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Lemmon: The Cowboy Capital

By Bernie Hunhoff

Lemmon embraces art, especially the sculptures of native son John Lopez, who created this statue of town founder Ed Lemmon.

If South Dakota built a tribute to the American cowboy, it might look like Lemmon. The little city that straddles the border of the two Dakotas has just 1,200 citizens, but it seems 10 times that size on days when there’s a rodeo or cattle auction. In fact, even on a slow day, Lemmon looks like our cowboy capital, though nobody there would use that term to describe their town because most cowboys won’t brag.

We tried to get Paul Huffman to speak philosophically on Lemmon’s prominence in the beef world, but the 77-year-old cowboy politely and plainly responded,”It’s big cattle country. It’s as simple as that.”

Huffman runs Lemmon Livestock, an auction barn that holds sales every Wednesday, and also on Thursdays during the fall and winter”cattle run,” when ranchers bring bawling spring calves to market. A big sale attracts hundreds of buyers and sellers and up to 6,000 head of cattle. Ranchers sip coffee and enjoy hot beef sandwiches — with homemade gravy and real mashed potatoes — in a restaurant at the auction barn before gathering on bleachers for the auction. Millions of pounds of beef change hands at a busy winter sale, and enough money to make a Chicago banker blush, though in Lemmon a stranger from the city would be hard-pressed to know the buyers from the sellers. Seven-figure transactions transpire in minutes, with nothing more noticeable than a nod or the raise of a finger.

Cattle outnumber people 4 to 1 in South Dakota, making beef the biggest single sector of the state’s economy. However, in Perkins County, where Lemmon is the largest city, there are 37 cattle for every man, woman and child. Seventy-eight percent of the land is grass. The federal farm census indicates that cow and calf sales total about $70 million a year in the county of just 2,400 residents.

“We especially have a lot of natural grasslands to the south and west,” says Huffman. Most of the ranch land is privately owned, but the region also includes the Grand River National Grasslands, a 154,000-acre native prairie. A hundred ranchers have allotments that permit them to graze from 50 to 300 head of cattle — some in community pastures that operate like the open range that existed until 1902.

Stuart and Lisa Schmidt say fossils and ancient geology are popular at the Grand River Museum.

Lemmon was founded in 1907 by a cowboy who was instrumental in the transition from the open range to today’s fenced prairie. Ed”Boss Cowman” Lemmon started as a ranch hand in Wyoming at age 13. Soon he was a trail boss, herding longhorns from Texas to fatten on the rich grasses of the Northern Plains. He was a founder of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association in 1902 and a leader of the beef industry when he discovered that a rail line was about to be built that would straddle the state border. He quickly bought land for a townsite, hoping he could make his new town the county seat for both Perkins County in South Dakota and Adams County in North Dakota.

Though he didn’t win either courthouse, Lemmon did get his town. Railroad officials named it after the cowboy, and he lived there until the day he died in 1945. Old-timers remember him today. Stories about his exploits are legendary, and several books about his life are for sale at the Grand River Museum, where an exhibit chronicles the life of a man the townspeople called Dad Lemmon.

The museum is a good reflection of how the cattle industry shapes Lemmon. The Schmidt family homesteaded in the Grand River Valley in 1910, contemporaries of Dad Lemmon.”Our grandchildren are sixth generation on the ranch,” says Stuart Schmidt.”My folks started the museum after many years of finding dinosaur fossils.”

Thinking the fossils and other local artifacts might be a way for the town to draw tourists, Stuart’s parents Ed and Phyllis Schmidt began to collect historical and geological items.”We moved into a downtown location in 1998 but we knew we needed more room and we wanted a highway location,” says Phyllis.”We soon bought an old machine shop that was empty for a long time. It was a mess. People thought we were crazy,” she laughed.

If so, their friends and neighbors like crazy: the Schmidts’ efforts attracted many supporters, including the Wheelers and Beelers — two other pioneer families who are very philanthropic in Perkins County, though that’s not a word that cowboys would use. Four years ago, the nonprofit museum moved into a new addition with ample space for exhibits, fossils and cast specimens from the dinosaur age.

Native American culture and history is also documented, and Stuart notes that new information continues to show up, including a hand-drawn map of how to fence the reservation that was sketched by Dad Lemmon. The map was discovered at the Wisconsin State Historical Society when Nathan Sanderson was researching and writing Controlled Recklessness, the latest book about the pioneer cattleman.

The museum has exhibits on major Hunkpapa leaders, including Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face, Gall and Thunder Hawk. It also has a timeline for Creation Science. The entryway features a life-size sculpture of a grizzly bear attacking mountain man Hugh Glass, an epic survival story of the American West that took place in 1823 in the Grand River Valley south of town. After the story was retold in the blockbuster movie The Revenant, Lemmon promoters started a Hugh Glass Rendezvous that has gained popularity every year.

The town’s signature attraction, since the 1930s, is the Petrified Wood Park, a funky collection of petrified wood, fossils, stones and other geological wonders, some mortared together in the shape of trees and spires. Rounded stones known as cannonballs, collected largely from the nearby Cannonball River Valley, are a big part of the park.

The Grand River Museum features a display paying tribute to Ed Lemmon, aka “Boss Cowman.”

But not even petrified art can upstage cowboys and cattle as Lemmon’s top attraction.”Let’s face it, this town has been a cattle town since the start,” says Dave Johnson, the economic development director.”Ranching is our foundation. Everybody feels it when cattle prices go up or down, whether or not they own cattle themselves.”

