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What About Doc?

By Paul Higbee

Doc Middleton was a Nebraska outlaw who gravitated northward to run saloons in southwestern South Dakota. His exploits included running in the 1893 Chadron to Chicago horse race, where he was pictured at the finish line.

TO BE CLEAR, Doc Middleton never earned a doctorate. Sometimes it seems that’s the only thing we know for certain about the outlaw.

Middleton spent considerable time in western South Dakota, first arriving nearly 150 years ago and variously described as horse thief, cattle drover, saloon keeper, murderer, sheriff and wannabe showman. For what it’s worth, he possessed one of the Old West’s best beards. In early photos, his facial adornment — maybe a foot long — could have made him the front man in ZZ Top. After it grayed, Middleton trimmed it; he then bore a resemblance to Buffalo Bill Cody.

In the Black Hills, a place long fascinated by notorious men like Wild Bill Hickok, Lame Johnny, Fly Speck Billy and even George Armstrong Custer, it seems as if Doc Middleton has fallen through the cracks. Not that he’s been completely forgotten. Look up Ardmore, South Dakota, on Wikipedia and you’ll see two people noted as playing roles in local history: President Calvin Coolidge, who visited in 1927, and Doc Middleton,”a former resident who was an infamous outlaw.”

What made Middleton an outlaw? It’s hard to top murder. He was indicted on that charge after shooting an Army private in 1877 during a dance hall brawl in Sidney, Nebraska. The charge never went to trial, says Rapid City writer Scott Lockwood, whose new book Alias: Doc Middleton, attempts to bring the somewhat mysterious Middleton back into the public consciousness. Horse-stealing did put him behind bars on several occasions.

Middleton’s thieving began at age 14 in his native Texas. One theory about his nickname is that he developed skills for”doctoring” horse brands. Or it could have stemmed from a sloppy signature with the initials for David and Charles scribbled together and mistaken for Doc. David and Charles, by the way, were not his actual first and middle names. He stole them. And Middleton, at birth, was a middle name and not his surname. His last name was Riley. Records show Doc was born in the Texas Hill Country, though he sometimes claimed Mississippi as his birthplace.

Rapid City author Scott Lockwood was introduced to Doc Middleton through his fascination with the town of Ardmore. Lockwood’s new biography traces the outlaw’s life as well as his connection to the Fall River County ghost town.

Doc’s life was so full of contradictions and outright lies that writing a book-length biography would challenge any author. But Lockwood embraced the historical detective work. As he was researching, Lockwood was asked if he liked Middleton. No, Lockwood replied. He can’t condone murder and won’t minimize it. He suspects the Sidney incident wasn’t the only time someone died due to Middleton’s violence. On the other hand, there were certainly not dozens of killings, as some exaggerated newspaper stories of the era claimed.

“For a while I didn’t really understand how bad horse stealing was in the 1800s,” Lockwood says. It deprived a person of transportation, perhaps their livelihood, and sometimes their closest companion. Some of Middleton’s early thefts may have been particularly nasty, taking animals from Oklahoma’s Indian Territory because he believed authorities wouldn’t pursue or prosecute. It’s possible he followed the same line of thinking on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in Dakota.

Lockwood was born in Huron and graduated from Custer County High School. He wasn’t particularly curious about history classes in school but, he says,”I was always interested in the stories about the ‘old days’ my elderly relatives and neighbors told me.” He worked for railroads throughout the country’s midsection, making and supervising track repairs, and eventually managing sections of Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s maintenance from Montana to Texas, and from Alabama to Illinois. When Lockwood retired, he came home to South Dakota and its”rhubarb and lilacs.”

Ardmore interested him in ways similar to the stories his older relatives and neighbors had recounted decades earlier. Virtually a ghost town now on the South Dakota-Nebraska line, south of the Black Hills, Ardmore similarly attracted Middleton in 1900. He bought town lots, served as sheriff for a while and owned a saloon. He may have failed in the liquor business in another town, Lockwood thinks, but by the time he arrived in Ardmore he had learned not to drink his profits.

Lockwood first learned of Middleton by reading the Wikipedia post linking President Coolidge and the horse thief. “I guess I was intrigued with him because he chose to make tiny Ardmore his home,” Lockwood says. And”he was able to steal hundreds of horses and escape vigilante justice.” Vigilantes operated outside the law, often lynching horse thieves and cattle rustlers in the Old West, including Middleton’s Nebraska partner-in-crime, Kid Wade. Middleton may have considered vigilantism more criminal than anything he perpetuated.

“He was such a restless man,” Lockwood says.”He liked to see his name in the newspapers and became a folk hero to many. He was great at promoting things he believed in.”

This is the earliest known photograph of James Middleton Riley, later known as Doc Middleton, taken around 1871 when he was 20.

Middleton obviously believed in Ardmore. But what he really wanted to promote was his own Wild West Show. There are stories claiming he performed briefly in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but Lockwood thinks Buffalo Bill Cody didn’t care for Doc Middleton. In Middleton’s mind, his own show, actually incorporated in 1904 in Rapid City, would be no less an extravaganza than Buffalo Bill’s. But it never happened. If it had, Middleton could have woven in plenty of his own real-life adventures: rounding up wild cattle roaming Texas after the Civil War, then becoming one of America’s original cowboys who drove herds north for public domain grass and less bovine disease. He rode through Kansas and Nebraska (the state that’s done the most to document Middleton’s outlaw history) and in 1877 he made it to the Black Hills, according to Lockwood. Middleton spent time in early Custer and Deadwood and was particular about whom he claimed as a friend or associate. Calamity Jane?”She ain’t my kind of people,” he reportedly said.

There’s an adventure the public would no doubt have demanded be recreated in abbreviated form as part of a Doc Middleton Wild West Show. That was a thousand-mile horse race from western Nebraska to Chicago in 1893. A Chadron, Nebraska, man promoted the idea as a hoax in an era of elaborate hoaxes nationally — ones that newspapers often reported, winning national attention for a community. In part, the news of a super-sized horse race spread because the idea appalled humane societies, and they took action to stop it. Middleton announced he would compete, and the Deadwood Pioneer Times entered into jokey reporting by remarking he should be ineligible because he would surely end up stealing other racers’ mounts.

Then remarkably, driven by the publicity, the race began to be taken seriously. In fact, humane organizations inadvertently boosted the competition when they said they would supply representatives to monitor animal health along the route. Middleton did, indeed, ride the distance on a gelding called Jim Fisk. Some observers predicted a win for Middleton. Strangely, Lockwood says (or maybe not so strangely when you consider the strong-willed contestants), the race didn’t begin until 6:15 one evening because of an argument over eligibility. The date was June 13, 1893. John Berry, riding a horse from Sturgis called Poison, first reached Buffalo Bill’s Wild West grounds near the Chicago World’s Fair on June 27. Berry wasn’t declared the winner, though, because in Chicago the eligibility issue flared again, and Berry had played a role in selecting the route, giving him an unfair advantage. Middleton finished about 27 hours behind Berry. Of eight riders who completed the long course, Middleton came in sixth.

Newspaper accounts of Middleton’s participation in the thousand-mile competition likely surprised some people. Reports of his death had circulated numerous times over the years, usually owing to gunshot wounds but once due to smallpox in Ardmore. It was as if the press was certain that Middleton would meet death at an early age and was ever ready to pounce on the news. While Middleton liked newspaper stories, even those maudlin and false reports, he had no use for anyone proposing a book about his life. He wanted that writing assignment reserved for himself, although he never got around to it.

“He even threatened to come after anyone attempting to write a book,” Lockwood says.

The Middleton family in 1899 included (from left) Doc; children Joseph William, Ruth Irene and David Wesley; and his wife, Irene.

Middleton married three times. In 1911 his third wife, Irene, died at Hot Springs after gallbladder surgery. Funeral services were conducted in Ardmore and then her body was interred about 30 miles south in Crawford, Nebraska. Certainly that’s where Middleton believed he would someday be buried, in prime horse country. Crawford sits a short canter from Fort Robinson, a major base of operations for the U.S. Cavalry during Middleton’s time.

But Middleton never made it to Crawford. He was occasionally involved in unauthorized alcohol sales and that landed him in jail in Wyoming in December of 1913. He died on December 27 at age 62 from a bacterial infection complicated by pneumonia. A burial plot at Douglas, Wyoming, was supposed to be temporary, but it’s where Middleton lies 112 years later. In 1968 a group of Nebraskans petitioned to move the body but didn’t gather many signatures. Lockwood, during his railroad career before he ever heard of Doc Middleton, lived in Douglas just blocks from the gravesite.

Knowing the geography of Middleton’s life was a plus for Lockwood in writing this book. So was newspapers.com, which allowed for electronic access to papers that Middleton knew and admired.”Sometimes I’d be so excited about what I found that I couldn’t stop at dinner time,” Lockwood says.”Other days I’d walk away and not care if I ever looked again.”

Such mixed feelings are to be expected about a man as conflicted as Middleton. Readers who love Western lore and the Black Hills — and are eager to rediscover a man nearly lost to history — will be glad he stuck with it.

Editor’s Note: Contact Scott Lockwood at b735198@gmail.com to purchase a book or to schedule an author talk. This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Our Goat Renaissance

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Humans and goats share a deep bond, one that’s rich with fun and laughter. Photo by Mark Smither

When I was growing up in eastern Yankton County, we only knew one person who raised goats — an eccentric bachelor named Ernie Stortvedt, who lived across the road from my grandparents and was famous for his lackadaisical approach to cleanliness. Even in our fun-loving neighborhood, Ernie didn’t set an example anyone was apt to emulate. Goats and Ernie remained linked in my mind for decades.

