Tag: deuel county

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A Cowboy’s Dream

Editor’s Note: We attended the Crystal Springs Ranch Rodeo in Clear Lake in the summer of 1988 and met E.W. Weisel, the cowboy who made his rodeo dream come true. This year’s rodeo takes place June 23-26, so we thought we’d share the story of how it all began.

By Bernie Hunhoff

No sport attracts more fun-loving folks in South Dakota than rodeo, and one of the granddaddies of them all, the Crystal Springs Ranch Rodeo, is among the best.

Clowns and trick ropers. Flag bearers and guitar players. Fans wearing 10-gallon hats and hawkers of pink cotton candy. Young cowboys wrapping last week’s bruises and old cowboys watching wistfully. Barrel-racing girls and wranglers herding stock.

That’s what we saw at Crystal Springs this summer — an Old West tradition that continues to capture the fancy of people everywhere.

Rodeo is a romantic reminder of the “rawhide and ride-hard” days of the Old West. Although nobody knows the identity of the dupe who first climbed aboard a Brahma bull, all the other rodeo competition grew out of routine chores on Western ranches. Cowhands balanced atop bucking broncs because they needed transportation. They roped and wrestled calves because it was their job.

Boys being boys, it was only a matter of time before they began to pit their skills against one another. Friendly competitions to see who could ride the ranch’s wildest critter were often accompanied by wagers and a smattering of onlookers.

Before long, the big ranches held rodeos as a uniquely Western festivity. Food, dancing and music were usually included. By the 1920s, the Rodeo Association of America was formed and today the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) rides herd on a professional sport that in 2012 paid almost $40 million in prize money on several circuits and tours.

PRCA was organized in 1945 as the Cowboy’s Turtle Association to protect the interests of cowboys and ensure fair prize money. That was the same year that a South Dakota rancher drained a duck pond in his hilly and rocky pasture near Clear Lake, put up a corn-cribbing fence, and held a rodeo on a Sunday afternoon.

“I’m just a cowboy who had a dream,” says E.W. Weisel, “And I made that dream come true.”

Weisel bought the Crystal Springs Ranch in 1936 and more than once he sat on horseback atop a hill that formed a circular valley and imagined what it might be like to hold a rodeo there. “I dreamed it,” he said.”I dreamed it was all there, with horses and cattle and the people all laughing and having a good time.”

Hundreds of people showed up on that first Sunday, so he tore down the corn cribbing and put up a permanent corral. A Clear Lake banker gave him a loan and he put on a bigger show in 1946. By 1947, he had lights in the natural arena.

But he never built bleacher seats, and for good reason. The surrounding hillside makes a natural outdoor amphitheater. Every clump of grass provides a great view of the action below.

A promoter from the old school, Weisel advertised it as “America’s Most Natural Rodeo Bowl.” He never apologized for the bumpy gravel and dirt roads that still lead to the site. Instead, he turned it to an advantage, calling it “Where the Pavement Ends and the West Begins.”

For 25 years, Weisel and his wife, Josephine, ran the rodeo along with the help of their daughter, Cleo, and veteran ranch hands like Two Gun Kelly and Little Joe the Wrangler.

“Everybody said I was crazy when we started,” recalls Weisel, who at age 90 has never missed a performance. At the last event, he sat high on the hill in a lawn chair, joshing with friends and watching each bronc bolt from the chutes.

He laughs at the doubters who thought he’d better stick to raising Herefords and horses. “It worked. We ran it 25 years and never went in the red once.” Not one to fiddle with balance sheets, Weisel can look over the hillside during the performance and determine success or failure. “See that over there,” he says, “there’s too much grass showing over there. There’s not enough people. That should be solid people.”

The Weisels entertained as many as 20,000 fans during the three-day competition in their best years. However, when they sold the ranch and rodeo operation and retired it slipped in attendance. There have been four owners since him, but now the rodeo is back in local control.

Realizing the importance of the event to the town, a group of 10 Clear Lake businessmen and ranchers assumed responsibility for the event four years ago and it is coming back faster than a coughing calf on penicillin.

“The guy that bought the ranch several years ago was no longer interested in running the rodeo,” explains newspaper publisher Gary Dejong, one of the 10. “It has been such a fine tradition for the community that we really hated to see it stop, so a group of us got together to keep it going.”

