinated Wild Bill Hickok for political means.”

There’s no smoking gun in the ledger book, either, though two of the bookmarked pages show that discussion of authority over the Black Hills was lively during the summer of 1876. On July 10, Marshal Burdick wrote to Attorney General Alphonso Taft regarding warrants that had been issued for the arrest of miners who brought whiskey into the Black Hills, still regarded as Indian Territory. Burdick’s position seems quite clear:”The Black Hills region as you are perhaps aware is located upon what is known as the Sioux Indian Reservation, within the limits of the Second Judicial District of this Territory, the Court being held at Yankton.”

Burdick said he had dispatched two deputies to arrest seven or eight men accused of bringing whiskey into the Hills, but that only one could be located. The others had escaped and probably could not be apprehended”by peaceable means.” He had requested military help from General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, but given the obliteration of Lt. Col. George Custer and his 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn just two weeks earlier, he suspected no help would come.

ìAny doubts which may have been raised in regard to the legality of the treaty under which the present Reservation was set apart I imagine has nothing to do with these cases. The United States Court here has never held that it is Indian Country,” Burdick wrote.”The people in the mining regions are firm in their belief that the Indians have no longer the right to prevent them through the action of the Government from occupying that section and working the mines. I state the fact without any reference to its correct basis.”

Still, he sought guidance.”The warrants in my hands are in proper shape for an offence clearly punishable under the Section referred to and are forced upon the indictments found by a qualified Grand Jury. I desire therefore in view of the peculiar circumstances which I have detailed to have your advice as to whether or not I shall proceed to execute them at all.”

The signature of U.S. Marshal J.H. Burdick, which appears many times in the historic ledger.

Two weeks later, in another letter to the attorney general, Burdick reported that his request for military assistance had indeed been denied, but he also provided more details about his interest in the Black Hills. In February, he dispatched a deputy and a posse to the Black Hills to apprehend several men, one of whom was accused of a murder at the Standing Rock Indian Agency. The lawmen captured only one, who was tried, convicted and punished in the Yankton court.”The expenses of this posse were included in my accounts for the Spring Term of Court at this place and upon my accounts being presented to the Court for approval by law the Judge struck out all that portion of the account relating to the expense of the posse and refused to approve them. I referred the matter to the Hon. the 1st Comptroller and he refused to audit the account although he virtually admitted its legality saying he would not look into an account which the Judge refused to approve.” Clearly, questions remained regarding what the marshal could and couldn’t do in the Black Hills.

Another marked page helps us to find the tangible reminders of McCall’s brief existence in Yankton. In September of 1865, Marshal L.H. Litchfield wrote to Secretary of the Interior James Harlan to ask again for a jail. He referenced a previous letter in which the secretary claimed that no request for jail space had ever been received. But Litchfield was insistent.”At the time I made the request I stated distinctly that the United States had no rooms suitable for the confinement of prisoners. There never has been in this Territory any rooms used for this purpose,” Litchfield said.”The Judges and myself could not complain of the unsuitableness of rooms, but we did complain that there were no rooms, and that prisoners had to be confined at a military post or in a county jail of Iowa, either of which is more than sixty five miles distant from here.

ìI wish the Department to distinctly understand that no rooms of any description have ever been provided or rented in this Territory for the safe keeping of prisoners. But there is great necessity for such rooms.”

Perhaps Litchfield’s entreaties resulted in construction of the federal jail on Linn Street, the facility in which McCall spent at least some time in custody. A tidy brown house sits on the lot today, just a block west of Broadway Avenue, the main north/south thoroughfare through Yankton.

McCall was also held in the relatively new county courthouse and jail, a large brick structure at the corner of Fifth and Douglas. Later, it was a lodge for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows but has since been converted into apartments. Its owner reported that before renovations, sections of bars could still be seen in the basement.

The building where McCall stood trial was part of the St. Charles Hotel, built in 1870 at Third and Capital. A portion of the building at the very corner of the intersection was rebuilt in 1891, but wings to the west and north — which included a courtroom where the trial occurred — remain. It also has been converted into apartments. A historic marker was placed on the east exterior wall along Capital Street in 1960. Its language, describing the courtroom’s location”directly back of this marker,” is to be interpreted literally.

Jack McCall stood trial on the second floor of the brick building at Third and Capital in downtown Yankton. The location is prominently marked.

A second marker stands at the intersection of 31st and Broadway near Yankton’s soccer fields. In 1877 this was the place where hundreds of people watched Jack McCall hang. The area has been graded and built upon several times through the years as Yankton gradually expanded to the north, but Lane believes the gallows were built somewhere in today’s Highway 81 right of way near the southbound lanes.

Perhaps the most intriguing mystery surrounding McCall is the location of his gravesite. Four years after the hanging, construction began on the Dakota Hospital for the Insane. McCall’s body, along with several others that had been buried in the pioneer cemetery, had to be relocated. When they opened McCall’s coffin, onlookers were surprised to discover that he’d been buried with the noose still tied around his neck.

McCall was moved to the Catholic cemetery, adjacent to the city cemetery. Over the years, his gravesite became a tourist attraction, much to the chagrin of the city’s Catholic leaders. Local historians say that in the 1930s, Father Lawrence Link, who served Yankton’s Sacred Heart Church from 1895 until his death in 1946, supervised a third relocation of McCall’s remains. This time, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Sacred Heart Cemetery along Douglas Avenue, where he lies today.