That changed five years ago, when my niece blew her birthday money on a goat. My family quickly learned that goats are kind of like potato chips — nobody has just one. Soon, my brother and sister-in-law started going to livestock sales in search of goat bargains. Friends offer them goats. Bucks and does regularly escape their sex-segregated pastures and five months later, baby goats arrive. It’s not unusual to find a diapered kid or two in their house, confined in a playpen as they await their next bottle feeding. Now my family describes themselves as goat hoarders. They even have a sweet brown Boer named Honey earmarked for my daughter to work with when she starts 4-H.

Goats will probably never supplant cattle in South Dakota, but ownership is rising. According to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, South Dakota’s goat population consisted of 17,868 animals in 2017, an increase of about 7,000 over the previous 10 years. That number will undoubtedly be higher when the next goat census is released in 2022. I asked Katie Freng Doty, Yankton County 4-H’s Youth Development Assistant, if she’d noticed the change. Doty, who raises 30 Boer goats with her husband, Tyler, and daughter, Avery, on their farm north of Mission Hill, said that she and her sister were among the first to show meat goats in our area in 2011.”In my younger years of 4-H I don’t recall there being a Market Meat Goat show at the state fair,” Doty says.”It is now just as big of a show as any of the other species.”

I turned to a few other goat-loving South Dakotans to find out what makes the animals so popular. Most people agreed that goats are livestock on a human scale, which makes sense — archeological evidence indicates that humans first tamed the goat around 10,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest species to become domesticated. Goats also require less space, feed and money than other, larger creatures. But the animals are also intelligent and full of personality, so it’s easy for human and goat to create a deep bond, one that’s often full of laughter. Doty remembers her sister’s first goat, a runt named Bambi.”Any time we would take our goats for walks, her goat would only make it so far and he would just flop over. My sister, who was only 9 at the time, would pick him up and carry him home,” she says.”He caught on to that pretty quick. It didn’t take long and we would only make it a couple steps before he was done walking.”

Four-Legged Hospitality

Visitors of all ages enjoy getting to know the livestock at Pleasant Valley Farm and Cabins of Custer. Photo by Ardent Photography.

In a quiet valley in the southern Black Hills, a guard llama named Batman watches over his herd of goats with a sharp eye and deadly feet, ever on the lookout for mountain lions, coyotes and other threats.”He is not a pet,” says Susan Barnes of Pleasant Valley Farm and Cabins.”We’ve seen him kill coyotes. He stomped them to death.”

Susan worked at the University of Wyoming for decades, while her husband, Tom, was an environmental engineer. But when they retired in 2004, they knew they wanted to return to the 120-acre farm near Custer that Susan’s family had called home for generations. They divided the land into 17 pastures, leaving 40 acres for growing winter feed, and began to raise Boer show goats, but their interests quickly morphed into creating a herd of crossbred Boer, Spanish and Savannah goats for meat purposes. In 2019, the couple opened three vacation cabins and started giving farm tours to Black Hills visitors curious about the goats, Batman, and the rest of the menagerie: two herd dogs, Lily and Monte, a flock of free-range chickens and a few pigs.”A lot of these people are from Chicago and places like that and have never really seen animals,” Susan says. And while the guests may giggle at a goat’s antics and get a kick out of feeding the livestock, Susan makes it clear that farm life is not all fun and games.”You have to be here all the time. It’s dirty. It’s heavy. It can be sad if you have a goat that gets hurt. This kind of work isn’t for everybody.”

Tom, who passed away in August 2020, was a driving force in the promotion of goats as livestock and as food animals in South Dakota — not always an easy task in cattle country. He served as vice president of the South Dakota Specialty Producers for two years, teamed with area chefs to introduce goat meat, also known as chevon, to local palates and was willing to talk goats any time he had a willing listener.”Tom was a good promoter. He really liked people and loved his goats,” Susan says.”He set a pretty good standard for me to keep up. Tom was crazy to get people to buy goats.”

Luckily, Susan has ample support from their two children, who have been heavily involved in business decisions from the beginning. Daughter Molly Schultz and her husband Clayton manage the farm’s social media, Airbnb listing and website, PleasantValleyFarmandCabins.com. Son Tony and his wife Heather live in Alaska, but they helped Tom build the cabins and come home to handle maintenance jobs.”It’s a real family deal,” Susan says.

Susan describes goat meat as healthy, lean and mild.”It’s just kind of unique and it’s not something that overpowers you. I use goat hamburger for everything that I would use regular hamburger for,” she says. The farm supplies meat to A&D Jamaican Restaurant in Rapid City, Wild Spruce Market, Skogen Kitchen and Black Hills Burger & Bun of Custer, which sometimes serves a goatburger special. But their best customers are a group of Pakistani doctors at Monument Health, who use the meat in dishes from their homeland.

Having a local market for meat ensures that the Barnes’ goats are all more or less friendly — a bad attitude is a death sentence at Pleasant Valley Farm.”If you’re mean, you turn into goatburger,” Susan says.

***

New Mexico-Style Green Chili

by Suzanne Stemme of The Goat Rancher

1 pound goat meat, cubed

1 sweet onion, chopped

1 tablespoon oil

1 can black beans

1 can cream-style corn

1/2 cup Hatch green chiles

2 tablespoons ground cumin

1 tablespoon chili powder

SautÈ goat and chopped onion in oil until onion is soft (about 5 to 7 minutes). Add black beans, corn, green chiles and spices. Cover pan and simmer on low heat for 1 1/2 hours, stirring frequently. Top with grated cheese and serve with tortilla chips or corn bread.

Soap Making in Smithwick

Connie Koski snuggles with Zoey, a small-eared Alpine-LaMancha cross from the High Prairie Dairy Goats herd near Smithwick.

Anita Mason and Connie Koski, Smithwick’s goat herding soap makers, came to South Dakota for the climate. Mason ran a raw milk cow share program and kept Alpine goats in her native Virginia for decades before she was diagnosed with lupus. Southern humidity exacerbated the inflammatory disease, so the pair moved someplace more arid.”We’re both getting older and we said, ëIf we’re going to do this farming thing, we need to be able to walk,'” Mason says. In 2019, Koski took a job teaching social science at Oglala Lakota College. The two settled in Fall River County and started High Prairie Dairy Goats and the Grubby Goat Soap Company.

Their South Dakota herd primarily consists of LaManchas, a breed with a sweet disposition, high-butterfat milk and nubby, barely-there”gopher ears.””Everybody always asks about the LaManchas: ëWhat happened to their ears?’ They think it’s like docking tails on dogs. You can make lots of jokes,” Koski says. There’s also a rescue Toggenburg who suffered ear loss due to frostbite, but the queen of the herd is a sassy Alpine doe named Lucy.”Lucy’s the boss around here. She’s the only goat with ears,” Koski says.

There are several ways to make soap, but the basic process involves milk, fat and lye, which creates a chemical reaction called saponification. Goggles and heavy-duty gloves are worn to avoid lye burns.”It’s pretty much a cross between a chemistry experiment and a math venture,” Mason says.”Everything has to work out in relation to how much lye you use or you’ll melt your house.” She is not exaggerating — she and her father once tried to wing their way through a batch of soap, with disastrous results.”It ate through an aluminum stockpot we were using, ate through the linoleum, burned through the floor and burned through a rug,” she says.

Mason and Koski make a cold-process soap. First, frozen milk is mixed with lye in an ice-cold bowl. Then coconut oil, safflower oil, shea butter or other fats are gently heated to about 110 to 125 degrees. The milk/lye mixture is slowly combined with the warm oil until it becomes thick. The mixture is then poured into bread loaf pans, allowed to rest for 48 hours, then sliced, wrapped and placed on a shelf. The soap blocks cure for five weeks, which allows excess water to evaporate and eliminates any residual harshness from the lye.

Some soap makers would stop there, but Mason and Koski take an additional step called remilling, in which the blocks of soap are melted in the microwave, along with a small amount of additional milk, fragrance and other additives as desired. The soap is then repoured into molds and allowed to dry for about 24 hours. The remilling creates a soft, smooth soap that is gentle enough for Mason’s sensitive skin.”I like the softer bar,” she says.”If I’m comfortable, then everybody else should be comfortable.”

The pandemic halted craft shows, so goat’s milk soap production has slowed accordingly. Instead, the pair focuses on raising milk-fed pork.”It really makes a difference in the meat. It’s a super moist pork,” Mason says.”It tends to be very flavorful, like somebody slow-cooked it for two days.”

Once the pandemic ends, Koski hopes to introduce South Dakotans to their docile LaManchas.”Our plan was to bring some of these awesome East Coast lines out this way. It’s hard to go meet the kids at 4-H because COVID put the kibosh on that. Maybe we aren’t super awesome yet, but we’d really like to start showing,” she says. Mason wants to educate people about the value of dairy goats as part of a self-sustaining lifestyle.”There’s just no better animal than a dairy goat for that. You can make your own dairy products. You can raise bum lambs and calves off of their milk. Most people could have one in their backyard.” But perhaps their greatest challenge is finding a trusted neighbor so they can take a vacation.”We’re trying to sucker somebody into looking after the goats so we can get away for a while. It’s not working out very well for us. As soon as we say ëdairy goats’ they run,” Mason says.

Raised by Goats in Groton

Tessa Erdmann of Groton had learned patience and adaptability through her work in the show ring. Photo by Jacee J Photography.

