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A Legacy in Lead

By Paul Higbee

Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s many philanthropic endeavors in Lead included the Homestake Opera House, which opened in 1914.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst died in 1918, several decades before Linda Wiley was born, but their paths crossed in the small Black Hills community of Lead.

Linda studied Phoebe’s writings and accounts of her business and philanthropic ventures and brought her to life through a production on Lead’s Historic Homestake Opera House. Linda believes South Dakotans should know about this remarkable woman who made a big impact in the Black Hills. When Phoebe’s husband George Hearst (mining entrepreneur, U.S. senator from California and fictionalized villain in the HBO TV series Deadwood) died, his 48-year-old widow inherited every penny of his considerable wealth. She gave much of it away.

Her belief in helping those in need could be traced to when she and George lived in San Francisco in 1873, the year an economic depression gripped the country. The couple got by okay,”because of the mines. People in San Francisco fared worse and when I witnessed the impact on the city and families, my philosophy changed towards wanting to help the needy, for I realized I could help,” Phoebe said.

Okay, let me clarify. Phoebe said that in Linda’s script and through Minneapolis actress Kathleen Dodsen Smith’s interpretation. And Jon Steven Wiley, Linda’s actor husband, had a hand in things, too, as script editor. Dramatizing history is a complex matter but a great way to communicate true stories to a mass audience, if the writer, performer and script editor are skilled and conscientious. I can personally vouch for these three. Linda combines a love of the Black Hills with a professional ethic that insists on accuracy. I’ll explain before the end of this column but right now I don’t want to drift too far from Phoebe.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst.

Phoebe considered George’s mining ventures across the West to be immune to the boom-and-bust phenomenon. Homestake grew continually, and after George’s death, Phoebe went to Lead and took a look. She invested in a private railway car she called the Lucania and traveled in comfort. Liking and apparently feeling somewhat maternalistic towards Lead’s people, she began sending $200 (nearly $6,000 in today’s dollars) to all 12 Lead churches every Christmas. She also endowed a fine library and was an advocate for what we now call early childhood education; Phoebe established a free kindergarten in the community. Some critics have looked at her love of Lead and her humanitarian gestures overall and wondered if she couldn’t have done more to prevent community hardship that stemmed from Homestake’s labor lockout over the winter of 1909-10. Whatever the case, Lead didn’t seem to direct anger toward her. Homestake’s board of directors in San Francisco took most of those barbs. Phoebe, meanwhile, rode the Lucania across the United States supporting a wide range of interests, from restoration of George Washington’s Mount Vernon home in Virginia to development of the University of California at Berkeley. She was the first woman to serve as a University of California regent.”I attributed my success in a man’s world of that time to politeness, clear goals, and sheer determination,” Phoebe says in Linda’s script. That style, Linda thinks, likely stunted Phoebe’s effectiveness as a suffragette, although that’s certainly where her sentiments were.

Her last gift to Lead, working with mine superintendent T.J. Grier, was the Homestake recreation building and opera house. In the script Phoebe expresses satisfaction with how Lead responded to an opening night opera in 1914:”I heard that there was standing room only with employees from the mine and their children!”

Historians have mostly overlooked Phoebe’s relationship with South Dakotans. Even Alexandria Nickliss’s fine biography, Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life of Power and Politics, only briefly touches on Lead in 664 pages. Thankfully, another California writer, Leta Miller, has written about Phoebe for the South Dakota State Historical Society, and the Homestake Adams Research and Cultural Center has archived South Dakota press accounts about Phoebe’s connections here.

All were resources for Linda, a native South Dakotan and meticulous researcher. She worked as a manager for Caterpillar, Inc., for 30 years across the United States and around the world. All the while, she and Jon knew they would retire to the Black Hills. They found their spot 7 miles outside Lead, and like Phoebe, quickly developed affection for the town. Both volunteered at the opera house that Phoebe made possible, and Linda served for a time on its board and then as president.

And she became a Phoebe Hearst expert. That’s very much a necessity in a town where residents told me the opera house — Phoebe’s final grand gift — is the very heart of the community.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Homestake’s Pit Ponies

By Chuck Cecil

“Old Smoky was hitched to a train of carts, each loaded with gold-laden ore headed to a Homestake elevator 400 feet underground in 1908.

Homestake Gold Mine depended on manpower in its early years, but in 1889 seven horses and 15 snorting mules were sent down its candlelit shafts.

Sometimes referred to as”pit ponies,” Homestake’s horses were lowered into the mine as fillies. The remuda eventually reached about 90 head. Once inside, most of the horses never again saw the light of day, although a few were trundled topside during fires, miners’ strikes and for rare promotional purposes.