A headstone claims to mark McCall’s grave, but in fact it threatens to eventually muddy the historical waters. It was placed in 2017 when the Amazon television show Fireball Run passed through Yankton. The premise involved teams of people traveling through communities on missions or adventures that allowed them to see and experience unique aspects of each city. When the city’s Catholic priests balked at placing a headstone at the actual gravesite, a marker was set inside the adjacent city cemetery instead. The inscription on the stone reads,”Here lies Jack McCall,” but it was placed on a spot where the legendary outlaw definitely does not lie.

The real location of the gravesite is a closely guarded secret. Local legend says that no more than a few people at a time know exactly where it is. Bob Hanson was one of those people, and he remained coy about it, even among his closest family members.”Before he died, he told me where McCall is buried, but I think it was to throw me off the trail,” says Sarah Hanson-Pareek, Hanson’s daughter and a library archivist at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.”I’m not sure if I got the true account.”

A true accounting of anything surrounding Jack McCall would be difficult to put together.”There are so many trails that lead off this story that just haven’t been followed,” Lane says.”Everyone’s done Hickok and Calamity Jane to death. Nobody really looks at McCall because there hasn’t been much there. But we should be hopeful that the current interest in genealogy and clues such as the Mary McCall letter might lead to new discoveries.” Easier access to materials online, such as digitized newspapers and ancestry websites, could help further investigations.

Then there’s the ledger book. Is the paucity of information simply due to the time that has passed, or is it at least partly intentional? What of missing pages 509 and 510? Lane is convinced.”I don’t see any evidence of anyone cutting pages out,” he says.”It just ended before it got to any of the stuff that we were interested in.”

With Jack McCall, it seems there will always be more questions than answers.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

West Friends

By Paul Higbee

Black Hills lawman Seth Bullock led the efforts to build Friendship Tower, a memorial to his friend Theodore Roosevelt near Deadwood. Photo by John Mitchell

The Mount Roosevelt Friendship Tower Trail, says Black Hills National Forest North Zone Archaeologist Michael Engelhart, can be thought of as an easy”tiptoe into the woods.” For children, or adults unaccustomed to long Black Hills hikes, the trail is a mile-high, 0.6-mile loop that’s moderately rugged and gains altitude as it passes through pines and aspens. It offers vistas of the northern Black Hills and adjacent plains.

The site is also a step into local and national history, a perfect tribute to President Theodore Roosevelt, who knew these hills and plains well, and labored hard to preserve all western lands.

The trail leads to a 35-foot-tall rough-hewn stone tower, a structure that some observers liken to an artifact straight from medieval Europe, or a gigantic chess piece. In fact, the tower was the nation’s first memorial to Roosevelt, erected in a flurry just months after the 26th president died in 1919.

Pushing aggressively for the memorial, as soon as he learned of Roosevelt’s death that January, was Seth Bullock — former Deadwood sheriff, marshal, Rough Rider, U.S. Forest Reserve superintendent, and posthumously the inspiration for a character in HBO’s Deadwood TV series. Photos taken at the tower’s July 4, 1919, dedication reveal Bullock looking unusually weary and drawn. Working with the Society of Black Hills Pioneers, Bullock had obtained land on Sheep Mountain 3 miles northwest of Deadwood, renamed it Mount Roosevelt, led the memorial tower’s construction, and organized a high-powered dedication program — all while battling intestinal cancer. Bullock died on September 23, 12 weeks after the dedication. He was 70.

Yes, the tower officially memorialized the president. But it also stood in testament to two remarkable friends — Roosevelt and Bullock — and people alternately called it the”Friendship Tower.” The stone structure has endured for more than a century, though in that time the elements took their toll. But a recent restoration and rededication project led by the U.S. Forest Service has encouraged hikers to traverse the trail and once again visit the magnificent monument that forever links two of the West’s most intelligent and hard-nosed characters.

Bullock and Roosevelt met while the future president was ranching in northern Dakota Territory. They remained friends the rest of their lives.

Bullock was born in Canada in 1849, moved to Michigan with his family, and hoped to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War, but it ended before he was old enough to enlist. At age 20 he embarked on a different kind of adventure to Montana Territory’s gold fields.

His biographer, David Wolff of Spearfish, writes that despite Bullock’s thirst for rugged outdoor adventure, he had taken school seriously and grown up to speak softly and properly like an educated gentleman. Wolff added that Bullock was strong-willed,”with firm opinions to match. He befriended people he saw as equals and ignored those he looked down upon.”

Except when people he looked down upon were outlaws that he arrested as a Montana and Dakota lawman. He believed they impeded vital progress in the West. After nearly a decade in Montana, Bullock rode into Deadwood, part of the great Black Hills gold rush that boomed in 1876 (ironically, the courts would eventually determine the gold rush itself was outlawry, because the Black Hills were reserved for the Lakota people in 1876). For a few months he served as Deadwood sheriff.

Among the people that Bullock ranked as his equal was Roosevelt, nine years younger than himself and a New Yorker. After Roosevelt’s first wife Alice died, the future president sought solace in Dakota Territory. In the process, he became a cattleman and jumped into civic affairs as fledgling units of government took form. An enduring legend claims that Bullock and Roosevelt first encountered one another as each was pursuing the same horse thief. Wolff, however, believes the pair met along the Belle Fourche River in 1892, and that when Roosevelt announced he was currently serving as a federal civil service commissioner, Bullock was impressed. While that story isn’t as colorful as the one involving a horse thief, it points to the men’s mutual belief in government and civil authority as means for moving the West forward.