After his family sold off their herd of registered Angus cattle, third-generation farmer Darrin Erdmann of Groton vowed to stick to corn and soybeans. Then his daughter, Tessa, joined 4-H. Erdmann bought her three goats, two does and a wether, and it all went downhill from there.”You can’t keep a waterer open for just three, so I got about 15 more. Then you can’t pay for the water with just 15 so I got about 20 more. Then we bought some more. At one point we had about 150,” Darrin says.”A project like this is hard to run as a business. It turns into a hobby, so you’re not really watching your balance sheet on it.”

The Erdmann family, which includes wife Julie and son Jarrett, raises predominantly Boer-based show goats, supplying animals to 4-H kids and to the local population of Karen and Somali immigrants. Darrin also owns Texkota Panel and Gate, distributing durable American-made steel pens to livestock producers.

Darrin remembers the public’s puzzlement when his daughter first showed goats at the South Dakota State Fair.”These old farmers would walk through and they were just amazed. ëWhy do we have goats here? This is South Dakota.'” But as a member of the state’s 4-H meat goat committee, Darrin has seen firsthand the goat explosion, which he credits in part to the bond that children develop with their animals.”Every one of them has almost a pet quality. Other livestock do not get that bond with a kid,” he says.

Tessa, a senior at Groton High School, has had the opportunity to bond with many goats since she first started showing in 2013 — some more successfully than others. Her first year, she wrangled a 100-pound hellion named Thunderbolt.”He had the worst personality. He was just absolutely wild. Holding that goat was never easy,” Tessa says. But she didn’t give up.”It drove me to try new things, different coolers, different feed, sit in their pen a little bit more. The next year, all the changes that I made paid off.”

That adaptability has served Tessa well, both when it comes to bonding with goats and when dealing with surprises in the show ring. One of her most harrowing experiences happened when her goat got diarrhea in front of a first-time judge in the middle of the 2018 Senior Showmanship competition.”I didn’t know what to do because obviously that’s not good looking for a show animal,” she says.”I wiped it off on my hand and wiped it on the side of my leg and kept going. That was probably the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done.” The judge never mentioned the mishap, and Tessa and her goat won the competition.

But whether Tessa won or lost, perhaps one of the greatest gifts Tessa has gotten from the goat world is friendship.”When I would go to these shows, all the kids there were just like me. They worked with their livestock day in and day out. They’ve become like a second family,” she says. Tessa is deciding whether to attend South Dakota State University or Oklahoma State University, but wherever she goes, she knows that friendly faces will make college feel like home.”4-H and FFA have given me the opportunity to branch out and meet so many different people,” she says.”My friends always joke if they meet a new person I probably know them first.”

Tessa gives 4-H a lot of credit in shaping her into the confident young woman she is today, but her father puts it more bluntly.”People always say, ëTessa’s such a good kid. Who raised her? It wasn’t you.’ It was the goats.”

From Finance to Fromage

Rapid City cheesemaker Spencer Crawford believes dairy goats are a good addition to a self-sufficient homestead.

Spencer Crawford went overseas to study finance and came home a goat farmer. After attending graduate school in Paris, he found himself drawn to socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneurship. During the course of his 10-year stay in France, he raised bees outside of Paris, dabbled in permaculture and was considering a move to West Africa to raise goats when a phone call from his mother changed everything.”My mom says, ëNo, no, no. I can visit you in Paris, but I don’t think I can make it to West Africa. Why don’t you come home? Why are you going to be a farmer in Africa? You can be a farmer in Pennington County,'” Crawford remembers.”Listen to Mom. Usually she’s right.”

Crawford returned to his native Rapid City three years ago, where he teaches French and Spanish at St. Thomas More Middle School and practices small-scale agriculture on his parents’ acreage north of town. His father, Tony, watches the farm during the day.”He helps out, but he and his friends are still scratching their heads. He never thought that his horse barn would be filled with a bunch of goats. I think the horses might be a little confused too,” Crawford says.

Some cowboys mock goats as”the poor man’s cow,” but Crawford appreciates the animal.”In terms of what they eat and what they produce, it’s just a lot more human scale,” he says.”You don’t need a ton of land, a ton of infrastructure. To milk the goats, you need a bucket with a lid, and the home kitchen is enough to have your family totally self-sufficient with milk and cheese and soap.”

With his herd of 10 Alpine dairy goats, plus chickens, honeybees and a number of cats, Crawford engages in permaculture, an interconnected style of farming in which all of the elements work together holistically.”Every plant that you plant, you can eat it or the goats can eat it,” he says.”No loafers. Everyone has a job.” One of the goats’ jobs is to provide rich milk, which Crawford uses to create tomme, an aged, washed-rind cheese.

The origins of cheesemaking are lost to time, but it is believed that the first cheeses were made when fresh milk was stored in pouches made from animal stomachs. Rennet, a mixture of enzymes found in the stomach’s lining, coagulated the milk and caused curds and whey to form. Crawford’s method is a bit more sophisticated. First, goat milk is heated in a sterilized pot. Next, bacteria is added to help the cheese develop flavor, followed by the curd-forming rennet. The curds are separated from the whey, placed in a mold or cheesecloth, weighted down and salted. This helps remove moisture from the cheese and encourages a crust to form.”It’s going to look a little spooky sometimes, but what’s inside is the good stuff,” Crawford says. His cheeses are left to age in a spare refrigerator in his basement. Cheese ages best in a humid environment at a temperature of about 50 degrees, so Crawford stores the cheeses in Tupperware containers with the lids cracked open and periodically washes each cheese with salt water. This helps kill bad bacteria or mold, develops the cheese’s protective crust and draws out additional moisture.

Unlike a commercial operation, there are many variables involved in Crawford’s cheese, so every wheel is a surprise.”The cheese is kind of a living, changing entity of its own,” he says.”You cut into a cheese that you’ve been saving for 10 months and then the wheel of cheese next to it that you made three days later and you think, ëWhat the heck? Why is this one so delicious?'”

Crawford would like to build a commercial kitchen, but due to government regulations, a health department-compliant cheesemaking facility is an expensive proposition. For now, he’s content to watch the comic interactions between his animals, share his best cheeses at potlucks and enjoy his after-school farm venture.”Some people go to the bar after work. I go milk some goats,” he says.

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.

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Wild Horses in Winter

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: The Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary is no longer open to visitors. This story is revised from the January/February 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

The mustangs of Fall River County wander steep cliffs that descend to the Cheyenne River Valley, the highlands of Hell Canyon and other Black Hills geological wonders.

We arrived at the Wild Horse Sanctuary on a cold and sunny winter afternoon. The mustangs, shaggy with winter hair, didn’t even glance up as we drove down a good gravel road toward what looks like many other West River ranches.

Two old houses and several modest barns sat at the end of the road. Wild turkeys were roosting on the hitch of an old horse-drawn wagon and deer — several with massive antlers — grazed near some haystacks. A smattering of snow lay around the corrals; deeper drifts could be seen in the hills above.

An aura of peacefulness blankets many South Dakota farms and ranches, especially in winter when the pace slows for man and beast. Still, you’ll find few places with more tranquility than this spacious, 14,000-acre sanctuary in Fall River County, a 10-minute drive south of Hot Springs on Highway 71.

Writer and naturalist Dayton Hyde founded the sanctuary in 1988 and helped to oversee its operations until his death in December 2018, but its wild mustangs have always been the stars. They are descendants from horses brought to Mexico and Central America 500 years ago by Spanish explorers. Despite their southern roots, they’ve acclimated well to the northern plains.”If you took them from California in the winter they might not be ready,” Hyde told us,”but if they come in the summer they’ll grow hair in the fall. They also know instinctively to maintain a closeness to the other horses; they’ll bunch up and warm each other. It’s the way they battle the flies in the summer and the snow and cold of winter.”

“The horses seem to like winter better than the heat of summer,” adds Susan Watt, executive director of the sanctuary for the past 20 years. But too much confinement makes them uncomfortable.”If someone wants to keep them in a barn, they’ll think, ‘oh no, that’s not what I like to do.'”

The horses do appreciate some human intervention.”We park the tour busses near the corrals so they break the north wind, and the horses don’t seem to mind that,” says Watt.

A full belly is the best defense against a South Dakota winter, and once again the humans of the sanctuary play a hand; they feed a half million dollars worth of hay every winter, along with a molasses supplement called”cake.”

Sanctuary staff have names like Painted Lady, Medicine Hattie and Magnificent Mary, for many of the wild mares. The horses may nick and bite one another to establish herd hierarchy.

As the sun disappeared behind the Cheyenne River bluffs, we retired to a cabin. After dark, it’s eerily quiet. You might hear a coyote’s howl, or the hoot of an owl. Walk outdoors, and you’ll believe those astronomers who speculate that there may be 100 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy; their brightness illuminates the sky, the chalky river bluffs and the snow-covered grassland.

Horses corralled near the sanctuary headquarters were already feeling frisky as the sun showed itself in the morning. Perhaps they were anticipating the molasses cake; some were frolicking, nipping at one another’s necks, establishing their pecking order. Their steaming breath floated in the 10-degree air.

A sanctuary staffer offered to give us a pickup tour. We rattled across frozen ruts and rocks, heading for high ground. Elevation at the sanctuary headquarters is 3,500 feet; we reached an overlook that measures 4,500 feet.

There the snow was a foot high in spots, deeper yet in the ravines, and the ponderosa pine forest was a glistening winter wonderland. Mule deer with racks like Santa’s reindeer grazed on winter grasses in the meadows. A coyote sauntered ahead of us.