Lifting or lowering the horrified horses to or from workstations thousands of feet underground was difficult. The elevator’s small size as well as the horses’ flighty dispositions were not conducive to noisy, rocky rides, so they were bound head to hoof in wide leather strappings. Their eyes were covered to help calm them. The 3-inch-wide harness held them in what resembled a sitting position, like an apple hanging in a stocking. This package of nearly a ton of horseflesh was fastened to the underside of a vertical shaft elevator. The signal was given and away they went, headfirst and squirming. The practice was considered the most humane because there was no pulling force bound to the horse’s neck or head.

Homestake wasn’t alone in its need for underground horsepower, although only a few of the more than 300 other mines in the Black Hills used horses underground. Those four-legged and faithful power sources at Homestake spent their lives in darkness, plodding through dank tunnels, using steel rails and memory as their guides to the ore dumping stations. On 10-hour shifts, they pulled rattling trains comprised of as many as eight, single-hitch, four-wheeled ore carts, each loaded with about a ton of gold-bearing rock.

Every miner was issued three candles to light their way during the long shift; the horses also depended on those tiny flickering flames. Hay, oats and water for the horses was lowered to roughly built wooden stables sited at key points along each mining level. Veterinarians, harness makers and blacksmiths were always nearby if needed. Walking on rough, sharp mine debris meant the horses required regular shoeing.

Not all Homestake horses were destined to a lifelong assignment underground. In the 20-year horse era at Homestake, some lucky ones were rewarded with visits to the surface and temporarily blinding daylight. During an 1893 mine fire, horses working in that area of the mine were brought above ground until the fire was doused.

A miner’s strike in 1906 posed a problem for mine bosses because the strike did not allow union workers to enter the mine, though the animals had to be fed and watered. Until the walkout was settled, all the nearly 90 horses were brought to the surface for an unscheduled vacation. It is said that the horses, once out of the mine, had to be taught how to eat green grass again.

Homestake Mine mascot “Teddy” was born 300 feet underground on May 26, 1902. The colt was named after Theodore Roosevelt, then in his second year as president.

A surprising turn of events occurred in the early morning hours of May 26, 1902 when a colt was foaled at the 300-foot level. Underground births were not expected since all the horses below ground were mares. Apparently one mare had been impregnated before she was lowered to Level Three.

Homestake officials took advantage of the opportunity to impress then President Theodore Roosevelt as well as the thousands expected to attend Lead’s 1902 Fourth of July celebration. The two-month-old foal was brought to the surface. Named Teddy in honor of the president, it became the hit of the holiday. Teddy was never assigned underground work.

To help the City of Lead stage its 1903 Labor Day celebration, a veteran mare named Mollie that had worked in the mine for 14 years was selected to make the trip to the top and be featured in a Homestake Mine display. Her eventual work assignment was not disclosed, but it is doubtful that she was returned to her former purgatory. She probably joined the surface herd, re-learned how to eat grass and enjoyed the rest of her life working daylight hours.

Soon after Mollie’s hoist to sunlight, the last of the horses working underground also made the upward journey. By that time, improved underground transport systems rendered real horsepower obsolete in pit mining. Steam engines were the first mechanized replacement, followed by compressed air, battery and electrical inventions. With each improvement, fewer pit ponies were needed. Gradually, horses were retired and hauled to the surface. The phaseout began in 1908, though horses played a role in the mine’s surface work well into the 1950s.

The mine closed in 2002. Now in its depths is the Sanford Underground Research Facility, where scientists search for neutrinos and dark matter — particles so tiny, mysterious and elusive that brainpower is in higher demand than horsepower.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Victim’s Daughter

By Paul Higbee

Musty smelling and crumbling, Black Hills newspapers of April 1917 report names that confirm their age. President Woodrow Wilson calls for an all-out American effort to win the World War. Former President Teddy Roosevelt suggests sending gung-ho, mature veterans into combat. Closer to home Robert Tallent, credited by the papers as”the first white boy in the Black Hills,” dies.

Only a few Black Hills residents knew the names Martin Conheeney and Eimel Joukkuri before April 25, 1917–the date the Lead Daily Call reported a deadly encounter between the two. The night before at about 9:30, just inside the Terraville tunnel, Joukkuri shot Conheeney. Then he walked to a police station at Mill and Main in Lead, turned himself in, and was placed under arrest.