Beyond that, what cemented the Bullock-Roosevelt friendship? According to Roosevelt, Bullock was a man who could always get him to laugh, and that counted for a lot in a life touched by personal sorrows and the immense pressures of the presidency. A story Roosevelt loved was the time the two men were in London, and Bullock approached a stuffy-looking Englishman and asked him the name of a nearby”creek” — knowing full well it was the River Thames.

The men were in London because Roosevelt wanted,”Britishers to see my typical ideal American.” That, to Roosevelt’s thinking, had to be a westerner. After he remarried and had sons, who grew up in New York and Washington, D.C., Roosevelt sent the boys on South Dakota vacations so that under Bullock’s tutelage they would become westerners, not greenhorns.

Seth Bullock is pictured at the While House with President Roosevelt during a reunion of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

In Bullock and Roosevelt’s minds, the toughest westerners were working cowboys. The men successfully advanced an idea to send mounted cowboys — Rough Riders — into combat during the Spanish-American War. These cowboys mostly hailed from the Dakotas and neighboring states. Although he was 50, Bullock jumped into the Rough Rider adventure, and volunteered to do so again at age 70 during World War I.

As had been the case in the Civil War, however, Bullock missed seeing combat in the Spanish-American War. But Roosevelt did, making his famous charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba that became a key to launching his national political career. He was elected vice president in 1900 and assumed the presidency following President William McKinley’s assassination in September 1901. Just nine years had passed since Roosevelt, on horseback along the Belle Fourche River, had introduced himself as a federal civil service commissioner.

Much later, in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge would bring the federal government’s executive branch to South Dakota for three months when he established his”summer White House” in the Black Hills. Yet no American president understood the state more intimately than Theodore Roosevelt. To use modern terminology, Roosevelt was”hands-on” in executing policy in South Dakota, including reclamation that would create Belle Fourche Reservoir and his 1902 order for stock growers to remove unauthorized cattle grazing on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Indian reservations. The resulting 1902 Roundup is legendary today, but at the time was seen chiefly as reflecting the president’s concern about reservation lands that were being damaged by overgrazing.

Likewise, Roosevelt worried about limited timber and water resources in the Black Hills. So did Bullock, who noted that all local industries were dependent on those resources and that their loss could turn the Black Hills into”a desert.”

This concern prompted Roosevelt, as vice president, to convince McKinley that the president should appoint Bullock supervisor of the Black Hills Forest Reserve — today the Black Hills National Forest. This Reserve, established in 1897, had already made history as the site of the nation’s first federal timber sale — about 30 miles south of what would become Mount Roosevelt. This regulated sale of timber to loggers was a big step as national forests everywhere embraced a multiple-use philosophy, with private industry playing a role in forest management.

Still, there were plenty of Black Hills people appalled by the thought of the federal government asserting itself into a forest they considered their own. Roosevelt sensed correctly that South Dakotans would accept Bullock as the face of the Forest Reserve over an outside bureaucrat. Roosevelt settled into the White House confident he had the right man — based in Deadwood — to fight fires, chase timber and game poachers out of the forest, handle timber sales, and encourage replanting efforts that would rejuvenate overcut forests (it was later determined that the Black Hills usually regenerate pine growth naturally).

Gen. Leonard Wood and Seth Bullock posed in the foreground of a photo during the dedication of the Friendship Tower. Around 1,000 people attended the ceremony.

In 1906 the president named Bullock, who had secured a firm place in history as a pioneer forest manager, to the South Dakota U.S. marshal position. Bullock set up his office in Deadwood; the westerner had no intention of living in Sioux Falls, the established base of operations for marshals.

Roosevelt chose not to seek re-election in 1908 and regretted it immediately. When he attempted to regain the White House in 1912, Bullock — still South Dakota’s marshal — campaigned for him. But Roosevelt’s comeback resulted in little except a badly-fractured Republican Party and a bullet left lodged in the ex-president’s chest after a campaign trail assassination attempt. Later, Roosevelt’s rigorous exploration trek to South America left him ill and injured, further compromising his overall health. Bullock contracted his cancer at about the same time.

But World War I proved to be the saddest struggle for the friends. President Woodrow Wilson nixed their hopes to reorganize the Rough Riders for combat in Europe. In July 1918, Roosevelt’s son Quentin died in an aerial battle over France. Six months later, Roosevelt himself passed away in his sleep at age 60.

The Society of Black Hills Pioneers and Deadwood civic leaders liked Bullock’s idea of honoring Roosevelt permanently in the Black Hills, but believed the memorial should stand in Deadwood, not miles out of town up a very steep grade. A revised plan could allow visitors to step off the train in Deadwood and walk to the site. Bullock dug in his heels and successfully made the case that Roosevelt’s chief legacy in the West was preservation and protection of lands. Bullock wanted visitors to experience those lands, to climb a winding metal staircase in the tower and survey them as far as their eyes could see.

A thousand people made their way to the tower’s dedication on Independence Day. The program Bullock arranged was, appropriate to the man being honored, awash in Republican politics. Gov. Peter Norbeck, whose natural preservation philosophy mirrored Roosevelt’s, spoke. So did Gen. Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s Army commander during his San Juan Hill charge 21 years earlier. Wood was preparing to run for president himself, on a platform Roosevelt would have approved. Wood, in fact, came close to winning the Republican nomination in 1920.

