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Abandoned

By Michael Heintz

Dad came home to Harrold from the South Pacific in 1946 when I was 4 and bought a 1929 Model A Ford that had been converted from a sedan to a pickup. I can still smell the interior and feel the big steering wheel. He let me sit on his lap and try to drive.

Baseball was the thing in those post-war summers. Dad would load a calf tank in the Model A and we’d go out to Beckett’s icehouse for straw-covered chunks of winter-cut ice. We’d fill the tank with water and pop and go to the ballpark before the game. I sold a lot of pop for the VFW from the back of that Ford.

Grandpa had two big tractors with steel wheels and a threshing machine. He wore a striped engineer cap on weekdays and a white Stetson on Sundays. He had a 1934 Ford coupe and he liked to drive fast. I wanted that car so bad and hoped to buy it someday, but he traded it for a blue 1949 Buick Roadmaster. Grandpa took me along when he tested the Buick. He ran it up to 90 mph and then without as much as a grin said,”that’ll do.”

A rancher bought the coupe and nearly wrecked it chasing jackrabbits and coyotes. I bought it for $35 when I was 12 and pulled it into town. That worried Dad. He was a horse guy. The idea of me having a car scared him, so he went into collusion with the Ford mechanic and made sure I got some bad advice so I couldn’t get it to run. I didn’t hear about that until years later.

The first car I got that would run was a’46 Mercury. It was a two-door sedan, Navy blue with a Flat-head Eight. I drove it four or five years all through high school at Harrold, where I graduated in 1961.

Then I studied at Northern State in Aberdeen from 1962 to 1967 and took every art class they offered. I went to California to be an art teacher. I used to dream of its beautiful beaches, girls, hot rods and motorcycles. Forty years later I’ve seen them all.

I became sad and sentimental as I watched the old cars and trucks of my youth slow down and finally stop to languish behind a barn or a grove of trees. Then, like the old-timers who drove them, one day they are gone. I missed them, so I bought a camera and began the journey of photographing abandoned vehicles in a romantic way. I was a painter with a camera. I laughed when my photography teacher said it would be my life’s work. Someday I intend to turn the series, which I title”Abandoned,” into a book. The first image in the book will be a family photograph of me and my mom and dad and my next-oldest brother, taken in 1947 in front of our first family car. I found that very vehicle some 50 years later. It was north of Harrold on an old farm with a collection of other stuff. And in 2008, when I came home, it was gone. I didn’t think it would ever move, but some guy in Highmore bought it for parts.

The picture of our family is special to me because it says something about that post-war period. My dad went through an awful part of the war and made it home, and there he is with his family.

My images are about the West — the dreams, the struggles and finally the rust. All of them have a mystery. They are about a different time when things were easier to understand and easier to love. It has been a wonderful adventure. I’ve crossed from Minnesota to California and Montana to Mexico, mostly in my’62 Ford truck,”Buster,” my best pal.

When I’m back in South Dakota, I drive dad’s’71 Ford pickup. We bought it new from Pioneer Garage in Highmore and when he passed away it was mine. I’ve driven it a lot, and my friends in Harrold store it for me when I’m gone.

I come back to South Dakota every year. I still have the farm, Dad’s pickup truck, family and friends. Maybe someday I’ll come back to stay.

Editor’s Note: Michael Heintz lives in Dana Point, Calif., where he designs and creates jewelry. This story is revised from the November/December 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Hyde County: Always Divided

By John Andrews

The first major story I wrote after joining South Dakota Magazine in the fall of 2007 was about the slow and steady loss of native prairie. Producers were digging into ground that had never seen a plow in order to plant corn and beans that would eventually be sold for incredible prices.

Ground Zero for native prairie loss was Hyde County. Bernie Hunhoff and I made the four-hour drive on a clear October morning. He walked around Highmore while I traveled another 30 miles north to Brady and Wendy Rinehart’s ranch. We rode cross-country in the Rineharts’ ranch truck and saw freshly turned ground, littered with huge rocks, while native prairie remained on the other side of a barbed wire fence.