The tunnel, long gone, once ran nearly a mile through a mountain ridge and connected Lead and Terraville. It was Homestake Gold Mine property and pedestrians regularly used it. But the mine built the tunnel so a train — a little air powered tram — could haul ore into Lead. If a pedestrian met the train in the tunnel, says Lead historian Wayne Paananen, he would have to back against the wall and watch the engine and ore cars pass within a foot. So guards were instructed to keep people out of the tunnel when the train was due, especially if they appeared intoxicated.

Joukkuri was one of those Homestake guards and Conheeney an off-duty Homestake explosives expert.

“Shortly after his arrest and before being advised to remain silent regarding the circumstances of the killing,” reported the Call,”Joukkuri made a statement to Chief of Police Keffler, in which he said that immediately before the trouble, he was on duty in the entrance of the tunnel and probably 60 feet away from the roundhouse where the concrete work of the tunnel begins, when Conheeney came through from the Lead end of the tramway, on his way into the tunnel. Conheeney was under the influence of liquor…”

Conheeney’s family and friends would later fight the notion that he was drunk. But in the hours after the shooting, Joukkuri’s statement looked like a fact in the Lead Daily Call.

Joukkuri said he told Conheeney to stop, the Call continued. Conheeney”paid no attention to Joukkuri’s admonition, but proceeded on his way, and the guard followed him. They exchanged blows and grappled, both going to the ground. Joukkuri stated that Conheeney had the better of him in the encounter, and attempted to choke him; that they got to their feet and Conheeney struck him with a bottle of liquor which he carried, landing a blow on the side of the guard’s head.”

In Joukkuri’s trial it would emerge that the liquor was for Conheeney’s wife, Mary, intended for medicinal use.

Joukkuri told police he ran for help after the struggle. George Hart, watchman and boiler engineer, added that Joukkuri bolted into his boiler room off the tunnel with a bloodied head and torn clothing. Hart couldn’t make out what Joukkuri told him, he explained, because working close to Homestake’s stamp mill left him a bit deaf. But Joukkuri’s condition certainly communicated trouble. Hart and Joukkuri stepped into the tunnel, Hart going first, and they spotted Conheeney. Hart said Conheeney threw a rock their direction, then charged toward Joukkuri. Hart claimed he tried grabbing Conheeney but missed.

Joukkuri, revolver in hand, fired two shots. One, Lead police determined, missed. The other hit Conheeney in the left temple and he fell against the tunnel wall and into a sitting position, dead.

The newspaper reported all this in great detail within hours, but there was more that the public didn’t learn for a while. Conheeney was 33, married with a young son and daughter, and had another baby on the way. At Joukkuri’s trial it was established that Conheeney was taking liquor to his wife, and witnesses from the Lead saloon where he bought the spirits said he left sober. Joukkuri’s shooting of an unarmed man didn’t sit well with the jury. It convicted the guard of manslaughter and sentenced him to hard labor at the state penitentiary.

Court records and press reports referred to Joukkuri as Finnish and Conheeney as Irish (both, in fact, were immigrants) and there’s been speculation that the references implied ethnic tension between those groups. But historian Paananen says identifying residents in remarkably cosmopolitan Lead by nationality was common practice during those years, even in Homestake employee records, and in this case probably implied nothing. It’s worth noting the family that first came to Conheeney’s widow’s aid that tragic night was Finnish (the Macki family).

Jim Dunn, former Homestake employee and state legislator, has taken interest in the case for reasons revealed later in this article. He thinks the tragedy resulted simply because of”an overzealous guard and a man who stubbornly insisted he was going home as quickly as possible to his sick wife.”

The widow, Mary Conheeney, took her three children (including a daughter her husband never met) home to Ireland in 1919. She had to wait for the war’s end before it was safe to cross Atlantic waters. Her middle child, Nora, was six in 1919 and would recall a rough crossing and terrible seasickness.

Seventy-five years passed. The tram system for hauling ore through the mountain ceased operation and pedestrians had the Terraville tunnel all to themselves for several years. Eventually sections of the tunnel were filled in, or lost to the expanding Homestake open cut mine. The open cut wiped away Terraville, too.

Then in 1994 Deadwood Mayor Bruce Oberlander received a strange letter. It came addressed to the”Lord Mayor, Deadwood City,” definitely a first. It bore an Athlone, Ireland postmark, and asked about”Lead City.” The letter-writer’s last name, written in pen, was hard to make out. It appeared perhaps to be Ryan. The first name, though, was unmistakable: Nora.

Nora Conheeney Ryan was in good spirits when she returned to the Black Hills, 77 years after her father’s murder.