In the 1920s and ’30s, automobile tourism surpassed vacation travel by rail into the Black Hills. Deadwood’s municipally owned Pine Crest Tourist Park catered to those new-era tourists and sat within hiking distance of the tower. For locals, the spot was a popular picnic venue when a road took their cars right up to the structure. The great Deadwood forest fire of 1959 nearly wiped out the town; flames came within a half-mile of the tower. In years following the fire, school groups, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and others made trips to the tower to gaze across charred hillsides and absorb the destructive fury of wildfire. Some youth on these field trips grew up believing Mount Roosevelt had always been Forest Service land and the tower a fire lookout.

In fact, the Society of Black Hills Pioneers transferred the site to the Forest Service in 1966. By that time, it seemed every Black Hills teenager had access to a car, and some of them discovered Mount Roosevelt to be a dark, secluded destination for underage beer parties. Some mornings broken bottles littered the tower’s base. The Forest Service closed the road leading to the tower, and for safety removed stone steps that took people into the tower. The interior metal stairway was also blocked.

When visitors reached the top of Friendship Tower, Bullock wanted them to enjoy a sweeping view of the Black Hills that he and Roosevelt both loved. Photo by John Mitchell

More damaging than glass was water — season after season of rain and snowmelt that slowly broke down mortar between the tower’s stones. Brett Ewald, Forest Service archaeological technician, says the situation never reached the level of”benign neglect,” where a site begins a slide into complete deterioration.”But,” he says,”the Forest Service did come to a point where it had to reassess how it managed the tower.”

A condition survey in 2001 was the start of a sequence that saw the tower added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and then survey recommendations were gradually fulfilled, including stabilizing the base, replacing the exterior stone steps and unblocking the metal interior ones, and working up new visitor interpretation. The loop trail from the parking lot was fully developed, and a metal cupola added to the tower’s top to improve drainage.

The site was rededicated exactly 100 years after Bullock’s original dedication. Some local people who attended admitted it was their first visit, while others declared decades-long affection for Mount Roosevelt.

It’s fair to say that the memorial has never won the national attention that Bullock hoped, but another Black Hills monument certainly has. If Bullock had lived another 20 years, he surely would have attended the 1939 dedication of his friend’s likeness on Mount Rushmore. Had someone asked if Roosevelt really merited inclusion with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, there’s little doubt that Bullock would have defended his old friend, whose granite gaze now falls forever over the rugged land that they both so loved.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

South Dakota’s Spooky Side

By John Andrews

It seems every town in South Dakota has a ramshackle old house that people believe to be haunted. In Lake Norden, it was just down the street from my house. It was small and had long been abandoned. It also had what looked like iron bars on one of the windows, which I’m sure fed the legends that older kids shared with us. I never ventured very close to it, and I always gave it a sidelong glance whenever I walked past on the street.

South Dakota boasts plenty of spooky places, where voices moan in the twilight and things go bump in the night. Several years ago, we spoke to Chris Hull about strange goings-on at Sica Hollow State Park near Sisseton. Hull is a Sisseton native who works for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks. Six generations of his family have lived around Sica Hollow, a beautiful woodland known for both spectacular fall foliage and haunting legends that date back to its very first Native American inhabitants, who christened the forest”sica” (bad, or evil). Visitors have reported hearing phantom drumbeats in the distance, and seeing bubbling bogs brimming with crimson-tinted water.

Hull and some friends planned to camp in the hollow one night. One member of the party returned home to retrieve a few forgotten supplies.”We were hiking and heard him yell from down in the hollow,” Hull recalled.”He must have yelled five or six times. We wondered if his truck had gotten stuck and he had started walking.”

Hull’s group walked to the bottom of the hollow, but their friend was nowhere to be found. They returned the campsite just as he returned.”He said he was at home, and he had all the sleeping bags and things he’d gone to get.”

Guests and employees at the Bullock Hotel in Deadwood have long reported spooky encounters. The hotel is said to have been haunted ever since its namesake, Seth Bullock, died in Room 211 in 1919. A Sioux Falls television crew visited the Bullock for a Halloween story and listened intently, albeit skeptically, to the staff’s stories. Then, while in the basement, the reporter heard a woman laughing good-naturedly in her ear. But when she turned around, there was no one there. Later, when they reviewed the videotape, the reporter’s voice was the only clearly audible sound — other than unexplained static at the precise moment the reporter heard the mysterious laughter.

We’ve also written about an eerie stretch of 424th Street between Carthage and Fedora that locals call Spooklight Road. For years, people living along that gravel road have reported seeing the bright headlights of a vehicle heading north at night. As they waited for the vehicle to pass their farmsteads, nothing ever showed up. One local legend says the light is the lantern from a wagon train of settlers that got caught in a blizzard and died.

If you’re feeling brave, take a friend and explore one of South Dakota’s spooky places this Halloween season. My only advice is to keep a safe distance.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Show Goes On

By Michael Zimny

Deadwood’s outlaw history is key to its draw as a tourist destination. Street performances by the local acting troupe Deadwood Alive — reenacting historic scenes featuring characters like Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane — draw crowds and stoke the Deadwood mystique.

This year, the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the start of Deadwood’s tourist season, but business is picking up.

Statistics tallied by the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce show May hotel occupancies were down 19 percent, and June’s down nearly 18 percent, though occupancy levels fared better than the national average. According to numbers compiled by the South Dakota Commission on Gaming, gambling revenues were down throughout the spring, but rebounded in June, with Deadwood casinos actually improving on last June’s take by 13.75 percent, led by a brisk slot machine business.