Dejong says more than 5,000 people attend the three-day rodeo in an average year, coming from as far away as Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Although the rodeo grounds are a few miles out of town, the community buzzes with activity during rodeo week, culminating with a gala parade through main street on Saturday.

The newspaperman says there’s more to putting on a rodeo than most people think. Though the duck pond has already been drained, it’s a big job to attend to the details of publicity, grounds keeping, ticket sales and concessions. The biggest challenge — and the task at which E.W. Weisel excelled — is putting together an entertaining show.

The community of Clear Lake has gotten involved. The weekend now features a carnival, car show and parade down Main Street on Saturday afternoon. Bullfighters, clowns, guitar-pickers, a mellow-voiced announcer, and hillsides full of people complete the cast.

A cowboy’s dream lives on.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 1988 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Coteau Rodeo

By Christian Begeman

In northeast South Dakota there is a great flatiron-shaped plateau of land that the early French trappers and explorers named the”Coteau des Prairies.” This is roughly translated as prairie hills or prairie slopes. The Coteau Hills, as they are more commonly called nowadays, are approximately 200 miles in length and 100 miles in width and start in North Dakota and end in Minnesota. The Big Sioux River provides drainage for the plateau, sort of. These hills are made up of ancient glacier rubble and rock so there are many prairie potholes as well as large glacial lakes on the topside.

The places where the slopes meet the flat prairie below provide wooded valleys of exquisite beauty as well as great vistas for the eyes. A couple of my favorite areas include driving Highway 20 through the Crandall-Crocker Hills on the west side. This is the route my family would take to see relatives living in southwestern Minnesota when I was a kid. My other favorite place is the Sica Hollow area on the east side of the plateau. Here the change in elevation between landforms seems to be the most abrupt and also the most beautiful. I’ve found pasque flowers in abundance in the early spring among the rocky hilltops in Grant County and have also seen wonderfully colored cottonwood creek bottoms during autumn from the streams running down the plateau into the prairie below.

Such a large landmark is tough to fit into just one column, so I decided to try a little something different this time around. A couple years ago, a friend and co-worker of mine from Clear Lake finally talked me into attending his beloved Crystal Springs Rodeo. I’m glad he did. This event is a pilgrimage every summer for him and his family and now I understand why.

Crystal Springs Rodeo bills itself as being the only rodeo to take place in a natural rodeo bowl. It is located right in the middle of the Coteau Hills of Deuel County as well. Basically an old prairie pothole duck pond has been transformed into a rodeo arena and has since become one of the most unique rodeo experiences you will find in the state. What better place than here to get a photographic taste of the Coteau Hills?

There are no bleachers at this rodeo. Locals and folks from Minnesota, North Dakota and beyond bring tarps, blankets and an occasional lawn chair and sit on the hillsides that surround the rodeo bowl. There isn’t a bad seat to be had. Every year I go, I am amazed at the amount of people gathered. All this provides quite a fun time for a guy with a camera. Capturing a little bit of Americana South Dakota style is both fun and challenging at the same time. If you’ve ever tried shooting bucking broncs and the cowboys that ride them then you know what I mean. That said, rodeos are more than just bull riding and calf roping. I found that it is a great opportunity to take candid shots of friends and family as well as the kiddos.

Willie Nelson sang about not letting your babies grow up to be cowboys, but if you really want to take that advice, I’d not take those babies to this rodeo. It’s pretty hard to watch those tough cowpokes and not start humming another old Willie song that goes something like,”My heroes have always been cowboys, and they still are, it seems.”

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing our prettiest spots around the state. Follow Begeman on his blog. To view Christian’s columns featuring other unique spots in South Dakota’s landscape, visit his landmarks page.


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The Hidewood

Deuel County’s Hidden Woods

By Bernie Hunhoff

Keith Diekman and his lab Trixie explore the oak forest where Dakota Indians hid after the Minnesota uprising.

The Hidewood Valley of Deuel County derived its name from Dakota Indians who called it the Hidden Woods.

In the summer of 1862, some of the Indians involved in bloody conflicts with white settlers in Minnesota fled across the border and hid for a time in the valley.

Some of the same slow-growing oaks that sheltered the Dakota still stand, along with their offspring, and it would still be possible to lose oneself in the thick growth that populates some of the 30-mile stretch of hills.

