Our July/August issue includes a story by Staci Perry on the Flandreau Bakery and Coffee Bar. Two generations of the Duncan family have been baking tasty treats there for 88 years. Perry visited the Duncans to hear their story, sample a few classics and take several photos — too many to print. Here are the ones we couldn’t fit into the magazine.
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| The Moody County Courthouse square is a popular gathering place for Flandreau youth. The courthouse, built in 1914, has an architectural twin in nearby Rock Rapids, Iowa. Both were designed by Sioux Falls architect Joseph Schwarz, who is best remembered for designing many Gothic-style Catholic churches in the region. |
Every Fourth of July in Flandreau’s restored 1880s railroad depot, the Lutheran ladies sell lefse by the pound, while nearby the Episcopal Church ladies dish out Indian tacos by the dozen.
But neither snack outdraws the popular Long Johns that are baked daily a few blocks away at the 83-year-old Flandreau Bakery.
The community’s gastronomic variety is one of many subtle and not so subtle dichotomies that blend in this Moody County community’s abundance of cultural habit and history.
One of the state’s oldest communities, Flandreau was settled in 1857. Its tone and fabric since has been fashioned by white settlers and Native American homesteaders who found the good life along banks of the serpentine Big Sioux River. At Flandreau the river makes a right turn to tumble over the largest dam on the river and then meanders west through town before resuming its southward journey. That river twist inspired early Native Americans to refer to the heavily timbered river valley as”the bend in the river.” Decades earlier, trappers were at the bend in the 1830s.
Flandreau is named after New Yorker Charles Flandrau, who came west as a young lawyer and took up railroading and the Dakota Land Corporation. Unfortunately, the town with his name is misspelled. A Flandreau newspaper editor in 1891 accidentally added the letter”e” to the type stick, and that spelling made it into history books.
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| The main streets of downtown Flandreau feature a mix of facades, but the town’s working class atmosphere is best personified in this business alley begind Pipestone Avenue, where Don Ulwelling has operated Don’s Tire Shop for more than 25 years. |
At the river’s bend the two cultures often dance to different drummers. Citizens still trip the light fantastic in Flandreau’s iconic 1919 ballroom in Riverside Park while a mile away along the same river others do the grass dance to a resonating rawhide drum at the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe’s powwow grounds. The Japanese Gardens ballroom was named in the 1920s because of the colorful, inexpensive oriental paper decorations adorning its walls. It’s the last of the old dance halls in eastern South Dakota. Like the Japanese Garden, the tribe’s powwow ground for nearly 50 years is in a park-like, shaded swale along the river. The traditional dances of the two cultures are set aside most days of the week.
“We take pride in working together with the tribe on matters of community concerns,” said Flandreau Mayor Brad Bonrud.”We have great cooperation.” Tony Reider, Flandreau Santee Sioux tribal president, agreed.”I can’t begin to count the number of ways we cooperate and work with the city,” he said. He mentioned the county Boys and Girls Club the tribe has taken on as a project for 200 children in the county.”But we try to get together whenever we can,” Mayor Bonrud said.
The federal government took notice of the coexistence of the two cultures in 1883, bought the mission school and established the Flandreau Indian School that today is the nation’s oldest continuously operated federal Indian boarding school for grades 10 through 12.
Betty Belkham, who served a dozen years as superintendent, said about 350 Native Americans representing 44 tribes from nine states live and study there. She likened the school to”a giant melting-pot of Native American cultures.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs school has an annual budget of about $5 million and 120 employees. Among its buildings is a museum of school and Native American artifacts. Last spring, 49 students graduated from the federal school. The Flandreau Public School in 2012 graduated 30.
Across Highway 13 from the school is the venerable First Presbyterian Church, also known as River Bend Church that was organized in 1869. Members built the church in 1873. It is the oldest continuously used church in South Dakota, said Pastor Paula Armstrong. Before there was a church on the hill, Native Americans used a simple building they called the Bend in the River Meeting House. The refurbished building has been moved, stocked with historic memorabilia and is open weekday afternoons as part of the county’s impressive museum complex.
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| Grace (seated) and Gabby Flute Player enjoy a Flandreau front yard decorated with red pipestone. Their parents, Rick and Kelly Flute Player, and their siblings quarry the stone at Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. Rick Flute Player makes ceremonial pipes from the catlinite, which is sacred in Lakota and Dakota culture. |
Another old timer, the privately owned, now empty St. Vincent Hotel with its broad veranda and 1887 look, is something of a museum piece in downtown Flandreau. Perhaps its most infamous guest was gangster John Dillinger, who stayed there while planning his successful March 6, 1934, robbery of the Sioux Falls Security National Bank.