That’s where Jim Dunn and his wife, Betty, entered the story. The mayor’s wife, Mary Ann, knew the Dunns had traveled in Ireland. Perhaps, she thought, they’d know Athlone’s location. As it turned out Jim and Betty had stayed in an Athlone bed and breakfast and knew the owner. In a plot development that would be laughed out of any fiction piece, the Dunns called their Athlone friend. She told them Nora Ryan lived less than a mile up the road. This was Nora Conheeney Ryan, Martin and Mary’s middle child. At age 81 she had decided it was time to return to the Black Hills, and maybe arrange for a new headstone for her father’s grave.

The Dunns promised to help any way they could. It was, says Betty, the beginning of a friendship that would shortly feel like a family relationship — and would continue feeling that way over the years. On Aug. 22, 1994, Nora landed at Rapid City Regional Airport and raised her hands in triumph. Two daughters, a son-in-law, and a friend from California accompanied her.

“I shall never forget my trip to South Dakota,” Nora later wrote.”It was the most challenging and wonderful thing I ever did. With Jim’s help, finding my father’s grave was the greatest moment of my life.”

Former state legislator Jim Dunn (pictured with his wife, Betty, at Martin Conheeney’s grave) believes the tragedy resulted from “an overzealous guard and a man who stubbornly insisted he was going home to his sick wife.”

They found it in South Lead Cemetery. Nora didn’t have to arrange for a headstone. The original stood in beautiful condition.

That wasn’t all Nora found. The Dunns made phone calls and the past 75 years melted away. Hubert McGrath stopped by with a photo of his parents, John and Margaret McGrath, who were Nora’s godparents when she was baptized at Lead’s St. Patrick Catholic Church. Nora recognized the faces in the photo immediately. She brought some pictures of her own, including that of a house between Deadwood and Spearfish. It once belonged to her father’s cousin and Nora recalled spending pleasant summer days there. Jim called Spearfish historian Linfred Schuttler, who in turn pulled Jim Riggs into the search.”Jim knew right away where the house was, north and east of the Spearfish airport,” Linfred recalls.”It had been a stagecoach stop on the old Spearfish to Whitewood line.” Nora visited the home and recognized it right away as she approached–right down to the trees in the yard.

“She sure had a memory,” Betty Dunn says.”What do I remember from when I was four years old? She remembered everything — sights, smells, sounds.”

And tastes. Betty was able to fulfill a menu request that Nora associated with her Black Hills childhood: corn on the cob and watermelon.

Joukkuri’s trial records surfaced easily. The Lawrence County courthouse had just been refurbished and the city of Deadwood took possession of its historical documents. The records held a surprise. Joukkuri appealed his manslaughter conviction, claiming self-defense, and won.

“He walked away from that sentence,” says Jim Dunn.”Nora didn’t know that and it was the only sour note on her whole trip, finding out he’d been released. But she wasn’t bitter. She said, ëWhat is done is done.'”

Of course, just as Black Hills life moved along with twists and turns for 75 years, so did Nora’s life across the sea. Her mother actually planned to return and raise her children in South Dakota after the 1919 trip home. But Mary Conheeney ended up staying in Ireland where she was embraced by a loving, supportive extended family. Nora became a teacher, married fellow teacher Martin Ryan, and raised a family of six. Late in life, after her husband’s death, Nora hoped to see the Black Hills again. She no longer knew anyone there, however. Deeply religious, she told God the trip would be possible only if he designated South Dakota friends and guides. That’s what happened, and she later reflected that the trip helped her understand a sadness she carried her entire life.

Nora returned to Ireland after a week, lived another 12 years, and took special delight in Jim and Betty’s visits to Athlone. From afar she kept an eye on the Black Hills.”Everyone appreciates an honest man,” she observed when Jim won another term in the state senate. In 2001, after the mine that employed her father closed, she wrote,”Farewell Homestake — it gave us lots of headaches.” Read into that what you will, but she probably referred to the same pounding stamp mill noise that hurt George Hart’s hearing.

What most impressed Nora’s South Dakota friends was that she didn’t want to forget the Black Hills after the family tragedy, but hoped to embrace her childhood home. And it wasn’t just a gravestone, house, and corn-on-the-cob she sought, but people.

“She could imagine making those kinds of connections in Ireland, but not in the United States, because America is so very vast,” says Tina Burke, one of Nora’s daughters who flew with her to South Dakota.”When she first thought about the trip, she believed it was unlikely she could even find the grave.”

Adds Jim Dunn,”There are very few strong ties these days, even among families. People are always moving around, cutting ties. Who could ever have guessed that looking for that grave would result in the close tie we have with Nora’s family?”

It’s an ending to the tragedy that reporters couldn’t have imagined as they studied grim police and coroner reports in 1917.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.