Tag: forest

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Black Hills Timber

By Paul Higbee

Alan Aker is a third generation lumberman who manages the forest, cuts the trees and markets niche wood products online.

At Christmas time David and Karen Papcke leave behind baffled friends in southern California. Why, these well-intentioned acquaintances wonder, is this couple in their 70s heading to the Black Hills now, for several months, just as winter starts throwing its hardest punches?

They go because they’re tree farmers. Assuming snow falls, this is the time to burn slash piles. It’s good for the forest’s health and, says David, for his health, too.”Being in the forest is the best thing for me,” he says.”The work is hard but in California I don’t have incentive to be outside and active like I do in the Hills.”

David and Karen Papcke thin and prune trees on their Custer County land to create a sustainable, healthy forest.

Farming implies harvesting, and while there’s more to tree farming than growing lumber, logging is a key part of what happens. Certified tree farms are lands deemed sustainable –thanks to forest friends like David and Karen.

Follow the Black Hills timber industry in the news and you might assume all harvesting stems from Forest Service contracts. Most Black Hills pine is, indeed, cut on federal lands, and there’s perennial public debate about Forest Service policy related to harvest numbers, overall environmental impact, whether forests are sufficiently thinned for fire suppression, and how to address the devastating mountain pine beetle epidemic.

Even without those contemporary matters Forest Service lands would steal the spotlight in most discussions of the Black Hills timber industry. That’s because of the region’s remarkable Forest Service history and its policy impact nationally. Think the issue of national health care gets a rise out of people in 2018? No more so than a proposed national forest reserve program with cutting regulations did across the West in 1891. Later that decade South Dakota’s U.S. Senator, Richard Pettigrew, argued the Black Hills should never be made a reserve because it was such a”sparsely timbered region.” There was some truth to that statement. Unregulated timber harvesting since 1875, when settlers began pouring into the Hills, had denuded entire mountainsides. President Grover Cleveland disregarded Pettigrew’s advice and announced the creation of the Black Hills Forest Reserve, effective in 1897 and with cutting rules enforced in 1898.

Gifford Pinchot, the visionary chief of the federal Bureau of Forestry then, decided the Black Hills region was a good model for developing timber policies for national implementation. In 1899,”Case No. 1″ was Forest Reserve terminology for the very first timber sale on Forest Reserve land. The buyer was Homestake Gold Mine and it obtained the right to harvest trees near Nemo. That was the birth of the modern Black Hills timber industry, and it did indeed set national precedent. Case No. 1 procedures were put into effect everywhere.

As if setting national policy in the Black Hills wasn’t enough, Pinchot found a Paul Bunyan of a man in the Hills who personified early 20th century sustainable forestry ideals. Plenty of people today think of Seth Bullock as an early Deadwood lawman, as portrayed on the HBO Deadwood series. In truth, Bullock was that and much more — entrepreneur, friend to Teddy Roosevelt, rancher, a founder of Belle Fourche and Black Hills Forest Reserve supervisor. If anyone could make logging on federal lands work, Pinchot reasoned, Bullock was the man. Bullock insisted Black Hills forest rangers be rugged westerners, not Washington appointees, and there’s no evidence he ever backed down from anyone — Washington bureaucrats or loggers skirting the rules.

South Dakota’s oldest certified tree farm was started by Korczak Ziolkowski, the visionary artist who began the Crazy Horse carving. Reddish trees surrounding the sculpture are evidence of a beetle infestation.

“Bullock was an important part of Pinchot’s experiment,” says David Wolff, Black Hills State University professor and Bullock biographer.”More than once he went to Washington to talk about timber as a sustainable crop and forests as lands of many uses.”

Bullock developed a national following among foresters, and in Washington officials who listened to his theories were even more impressed by the logging revenue he generated. Some years the Black Hills Forest Reserve made more timber sales than all other Reserves in the nation combined. In 1905, Forest Reserves were moved from the U.S. Department of Interior to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — very much in line with Pinchot and Bullock’s view of timber as a crop. The Forest Reserve’s name was changed to the Forest Service in 1907.

Bullock planted new growth of a tree type native to the Black Hills and central to its timber industry — what he knew as”yellow pine.” Today we call it Ponderosa pine, a species able to survive most fires and indeed thrive because of them. Bullock had no way of knowing how technical advances would eventually bring about far-reaching fire suppression. Decades later his forest stood so overgrown that fires would burn hot and likely kill everything.

“We created conditions where big Ponderosa pines, 600-year-old trees, are at risk,” says Frank Carroll, an independent forest management consultant. There are lots of acres in the Black Hills, he notes, where a thousand or even several thousand trees occupy a single acre. Long ago perhaps 30 to 70 Ponderosa pines stood in that space. Dense forests, beyond fire risk, are prone to disease.

