Tag: hill city

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How Palmer’s Gulch Raised a Professor

By Bernie Hunhoff

Ruth Ziolkowski once told our writer Paul Higbee that she doesn’t feel a need to travel outside the Black Hills because “anybody you could ever want to meet will eventually come here.”

The attraction of outsiders to our mountain valleys also explains how Watson Parker, a child of Hill City, became professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin. Watson is also the author of several books, including the hiker/cult classic “Black Hills Ghost Towns.” He is one of your very favorite South Dakotans, unless you don’t know him. And last but not least, he was inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame a few weeks ago.

A few years ago, Watson explained to me why he aspired to a career in academia. “In the 1940s my family was running Palmer Gulch Lodge near Hill City,” he said. “We generally had a lot of vacationing professors from the University of Minnesota, so after-dinner converations on the terrace were learned and lively.

“Chief among the professors was Richard M. Elliot of the psychology department. My dad had known him at Dartmouth, where they were classmates. One evening when I was about 10 years of age, Dr. Elliot and a fellow academic were discussing Roman history. One of them quoted Cato the Elder as saying, ‘delando est Carthago,’ to which another raised an objection, insisting that he’d really said, “Carthaginem esse Delendam.’

“They began a spirited discussion in Latin and I listened with my ears wide open, and my mouth, too,” Watson said, “for there, in the heart of the Black Hills, a whole new vista of knowledge, learning and wisdom was opened for me.”

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The Original Badger Hole

South Dakota nearly lost our beloved poet’s first Black Hills cabin

By Shebby Lee

Badger Clark’s original Black Hills cabin (shown here) has been rescued by the Badger Clark Memorial Society.

The Badger Hole is missing! The cabin home of the cowboy poet, Badger Clark, located in Custer State Park has been demolished! No, it has not been demolished, it has been moved. But where? And why? Rumors are flying about the former home of beloved cowboy poet, Badger Clark, and it’s time to take the wraps off the mystery.

Most South Dakotans know about the state’s first Poet Laureate, the charismatic cowboy known as Badger Clark (full name: Charles Badger Clark, Jr.). During the first half of the twentieth century he lived and worked in a cabin in Custer State Park, writing evocative Western poetry and speaking to countless graduates across the state and region. His cabin was known as the Badger Hole, and the park maintains it today just as he left it, for visitors and school children to visit during the summer season.

But there was another Badger Hole, a one-room cabin that Badger Clark lived in from 1924-1937 while building his permanent four room cabin nearby. Badger Clark did not build that little cabin and never actually owned it. After his tenure, it was moved, changed hands many times, was added on to, and eventually ended up in the hands of the Badger Clark Memorial Society, which used the wings for a caretaker’s residence and storage, while returning the original central room to the way it looked when Badger Clark lived there.

In recent years the wings of the older cabin became unstable and the park added it to its list of surplus property slated to be torn down. This triggered a frantic effort to save the edifice — or at least the original central portion — as a piece of South Dakota history. After many months of negotiations, an agreement was reached between Custer State Park and the Badger Clark Memorial Society under which the park agreed to demolish the wings, if the society would move the main cabin out of the park.

The society set about finding a suitable location where the cabin could not only be preserved but serve an appropriate role. The park upheld their end of the bargain and prepared the cabin to move, but negotiations with various entities for the cabin’s new home were inconclusive. So Society Vice President Paul Jensen of Wasta, arranged to have the cabin removed from the park without a definite place for it to go. Society member Dorothy Delicate of Custer offered her land as a temporary resting spot, but somehow it never got there.

Enter Linda Flounders, owner of the historic Newton Fork Ranch, located on Deerfield Road, 1/2 mile from Hill City’s Main Street. Linda is slowly restoring the 18 acre property comprised of six full round log cabins built in 2000, a large picnic shelter plus her grandparents’ 1912 home. Her grandmother was a prolific writer, albeit unpublished, and her uncle Paul Lippman, from whom she purchased the property, was a published writer and held several workshops on the property in the 1980s. Writing is obviously highly revered in her family. When Linda built the cabins at Newton Fork Ranch, it was with the intention of creating a writers retreat. As such, the cabins do not have telephones or television sets. Linda has placed the original Badger Hole on an undeveloped lower portion to the ranch property along the Mickelson Trail and incorporated it into her writers retreat.