As the sound of pulled slot levers get louder, crowds have grown for Deadwood Alive’s street performances.

Andy Mosher is the executive director of Deadwood Alive. He also plays several roles, including that of Con Stapleton, the first and only town marshall of Deadwood, and John Swift, the court clerk at The Trial of Jack McCall.

This year, Deadwood Alive cancelled its weekend spring season. The summer season started Memorial Day weekend with the troupe, per usual, presenting several outdoor performances at daily scheduled times.

The Trial of Jack McCall, a Deadwood theatrical tradition since the 1920s, is still presented indoors, nowadays to a smaller audience. Masks are recommended though not enforced.

“We started out to a very small crowd,” Mosher says. “Our attendance has increased as the summer has progressed. Outside our shows are practically not affected. It’s built slowly up through the summer and now it’s kind of normal for what it would be. Our indoor show is still quite reduced and probably down about 30 percent for the year.”

The reduced numbers at the indoor show and loss of the spring season have markedly decreased revenues, but they’ve managed to stay fully staffed.

“We were lucky enough to attain a little bit of funding through government subsidies and so forth to make up some of the money that we’re losing,” Mosher says.

Deadwood Alive’s outdoor performances are popular but don’t pay the bills.

“The Trial of Jack McCall of course, is [at] an indoor venue, so people are a little more hesitant to attend. That’s the only thing that we charge money for is that show. So it is going to affect our revenues substantially this year.”

The players recently performed at the (outdoor) Days of ’76 Rodeo, which Mosher says was a success.

“It was huge. I was actually kind of surprised at how many people did attend and sit right in the bleachers nearby each other. Of course, it is outdoors and that does help quite a bit.”

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

South Dakota’s Death Valley

By Colin Kapitan

Major League Baseball has long been known for its blend of interesting and controversial characters. One of the most interesting of the pre-1920 era was Deadwood native James “Death Valley” Scott.

Scott was enshrined in the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame in 1985 for his nine years of excellence as a big league pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. He is unquestionably the most successful pitcher among native South Dakotans.

Scott was born in Deadwood on April 23, 1888. His father, George, was a weatherman and telegraph operator for the government. The Scotts moved to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation west of Mobridge and later to Lander, Wyoming. It was in the country fields around Lander at the turn of the century where Scott first found the joys of hurling a baseball past aspiring hitters.

Scott refined his pitching skills as a one-year college student at Kansas Wesleyan. He also spent one summer at Oskaloosa, Iowa, pitching for a semi-pro team. In 1908, Scott signed on with a Wichita, Kansas, team in the Western League. After only one season of professional baseball, he was sold to the Chicago White Sox and made his debut in the big leagues and celebrated his 21st birthday just days apart. He spent nine years in the majors, all with the Sox.

Scott’s first appearance in a major league game was indicative of his career to follow. He won his debut 1-0, and he was glorified in print the day following by noted sports journalist Ring Lardner, who covered the game for a Chicago newspaper.

In his 1909 rookie season, Scott went 13-12, through his won-loss record is somewhat misleading. He pitched five shutouts that summer and was on the losing end of five 1-0 games. Scott lost four other games by a 2-1 score. It was the harbinger of his career.

The following year, Scott posted a 9-17 record for the White Sox. He spent that winter in Imperial, California, and upon his return for the 1911 season, he was quickly dubbed “Death Valley” after the legendary desert character called Death Valley Scotty.

The next two seasons were so-so for the tall, burly 235-pound, right-handed pitcher. In 1911 he was 12-11 and the following year only 2-2 as he saw limited pitching time.

But over the next three seasons, Scott was as good as any pitcher in major league baseball. In 1913, he was not only a 20-game winner but a 21-game loser for a second division ball club. He fashioned an outstanding 1.90 earned run average and highlighted the year in a game against the St. Louis Browns when he struck out 15 batters, including six in succession. Scott pitched in 48 games and totaled 312 innings that summer.

Scott’s hard luck pitching was perhaps personified in the 1914 season when he pitched a no-hitter …. and lost. His record was 16-18 that year, and his toughest loss occurred on May 14 when he shut out the Washington Senators on no hits for nine innings only to lose the no-hitter and the game, 1-0, in the 10th inning.

(According to no-hitter historian Dirk Lammers, in 1991, the Committee for Statistical Accuracy amended its definition of a no-hitter, “declaring it a game of nine innings or more that ends with no hits.” Scott’s “no-hitter” was officially wiped from the record books, along with 49 other such games that had been played throughout the history of Major League Baseball. Learn about them at Lammers’ website, www.nonohitters.com.)

His biggest season was 1915. Scott won 24 games in 35 decisions and led the league with seven shutouts. This was also the year that he was on the mound when Detroit Tiger Hall of Famer Ty Cobb’s 35-game hitting string came to an end.

Scott’s record slipped to 9-14 the following year. In 1917, he was 6-7 with a sparkling 1.87 earned run average when he left the team in the middle of the season and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was the first major leaguer to do so. He later earned a commission as a captain before his discharge in 1920.

His major league totals for nine years read 111 wins, 113 losses, 26 career shutouts and a 2.32 career earned run average. Scott’s career was noted by his character and sportsmanship almost as much as his superb curveball and deft pickoff move to first base.