Flandreau’s tradition of the melding of cultures is also illustrated in some of its wealth of local art. Wall murals by Native American artist Paul Iron Cloud brighten the tribe’s Royal River Casino. Harvey Dunn’s salute to homesteaders, The First Furrow, and an 1895 painting by Elsbeth Jackson of a famous Indian woman of the late 1800s everyone at the Great Bend called”Granny Weston,” are in the County Resource Center near the high school.
Just pass the town’s Aquatic Center there are fabulous paintings in the William Janklow Armory-Auditorium. The series are by then-Flandreau resident Dorothy Lyford, now of Brookings, who was commissioned to illustrate the city’s history as part of the city’s State Centennial Lasting Legacy project.
The first of Lyford’s six large paintings was inspired by a personal account written by Helen Locke Pettigrew, a child of a pioneer Flandreau minister. She wrote of her friendship with a Native American girl. The painting shows the two girls playing on the banks of the Big Sioux River, communicating in the ways of children and amusing one another with Indian beads. The paintings by Lyford are available for public viewing. Each mural is a montage of historical highlights in 20-year slices
One of those colorful slices shows the Flandreau Dam, the river’s largest. Concrete has replaced the first wooden barrier built in the late 1890s that until World War I ground wheat into”Golden Girl” and”Lily of the West” flour. A changing preference by area farmers to grow corn rather than wheat contributed to the mill’s demise. Today only part of its sluice remains.
The dam is still a big draw. Noisy water cascades over the 12-foot high barrier, reinvigorating the pokey river that attracts fish and fishermen.
Most of the flour in Flandreau that is kneaded in profusion today at the popular Flandreau Bakery isn’t the old mill’s”Golden Girl” variety. The late Mel Duncan, a popular businessman who later served 20 years as Flandreau’s mayor, started the bakery in 1930. His sons Ed and Don now operate what is the state’s oldest family bakery.”We make 32 different kinds of bread and 21 different pastries every day. Of the pastries our Long Johns are the best sellers,” Ed says.
Ground corn, not wheat, is a big item on the menu at the Dakota Layers massive egg production facility north of town that was hatched in the late 1999 by 100 local farmers and businessmen led by second-generation Flandreau businessman and Dakota Layer President Scott Ramsdell. Hyline and Shaver hens peck away at a million bushels of ground corn and about 10,000 tons of soybean meal a year.
The menu and the flock will be expanded soon to 1.3 million hens. Then the annual production will be about 324 million eggs trundling along the plant’s conveyor labyrinth to intricate sorting and packaging stations.”We’re the largest egg producer in the state and have the only in-shell, in-line pasteurizing system in the nation,” Ramsdell said. About 60 people work at the facility shipping eggs to Midwest groceries and to an expanding California market.
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| Local artist Dorothy Lyford painted six large murals in Flandreau’s armory as a state centennal project. Each painting is a montage of historical and cultural highlights that represent a 20-year period in the region’s history. |
Although Flandreau’s wealth of cultural and historic attractions draws people to town, it’s the river that is the constant for everyone. Its profusion of flora and fauna has a magnetic attraction, just as it did for early Santee Sioux families who found the area similar to their former home in Minnesota.
That momentous move to the bend in the river took place in 1869 when 25 Santee families became the first Sioux ever to take up homesteads. Those Native American settlers and others who followed in 1870 sought peace, which wasn’t the case for others who became involved in the Dakota Uprising of 1862.
Leaders of the uprising were arrested, and 38 were hanged at Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 27, 1862. One leader, Chief Little Crow, was among many who were released. He died in 1863 at age 45. In 1971 his body was moved and reburied at the Native American Cemetery near the Bend in the River church.
Not far from there his burial place is a monument to another uprising victim. Mrs. Joseph Thatcher and three other women were taken prisoner by Inkpaduta’s band near Lake Okoboji. Fleeing into the interior of what is now South Dakota, while crossing the Big Sioux River on a fallen log near what is now Riverside Park, Mrs. Thatcher fell into the river and drowned. A 10-foot high obelisk in her memory was erected in 1937 approximately 300 yards west of where she disappeared.