Why all this fuss over a dilapidated old shack? Well, for one thing history was made there. Not only was it the home of South Dakota’s first Poet Laureate for 13 years, but his first book of poetry on South Dakota subjects — Skylines and Wood Smoke — was written there. Badger Clark also wrote prose, including contributions to the South Dakota Writer’s Project, a Depression-era compendium which was almost certainly written while residing in that one-room cabin. His letters to the editor were frequently printed in Hills papers, and his poetry was published in national magazines such as Scribner’s, Outing, Arizona Highways, Sunset, the Pacific Monthly and the South Dakota Poetry Society‘s Pasque Petals, during this period.

The cabin is a part of South Dakota history. After a season of drift it has finally found a home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shebby Lee is a writer, Black Hills tour guide and member of the Badger Clark Memorial Society in Rapid City. For more information, contact the society at 343-4852. The society website is www.badgerclark.org.


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Improving with Age

Hill City’s heralded winemakers trace their heritage to 19th Century Mobridge

By Katie Hunhoff

Prairie Berry Winery relocated from Mobridge to Hill City in 2004. Larger tanks let Sandi Vojta experiment with wines and begin the fusion label, which blends two fermentations into another style of wine.

Sandi Vojta became a fifth-generation winemaker at the age of four when she experimented with yeast and fermentation. Her dad would take her out to pick chokecherries for wine, tying a piece of twine with a pail attached around her waist so she could pick berries with both hands.”But my favorite part was, and still is, getting the fermentations started; getting the first smell of the fruit’s potential.”

“It has been a way of life. It’s just who I am,” she says. Neither she nor her father has copied a recipe for the family wines.”Instead, we used a taste of the wine that he grew up with. When he made his wine he was trying to replicate that taste, so that is what I tried to do with my wine,” she says.

The winery won a double gold medal at the 2011 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition for its Brianna wine in the white hybrid category. The Brianna grapes are grown at Lewis and Clark Vineyard in Yankton. Their wines have been winning awards at prestigious wine shows for years.”It’s awesome because people are paying attention to the state of South Dakota, and it’s great for our entire state’s wine industry,” Sandi says.

Prairie Berry currently makes about 30 varieties of wine — including the popular, funky Red Ass Rhubarb. The Hill City winemakers are branching out into new tastes, including a fermentation made from West River prickly pear to be released this fall. Vojta has a flavor vision of what she wants to accomplish with each new wine.”Sometimes I feel like I nail it the first time around. For others, I feel like I’m just getting closer to the vision with each release. I’m always trying to make things better. I’m never content.”

Perfect Pairings

Sandi Vojta’s parents taught her how to make wine and how to cook.”We grew up eating a lot of chili, and mom often followed it with steamed apple dumplings,” she says. This dumpling recipe is her mom’s, and the chili is”pretty close to what she used to make.” Vojta chose these recipes as perfect pairings for her Buffaloberry Fusion, Gold Digger and Crab Apple wines.

White Bean Chili

Pair Vojta’s chili with Prairie Berry’s Buffaloberry Fusion wine.

Serves 2 – 4
Paired with Prairie Berry’s Buffaloberry Fusion wine

1/4 yellow onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 cup no-salt added crushed tomatoes (not drained)
4 tablespoons canned chopped green salsa
1 cup water
1 cup canned Great Northern beans, drained and rinsed
Juice from 1/2 lime

SautÈ onion, garlic, Italian seasoning, and cumin in oil over medium heat for 3 minutes. Add tomatoes, green salsa, water and beans, and bring to boil. (If desired, add 2 ounces cooked ground turkey or diced chicken breast.) Simmer 10 minutes, and serve with lime juice on top.

Steamed Apple Dumpling

Try Prairie Berry’s Gold Digger or Crab Apple wine with these apple dumplings.

Serves 6 – 8
Paired with Prairie Berry’s Gold Digger or Crab Apple wine

2 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons vegetable shortening
3/4 cup milk
1 quart boiling sweetened apple sauce

Bring the applesauce to a boil in a non-stick Dutch oven. Sift together the dry ingredients, rub in the shortening with fingertips keeping the mixture coarse. Moisten with the milk, mix, turn onto a floured board and pat to one-half inch thickness. Shape with a biscuit cutter and place in the boiling apple sauce.

Cover tightly and boil 20 minutes. Additional sugar and cinnamon may be added to the boiling applesauce if desired.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the May/June 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.