As we neared several small herds of wild horses, we parked the pickup. Soon we were surrounded by a dozen or more of the most curious. The mustangs can be jealous and may even bite with their big teeth. Our guide says they never nicked a visitor, though she was once lightly bitten on the thigh. The safest place to stand is along the shoulder or flank.

On summer outings, the guide carries a stick and a bucket in the truck box in case she spots a rattlesnake. That’s not a worry in winter –flies or snakes are nowhere to be found.

This land marks the convergence of the great northern prairie and the deciduous Black Hills ponderosa pine forest, so the views are unique to the world. Pelicans fish on the Cheyenne River, which twists through the very heart of the sanctuary. Cascade Creek, fed by the ever-warm spring waters that gave name to the nearby city of Hot Springs, steams on a winter’s day. In summer, sunbathers and swimmers congregate at Cascade Falls, a historic swimming hole just north of the sanctuary along Highway 71. In winter, the little falls — bordered by foliage frosted from the mist — are an ethereal sight.

We drove past a Sun Dance lodge where Lakota men and women gather in the summers for vision quests, sun dances and other spiritual and cultural activities. In winter, cedar branches that shade the Native Americans in July are now brown and dry. Buffalo skulls, bleached as white as the snow, are lined on a slope. Hyde welcomed the sun dancers 20 years ago and they have been coming back ever since.

The sanctuary also includes ancient Lakota hunting grounds where people came to collect medicinal plants and herbs along the river. Hell Canyon, Wildcat Canyon and a dozen other scenic and historic crevices spill out of the southern Black Hills onto the rough hill country.

The sanctuary staff know the names of the families who homesteaded there, and even the history of the roads that pass through the five-square-mile sanctuary. Yes, roads have histories here. They’re not taken for granted. Ranchers depend on roads that cross each others’ pastures for access to the main roads.

Fences also have histories, even gates; an automatic gate was installed to ease the aging Hyde’s comings and goings. Unfortunately, the mustangs quickly figured it out. They learned that if enough of them stand and squeeze against it, that it will open. Basically, they know they have to simulate a vehicle.

Even in winter snow, yucca, prickly pear cactus, buffalo grass and other vegetation peeks through on the windswept hilltops. As we returned to the ranch headquarters, we noticed a newer variety of plant — a tidy vineyard of Concord grapes, now dormant and leafless.

Quiet and solitude are year-round virtues of the sanctuary. Winter simply adds an extra hush.

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Warm Water, Warm Hearts

By Bernie Hunhoff

One of the most beautiful evenings of the South Dakota holiday season comes Tuesday (Dec. 8) at Hot Springs, a city with a 131-year legacy of caring for the veterans of South Dakota. That’s when the local Stillwater Hospice (112 S. Chicago) welcomes family and friends of deceased veterans for its annual Holiday Tree to Remember program, beginning at 5 pm.

Dawn Hurney, Stillwater’s director of clinical services, says attendees are welcomed at the door and offered an ornament to hang on a tree in honor of their loved one.”We have a signup sheet at the front where they can write the names of their veteran. This can be someone who died in the past year, or who died many years ago. As the program gets underway we will read the names, and if they wish they can talk a little about the loved one they lost. It’s a beautiful time. It never ceases to amaze me how touching it is.” Hurney says the program is not limited to families of hospice patients.

Hot Springs has a rich history of caring for soldiers and veterans. In 1889, the very year that South Dakota gained statehood, the legislature established a Soldier’s Home there, partly because the city’s natural warm-water springs had already gained a reputation for health and rejuvenation. A few years later, the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers began to send Civil War veterans to Hot Springs. The care was so well-received — both the waters and the people there — that President Teddy Roosevelt signed a bill to establish a federal veteran’s hospital that was originally called Battle Mountain Sanatorium.

Today the state’s nursing home is thriving. It’s now called the Michael J. Fitzmaurice South Dakota Veterans Home. The federal sanitarium grew to become the Veterans Administration Black Hills Health Care System. Hot Springs’ healing history has won it a nickname as”The Veterans’ Town,” and now attracts tourists who appreciate the patriotic mission of the community’s citizenry.

In recent years, federal officials were making plans to close the federal hospital. A”Save the VA” group organized to prevent the closure, and last September the Veterans Administration announced that it would remain open.

Warm spring waters was the first attraction for state and federal leaders who established health facilities in the Southern Hills city of 3,500. A warm-hearted culture has kept the nursing home and hospital open. Tuesday’s holiday tree service at the Stillwater Hospice is a holiday example of how the people of Hot Springs care for our veterans and their families.

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The Utopia That War Built

By Michael Zimny

The Black Hills Ordnance Depot rose among the plains of Fall River County in 1942.

There’s a lost city, out among the rolling hills of Fall River County, south of Red Canyon, where the last ponderosa stands give way to yucca-studded grasslands undulating outward like a rattlesnake glissade. For some — children of the Depression and World War II, real-life Rosie the Riveters, Lakota people looking for a better life off the reservations — the strange ruins faintly visible from Highway 471 were once their own little prairie heaven.

Watch carefully from the road, and you might not know what to make of what you see — when suddenly hundreds of earth-covered domes bulge from a sun-facing slope, all in tidy rows, concrete faces casting shadows.

This was Igloo. For 24 years, the U.S. Army’s Black Hills Ordnance Depot (BHOD) provided livelihoods for thousands of workers and their families here — as well as a sense of community and solidarity of purpose unlike anything that many Igloo alums feel they’ve ever seen since.

In 1941, as the U.S. prepared for its possible entry into World War II, the Army’s Ordnance Department sought to vastly increase its weapons and ammunition storage facilities. Western South Dakota and Nebraska were viewed favorably for munitions storage, as their altitudes and low humidity were conducive to longer shelf life. South Dakota Congressman Francis Case lobbied hard for the Southern Hills. Though there were concerns about where the help would come from in such a sparsely populated area, the presence of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad helped win the day for the future BHOD.

A 21,000-acre site was acquired in the treeless, coyote-wandered hills between Edgemont and Provo. The devastation wrought by the Dirty Thirties had already depopulated much of the land, making acquisition less painful. The Army Corps of Engineers set up at Union Station in Hot Springs, a town hard hit by the Depression. Construction began in the spring of 1942. By August, 6,000 workers were employed on the project, double the population of Hot Springs.

Nearly overnight, tiny Provo was transformed into a worker’s tent camp. Other workers commuted from Edgemont and Hot Springs. Private homes became makeshift cafeterias. Every available living space nearby was rented. Wooden sheds were converted into sleeping quarters.

Conditions may have been squalid during construction, but the region was still reeling from the Depression. Building the BHOD was a paying job, and permanent employment at the Depot would be a better gig than anybody could have known.

Robert Raymond, a kid from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, moved to the Provo workers colony with his sister and her husband in 1942.”We lived in a tarpaper shack and a tent,” he recalls. But the lean times paid off.”After a year, we were eligible to move into Igloo. It was the best place I ever lived in my life.”

Around 800 dome-shaped structures that resembled igloos were built on 21,000 acres between Edgement and Provo.

Construction of the BHOD was a tremendous feat of engineering, logistics and labor. In just a few months, 802 of the”igloo” structures that would give the installation its popular name were erected. Purpose-built for munitions storage, the reinforced concrete domes — called”igloos” because they were thought to resemble traditional Inuit ice dwellings — covered with earth, were designed to direct explosions upward, not outward. Housing units and communal spaces were also built, and a looped railroad spur accessible to the igloos for loading and unloading war materiel.

A movie theater was picked up and moved from Lusk, Wyoming. A grocery store was hauled over from Chadron, Nebraska. Stonemason Monte Nystrom — famous for his Black Hills stonework including the State Game Lodge at Custer State Park — built several sandstone guard posts. The first shipment of munitions came in the fall of the same year construction started.

These were heady times at the BHOD.”The sheer excitement, 24/7 hustle and bustle of war time — neighbors coming home from or going to war. Test explosions on the Prairie” — are some of famous resident Tom Brokaw’s memories of his years (1943-44) at Igloo.

The Ordnance Department was one of the largest employers of civilians during the war, and for a place hard-pressed for jobs, the BHOD was a Keynesian dynamo. Clarence Anderson moved to Igloo from Hot Springs as a young boy.”Our family was extremely poor. We moved from a house that had two rooms and a path out to the outhouse. We had running water from one spigot. We had one light bulb that had a socket set-up to where we could have extension cords. I remember my mother had gone out and bought a toaster and we were all so excited because before that our toast was always made on the wood stove. When we moved to Igloo, we were very similar to all the families coming there. They were families that were out of work looking for a place to get a new start. We moved into a house that had five rooms, two bedrooms and an interior bathroom with running water. We were really excited as kids over that.”

“The Depression was just over,” recalls Robert Raymond.”We basically had nothing back on the reservation. We moved there and we had everything — there were jobs, money, brand new houses, indoor plumbing, ice boxes, a brand new school.”

Despite the tough times, labor was still an issue since nearly all of the military-aged men were off fighting when Igloo came online. The Ordnance Department had to look outside of the traditional labor pool for workers. Recruiters worked hard to attract workers from the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations. By 1945, 160 Native Americans were employed at BHOD.