Scott was one of the first baseball players to form a link with the world of show business. He and White Sox teammate Buck Weaver were married to two of the four Cook Sisters, whose singing act was the talk of Chicago in those days.

In 1914, Scott took his turn on the mound as the White Sox and the New York Giants spent the off-season touring places such as England, Paris and Tokyo. He even pitched before the Pope at the Vatican.

It was while Scott was at war that the famous Black Sox Scandal occurred. It involved eight White Sox players who contrived with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. In his later days, Scott confided to his son, “Had I still been with the team in 1919, it never would have happened. When I found out about it, I would have reported it for the honor of the game.”

Scott returned to baseball after his military service, but not to the White Sox. He refused an invitation because of conflicts with team management. Instead, he finished his professional career in the minor leagues, pitching four seasons with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and two years for the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern League.

In 1923, Scott needed permission from Pacific Coast League president W.H. McCarthy to wear a mustache on the playing field. Such facial hair had long been taboo in pro baseball. Scott grew the mustache as a result of a winter Canadian hunting trip. It quickly became a good luck piece, as he pitched a no-hitter in one of his first games that year.

His playing days ended the summer of 1927, when he suffered a broken leg. Scott remained active in baseball, working as an umpire in the Southern League. In 1930, he became one of the few big-league baseball players ever to return to the majors as an umpire, working for three National League seasons.

During his minor league days in the Pacific Coast League, Scott worked winters in the movie studios. Following his retirement from umpiring, he went to work full time with such major studios as Warner Bros., RKO and Republic Pictures. He retired in 1951 and died on April 7, 1957 in Palm Springs.

Although he left South Dakota at an early age, there was a return of sorts in 1939 when his son, Jim Scott, Jr., pitched for the Northern League Sioux Falls Canaries under manager Rex Stucker. Years later, the younger Scott compared his own and his father’s pitching skills.”I was a thrower,” he said.”Dad was a pitcher.”

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Mr. Bullock Goes To Washington

By Roger Holtzmann

Seth Bullock’s chance meeting with Theodore Roosevelt was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Roosevelt’s passing. Bullock (front row, just left of the man in the gray suit) was a member of Roosevelt’s so-called “Tennis Cabinet,” a group of close friends and informal advisors who were received at the White House on March 1, 1909, the last day of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Seth Bullock arrived in Deadwood on August 1, 1876, the day before Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok in the Nuttall & Mann Saloon. With so much excitement in the air, it’s not likely anybody paid much attention to him as he parked his wagon on the muddy main”street” and commenced auctioning off the goods he’d brought with him from Montana Territory. Bullock family lore has it that he sold a large number of chamber pots, which means Deadwood took a small step forward from its uncivilized, mining camp ways that day.

Above and beyond that contribution, no one man did more than Seth Bullock to hurry Deadwood along on its fitful journey toward respectability. He was appointed Lawrence County’s first sheriff in 1877, and by doing a credible job in a volatile time he gave the Northern Hills its first taste of law and order.

Bullock’s more important contributions to Deadwood’s long-term prospects were as a businessman and civic leader. The Star and Bullock Hardware Store, operated with his partner Sol Star, was a fixture on Main Street. Bullock also recognized that Deadwood would need to diversify its economy if it expected to survive once the gold rush was over. He invested his own money in the cause, not always with favorable results, and was”the loudest and most persistent” advocate for a Board of Trade, the equivalent of a modern economic development committee, wrote David Wolff in Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman.

Bullock and Star invested beyond the city limits as well. They acquired 160 acres along False Bottom Creek with the intention of establishing a dairy farm. When that didn’t pan out they moved farther north, purchasing land at the confluence of the Belle Fourche and Redwater rivers, where they established the S&B Ranch. In time that investment paid off in an entirely unexpected way, and sent Mr. Bullock to Washington.

Seth Bullock (left) and Theodore Roosevelt met on the banks of the Belle Fourche River.

Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly, often bed-ridden child who spent his adult years making up for lost time. His quest for vigorous, manly adventure led him, in 1883, to try buffalo hunting in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. He was so taken with what he found he decided to buy a ranch in the region, and the very next year it became more than an investment. Disillusioned with politics, and in the wake of great personal tragedy — his mother and his wife died on the same day — Roosevelt told friends he was going to retire in Dakota.

Roosevelt’s Elk Horn ranch, on the Little Missouri River north of Medora in today’s North Dakota, was a bust financially, but he gained far more than he lost in Dakota. He embraced the West’s rugged ways, and cowboys as kindred spirits, and in so doing rediscovered himself. Before long he was back in public office, this time as sheriff of Billings County.

“As he grew older, Bullock liked to recount tales of the old days, and in particular, he enjoyed stories that drew Roosevelt into the narrative,” wrote Wolff. As Bullock remembered it, he and Teddy met about that time, while each was separately tracking the same trio of horse thieves. This story is in most accounts of Bullock’s life.

Roosevelt told a less colorful tale to his son Kermit. After resuming public life back east, Roosevelt was appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission. He returned to North Dakota and the Badlands on commission business in 1892; his next stop was to be the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Roosevelt chose to mix business with pleasure — his notion of pleasure, anyway — and make that leg of his journey on horseback, by way of Deadwood, which took him across Seth Bullock’s place.

“When Roosevelt and his companions crossed the Belle Fourche River, they encountered a cautious Bullock,” wrote Wolff.”As Roosevelt admitted, his party looked out of place, ‘exactly like an outfit of tinhorn gamblers.’ Once they exchanged introductions Bullock became much more cordial, and … this simple meeting initiated what would become a lifelong friendship between Roosevelt and Bullock.”