Independent loggers were the key to thinning Black Hills forests in the 20th century. Sometimes they reminded fellow South Dakotans that they weren’t quite as independent as people thought. The region’s biggest buyer of timber sales was Homestake, which consumed vast quantities of pine for everything from underground mine bracing to employee housing. The mine operated its own sawmills and, in 1940, consolidated most of its milling in its new state-of-the-art sawmill at Spearfish. With its mammoth lumber infrastructure Homestake pretty much dictated the going rate for timber sales and could afford to under-bid when competitors turned too competitive. Logging has always been an expensive venture, requiring ever-evolving trucks and other equipment, and there were years when more competitive bidding might have helped everyone’s pocketbook.

Mark Ziokowski, son of the legendary Crazy Horse sculptor, now manages the trees around the monument.

Alan Aker has seen a lot of that Black Hills timber history, accompanying his dad on logging excursions as a boy, and owning his own timber company since 1983. Today Aker can be considered a consummate contemporary lumberman — Aker Woods Company makes possible half a dozen jobs, cuts timber on its own land and Forest Service lands, mills it, and uses it to build log homes and other products.

Aker attests to tremendous changes over the years.”Everything’s a lot more mechanical and there are fewer accidents,” he says.”I’m hearing more Spanish spoken in the forest.”

When Aker started his business there were about a dozen big sawmills in the Hills. Now there are three major ones at Hill City, Spearfish and Hulett, Wyoming — and a handful of smaller mills, which, in some cases, have developed specialized byproducts. Homestake is gone but that doesn’t mean independent loggers gained autonomy in arranging federal timber sales contracts. In today’s industry the mills deal with the Forest Service and then contract with loggers.

As the decline in big mills reflect, there’s less logging in the Hills than there was 30 years ago. Still, compared to some other regions — sections of the Pacific Northwest, for example — the industry is holding its own in the Black Hills. Logging trucks rumbling into Hill City and Spearfish are tangible reminders of a way of life that continues despite reduced demand for building materials in a sluggish economy, and despite a series of environmental lawsuits that slowed Forest Service sales. The lawsuits, however, spurred interest in timber coming off private tree farms.

Another challenge is the mountain pine beetle plague, an old disease that Seth Bullock recognized, but now attacking the Black Hills and Rockies as never before. In a single year, Black Hills residents watch entire hillsides turn from green to rusty-red. Once trees are infected the lumber can be salvaged within a few months. Then it deteriorates into worthless debris and is a frightful forest fire fuel.”I look at what’s happening and think we’ll probably see a lot of cutting the next five years,” says Aker.”But then what?”

Not that South Dakotans are surrendering to the beetle without a fight. Aker is impressed by the arrangement Lawrence County struck with the Forest Service to jointly attack the disease. It’s maybe yet another Forest Service precedent set in the Hills that will have national impact.”The Forest Service is committing to very different practices and is to be commended, as are Lawrence County officials,” says Aker.

Lawrence County commissioner Terry Weisenberg gives much credit to Rhonda O’Byrne, Forest Service district ranger for the northern Black Hills.”She really stuck her neck out for us,” he says.”As a result we were able to write a first-of-its-kind contract with the Forest Service, allowing Lawrence County to go to work and fight this tsunami of destruction.” The county hires subcontractors who”cut and chunk” trees the Forest Service knows to be infected, but which haven’t yet launched beetles that will fly and infect more trees. Lawrence County uses mining severance tax revenues for the fight, and has accepted funding from the City of Spearfish and Spearfish Canyon Foundation. The nonprofit foundation accepts tax-deductible contributions from anyone wanting to put dollars into Lawrence County’s battle.

Holes in the bark are evidence of woodpeckers attacking pine beetles.

For South Dakotans who would like to put their own hands to work in keeping forests healthy and productive, there’s always the example of David and Karen Papcke and fellow tree farmers. The Papckes first acquired Black Hills forest land in the 1970s and now own 640 acres in three locations near Custer, Rochford and Moon. They were named South Dakota Tree Farmers of the Year in 1986 and 2006.

“David and Karen are tree farmers extraordinaire,” says David Hettick, state service forester for the southern Black Hills who has greatly enjoyed his association with the couple.”Their property long ago became a certified South Dakota Tree Farm, which in the past was just a recognition of people who go above and beyond what’s necessary to keep a forest healthy. But now certification means a forest is managed in a way that’s sustainable. That brings a better price for timber cut there.”

The Papckes don’t plant trees. They describe their work as mainly keeping the forest thinned, keeping the best trees growing, and recognizing diseased trees and taking them out. Mountain pine beetle isn’t the only disease. Tip moth, says David Papcke, attacks seedlings and results in deformed”junk trees.” The Papckes have fought fires and dealt with the aftermath of winter storms that toppled trees.