Native American recruitment overlapped with heavy recruitment of women. When the first shipment of munitions arrived at BHOD, Goldie Lovell, a pioneering female truck driver, was there to haul the cargo to storage. Women like Lovell were Woman Ordnance Workers (WOWs). Immortalized by campaign poster icon”Rosie the Riveter,” WOWs worked at many traditionally male occupations during the war effort. Like Rosie, they often wore a red bandana. But instead of the white polka dots Rosie wears, theirs were emblazoned with white bombs, fuses lit.

“At Igloo, many, many of the workers were females, including my sister,” Raymond says. In that, Igloo was in line with depots and armories throughout the nation. In 1946, WOWs constituted over 46 percent of the Ordnance Department workforce nationally.

A stanza written by Igloo worker Clara Jackman captured WOW pride in verse:

Though we’re not Miss Americas
Nor shaped like ancient Venus
We’re doing a job for Uncle Sam,
You’ve got to hand it to us.

Women ordnance workers, or WOWs, were immortalized in posters featuring Rosie the Riveter.

For those who could find a job at Igloo, the post offered adequate — if not fancy — housing, a self-contained community with grocery store, bowling alley, roller rink, the Cactus Inn lounge, even a dance hall where acts like the Tex Beneke Orchestra would play. Anything Igloo didn’t have could be found in Edgemont. Many families didn’t own a car, but that was no problem.”There was a bus that went back and forth to Edgemont,” says Clarence Anderson.”At the time that Igloo was developed, very few people had cars. And for those who did, not long after they decided people had to have insurance, so if you didn’t have liability insurance you had to park your car right inside the gate.”

One unique aspect of Igloo life that there seems to be some consensus on — people got along, regardless of their ethnic background. For a hardscrabble, working class town built from nothing on a desolate stretch of sunbaked steppe, Igloo was a real deal melting pot by many accounts.

“We lived in a section of Igloo where the housing was mostly Indian,” Raymond says.”However, other Indian families were scattered throughout the housing area. There was no apparent racism to me. It was the best place I ever lived in my life.”

“In 1943, the American Indians were very much discriminated against and they moved there and joined in with all the other people and became part of that big family,” says Clarence Anderson.”Many didn’t stay long because it was an awfully new culture for them, but an awful lot of them stayed for the duration and went to school with us. As young kids we had no idea that there was a prejudice against Indians because they were our neighbors and friends.”

In addition to white, Native American and African American employees, there was also a contingent of Italian prisoners of war at Igloo. They served as part of a national experiment with”Italian Service Units,” in which Italian POWs who didn’t demonstrate overt fascist leanings were allowed some measure of freedom in exchange for work. It’s rumored that the Italians had a knack for drawings, and that some of their bawdier masterpieces can still be seen inside some of the igloos.

The Igloo years coincided with the baby boom, and unsurprisingly people who grew up there remember it as a paradise for kids.”There were lots of kids around,” remembers former resident Beverly McBride.”It was very family-oriented. The houses were small but nice. Every house had a sidewalk.”

“People were just coming off food stamps,” says Yvonne Grubbe.”We had the commissary and that food came through the military. So we had a lot of advantages out there. You know all of the new buildings and everything, the schools. We had a roller-skating rink that was fabulous. And there was a big wonderful swimming pool, a huge community center, two basketball courts. You could walk around anytime, day or night. We had a big theater, and I think the first price I ever paid to go to a movie was 15 cents. Mom would give me a quarter and I could get a cold drink and popcorn with the rest of the change. They had all the movies that were put out in the big cities. We never had a loss for things to do.”

Facilities for play were abundant. Basketball was the most popular sport. Jim Anderson, who’s compiled an extensive online filing cabinet of BHOD memorabilia, remembers how the students from the reservations brought their”run and gun, full court press” style of play — popularized by Leonard Quick Bear and the St. Francis Mission teams of the 1930s — to the gyms at Igloo. The Provo Rattlers took their high-energy game to three state tournaments, making it to the 1954 finals (where they lost to Hayti) behind Lakota stars, brothers Dan and Herb Goodman.

The federal government recognized in 1942 that the children of itinerant BHOD construction workers, and ultimately permanent employees, were going to need an on-site school. In a matter of weeks, enrollment at the Provo School had jumped from 15 to over 200. Long-time Buffalo Gap principal Adelaide Ward was brought in as district superintendent, along with her lifelong colleague and friend Christina Hajek. The two devised a temporary plan to expand the Provo School, and bus excess students to school in Edgemont until a permanent school for BHOD workers could be constructed at Igloo. In 1943, the new school was completed. Though situated on Igloo proper, the school was still administered by the Provo School District, hence the school retained the Provo name, and Igloo athletes wore the Provo Rattlers uniform.

Enrollment at the Provo School skyrocketed after families moved to Igloo.

Adelaide Ward was a towering figure in the minds of Igloo youth, and undoubtedly made an impact on a generation of kids from Dust Bowl beginnings.

“I’ve always felt that she was one of the people that put me on track to, what otherwise might not have been a very successful life,” says Clarence Anderson.”She was a pusher. When she walked down the hallways you could hear her for a long ways. She’d been in a car accident and had a pretty healthy limp and she was, not overly heavy but a big woman, and when she’d walk you could hear her coming. I think to this day, she did it purposely, because everybody kind of shaped up as she was coming down the hall.”

“I was like, ‘Man we can’t get away from her, what’s the deal here?'” says Yvonne Grubbe.”She was quite a disciplinarian and all she had to do was walk down the aisles and the hallways. And you never knew when she’d show up at the door at any classroom and just watch and be quiet. We’d behave. Because we didn’t want her to catch us doing anything bad. She never even had to raise her voice really. She had the power, and we knew she did. And, of course, that was a different time. We didn’t sass back. We did our homework. We didn’t really do anything out of line. Anything that we did went back to our parents.”

Ms. Ward served as principal of Provo High School until her retirement in 1961. Christina Hajek served as principal of Provo Elementary. The two moved away some time after retirement, but occasionally returned to take care of business at the house they owned together in Provo, and possibly to maintain a connection to the community.

By the summer of 1945, some 4,200 people lived at Igloo, more than in Hot Springs today. As Igloo grew, so did the surrounding towns. The war effort had elevated a sleepy, seen-better-days backwater — hammered by broken banks, ruined homesteads and the decline of Hot Springs as a well-heeled spa resort — to a thriving economy with a housing demand that was hard to satiate.

Post-war, over a period of several years, there was a dramatic decrease to about 700 BHOD employees and a return to something more like the pre-war gender balance in the workforce.

While female workers would always play a major role at Igloo, victory overseas ended the halcyon red bandana days.”When the war ended and the veterans came back, they had veterans’ preference and most of those females lost their jobs as veterans took over,” Raymond says. His sister was one of those that lost her job, so the family moved on.

The conflict deficit didn’t last long. In the summer of 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and America became involved in another war in Asia. The Korean War effort nearly doubled the number of workers to about 1,300.

After Korea, there was another slowdown and some workers were laid off, then life went on for the workers and families at Igloo. There was always the occasional rumor that the Depot would lay more people off or shut down for good, but it was the height of the Cold War. Keeping America’s military good and lethal was the lifeblood of the prairie melting pot. When Nikita Khruschev assaulted his desk with a loafer at the United Nations General Assembly, that was probably a net good for wage earners from Hot Springs and Pine Ridge who might land a gig at Igloo.

Igloo had all the amenities of a typical small South Dakota town, including stores and a movie theater.

In the absence of a major war, the installation made itself useful as a conveniently remote place to conduct bomb disposal and explosive ordnance parts salvage. In 1962, a relative peacetime, 575 civilian and military employees worked at Igloo, and about 1,800 people lived there.

Ironically, the decision to shut down Igloo was made during the ramp up to the Vietnam War (during which, by some estimates, up to 7 million pounds of ordnance were dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). In 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara launched an effort to reduce military expenditures, even as he recommended a bombing campaign against North Vietnam. The BHOD, and 95 other installations quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of the Department of Defense.

“A cry of anguish went up from coast to coast,” wrote South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, in an editorial for The Progressive entitled”Swords into Plowshares.” The statement wasn’t entirely hyperbolic. Workers — and their representatives — at installations from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to BHOD argued that the cuts would devastate economies and communities.

McGovern was empathic:”One readily sympathizes with the men and their families who lose their jobs as a result of defense shifts or cut-backs.” But he was also circumspect:”Do we want the Defense Department to meet the military needs of the nation in a business-like manner, or do we want it to function as a gigantic WPA responding to local and Congressional pressures all across the land?”

From a budgetary perspective, he had a point — one that dovetailed well with a larger point he was making (one that’s still argued today), that”many of the most vocal ëeconomizers’ are the biggest ëspenders’ when it comes to armaments. Place the label ëdefense’ on a project and it will zip through the Congress with little or no floor debate.”

Still, one could argue that if any Defense project in America warranted the WPA treatment at the time it was Igloo. The BHOD not only helped revive a severely depressed portion of the former Dust Bowl, it was probably one of the federal government’s most successful attempts at a long-term employment program for Native Americans from Plains reservations. For that reason, Sen. McGovern and Sen. Karl Mundt did plead with the Secretary of the Army that Igloo was an extraordinary case, that nearly 20 percent of workers employed were Native American, that the closure would ripple outward damaging communities throughout the area. Edgemont had just built a new hospital, which wouldn’t likely survive.

In April, McNamara announced the impending closure of Igloo, to be carried out in phases, completed by the summer of 1967. Less than six years before Pine Ridge would erupt into open insurrection at Wounded Knee, tribal members lost not only a rare source of employment, but something rarer still — a place where Lakota and other Native Americans had worked and lived in relative harmony with non-Indians for 25 years.