Deuel County lies on the east slope of the Coteau des Prairies. The highest point in the region is on a farm field east of Castlewood that overlooks the Minnesota River valley. Indians marked the site with rocks and used it to spot water. Today it is marked with a tin government sign.

Hidden among the occasional woods and grassy hills is other modern evidence of century-old stories that speak to the difficulties of life here for both man and beast.

The forest once grew so thick “you needed headlights to drive through in the daytime.” — Hidewood old-timer

Many of the stories are buried by time and grass, but some old-timers know the Hidewood and its secrets. Floyd and Gladys Haug farmed in the Hidewood country during their younger years.

Floyd grew up on a farm in the valley. When we visited him in 1999, he told us wolves still howled at night when he was a child. Not far from the old Haug family farm, buffalo rings can still be found in a pasture. The circular indentations were formed perhaps 150 years ago or more when wolves threatened buffalo herds.

“The cows would form a circle and put their calves in the center,” Floyd said. “Then as the wolves came closer, the cows would circle around and around, protecting their calves.”

The rings always turn green before the rest of the prairie in springtime, probably because the cows left manure in their excitement, and their indented path collects moisture which speeds the grass.

Not far from the buffalo rings — but on the opposite side of Interstate 29, which cuts through the Hidewood — two nearly forgotten graves lie high on a pasture hill.

Floyd discovered the graves when he rented the land in the 1950s. “I was fixing the fence on May 10 and I saw two perfect rectangles of blue flag flowers.”

Floyd Haug pulls grass away from the blue flag flowers that still mark the graves of a homesteader’s wife and daughter. The flowers had bloomed several weeks before our arrival.

He suspected that the flowers were planted to mark a grave site and when he visited the landowner, Ed Koppman, his hunch was confirmed.

From research done by the Haugs and the late Clear Lake farmer-historian Henry Wells, it seems the land was homesteaded by a Norwegian settler named Per Gustav Erikson and his wife, Ida Mary. Little else is known about the Eriksons.

Wells did discover some additional details from the register of deeds in Deuel County and other historical records. “It is a story that has no beginning and no end,” he told us. The Eriksons came from Norway, stopping first in Wisconsin.

Wells figured they came by train to Gary and probably used their savings to buy a horse and wagon to drive to their new home in Section Eight of Hidewood Township. They settled on a hill overlooking a valley. “It probably looked to them like a peninsula in their native Norway.”

In the early l880s they had a baby daughter. But during the harsh winter of 1885-86, a diphtheria outbreak struck the territory and both Ida Mary and the daughter died. Because the snow was so deep and the ground so frozen, their bodies were placed in two wooden boxes built by a neighbor.

The grieving young settler kept the rough-hewn coffins in a shed until spring, when he dug two graves just to the south of his house and buried them above the Hidewood Valley. He probably had no money for a permanent marker, but he planted blue flag flowers ≠– a cousin to the iris — in the overturned soil.

That same year, he sold his claim for $300 to Peter Dahl. Wells said nothing else is known for certain. “Did he go a few miles or did he follow the trail left by others to Oregon? I see him as a man with lowered head passing into the midst of time, ever searching for a new life.”

Blue flags bloom for a brief time in early May, and when Floyd Haug happened upon them 60 years after they were planted he was intrigued by the fact that they had survived the elements.

“They survived the Dirty Thirties when grass wouldn’t even grow,” he marveled.”They survived the badgers and the gophers and the cows that have grazed on those hills.”

The Hidewood forest ends abruptly at the edge of the flat prairie.

Now, almost 130 years later, the flowers still mark the simple grave site. Prairie grasses have infiltrated the flowers, but the blue flags still grow thick and in the obvious rectangular shape of a grave. They have outlasted many pioneer grave markers.

Only a few people now know where the Erikson graves can be found. But other gravesites in the Hidewood are even more forgotten. Some belong to Indians, and others to early settlers.

Floyd said the landscape didn’t change dramatically in his lifetime — and he knew this country as well as anyone. He was born here in 1918, and passed away in nearby Castlewood in 2010. As a youngster, he earned 50–75 cents a day for carrying the mail by horseback and sleigh in winter to neighboring farms.