There was more than friendship on Bullock’s part, according to Kermit.”Seth Bullock was a hero-worshiper, and father was his great hero,” he recalled. Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most strident voices calling for war with Spain over Cuba, and when it came to pass in 1898 he rushed to volunteer. Bullock soon followed suit.

Melvin Grigsby, South Dakota’s attorney general, was commissioned as a colonel and placed in command of the Third Cavalry Regiment, which was slated for service in Cuba. Grigsby recruited Bullock to command Troop A, and Bullock in turn signed up 84 volunteers, mostly miners and cowboys. They left the Hills in high spirits, confident that they would make short work of the Spanish, and wherever their train stopped on the journey east,”people cheered, bands played, and food appeared,” wrote Wolff.

Which all went for naught. Roosevelt and his Rough Riders earned lasting fame in Cuba; Troop A, meanwhile, was still training in Georgia when the war ended. Bullock and his men were sorely disappointed by this turn of events, but his service did earn him nationwide publicity,”as a man of the frontier, a no nonsense pioneer,” wrote Wolff. It also cemented his bond with Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was named vice-president on the ticket with William McKinley in 1900, largely on the basis of his wartime reputation, he asked Bullock to accompany him on a campaign swing through the Dakotas and Montana.

Roosevelt loathed the largely ceremonial office of vice-president, but fate soon relieved him of the burden. An assassin’s bullet cut William McKinley down in 1901, and Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the”bully pulpit,” as he famously characterized the presidency. He liked the job so well he ran on his own in 1904, and when he won, Seth Bullock had a corker of an idea: round up a posse of real western cowboys, head for the nation’s capital and ride in his good friend Teddy’s inaugural parade.

Bullock (front row, seventh from left), Tom Mix (front row, third from right), Fred Wilson (middle row, far right) and the rest of Bullock’s Brigade rode in the inaugural parade and showed the folks in Washington what real live westerners looked like.

Bullock’s Brigade, as they came to be known,”are not dime novel heroes or stage robbers,” wrote Bullock in his newspaper account of their trip.”They are cowboys, and as such are the real article, and the reason they [went to Washington] is because this was the first inauguration of a man who knows them.”

Fred and Charlie Wilson, ranchers from Harding County, were among the 60 men Bullock invited on the grand adventure.”They also picked up a few people along the way,” says Fred’s grandson, Fred Wilson, of Belle Fourche.”One of them was Tom Mix, before he got famous for making movies. He got to talking to them [during their stop in Chicago] and he decided to join up.” Mix had also volunteered for service during the Spanish-American War, and like Bullock, he never made it overseas before the guns were silenced.

Fred Wilson the elder wrote an entertaining account of the Washington trip in the 1950s. Curtis H. Satzinger, the long-time printer for the Belle Fourche Daily Post and Weekly Bee, kept a copy which his daughter, Rita (Satzinger) Edwards, found while going through his papers after Curtis’ death.

“There was a large crowd to see us off [from Deadwood],” wrote Wilson. A delegation of Wyoming cowboys joined the group in Edgemont,”and to say they were a lively bunch would be putting it mildly.” Some of their fellow passengers, a group of”Eastern ladies” in particular, were afraid to go into the dining car when the rough hewn cowboys were around, but before long they were charmed by the Westerners’ banjo and guitar serenades.

Bullock and company were given a tour of the city when they stopped in Chicago, and a large, raucous throng greeted them upon their arrival in Washington on March 2. Their horses had been shipped in advance, and the cowboys were disappointed to discover that their animals were in”pretty tough shape” after the long journey east. That couldn’t be helped, so they saddled up and set off toward the Washington Monument for some exercise and a little shockingly cruel”fun.”

“A large crowd followed us out there, many negroes among them, and we had great fun roping them as they ran from one side to the other,” wrote Wilson.”One negro … took exception to the fun we were having. He came out of the crowd … [but] we never knew what he intended for just then Jim Dahlman, of Crawford, Neb., who later became the mayor of Omaha, dropped a rope over his head and pulled him to the ground.”

Such were the times that no one chastised Bullock’s boys, or even remarked upon this behavior. Quite the contrary, wrote Wilson. Everywhere they went in Washington they heard,”‘You boys are alright. The president has vouched for you.'”

President Roosevelt visited the booming cow town of Edgemont in 1903 and addressed the crowd from a bandstand that still stands in the city park today.

Inaugural day dawned bright and clear. Roosevelt delivered his address, then took his place at the parade’s head. More than three hours passed before Bullock and company got their chance to promenade, by which time,”interest in the parade had perceptibly begun to wane,” according to a newspaper account.”It was thoroughly awakened, however, by the arrival of the Cowboys, who made only a pretense of keeping in line and flirted with every pretty girl who would look at them twice.”

This was the first time back east for many of the cowboys, but they sure knew what city folk wanted to see.”Lassoes hung from the pummels of their saddles and pearl ebony six-shooters stuck out aggressively from holsters suspended from their belts,” reported the newspaper, and at their head rode the quintessential westerner,”Captain Seth Bullock, who sat his horse as if he was in an easy chair, with his long moustache twisted by the wind and his left arm resting akimbo on his hip.”