In its heyday near the end of World War II, nearly 4,200 people lived at Igloo. By 1967, the depot had been closed.

After the closure, Provo dwindled down to a few houses. Edgemont prepared for the worst:”It was devastating,” says Clarence Anderson, who lives in Edgemont.”I remember the day when the announcement came out. It was just like the town had a heart attack. When the base closed, that was just a tremendous impact on the community. I would say almost half the population of Edgemont was lost at that time. We had a very vibrant business community — three auto dealerships, three hardware stores, two grocery stores, clothing stores — and it just went down to virtually nothing.”

The Department of Defense attempted to move displaced employees to other bases. As workers moved on, the short-lived prairie utopia was systematically dissolved by the cool bureaucratic hand. Yvonne Grubbe, having grown up a child of Igloo, worked at the business of taking it apart.”As people were transferring to different installations, the Army and Air Force would see what was available on this great big sheet that went out from the government. If they needed this stuff, it would be shipped out to whoever asked for so many chairs, or so many beds, or whatever.”

“And they even came in and took out the individual houses. There’s housing that came from Igloo all throughout the state. Lots of it went down to the Indian reservations. A lot of it came to Edgemont. People bought the duplexes and remodeled them. We tried to get rid of everything we possibly could.”

The 801 igloos and some other structures remain. Through the years, several schemes were hatched — including frozen meat storage — to make good economic use of the igloos, but none panned out. The prairie utopia is now entirely situated on private ranch land — a strange, distant sight, like an apparition on a seldom traveled road.

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.

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“Very Hard Traveling”

By Michael Zimny

The 25th Infantry U.S. Army Bicycle Corps in the badlands of Montana.

If you happened to be working in southwestern South Dakota in July of 1897, you might have spotted an unusual sight: the first organized American mountain biking expedition. The soldiers of the 25th Infantry U.S. Army Bicycle Corps were on their way from Missoula to St. Louis, a 1,900-mile expedition designed to test the idea of bicycle-as-combat-vehicle.

On July 2, the Buffalo Soldiers — the colloquial name given to segregated, all African-American military units — covered 54 miles between Clifton, Wyoming and Rumford, South Dakota.

Blogger and Wyoming middle school social studies teacher Mike Higgins has compiled a day-by-day travelogue from contemporary newspaper stories and the journal of Second Lieutenant James Moss. E.H. Boos, The Daily Missoulian‘s embedded reporter wrote, “At S&G, the first station in Dakota, we filled our canteens with some of the worst water we had yet used. From the latter place to Edgemont the road, mostly sand, made very hard traveling. At Edgemont we stopped for lunch and departed soon after. Struggled against dust, heat and vast fields of prickly pear that morning, stopped in Edgemont for lunch, and departed soon after. Good roads, although hilly, were met, we were able to go at a good rate and were at Rumford, 16 miles from Edgemont before sundown.”

A map detailing the 1,900-mile journey.

The Corps crossed into Nebraska the following day, reaching Crawford as, “the Fourth of July celebration was at its height,” Boos wrote. “The town was full of people and the corps was given a hearty welcome.” After they were dined and entertained by revelers and soldiers from nearby Fort Robinson, the corps “left the town, passing through the big crowds on the main street amid loud cheers.” They camped that night in Belmont.

Their time in South Dakota had been strenuous and short. Just 48 of their 1,900 miles unwound across our state. Good drinking water was hard to find. Wheels sunk deep in dust on sun-parched ruts, and on reaching Rumford, “a section hand … advised us that the nearest camping place was at a ranch a mile and a half further on,” Boos wrote. “We started out and traveled five miles before reaching the ranch. A madder set of men never lived than the bicycle corps when we finally did get a camp.”

Cycling was already enormously popular in late-19th century America and Europe, but bicycles weren’t generally thought of as all-terrain vehicles. European militaries experimented with bicycle units with mixed results. The longest-lived was the Swiss Cycle Regiment, founded in 1891 and retired in 2001.

In the U.S., Gen. Nelson Miles was aware of European experiments and advocated for the metal mule. “The bicycle requires neither water, food nor rest,” he wrote. “The rider may push to the top notch of his own endurance without thought of his steed.”

When Second Lieutenant James Moss graduated at the bottom of his class at West Point in 1894, he was assigned to the 25th Infantry in Missoula. (Moss was white, like all officers placed in charge of otherwise all-black units). Moss quickly boarded the tactical cycling train and sought volunteers for a cycling corps. His first crew successfully completed several experimental forays, including an 800-mile round-trip trek from Fort Missoula to Yellowstone National Park.

Army leadership was divided on the utility of the military bicycle, so Moss devised an epic journey, hoping to silence the doubters. The 1,900-mile expedition from Missoula to St. Louis would cross terrains from, “the mountainous and stony roads of Montana; the hummock earth roads of South Dakota; the sandy roads of Nebraska and the clay roads of Missouri,” he wrote. For this mission, he assembled a team of 20 men and ordered custom-designed Spalding bicycles to carry their weapons and gear. The men trained for two weeks and embarked on June 14, 1897.

The soldiers encountered rough traveling during their brief time in South Dakota.

The roads they followed were anything from wagon trails to game trails to railroad track beds. They often had to dismount and walk for miles, their bicycles loaded with rations, rifles, ammunition, spare parts and gear. They averaged about 52 miles per day, facing their toughest test in the sandhills of Nebraska. They became experts at patching tires.

At journey’s end, Moss told the St. Louis Dispatch that, “The trip has proved beyond peradventure my contention that the bicycle has a place in modern warfare. In every kind of weather, over all sorts of roads, we averaged fifty miles a day. At the end of the journey we are all in good physical condition.”

The onset of the Spanish-American War brought an end to Moss’ experiments in military cycling. In the summer of 1898, the 25th Infantry — and all four of the Army’s all-black units — distinguished themselves in battle in Cuba. As with the other African-American units, their centrality in pivotal battlefield moments was often erased when mythologized versions of the War became popular lore.

There’s one accomplishment no one ever tried to strip from the 25th — the Missoula-to-St. Louis mission, perhaps because there was no competition. Nobody before or since has matched the Bicycle Corps’ journey.

Pferron Doss, author of a historical novel about the Bicycle Corps, led a commemorative journey that retraced their route in 1974. “We thought once we reached the Continental Divide, it would be downhill all the way,” Doss says, “but that wasn’t the case. But it’s a trip that every last one of us will never forget, because it was a time in our lives that we felt very proud to be doing this in their honor.

“It had not been done before, and these were black soldiers who formed a very unique first-time group. That in itself gives you a sense of, not only responsibility, but the freedom to feel very proud of what you’re doing.”

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.

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Hot Water and Old Bones

By John Andrews

Last summer our family spent an afternoon at Evans Plunge in Hot Springs. Its warm-water pools have attracted people for decades, but it was the first time we had ever been there. I wasn’t prepared for the rocky bottom in the main pool, but the kids enjoyed the water slides, games and watching other swimmers try to cross the width of the pool Tarzan-style by swinging from ring to ring (neither of them were tall enough to try on their own).

Hot Springs is the seat of Fall River County, which encompasses 1,749 square miles in the far southwestern corner of South Dakota. As is the case with much of arid West River, rain is tough to come by. The county averages 20 inches or less of rain a year, which is why it seems so remarkable that water played such a tremendous impact on life in that part of the state.

We can say it began 26,000 years ago, when an enormous sinkhole formed on what would eventually become the southern edge of Hot Springs. The prehistoric creatures that roamed the continent — mammoths, giant short-faced bears, camels — ventured to the oasis to drink, only to discover its banks were too slippery to ascend. They died and were buried there, lost for millennia.

Visitors file past mammoth bones that lay buried for thousands of years. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

Then in 1974, Philip and Elenora Anderson began to develop that land for a housing project. Dirt work stopped immediately when a bulldozer unearthed a huge tusk. The Andersons donated the land to a nonprofit organization that built an enclosure over the site. Dr. Larry Agenbroad of Chadron State University in Nebraska oversaw the initial paleontological work there and stayed until his death in 2014. Today, visitors can stroll through the 23,000-square-foot Mammoth Site on walkways that provide views of volunteers working to expose fossils. The most recent count says that scientists and volunteers have discovered 61 mammoths, plus fossils from other land and sea creatures.

Fred Evans capitalized on water when he arrived in the Black Hills in about 1875 and heard about Minnekahta, or the warm water springs where Native Americans sought healing. The springs that eventually became Evans Plunge had a relatively inauspicious beginning. One early settler who owned the land on which the main spring is found reportedly sold it for a horse valued at $35. Evans built a grand sandstone hotel and enclosed the spring in 1890. He advertised its mineral waters, flowing from the earth at a steady 87 degrees, as a cure-all.

Hot Springs’ Freedom Trail follows the Fall River through town.

People came from throughout the country to test the springs’ medicinal qualities. The wife of a Nebraska senator visited and returned home feeling like a new woman.”Mrs. Paddock has fully recovered after many years of suffering, a result wholly due to the mineral properties of the Hot Springs water,” reported the Hot Springs Star. I don’t recall feeling particularly rejuvenated after our visit last summer, but the fun we had surely did something for our spirits.

If water could make a Fall River County town, it could also break it. A few years ago, a freelance photographer submitted a batch of photos he’d taken on a trip through Ardmore in the far southern reaches of the county. He thought at the time that maybe a couple of people still lived there, but it seems to be considered a ghost town today. Old cars, buildings and even the town’s water tower still stand, but there’s no life to be seen. Ardmore sprang up as a railroad town in 1889, but water was scarce. Hat Creek proved an unreliable source. A train car brought the last load of water into town more than 40 years ago. Still, Ardmore holds a special place for the people who grew up there. They still comment on the photo gallery we created from that batch of photos, almost four years after we originally posted it.