Many farmsteads were once situated in the Hidewood Valley. It offered good grass, water and protection from the wind. Farms have been thinned out by weather and economics.

But some remain. One of the surviving farm families is the Diekmans, who came in 1946. Keith Diekman’s land includes some of the oak forest where Sioux Indians took refuge during the 1862 uprising.

A visit to the forest is all the research needed to understand why they came. It is a lush oasis on a nearly treeless prairie, rich with tall grass, shade, wildlife and water.

“In a winter storm, you can go down there and it will be as nice and pleasant as can be,” says Diekman. “It is a good place to winter cattle.”

Foliage from burr oak, a rarity on the Coteau des Prairies, but a dominant tree in the Hidewood forest.

Along with old burr oak trees, the forest is dense with native grasses, chokecherry bushes and ash. Diekman said areas of the forest once grew so thick that old-timers said, “you needed headlights to drive through in the daytime.”

That was the density desired by the Dakota Indians. According to Kenneth Garley’s book, The Sioux Uprising of 1862, the blood began to flow after a trivial incident in which one Indian called another a coward because he had cautioned his friends to not steal a white family’s eggs.

One misstep led to another, and before long the Indians entered a farmyard and shot five members of two families. Eventually, the conflict spread dramatically and over 450 settlers and soldiers were killed. Thirty-eight Indians were executed for their crimes.

Little is known of the party of Indians that hid out in the valley, but their presence gave the range of hills its name and a colorful history still talked about today.

Robert Amerson, who grew up on a Hidewood valley farm in the 1930s, brought more attention to the hills recently when he published childhood memoirs called From the Hidewood. His grandfather came to Deuel County as a homesteader in 1876.

In the book, Amerson refers to the Hidewood as “an in-between country” that was too rough for quality farming and too far east for customary ranching.

He said the Hidewood farmers felt a remoteness, even from their nearest neighbors who often tilled better land and lived closer to the town and cities. But he says the families were good and honest folk.

“The Hidewood community taught me that you can trust people and expect them to help you. Out in the country, you can still assume your neighbor — or even a stranger — is a decent person, at least until proved otherwise.”

The Amersons are now gone from the valley, along with most of their neighbors. Over 9,000 people lived in Deuel County in the 1920’s but the number has been dropping ever since.

Still, improvements can be seen in the rural infrastructure. For example, a good gravel road winds its way past the Diekman farm, past abandoned barns and the gurgling Hidewood Creek that meanders through the valley. The creek eventually empties into the Big Sioux near Estelline, crossing into the southeast corner of Hamlin County.

Even though the road was constructed in 1955, it is still called The New Road by locals. The name is one more reminder of how life has a way of staying the same in the Hidewood.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 1999 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Buffalo Ridge Resort

Gary’s School for the Blind is now a top-notch resort

By Paul Higbee

Historic buildings and the small-town setting give Buffalo Ridge a unique ambiance. The property is also attracting new business enterprises.

Long ago American Indians carried rocks to a designated spot on a hillside, west of present-day Gary. No one knows which native people they were, nor in which century they lived. With the rocks they created a great replica of an arrow. Does their artwork mark a burial ground, or did it perhaps point to a gulch flush with game? Roger Baer, active in the Gary Historical Association, has done some investigation and thinks the arrow could be a kind of compass indicating the region’s prevailing winds — northwest to southeast, and southeast to northwest.

If so, the arrow has proven strangely symbolic in the 21st century. Wind is a powerful force in Gary today, having delivered employment at renewable energy companies here: Broadwind Energy, Dakota Wind, Airstream Renewables. Wind industry profits even saved the original South Dakota School for the Blind campus in Gary. Thanks to Joe Kolbach, owner of Dakota Wind, the campus was transformed in 2009 to become the Buffalo Ridge Resort and Business Center.

Satisfied guests like the quiet setting, an atmosphere that feels like a bed and breakfast, a large patio set up for barbeques, and 50 pretty acres. Kolbach brought back the campus lake, which is actually a damming of Lac Qui Parle Creek — the only eastern South Dakota stream rapid and cold enough to support trout. Guests say they can sense history in the stately buildings, especially in the web of tunnels that visually impaired students once walked daily between buildings.