After that uprising, about 1,300 uninvolved Santee Sioux were relegated to the Santee Agency in Niobrara, Nebraska. There, a few made the decision to leave the reservation and establish a community in 1869 at the bend in the Big Sioux River. They broke the nomadic mold, accepted Christianity, took up homesteads and adopted English names. Today the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe has a national membership of about 750, of which about 350 live in and near Flandreau.
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| Paula Armstrong is pastor of First Presbyterian, the oldest continuously operating church in South Dakota. |
Contiguous to the Flandreau city limits is a portion of the tribe’s approximately 3,100 acres of trust land. The line between city and trust land is a street with access to the tribe’s attractive headquarters building and its well-equipped clinic. That area also boasts a comfortable Native American neighborhood. Nearby on the same trust land is the tribe’s glitzy Royal River Casino and Hotel, opened in 1992. It provides jobs to tribal members and others, and issues a monthly stipend to tribal members. The casino offers the River’s Bend dining area, and just down the hall is the auditorium where popular shows are staged. The tribal business complex also has an RV camping area, convenience store and bowling alley.
Flandreau’s downtown Crystal Theater has also been a popular entertainment venue, although the last movies were shown in the early 1980s. The theater was falling in on itself. Interested citizens came forward, and with donated funds and labor, saw to its restoration. Today, with its showy original neon marquee lighting the way, the theater is a font of entertainment, from magic shows to speakers, and musical and dramatic presentations. It’s also home for the J.C. Wade Children’s Summer Theater, started by the late J. C. Wade. A member of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and recognized for his work nationally and in South Dakota in Native American education, Wade moved back to his hometown after retiring.
A herd of 250 buffalo owned by the tribe as a tie to its past was an attraction to highway passersby in the 1990s. Now in that large pasture is a herd of about 50 that South Dakota State University scientists, tribal members and students at the Flandreau Indian School work with to find ways to better market the meat.
For better police protection in the town of 2,400 and on the 3,100 acres of trust land and other Santee land ó it owns 2,500 acres for which it pays property taxes ó the tribal council and the city council formed a joint powers committee. The five Santee and six Flandreau residents on the committee meet monthly with the contracted Moody County Sheriff’s Department to discuss enforcement matters.”I believe Flandreau was the first, and it may be the only city in the state, where the tribe and the community work so well together in matters of law enforcement,” Mayor Bonrud said.
That same cooperation, pride and community spirit tumbles out in so many other ways all along the historic and still popular Big Sioux Bend in the River.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
South Dakota’s state flower, the pasqueflower, is among the first flowers to bloom in spring — sprouting from late March until early June. They are sensitive to herbicides and are more likely to be found in untilled areas, some say especially on north slopes. Bruce Porisch found these pasqueflowers on the steep hillsides of a pasture near Flandreau.
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If you took a road trip around South Dakota with the goal of seeing one — and only one — thing in each of South Dakota’s 66 counties, where would the intrepid editors of South Dakota Magazine send you in Moody County?
We asked ourselves that very question in the summer of 2011, when we wrote an extensive travel feature based on the idea of seeing one unique spot in every county. There were some fascinating places: 19th century cabins and churches, wildlife refuges, public art displays and beautiful sections of the Missouri River known only to locals.
And what did we select for Moody County?
A rock.
Yes, a rock. But it’s a really big rock with a story that’s 1.8 million years old. Lone Rock is one of millions of stones deposited by glaciers as they scraped across present-day South Dakota, but this one stands out. The boulder is 25 feet high and is estimated to weigh 100 tons — and that’s just the part you can see. Locals think another 50 to 75 tons remain buried beneath the prairie. Lone Rock became a travelers’ landmark and a favorite picnic spot for locals since the late 1880s. If you want to see the king of glacial erratics, Lone Rock lies in a pasture near the corner of 487th Avenue and 235th Street, southeast of Flandreau and less than a mile from the Minnesota border.
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| Lone Rock has been a landmark in southeastern Moody County for centuries. |
Who knows if Gideon Moody ever saw Lone Rock, or how much time he actually spent in the county that was created and named for him in 1873? Moody was one of several territorial politicians for whom counties were named, but he was probably the only one who narrowly avoided a knife fight with a colleague. It happened while Moody served in the Indiana legislature in 1861. The body was debating states’ rights, an especially controversial pre-Civil War issue. One legislator attacked the governor and Moody came to his defense so vociferously that he was challenged to a duel using bowie knives. They crossed the border into Kentucky to consummate the challenge and were promptly arrested and fined $500 each. The bowie knives remained in their sheaths.