Old cars and a water tower are among the remains of Ardmore. Photo by Joel Schwader.

Fall River County is also the source of some historical oddities. The community of Igloo was created in the early 1940s when the U.S. Department of Defense located the Black Hills Ordnance Depot in rural Fall River County. Hundreds of dome-shaped structures resembling igloos began to rise across the prairie. Thousands of people lived at Igloo until the government cut the depot’s funding in 1967. Look closely when you pass on Highway 471; the strange ruins are still visible.

The canyons around Edgemont are home to mysterious petroglyphs that are thousands of years old. Several years ago, I talked to John Koller, who grew up on a 2.500-acre ranch along the Cheyenne River east of Edgemont.”I was told they were there, but as a kid out here, you work,” he said.”So when you pick up a rock and throw it at a cow to get it out of a box canyon, you don’t have time to stop and look at these wonderful finds. I crawled around these petroglyphs all the time, but didn’t pay attention.”

Later in life he began to appreciate the ancient art that surrounded him. He estimated one drawing to be at least 8,000 years old, while others were between 2,500 and 3,000 years old.

Hundreds of dome-shaped structures were constructed when the Black Hills Ordnance Depot located in rural Fall River County in the 1940s.

Perhaps the most interesting oddity I discovered while poking around Fall River County is a map that Hot Springs businessman Orlando Ferguson used to support his theory that the earth was square and stationary. Ferguson had the map printed in 1893. It resembles a bundt cake pan turned upside down. The continents and oceans lie around an indented ring, while the North Pole is raised in the center. The sun and moon are attached to an actual pole rising from that point.

His astronomical principles were based on a very literal interpretation of the Bible, beginning with the reference to angels visiting the four corners of the earth. From there, he developed his square and stationary idea. He claimed the sun was 30 miles in diameter and just 3,000 miles from earth. His reasoning? If you stand at the equator on March 21, when the sun is directly overhead, then the distance you can walk north or south without casting a shadow is equal to the diameter of the sun.

He also shunned the idea of gravity. Instead he thought atmospheric pressure held people down and pushed the oceans up the sides of his indented map. Stop by the Pioneer Museum and take a look at the map and a pamphlet he had printed. Chances are you won’t buy what Ferguson was selling, but there are plenty of other natural and historical wonders to be found in Fall River County.

Editor’s Note: This is the 34th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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Dinosaurs and Big Art

By Paul Higbee

Bison roam freely inside Wind Cave National Park.

Just after dawn I hit the Nebraska-South Dakota line, moving north on U.S. Highway 385. I had a hundred bucks in my pocket and lots to see and do along this incredible road, leading 122 miles from the state line to Deadwood. It would be a good day.

For the next 25 miles I drove through southwestern South Dakota’s beautiful grasslands. Most people, though, think of Highway 385 in this state as a way to experience the heart of the Black Hills, and the Hills were my destination. First I wanted to visit a favorite place that bills itself as a”transition zone between ponderosa pine woodlands of the Black Hills and the mixed grass prairie of the northern plains.” I spotted my turn-off at Wallygator’s Bait and Tackle and in five minutes sat sipping coffee from a Thermos, watching the full morning break over big Angostura Reservoir — a damming of the Cheyenne River. While the Black Hills stand within view of Angostura, the lake feels more attuned to the prairie. Pronghorns bounded through lush grass just yards from the water.

Twelve miles later I arrived in Hot Springs and felt fully enveloped by the Hills. The town is home to plenty of attractions: Evans Plunge, the Mammoth Site, lodging and dining in historic sandstone structures. But this morning I sought the Black Hills’ heartiest breakfast. That’s the liver and onion breakfast served on two platters, with eggs and potatoes and toast, at the All Star Bar and Grill right on 385. Usually I’m not much for big breakfasts, but something about spending a full day in the Hills suggested that one was in order.

Janell Andis (center) has been serving Spudburgers for 20 years at Custer Crossing, a Highway 385 pit stop enjoyed by locals and tourists.

After devouring the liver and onion specialty, a traveler may feel a walk is needed before climbing back into the car. There’s an excellent urban hike through downtown and up old slab stone steps to the hilltop 1893 schoolhouse. These days the four-story sandstone school, now the Pioneer Museum, puts every square foot to work interpreting the history of the Southern Hills. The grounds offer a pretty view of the town below. This is the first of many museums along the state’s stretch of 385.

Ten miles beyond Hot Springs I entered Wind Cave National Park, established in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Immediately inside the park a sign read, BUFFALO ARE DANGEROUS, DO NOT APPROACH.

“It’s a deal,” I thought.”I won’t.”

But moments later a buffalo bull approached me. I pulled off the road and sat in my car, lost in notes for this article, writing about the view at the park’s south entrance: a mountain prairie dotted here and there by pines, with the Central Hills’ high peaks serving as a backdrop. Suddenly a great shadow darkened my paper and there the bull stood, right up against my car. I was glad I had been too lazy to follow through on my original plan of getting out of the car, sitting on the hood, and incorporating the scent of the summer morning in my notes.

Wind Cave National Park is home to this free-roaming bison herd, 30 miles of hiking trails, camping and the famous cave that spouts air. Park staff lead tours through the cave, officially the world’s fifth longest. But people in Hot Springs and Custer scoff at that designation. Most believe Wind Cave and nearby Jewel Cave, a national monument ranked as the world’s third largest cave, are one and the same. If passages connecting Wind Cave and Jewel Cave are ever mapped, the cave is the biggest on the planet.

North of the park the highway ran through a section of forest devastated by a 2012 fire, and beyond that point I saw increasing evidence of mountain pine beetle disease. As beetles kill trees, pine needles turn the color of dried blood. Those trees are widespread throughout areas of the Central Hills especially.

Approaching the town of Pringle, outcrops of granite began to appear as the highway entered a rocky zone beloved by climbers and sculptors. Pringle boasts two pieces of roadside art that by no means are the most famous along this highway. But I like them and always keep an eye peeled for them: the sculpted mountain lion slinking atop the Pringle Mercantile bar, and an unusual bicycle creation right next to 385 (left side when traveling north). Dozens of bicycles — some rusted, some gleaming and all with histories — cling together to make a curious geometric formation that glitters in the sun. This is serious bicycle country. The 109-mile Mickelson cycling and hiking trail runs close, and sometimes immediately adjacent to, Highway 385 for many miles toward Custer and Hill City.

Hill City is home to Prairie Berry winery, where travelers are welcome to stop for a tasting.

The outcrops towered taller and the great granite peaks loomed closer as I put Pringle behind me. The land is a mix of forest and clearings with homes, barns and horses, along with evidence of sawmilling and other entrepreneurial endeavors. The town of Custer announced itself boldly with billboards, and the community definitely has a whimsical side. Where else would I find a shrine to Fred and Wilma Flintstone, complete with a full-size replica of Bedrock City? The town has preserved the handiwork and legend of Wilber Todd, builder of Custer’s first stone jail. He used the money paid him for the construction to get drunk and rowdy and became his jail’s first occupant. Like Hot Springs, Custer turned a big public building, the 1881 Custer County Courthouse, into a history museum. Some visitors know the courthouse made significant history itself in 1973, when law enforcement and the American Indian Movement clashed there — a precursor to the Wounded Knee occupation.

My reason for stopping in Custer today, however, was to experience one of Claude and Christie Smith’s burgers. It seems that by consensus two years ago the Black Hills decided their just-opened Black Hills Burger and Bun Co. served the region’s best hamburgers. That’s high praise in beef country. Friends had told me that the little diner on 385 would be packed regardless of when I visited. It was. Two bites into the Hot Granny burger (with bacon, cream cheese, fresh jalapeÒos and sweet jalapeÒo sauce) I decided I would join the chorus of Smith burger boosters. Christie told me she and Claude formerly ran an Iowa grocery store, then moved west with their kids after several Black Hills vacations, looking for a better lifestyle.

“We found a lot of local support here,” she said. They stay busy. Claude starts with whole chuck roasts and grinds the meat daily. Buns, potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans and a range of desserts are also prepared fresh every day.

As the Smiths get up every morning and grind beef, just up 385 to the north the Ziolkowskis prepare to blast granite. They’re creating Highway 385’s most famous piece of roadside art, the world’s largest mountain sculpture, recognized worldwide. The great carving of Crazy Horse is clearly visible from the highway, but turning into the grounds is well worth the admission fee. Mary Bordeaux, from Pine Ridge, is the new curator of the huge Indian Museum of North America below the sculpture, and she’s the site’s cultural coordinator, organizing artists-in-residence, performers, and lecturers.”We hope people will view the sculpture and then also interact with the museum collection,” she said.”For those hoping to buy art, here’s a chance to meet the artist, to have a connection with the artist.”

Paleontologist Pete Larson and his brother, Neal, founded the Black Hills Institute of Geology at Hill City.

As a kid I knew Hill City as a place of hard working loggers, a summer excursion train and mysterious Goodhaven,”the house of many doors.” It’s hard to think that any small town in America has transformed itself more completely than Hill City. The development of fine art galleries, including Jon Crane’s, has been well publicized, as has the arrival of wineries. The old city auditorium became a museum that never ceases to amaze, reminding visitors that South Dakota is prime dinosaur country. In addition to running this museum, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research continues to dig for fossils and is a resource for science centers around the world. Probably this Hill City museum’s star attraction, although he has considerable competition, is Stan, a T-rex excavated by the institute in Harding County in 1992.