When it comes to thinning, the Papckes handle trees with trunks up to 10 inches in diameter themselves. Bigger than that and they contract with commercial loggers.

Not far from the Papcke’s Custer area property is South Dakota’s oldest and biggest certified tree farm. Millions of people have visited, but few recognize it as a tree farm. Not only did sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski begin carving the world’s largest sculpture in 1948, but he also acquired forest property and implemented a management plan below the Crazy Horse sculpture site. Today, son Mark Ziolkowski is the forester, taking care of more than a thousand acres and winning South Dakota Tree Farm of the Year honors in 2007.

Crazy Horse has been aggressive in fighting pine beetles. Mark and a crew of four cut more than 20,000 infected trees in 2011. Additionally, an outside insecticide crew sprays 2,200 trees annually near the visitor complex. Spraying is an expensive annual process that can’t blanket the Hills, but it will save heritage trees and other pines considered significant.

Obviously, as a visitor destination, Crazy Horse Memorial has added incentive for keeping its lands aesthetically appealing. Yet tree farmers in the most remote sections of the Hills say aesthetics matter to them, too.

“The reward for us is to just walk through a healthy forest,” says David Papcke.”Supporting wildlife, thinned, no junk trees.”

We live in a naÔve era nationally when”save a tree” is a euphemism for”be environmentally responsible.” South Dakota tree farmers and others in the Black Hills know that sacrificing trees in proper manner will save a forest.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Foliage at Friendship Tower

Seth Bullock built Friendship Tower on Mount Roosevelt for his close friend Theodore Roosevelt. Bullock chose the location north of Deadwood for its overlook of the plains beyond Belle Fourche and into North Dakota where Roosevelt owned a ranch. A half-mile hiking path leads to the castle-like memorial. John Mitchell visited recently to photograph fall color.

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After the Blaze

Lightning sparked a fire that blazed across Crow Peak near Spearfish from June 24 into July, burning more than 2,700 acres and temporarily closing its trail. John Mitchell recently explored the popular path, much of it now running through a direct burn area. The forest service urges visitors to stay on the trail due to unstable trees.

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Crow Peak Wildfire

Crews continue to battle a fire started on Crow Peak near Spearfish last Friday. An estimated 1,000 acres have burned and the blaze is still uncontained. The lightning-caused fire is largely fueled by pockets of dead ponderosa pine brought down by pine beetles. Abnormally dry and warm spring and summer weather has also been a factor.

Crow Peak is a favorite of local hiking enthusiasts. The summit provides an expansive view of the Black Hills, Montana and West River’s plains and Wyoming’s Bearlodge Mountains.

Photos by John Mitchell.

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Lyme Disease Awareness

By Rebecca Johnson

May is Lyme disease awareness month. Most of us know the common way of contracting the bacterial infection — through a deer tick bite. My husband and I had a close encounter with a tick a couple of weeks ago while hunting morel mushrooms. We knew enough about Lyme disease to get worried, but it turns out contraction in South Dakota is very rare.

The deer tick (Ixodes scapularis) has been detected occasionally in far-eastern South Dakota. But in the 2011 survey conducted by South Dakota State University and funded by the Department of Health no deer ticks were found.”My interpretation is that we probably have low levels of Ixodes ticks in isolated areas of eastern South Dakota,” says Lon Kightlinger, State Epidemiologist.”Our main Lyme disease risk is for South Dakota residents who travel to Lyme-endemic states, like Minnesota where over 1,000 human cases are reported annually.” Last year there were four human Lyme disease cases reported and all were with out-of-state tick exposure.”The deer tick habitat is dense forest area, not prairie,” says Kightlinger.”Our environment is protective.”

Though contraction in South Dakota is very rare, I felt better familiarizing myself with the symptoms. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), early indicators may seem flu-like, including fever, headache, muscle aches, and swollen lymph nodes. A very obvious symptom that occurs in about 70-80% of infected cases is erythema migrans or a”bulls-eye” rash at the site of the tick bite. The circular rash gradually expands and can grow as large as 12 inches in diameter. Parts of the rash may fade as it grows, creating its bulls-eye appearance. Later symptoms include loss of muscle tone in the face, severe headaches and neck stiffness due to inflammation of the spinal cord, pain and swelling in large joints, heart palpitations and dizziness. Most cases can be treated successfully with a few weeks of antibiotics. Left untreated, Lyme disease may cause severe arthritis and chronic neurological problems.