The photo of that scene inspired the headline”Hyde County Divide,” but it wasn’t until long after the article was published that I learned that division has been a part of the county since its very beginning. Hyde County was first created in 1873 and named for territorial legislator James Hyde of Vermillion. Its borders were changed with passage of the Brown Bill in 1879. Lawmaker Alfred Brown of Hutchinson County sought to consolidate his county with Armstrong County and found considerable support for other consolidations throughout the territory. His bill essentially redrew the territorial map and gave many of our counties the shape we recognize today.

Division came when Governor Nehemiah Ordway, a notorious schemer, officially recognized the new Hyde County in 1883. When 150 people had established residence there, they petitioned Ordway to appoint three county commissioners to begin conducting business. Ordway, planning to benefit if the county seat was placed at Holabird, appointed L.E. Whitcher and John Falde from Holabird and A.E. Van Camp, owner of the Highmore town site. But then Ordway changed his mind and favored a town site 2 miles east of Holabird on land belonging to J.S. Harris. He expected his appointed commissioners would carry out his wishes, but he learned that Falde and Van Camp planned to vote for Highmore. Ordway responded by revoking Falde’s appointment in favor of George Dunham.

Gov. Nehemiah Ordway brought his scheming ways to Hyde County in 1883.

That led to the creation of two county commissions, each conducting business on opposite sides of Highmore. Whitcher and Dunham continued as Ordway’s puppets and were challenged by Falde and Van Camp. The Ordway group held an organizational meeting and passed a resolution calling Falde and Van Camp bogus commissioners. In the meantime, the Falde-Van Camp commission also met, organized a slate of county officers and passed their own resolution denouncing the Whitcher commission. The dueling boards eventually dissolved in September 1884. Whitcher and Van Camp then joined to form the first real Hyde County Commission.

When we visited in 2007, traces of another division were still evident. In 1882, Van Camp and rival businessman E.O. Parker each created his own business district in Highmore. Van Camp’s development was spread along Iowa Avenue, while Parker settled on Commercial. Most of Highmore’s businesses are still located on those two streets.”It is a challenge to have two main streets,” Mayor Vikki Day told us.”We’re too spread out for the number of stores and businesses we have, and it becomes a lot to keep up for a small city.”

The agricultural divide was clear. When we visited, South Dakota farmers were plowing 50,000 acres of native grassland every year. Over 7,300 acres had been lost in Hyde County alone from 2003 to 2007. Most ranchers we talked to were sorry to see the prairies disappearing, but understood the farmers’ motivations.

Hyde County was “ground zero” for native grassland loss.

To counter the loss, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has purchased easements protecting roughly 25,000 acres in Hyde County, and hundreds more East River landowners are on a waiting list. One such preserve south of Highmore is named for June Harter, a noted area conservationist. When she died in June 2002, the fate of the Harter family ranch fell to her four children. Three of them lived in California, but Richard had just returned to Highmore from Boston after a career in software. They decided to sell, but none of the siblings wanted the land plowed.”It didn’t take me long, once I got back here, to realize what they were doing to the prairies,” Richard told us.”We knew that this was grassland and we knew that it was good ranching country. To see it plowed up for nothing would have been a real offense to our family traditions.”

The Harters contacted representatives from the Fish and Wildlife Service, who soon discovered the land was a waterfowl hotbed. Instead of purchasing easements, the service bought 1,400 acres and created a waterfowl production area.

Richard Harter and his sisters turned their family ranch south of Highmore into a protected waterfowl production area.

Controversy hasn’t always reigned in Hyde County. Its citizens have a streak of light-heartedness. Before his death in 2012, Harter operated a quirky website called Richard Harter’s World, complete with editorials, jokes and witty exchanges with people all around the globe. Another enterprising publisher is Jerry Hinkle, founder of the Holabird Advocate, an online newsletter for the unorganized village west of Highmore. Hinkle launched the Advocate in 2002 and immediately tackled the controversial issue of nude dancing in Highmore. He contemplated a protest but relented. He explained why in an editorial.