“We were given a great ovation … from building after building and stand after stand as we rode up [Pennsylvania] Avenue, until we finally came in sight of the presidential stand,” Wilson recalled.”And there was Teddy, leaning out over the railing, and as we passed he shouted, ‘You’re alright, boys! I’ll see you later!'”

Roosevelt received the brigade at a White House luncheon later in the week. He introduced the boys to his family and conducted them on a tour, which ended in the State Dining Room.”‘Boys, I’ve got to bid you good-bye as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee has been waiting to see me,'” said Teddy after an hour.”‘But I want to assure you, I have had many delegations in the White House, but none more welcome.'”

Bullock and the cowboys apparently worked all the wildness out of their systems before they reached Washington.”Compared with the noise made by the plug-hat-and-boiled-shirt political clubs, the cowboy brigade was Quakerish and decorous,” wrote Bullock. The astonished manager of their hotel agreed, saying they behaved,”like a Sunday School Teachers Convention compared to some of the other delegations entertained by him.”

Cowboys can only be good for so long, however. Some of them had to sell their horses in Washington,”so they would have enough money to get home,” wrote Bullock.”[Others] wanted a little cash to blow in New York, where they were going to stop before they started back to the range.”

After Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919, Seth Bullock erected a memorial to his hero on Sheep Mountain in Deadwood. For Wilson and the other cowboys, the monument paid tribute to a man they admired and served as a reminder of what was”the greatest event of our lives,” he concluded.”Many of the boys have crossed over the Great Divide, but there are those of us whose thoughts go back to those eventful days when we helped one of the greatest of our presidents, and took part in the greatest and grandest and most spectacular inauguration in history.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Art, Violence and Poker Alice

By Michael Zimny

Legend says that Poker Alice damaged this painting when she fired her shotgun inside her Sturgis brothel. Image courtesy of the Days of ’76 Museum.

There is art that memorializes, mourns, celebrates or foments violence. Then there are works that get a value-upgrade out of real acts of violence.

Henry Ford paid a mint for the rocking chair Abraham Lincoln was reclined in when John Wilkes Booth shot him. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses killer art from shrunken heads to arms and armor. John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings are creepy enough on their own, but his artist’s bio helps move the merchandise. If the platter Salome used to bring Herodias the head of John the Baptist could be certified, it would fetch some serious coin at Sotheby’s.

Legend says Poker Alice used her shotgun to value-appreciate a decent if unremarkable nude that used to hang on her brothel wall. The painting is now in the collections of Deadwood’s Days of’76 Museum. Reportedly, Alice laced it with holes at her Sturgis brothel and willed it to fellow madam Big Hulda. Local artifact collector Don Clowser later located it at a bar in Gillette, Wyoming. The museum has since had the painting restored.

Is the story true? What can be verified is that Poker Alice was familiar with firearms. There is plenty of legend to go around about Deadwood’s famous card shark. It’s hard to know whether she became a gambler from a young age as some suggest, or as the cigar-chomping elder in the famous photos; or if she impressed future husband Warren Tubbs by shooting a man, who aimed to stab him, with her .38.

She did kill a man. More than a dozen rowdy soldiers burst into her brothel one night in 1913, and according to the Deadwood Pioneer-Times,”started to clean out the place … by cutting the electric light wires and throwing rocks through the windows.” Locked and loaded, Poker Alice”started shooting into the crowd with a .22 rifle,” hitting two soldiers. Private Fred Koetzle was mortally wounded. Two days later the Pioneer-Times reported that the state’s attorney would not file charges against her for the shooting, though she would be charged with”keeping a house of ill fame.”

“Ill fame” surrounded Alice the rest of her days. At 78, some forgotten state’s attorney shut down her business and prosecuted her for prostitution and violating Prohibition. Gov. William Bulow pardoned her. By then she was already a legend, making appearances as an icon of the Old West at the early Days of’76 parades.

Poker Alice.

For decades, she gambled with accomplished gunslingers and took them for everything they had. She outlived three husbands and nearly all the more-famous fellow outlaws — like Wild Bill and Calamity Jane — she may have knocked one back with in the saloons of Deadwood’s”Badlands” district, into an era of gentrification (Black Hills style) that capitalized on the legend of the old days to attract tourists.

So it wouldn’t have been out of character for her to shoot up the place and lodge some shot in an artist-rendered lady of the evening’s backside.

The painting itself is not by an unknown. Astley David Middleton (A.D.M.) Cooper was a renowned artist and protÈgÈ of George Catlin, who had retraced Catlin’s journeys through the American West and often depicted Western, particularly Native American subjects. Like Catlin, he saw the tragedy of westward expansion. His best works serve as elegies for lost ways of life.

He was well regarded in his time, earning enough to build a garish Egyptian-themed studio in his home base of San Jose, and still has a cult following, though his stature has waned with time. He was also the kind of guy who would enjoy a night at a joint run by Poker Alice. He liked the nightlife and left behind a prodigious output of lowbrow nudes that may have been used to pay off bar tabs.

That’s the kind of Cooper that hung on the wall at the Poker Alice joint in Sturgis, and that legend says she honeycombed with buckshot. If it’s true, she may have embellished the work of a (sometimes) funereal artist with the forensic debris of some john’s last night on the town.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Artists with Ax and Saw

Our November/December issue includes a story on the Juso Brothers, sons of a Finnish immigrant who brought western European log construction skills to South Dakota. We gathered several photos for the story on the family’s craft. Here are some that didn’t make the magazine. Color photos by Stephen Gassman. Black and white photos courtesy of June Nusz.