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| Gideon Moody. |
Moody’s fighting spirit (at least in the physical sense) abated when he came to Dakota Territory with his family in 1864 to supervise construction of the Sioux City to Fort Randall military road. When he discovered the road could be built for far less than the money already appropriated, he paid the farmers he had recruited to work on it double the money originally intended. It raised the ire of the federal government, but he earned the respect of thousands of South Dakotans.
Moody served in the House of Representatives, was a judge in Deadwood and became one of our first U.S. Senators in 1889. He cultivated an unparalleled reputation for honesty. During one court case in Deadwood, litigants worried over the trial’s probable outcome against them tried to find someone who would bribe Judge Moody. They found an old law partner of Moody’s from North Dakota and brought him to town. When he heard their plan, he shouted,”My God, men! Do you expect me to tackle that man on any such proposition? Why, I should be in the penitentiary in 48 hours. If that is what you got me here for, I might as well leave for home on the coach tomorrow.” And he did.
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| Grace (seated) and Gabby Flute Player enjoy a front yard decorated with pipestone in Flandreau. Their father, Rick Flute Player, uses the stone quarried from the Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota, to create ceremonial pipes. |
When he faced defeat in his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1891, several legislators suggested supporting Moody in exchange for certain privileges.”He told them that if one dollar were used in buying a vote for him he would refuse to qualify for the office or accept it, and more, that he would assist in prosecuting both the man offering the money and the man accepting it,” wrote state historian Doane Robinson.
Moody ultimately lost the election. He practiced law before moving to California in 1900. He died four years later.
Today about 6,500 people call Moody County home. Its biggest city is Flandreau, where the citizenry is a mix of the descendants of European homesteaders and the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe. After the Dakota Uprising in Minnesota in 1862, several Santee Sioux were relegated to the Santee Agency in Nebraska. Seven years later, a delegation of them left and decided to settle on a bend in the Big Sioux River.
Flandreau boasts both public and Indian schools, and the Royal River Casino and Hotel draws people from hundreds of miles. If you are passing through, don’t miss the Long John’s at the Flandreau Bakery or the large paintings inside the auditorium by Brookings artist Dorothy Lyford, who was commissioned to illustrate the city’s history. The historic St. Vincent Hotel has also been restored. It’s where John Dillinger stayed while planning his robbery of the Sioux Falls Security National Bank in 1934.
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| The Big Sioux River’s shallow depths make it an easier river to kayak. Photo by Greg Latza. |
Take advantage of the outdoors by paddling the lazy Big Sioux River, which snakes through Moody County. Kayaking enthusiast Jarrett Bies told us the river is perfect for paddlers of all skill levels.”The Big Sioux is a pretty easy river to paddle, because if you have a mistake or you tip over, your number one strategy is to just stand up because you’re probably in knee-deep or waist-deep water,” Bies says.”If you tipped on the Missouri, you’d face a much more complex rescue.”
One of his favorite stretches follows the big horseshoe bend. Start at the access point at the pow wow grounds about a mile north of Flandreau on Highway 13. The river flows east toward Minnesota before curving south and west, past the Flandreau city park to a low-head dam in town.”It’s a five minute drive from the pow wow grounds to the dam, but you get a three-hour paddle on 12 to 14 miles of river,” Bies says.
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| Jim and Joan Lacey’s Little Village Farm is an eclectic collection of farm equipment and memorabilia. |
You can also portage around the dam and continue south for another three-hour paddle to Egan. Stop at the access point in the city park, or continue south to Dell Rapids. This course features farmland, abundant wildlife, woodland areas and rugged red quartzite canyons.
Outdoorsmen like to stay at the River of the Double Bend Campground and Outfitters near Trent. Owner Morris Kirkegaard is a life-long Big Sioux River rat, full of stories about his experiences.
Another unique destination just outside of Trent is Jim and Joan Lacey’s Little Village Farm. The Laceys have moved several large barns onto their property to house the enormous collection they’ve amassed over the years — tractors, windmills, cream separators, lightning rods and other farm equipment.
A day in Moody County might begin with rolls at the Flandreau Bakery, then a round of golf at Sunrise Ridge Golf Course on the south edge of Colman. Spend a quiet afternoon at the city park in Egan and have a thick, juicy steak at the Feather’s Nest in Ward. Finish it off with a float on the Big Sioux or a campfire with the Kirkegaards.
And if you see any other rocks you think we ought to know about, give us a call.
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth†installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.