“After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that Highmore will do what Highmore will do. … Hinkle was going to protest nude dancing by removing his own clothes at the establishment in question. Of course he said that when it was a whole lot warmer outside.”

Hinkle has moved to Mitchell, but he still posts periodically on a Facebook page.

Then there was this exchange when Bernie Hunhoff tried to track down John Zilverberg. Locals told him that Zilverberg was a national horseshoe champion. Bernie found him and his brother David, both in their 90s, playing pool at the senior center.

Jerry Hinkle: prairie publisher.

“I hear you’re a national horseshoe champion,” Bernie said to John.

“No.”

“You don’t throw horseshoes?”

“No.”

After a long, friendly silence, John admitted he had competed in the Senior Olympics.

“Did you throw horseshoes in the Senior Olympics?”

“No.”

“What did you do in the Senior Olympics?”

It turned out that he’d won 16 gold medals in a variety of events.

“But you don’t throw horseshoes?”

“No.”

Then, after another friendly silence, he tilted his head towards his brother and said,”He does.”

It took some work, but we discovered David had won the national championship several times over the previous decade. I’m sure the Zilverbergs enjoyed the chance to have a little fun with an out-of-towner. David passed away in 2010, but as of this writing John, age 102, is still competing in the Senior Games.

Hyde County also has its claim to fame. Two clever brothers from Ohio spent their summers in the 1890s with an uncle who lived just a few miles from Holabird. The uncle’s daughter, Clara, taught Sunday School, but when her cousins came to visit she turned the teaching over to them. They were more than qualified; their father was a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.

The Wright brothers were summer visitors to Hyde County.

The brothers were intelligent and mechanically gifted. They took pleasure in tinkering and improving machines and in coming up with new inventions. Mildred France was barely a teenager when the boys started coming to South Dakota. She recalled their summertime visits in her diary, which was reprinted in the Hyde County history book.”With them, they carried their many models, which they delightfully showed and explained,” Mildred wrote, noting they had created versions of windmills, washing machines and churns.

“My young brothers would have cheerfully given their right arm to have had any one of those copper and brass models which the boys showed them,” she continued.”My brother came home so full of enthusiasm he went to work and built a windmill that would pump water from a large can sunken in the ground and flowed in a trough and back to the can from where it first started, less, what his little chickens would drink.”

The brothers had quite an influence on Holabird’s youth. It’s a sure bet, then, that the youngsters kept a close eye on the newspapers in December 1903, when Wilbur and Orville ó the Wright brothers ó made aviation history by successfully completing the first manned, powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Imagine if that flight had been made over the grasslands of Hyde County? Surely its people would have been proud. Maybe others would have chided the new-fangled invention as a passing fad. That seems to be the way things have gone in a county with an affinity for division.

Editor’s Note: This is the 18th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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The Blogmore Hunt

By Lee Schoenbeck

Photos by Jeremiah M. Murphy

For the last several years, sometime in November on a farm southwest of Holabird, a not-so-secret conclave gathers. Ostensibly their mission is to chase and bag the wily South Dakota ringneck. The Mount Blogmore hunt accomplishes that mission well each year and, even with loaded weapons in hand, it proves that the divide between red and blue in South Dakota is not too wide.

The Origins of the Hunt — a Wosterism

Somewhere along the interstate of life near Reliance, one of the infamous Woster brothers, this time Kevin, came up with the outrageous idea that political bloggers across the political spectrum could join together civilly, be properly armed, and share the bonds of friendship that are a natural by-product of a South Dakota pheasant hunt. Kevin is the founder of the political blog Mount Blogmore and the outdoor blog Take it Outside, hosted by the Rapid City Journal. Kevin is one of South Dakota’s founding brothers, the Wosters: Jim, Terry, Kevin and probably a few other siblings that haven’t been quite as newsworthy. Kevin’s politics lean a little left of center, he claims. But when you’re talking about somebody from Lyman County, left of center may just mean that they were a few days late with their annual John Birch Society dues.