And in case you were wondering, wood ticks and dogs tick do not carry Lyme disease.”You can only get Lyme disease from the Ixodes deer ticks,” says Kightlinger. “Dog ticks, however, may transmit tularemia or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.” Visit the CDC web site for information on preventing tick bites and tick removal.

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The Hidewood

Deuel County’s Hidden Woods

By Bernie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Exploring Gilley’s Grove

History and unique plants highlight this Brookings County treasure

By John Andrews

Untouched by the plow, Gilley’s Grove in northeastern Brookings County slows researchers to see what the ecosystem looked like before homesteaders arrived.

Brookings County is farm country, but when South Dakota Magazine visited Clarence Simmons’ land northeast of White in 2008, we discovered a thick forest with history as interesting as the unique and valuable plants that grow there.

Gilley’s Grove is a natural oddity, say researchers at South Dakota State University in Brookings.”It is quite a unique area in terms of botanical diversity,” says botanist Gary Larson.”In the under story, you have a lot of species that are typical of dense, hardwood forest that we would find in central and eastern Minnesota. For South Dakota, that habitat is very restricted. We find a number of wildflowers there that aren’t found in other places.”

Gilley’s Grove is the largest wooded coulee south of Sica Hollow in Roberts County. In their book Grassland Plants of South Dakota and the Northern Great Plains, Larson and James Johnson, a former range science professor at SDSU, classify the strip of land in which Gilley’s Grove lies as tall grass prairie, an agriculturally fertile area that has largely been converted to cropland. Eons ago, glaciers eroded the steep-sided ravine on the eastern side of the Coteau des Prairies and left an unusual landscape.

“It’s a dry prairie region. It’s very hilly,” says Craig Novotny, an ecologist who has written about the grove.”There’s usually grass in the ravines of the hills, but in this particular area the forest still remains. There are probably 100-plus species of native plants out there, and a lot of those plants are valuable.”

They allow researchers to see what the prairie looked like centuries ago. There’s bur oak, green ash, and basswood, a rare tree in the area that Native Americans used to make rope. The grove contains exotic plants usually found in more eastern locales and rarely in South Dakota. There is blue cohosh, an herb monitored by the state as a rare species. Visitors in spring easily spot the Dutchman’s britches. The white flowers that resemble pants turned upside down are unmistakable.

The grove also boasts bloodroot, another spring flowering plant with delicate white flowers and toxic red sap that was once used to make dye. Jack-in-the-Pulpit is a well-known woodland species with a spike that pokes out of a pulpit-shaped spathe. The plant is sometimes confused with poison ivy because its three leaflets look similar.

The grove’s steep sideslopes have never seen a plow, so unique native plants still grow. Amid the bluestem and cordgrass is rough gayfeather, which sprouts purple, globular flowers in late summer. Another is prairie smoke, sometimes called torch flower or old man’s whiskers. It develops a wispy, pinkish red flower that looks like a puff of smoke.

People around White and nearby Hendricks, Minn., remember the grove as a high school hangout, but artifacts show its rich history goes back centuries. A French fur trapper working for the Hudson Bay Company and Indians lived in the grove before settlers arrived. For years a ring of large rocks 40 feet in diameter remained on the north edge, not far from an Indian burial mound. A dispute between Indians and the trapper in the early 1860s brought the U.S. Cavalry, which built fortifications in the grove. Old ammunition and entrenchments survived for decades.

“There’s the hanging tree,” Simmons said, pointing out an old, dead cottonwood that seemed out of place among the tall, lush oaks. In the late 1800s a local teenager was the victim of frontier justice. He was hanged in the grove for stealing a horse. Jesse James, a far more prominent outlaw, supposedly used the grove’s thick cover to hide from a posse after his gang’s unsuccessful bank robbery in Northfield, Minn., in 1876.

Gilley’s Grove is named for A.C. Gilley, who owned the land during the 1930s. Before that it was called Warren’s Woods, for owner Washington Warren, and Day’s Timber for George Day, who became the first settler in the grove when he arrived around 1870. About that time a log cabin made from the grove’s native oak trees was built, either by Day or the trapper. It has been restored and now stands in White. Other families called the grove home as well, but an old barn and chicken coop are the only buildings left.

Simmons and seven other men bought the 560 acres surrounding Gilley’s Grove primarily for hunting, but they often spend summer weekends picnicking and riding horses through the thick oak trees. As more people hear about the grove, Simmons gets calls asking for tours.”I’ve taken a lot of people out here who did not know this type of thing existed in eastern South Dakota,” Simmons says.

He’ll give tours any time, but spring is best to experience the grove’s uniqueness and diversity.”You have to go there during the growing season just to appreciate the extent of it and how different it is,” says Larson, the SDSU botanist.”You just wouldn’t guess you were in South Dakota.”

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the May/June 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.