I visited Stan and his prehistoric peers, then went up the road to see a new museum in the back of the chamber of commerce building that documents the Civilian Conservation Corps’ work in South Dakota during the 1930s. The steam powered excursion train of my youth, the 1880 Train, still makes its scenic runs, and for the past five years it has shared a parking lot with the fine South Dakota State Railroad Museum. As I talked to museum director Rick Mills, author of several books about railroading, it struck me that there’s tremendous expertise along 385 in many fields. And every expert I’d talked to on this trip seemed to have all the time in the world for me.

I’m happy to say Goodhaven still stands, although it goes by another name now. In 1894 husband and wife John and Kit Good built a one-story house in the Black Hills town of Sheridan. Kit had survived a terrifying house fire and wanted a home with doors leading directly outside from every room. The”house of many doors” — 11 to be exact — won Black Hills fame because of its unusual look. It drew even more attention when it was moved to Hill City in 1944, right next to the highway. In 2003 David and Dawna Kruse bought Goodhaven and turned it into a unique bed and breakfast. They renamed it Holly House because of Dawna’s love of Christmas and flair for decorating for the holidays.”We still have seven of the 11 doors leading out,” she told me. But I had been told earlier that when visitors speak of Holly House these days, the doors rank second to another asset: Dawna’s breakfasts.”When I say I serve a full breakfast, I mean a full breakfast where everything’s homemade,” she said.”We offer a Mexican breakfast, and breads and casseroles, and biscuits and gravy and lots more.”

It’s an increasingly rare Highway 385 traveler who makes it out of Hill City to the north without being lured into Prairie Berry Winery for free wine sampling. I joined in and got personal instruction from my server about which foods go well with the wines I selected. She suggested asparagus with my dry Phat Hogg, and roast duck with my sweet Calamity Jane. Actually Prairie Berry is becoming a wine and beer campus, with a new events center next to the main building, and Black Hills Miner Brewing Co., the winery’s beer making arm, right across the parking lot. Sandi Vojta is the company’s award-winning winemaker, and she brews the beer, too.

Black Hills Burger and Bun’s crew includes (from left) Jessica Smith, Lindsay Percival and owners Christie and Claude Smith.

North of Hill City a sign told me to watch out for bighorn sheep, and immediately I spotted three. It appeared that they saw me, too, and watched me pass from a safe distance off the road. I thought they demonstrated more sophistication about traffic than lots of domestic animals I’ve known. Then Sheridan Lake came into view. A man fishing from shore reported trout were shy this afternoon but crappies were hitting his bait in a frenzy. I got back in the car and in no time came to spectacular Pactola Lake, the Black Hills’ biggest. Sheridan and Pactola are actually manmade reservoirs, products of 1940s era reclamation (as is Angostura). It surprises visitors who regularly bring boats, water skis and lake fishing gear to the Black Hills to learn the region was shortchanged when it came to natural lakes. Both Sheridan and Pactola are named for towns that surrendered the ghost to rising waters. It’s why Goodhaven ended up in Hill City.

Beyond the lakes the highway made a final 25-mile sprint to Deadwood. It’s the home stretch not only for South Dakota’s 122-mile section of the highway, but for all of U.S. 385, which begins at Big Bend National Park in Texas and extends north through Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, and of course South Dakota, for 1,206 miles. Old-timers sometimes called the route the Potash Highway, after a form of fertilizer that transformed big sections of the Great Plains. The road is one of South Dakota’s Blue Star Memorial Highways, honoring the Armed Forces, and it has also been called the George Hearst Memorial Highway, recognizing the man whose investment brought Homestake Gold Mine to full production.

The road climbed and dropped over several ridges. Pines closed in at points, then opened up to reveal draws, meadows with grazing cattle, and Custer Peak with a summit so pointed it resembled an upside down V. And then, amid pastoral scenery, things almost surreal popped into view, like a Ferris wheel in the middle of the Hills, and the World’s Largest Log Chair. How large? About 34 feet high with a seat so big that a family and several friends could picnic up there. Why? That’s a harder question to answer. I stopped by the Sugar Shack, within view of the chair, and the best answer I got was,”Well, there are lots of logs out here.” Plus, of course, no one does anything small along 385. The Sugar Shack, incidentally, is a cozy old diner with a long wooden lunch counter, behind which are prepared huge and excellent burgers. It should be noted plenty of Northern Hills partisans consider these the best Black Hills hamburgers. Evidence that the Sugar Shack has topped public polls to that effect is posted in the diner.

Twelve miles north, the Ferris wheel stood at Brownsville, long ago a busy logging and sawmilling town and now sometimes called”50s Town.” That’s because of Boondocks, a roadside business that celebrates all things 1950s — Elvis, cars, food. The centerpiece is an authentic Valentine diner shipped in more than 60 years ago and still serving up sandwiches, milkshakes, apple pie and more.

I knew I was nearing Deadwood when I spotted the Tomahawk golf course. Then I made a steep climb and descent over Strawberry Hill, coasting past a runaway truck ramp and under hills left bare by a great 2002 forest fire. I breezed through the little town of Pluma and then … well, Highway 385 just ended. Abruptly and without ceremony.

I could turn left and drive on to Lead, Terry Peak, and Spearfish Canyon. Or I could go right, into the heart of Deadwood with its entertainment, casinos and dining. It wasn’t a bad place to be, stared in the face by attractive options the northern Black Hills offer. But I wished for a sign saying, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE COMPLETED A TRULY CLASSIC AMERICAN DRIVE.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Writer’s Block in South Dakota

Editor’s Note — Pierre native Joseph Bottum went to Washington and built a career by writing about politics and religion. When he and his family came home to settle in Hot Springs, he knew there’d be challenges to continuing his career path in South Dakota. But he wasn’t thinking that the new roadblocks would have antlers and four legs. We reprint this essay from The Weekly Standard.

By Joseph “Jody” Bottum

She seemed more curious than frightened, the doe-eyed … doe, I suppose, and we studied each other for a long moment or two. She, calm in a farmer’s field, looking over the fence line. And me, unmoving in the wreck, staring back at her through the shattered glass.

Then some click of the cooling engine, or maybe a groan of bent metal and drip of radiator fluid, convinced her that I wasn’t worth her time. The deer trotted a few yards further along the fence, leapt it with a neatfoot bounce, and disappeared off into the woods — leaving me to climb my way out of my broken car and scrabble back up to the highway, hoping to flag down some help.

Odd, really, to see her so clearly, so sharply, when I never actually saw the other deer, the one I hit at 80 miles an hour on a South Dakota highway–the one that left me with a couple of cracked ribs, a chipped collarbone, a gouged ankle, and a sprained wrist. Oh, and a spectacular set of bruises placed around my body with the precision of a drunken xylophonist.

Plus, of course, a totaled car. There are, it is said, more deer in North America today than there were when the Pilgrims landed. Certainly there are more out on the western prairies. The Homestead Acts often required the planting of acres of trees to prove a farmer’s claim, and those windbreaks and narrow groves have added up to a massive national nature preserve: a refuge for white-tails and mule deer. Of course, they then wander out onto the highway, where there’s not much refuge for either deer or the drivers who hit them.

Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to, in the days since my accident, has a story of animals on the road. The problem, in my case, is that the first notice I had was the darkening of my field of vision as the windshield bowed in at me. Picturing the accident now, I realize that the deer probably didn’t see me, either. Driving into the dark, with the twilight behind me, my car would have been invisible, and the deer must have jumped up out of the long fall grass of the road’s shoulder at exactly the right moment to slide across the hood of the car and land, back first, on the windshield.

But I see that only in retrospect. At the time, the craze of cracks in the safety glass left me blind as I flinched and swerved, only to slide sideways down the steep embankment and bang along a 50-yard line of–what else?–trees planted as a farmer’s windbreak maybe a hundred years before. Eventually, the fender was bent in enough that the front wheel could catch on one of the trees, swinging the car 180 degrees so that the driver’s side could get its own share of smashing.

I’m not sure where, along the way, the deer fell off. A little blood on the fender, as though I’d clipped its legs, and some hair on the windshield shards were all that was left–even on the trail of plowed down grass I’d left behind. However badly injured, the deer somehow managed to walk away from the accident.

Which is better than I did. For me, it was more of a crawl out of the car and up the embankment to wait for help. After I declined an ambulance, a paramedic told me I’d need X-rays and taping up, and, sore as I was, I’d be even sorer the next day, once everything tightened up. So I signed the highway patrolman’s accident report and had the tow-truck driver drop me off at a Sioux Falls car-rental agency– deciding that, since I still faced a six-hour drive back home to the Black Hills, I might as well do it immediately rather than wait for the painful stiffness of the next day.

That may have been a mistake. The Midwestern demand for self-sufficiency, an often self-defeating virtue drilled into my boyhood, was strong enough to get me up and moving. Strong enough, for that matter, to keep me going about as far as Rapid City. But, man, the hour in the car beyond that, driving home into the Hills, was a trial.

Still, I figured that if the deer I hit could walk away from the accident — if the other deer, the one I watched from my wreck, could stay calm even after I’d smashed through her woods — I could probably make it home, however painful the final miles. And though I saw a few deer in the woods along the way, they must have decided enough was enough. None of them jumped out into the road, and I made it at last home to painkillers and bed.