The Place — as Blue as you can get in Hyde County

Kevin’s wife hails from Highmore, and through that relationship, Kevin is friends with Holabird rancher Nick Nemec. Nick’s not much into hunting, but he and his wife Mary Jo are lots into company and political talk around the dining room table. Nick’s got plenty of pheasants, which he is about as interested in chasing as he would be the beautiful blue jays that populate the shelterbelts by his home. But if company wants to visit and chase around his fields, then for a day, Nick’s a pheasant hunter. Between shelter belts, a few cattail sloughs, and sunflower fields, the Nemecs have the kind of traditional pheasant habitat that you only find with a real farmer who practices real conservation. It’s easy to find the Nemec farm in the fall in even years — just look for the only Democrat signs along Hwy 14 between Holabird and Harold, and turn south!

The Crew — Eclectic, Political and all South Dakotan

Birds, dogs and hunters of all political stripes at the 2009 Blogmore Hunt.

Kevin handles the invites. Just about anybody that’s posted on a blog and cared about South Dakota politics appears to be eligible, although the size of the crew of actual attendees ranges from 5 to 15. Tony Dean was at the first hunt. John Thune and Tom Daschle have been invited. This summer George McGovern was anointed the 2012 hunt captain — unfortunately that couldn’t come to fruition. Jon Lauck, Pat Powers, Bill Fleming, one of the Nielson brothers (of polling fame), and Doug Wiken are a few examples of politicos who have graced the hunt. Each of these would be colorful in his own right, but a few others stick out.

My son, Jake, has been along and asked me if the guy that said he was a Methodist-Buddhist (Todd Epp) really was such a thing. (And if so, what is that?) Jake also wanted to know if that Cory guy (Heidelberger) was serious when he said he didn’t carry a gun and shoot pheasants because he was a pacifist. (I assured him he was.) But my all-time favorite may have been the first year, when staunch defender of the right, Sibby (Steve Sibson), attended the hunt and missed five consecutive roosters my dogs put up in front of him. When I poked him later about the Second Amendment also including the requirement that you know how to bear a firearm well enough to hit a barn from the inside, he seemed to laugh along — but he never returned to another Blogmore hunt.

The Hunt — Who Could Captain this Ship?

Every good hunt I have ever been on has, at least unofficially, a person in charge to provide some order for these armed primates. Blogmore is an exception. The unofficial hunt photographer, Jeremiah M. Murphy of Rapid City (he’s not a pacifist — he’s just excellent at self-assessment and knows which weapon he shoots most capably) captured the organized disorganization in one of his candid shots accompanying this article.

In past hunts, I’ve gotten the credit for laying out a successful plan for hunting large sunflower fields with small groups (section it off and hunt it cross rows). Plus, since most of the dogs are mine — and all of the ones that behave are — I get to have my share of input. This year our gracious landowner did lay out a plan of attack that on its face looked crazy, but in spite of our inartful execution, worked brilliantly.

The temperature ranged from 9 to 17 degrees, and the wind was at least a steady twenty miles per hour from the west, with even stronger gust. With dogs, you always hunt into the wind so they have their best shot at trailing the birds’ scent. But Nick convinced us that when the birds flushed at Mach 1, the cover we wanted them to land in was his and it was to the east, so we needed to push them with the wind out of a cattail-filled dam and draw. Skeptically, we started into the cattails. To the east we had only three blockers, who were spread out over several hundred yards of pasture and draw. The walkers included me and my three labs on the north side, and Kevin, Nick and one very rangy spaniel thing named Rosie on the south side. What Rosie lacked in discipline she made up for in raw energy. Within less than two minutes Rosie had put dozens of pheasants into that jet stream headed east. Kevin and I each dropped one, and the blockers enjoyed many opportunities to fire their weapons — unburdened by the task of recovering downed birds.