In the 1870s, when only a handful of people lived on this glacial ridge that runs along the South Dakota and Minnesota border, the ridge offered good soils, stands of burr oak and other timber, and springs feeding clear, rapid creeks. Their setting, early residents believed, was perfect as a welcoming gateway to Dakota Territory. They sprang into action and built a town as the Winona-St. Peter railroad extended its rails west into the territory in 1872. First the fledgling community went by the name Headquarters because it was where the railroad based its construction operation, or by State Line because it sat right on the border. Minnesota was the only state in the equation then, because South Dakota statehood wouldn’t be achieved for nearly two more decades. The name Gary stuck after postal agent H.B. Gary delivered the first U.S. mail by train in autumn, 1872. By 1873 regularly scheduled trains were carrying passengers and freight.

By 1889, the year of statehood, some 650 people called Gary home. Local historian Eldeen Baer says brick making was an emerging industry then, as was a form of tourism. Hunters rode the rails into Gary for waterfowl and prairie chickens prior to the pheasant’s introduction to South Dakota.

In 1894 Doane Robinson, future state historian, became publisher of the newspaper, the Gary Interstate. As state historian in the 1920s he would be credited for first proposing a mountain sculpture in the Black Hills. In the 1890s, on the opposite end of the state from where the Rushmore carvings would take form, Robinson proposed a much different scheme. After Gary lost county seat status to Clear Lake in 1895, Robinson began advocating for the state to commit to a South Dakota School for the Blind, to be built on former county courthouse property a couple blocks north of Gary’s business district. As time would prove, Robinson possessed a knack for pushing big projects toward fruition. Ground was broken for the school’s construction in 1899 and students were on campus in 1900. Over the next 25 years, in addition to the original administration/classroom building, girls’ and boys’ dorms were built, along with a power plant connected to a laundry. Also vital to the school’s operation were a barn and other agricultural outbuildings, recalls Baer, who worked in the school’s kitchen in the 1940s. On-site crops, an apple orchard, cows, pigs, and chickens made for healthy, home-grown meals.

George Selken of Sioux Falls was among the students who lived at the school in the 1940s and’50s, when enrollment averaged 40 or so.”I was there nine months a year for 12 years,” he says.”The way they’ve brought it back is fabulous. It blows my mind, but of course a lot of the students aren’t alive to ever visit it.”

That’s because the school moved its services from Gary to Aberdeen nearly half a century ago, in 1961. Selken says he can count most of his living schoolmates on his fingers. One is Dorothy Fiala, class of 1953, now residing in Browns Valley, Minn. She attended the resort’s grand opening, came back for a barbeque in August, then returned in September with her husband, five adult children, and three grandchildren. It was important, she thought, for her children to fully understand her years at Gary.

Fiala lost her sight at age 11 after contracting both polio and the measles. Just months later she left the family farm near Sisseton for a new world at Gary.”Big changes, of course,” she remembers.”Living in a dorm, the rules of the school, an exact time to be up every morning. Everything was regimented and I came to like that. The structure was a big help in getting my life together.”

She recalls the regimentation in detail: up in the morning at 6:30, lined up for breakfast at 6:50, standing next to her chair in the dining hall at 6:57, taking her seat at 7. Assembly began at 8, followed by classes at 8:30. Girls took walks around the block clockwise, boys counterclockwise. Younger children were in bed at 8 and older ones at 10.

Not that there weren’t whispered conversations after lights out. As would be expected, students found any number of ways to occasionally bend or break rules. Some had favorite hiding places near the school where they’d go to smoke. At least once a group of boys climbed the Gary water tower. As for the tunnels, Fiala laughs,”Thank goodness those walls can’t talk.”

After the school relocated, part of the campus served as a privately owned retirement center for several years. But the buildings were mostly abandoned after 1980. Once in a while, kids broke in to look around, as did raccoons and squirrels. Human visitors started a campfire in the old school auditorium and charred the floor. The outdoors had also changed dramatically after Lake Elsie was filled in, following a drowning soon after the school closed.

So, on a given day, the campus could see vacationers checked into some of the resort’s 19 guest rooms, along with students training across the yard (or through the tunnels) at the administration/classroom building. Meanwhile a meeting could be underway in the former school auditorium, now called the ballroom, and an outdoor wedding could be happening alongside Lake Elsie.

EDITOR’S NOTE ñ This story is revised from the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.