And never bet against the landowner — the birds all came down in the shelterbelts to the east, still pleasantly huntable on the Nemec land.

The Meal — Stories Shared, Friendships Made and Renewed

Kevin Woster and Bill Walsh in the Nemec dining room.

After the hunt, the group gathers at the Nemec dining room table for a feast of chili and whatever else Mary Jo has chosen to warm the hearts and stoke the bodies for the discussions to come. In years past the debates and discussions have included such diverse topics as everybody telling their favorite Frank Kloucek story (that should be a book), to assessing the fall of Tom Daschle and the rise of John Thune on the political landscape. This year, for the first time, former congressional candidate Bill Walsh joined the hunt. It took some prodding, but he shared recollections from the 1978 Democratic US House primary.

With Woster moderating the discussion, as long as the chili holds out, the South Dakota stories flow at the Blogmore Hunt. Real friendships are made by the most unlikely of people. Personally, there’s a strange character from Rapid City named Bill Fleming that has become a close pen pal (or whatever we call keyboard friends now) ever since meeting at the early hunts.

The Secret to World Peace

As hunts go, when the wind chills are below zero, 5 hunters yielding 10 birds — and missing another hundred — is a good day. It may be a few days before the frostbite goes away, but the friendships, camaraderie and experience hand around for a lifetime.

The real magic of the Blogmore Hunt is the Red and Blue sharing that takes place at the Nemec dining room table. History is filled with examples of the healing power of this phenomenon. Senator Karl Mundt and his colleagues used a weekly poker game. President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill shared a bump on the back porch at that white house. So here’s my thought. Senators Johnson and Thune and Representative Noem should get the Nemecs to lend them the dining room table for a week, ship it to DC, have Mary Jo make a roaster of her chili and get Harry and Nancy and Mitch and John all together for a little bonding and bridge building, Blogmore style. It can’t hurt, and if they play nice, Kevin might invite them to the real Blogmore Hunt next year.

Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.


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The Great Hyde County Prairie Fire of 1947

By Johnny Bown

Editor’s Note: Third-generation rancher Johnny Bown sent this account of Hyde County’s devastating prairie fire to his mother-in-law in St. Louis 64 years ago. His daughter, Eileen Bown Just of Hoven, sent it to us in 2000. The September 1947 fire was apparently started by a cigarette flicked from a car on Highway 14 between Highmore and Holabird. It burned north northwest across 40 miles of prairie, almost to Lebanon.

The fire started about 30 miles south of us, and the wind brought it directly at us. Our house set in dry grass with prairie on all sides, so when I first saw the fire, there went all my hard work building the house.

Eventually the wind changed enough to push the fire to the east of our house one mile, so we were in luck. We had a cattle sprayer with a fire hose attachment, so we took it down to the fire, but it was no use. There were five fire trucks there already and they were helpless. It jumped wide highways and burned through green fields. There was no stopping it.

The whole country was just a black desert. My brothers Fred and Bob and the home place and ours were the only places it spared. The rest of the boys plus people from all over the state were fighting the fire, so I came back and got the saddle horse and took off to try to push the cattle into bare ground, but the doggone things were scared and wouldn’t drive. The fire was coming right toward them at about 25 miles per hour, so I had to get them out.

Finally I got them crowded into a dam when it came roaring through, so I high-tailed it for home with the fire chasing me all the way. The heat was terrific! Never loved a horse as much as old Smoky after he took me out of that fire.

We fought side fires all that night, next day, and new fires flared up next night. Rosemary was out with an old water-soaked coat fighting too. She looked so cute all smoky and black. Ha. Most of the time she was patrolling the fire in the car, watching for fresh ones. In all it burned over 1,000 square miles, so it was fight or get burned up.

We were lucky. At one time about 200 square miles right next to us was roaring at once. Cattle, horses, rabbits, pheasants — everything was running madly ahead of it. When you drive around this black desert and see the paint burned off the sides of ranch houses and buildings, you wonder how those people ever saved them with water buckets and wet rags.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.