Johnson says the cow culture goes beyond dollars and cents; it impacts the arts, literature, recreation and education. The local high school mascots are Cowboys and Cowgirls. Rodeo is bigger than football and some local athletes have done well on the rodeo circuit, including Stuart and Lisa Schmidt’s son, Chuck, who is a champion saddle bronc rider.

Lisa’s brother, John Lopez, is a nationally acclaimed metal sculptor. Several of his sculptures are found in town, including the museum’s Hugh Glass piece; a cowboy aboard a bucking horse, by the front door of the high school; and a representation of Dad Lemmon on a horse that stands in a little plaza downtown. Lopez has opened a studio and gallery known as the Kokomo Inn next to the plaza, one of several recent civic additions and improvements — many of them either assisted or spearheaded by Dave Johnson’s organization, the Lemmon Area Charitable and Economic Development.

Johnson worked as a commercial photographer in Dallas and Chicago before coming home. One of his first challenges was the Palace Theater, a dilapidated movie house where he ran the reels as a teenager. The community supported his efforts to digitize the projector system, renovate the interior and reopen the theater for movies, live concerts and other events.

When the State Extension Department held its annual Energize Conference in Lemmon last summer, Johnson gathered some of the town’s newest business men and women in the theater for a panel discussion. He began by explaining that even he is sometimes amazed at how much a little city can accomplish. He credited a creative culture and a community spirit.”The trend for a lot of these little places in the 1980s and 1990s was just to become a bedroom town to a bigger city but Lemmon never had that option because we are too far away from a bigger town,” he said. The only alternative was to maintain a high quality of life despite the smaller population. Encouraging museums, art, restaurants, theater, entrepreneurship and music seemed daunting, but it’s probably not any more difficult than fencing the prairie or building a petrified park.

Jack and Kim Anderson operate Midwest Rodeo Entries, which handles reservations for the South Dakota Rodeo Association, as well as The Current Connection, a computer and office supply store.

Johnson told the Energize attendees, who came from equally small communities across South Dakota, that he learned an important lesson from participating in big projects:”It’s about doing what’s right — it’s never about the money.”

Lemmon’s success stories include a new housing neighborhood and the downtown plaza known as Boss Cowman Square. The community has also supported several new businesses, including a hotel, grocery store, butcher shop, photography studio and a boutique with sequin-lined denim jackets for cowgirls. They coexist with old Lemmon standbys like Wheeler Manufacturing, a family enterprise that employs more than 100 jewelry-makers.

Romancin’ the Range, the new boutique, shares space with a flower store and coffee shop. The owner is Kate Westphal, a young nurse who grew up on a nearby ranch and moved away to Bismarck, North Dakota.”I thought I was never coming back,” she says,”but I started to miss home. Nobody greeted me or asked how Dad’s sheep were doing or how my mom was feeling. Now, if my car breaks down I have 10 people to call, where in the city I had no one. I also realized there were opportunities for growth.” She works as an R.N. at the local nursing home, manages the boutique and makes leather jewelry.

The Current Connection is another Lemmon success. Jack and Kim Anderson started the computer and office supply store 15 years ago. When the local Ben Franklin store closed, they added school supplies. Jack, who grew up locally and rode bulls in high school and college, recognized that the rodeo industry wasn’t taking advantage of technology. He developed software and started a company called Midwest Rodeo Entries, which handles reservations for the South Dakota Rodeo Association, the Colorado Rodeo Association and the Indian National Finals Rodeo.

“Jack wanted to stay active in the rodeo industry, but not ride bulls,” Kim says.”This was a way for him to do that.” He also created summer jobs for teachers and students, who staff the phones.”It saves cowboys and cowgirls a lot of time,” says Kim,”and it gets them to the right place at the right time.”

The town’s new LemmonMade Butcher Shop was started by Carl and Kylee Kimmerle, who came from Utah two years ago to live on land homesteaded by Kylee’s great-grandfather. The shop quickly gained a reputation for beef jerky, breakfast sausage and other specialties. The Kimmerles hope to eventually raise and process their own cattle and hogs, but for now the new business and three young children occupy most of their time.

The downtown area has also been bolstered by the Beeler Center.”It was put up about a dozen years ago because of the success of the Boss Cowman Rodeo,” Johnson says.”Every year, we would rent a tent for the rodeo and someone had the good idea that it might make sense to just build a building.” Ever since, the town has hosted more weddings than 1,200 people would ever propose.”Lots of times, the bride and groom are not from here but they know they can stay in the hotel and there are plenty of restaurants so it’s just a good place to get married.”

The town’s six restaurants include Benny’s, just across the street from the Beeler Center. Matt Johnson (David’s nephew), who recently purchased the long-established eatery, says it’s a challenge to run a steakhouse when most of your customers are ranchers who raise some of the world’s best beef.

“You gotta start with the good stuff,” he laughs. His most popular menu item is called the Steak Sandwich, but again that’s cowboy modesty: the”sandwich” is a delicious sirloin coulotte.

Chislic is also popular at Benny’s, but Johnson doesn’t use lamb, like restaurants in Hutchinson County, where Germans-from-Russia first brought chislic to the Dakotas. He grills cubes of –you guessed it — beef sirloin ball tip.

That seems appropriate, however, in a city corralled by cowboys.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Lemmon: Our Cowboy Capital

By Bernie Hunhoff

If you designed a town as a tribute to the American cowboy it would look like Lemmon. The little city straddling the border of the two Dakotas has just 1,200 citizens but it seems 10 times that size on days when there’s a rodeo or a cattle auction. Even on a slow day, Lemmon looks like a cowboy capital — thought nobody there would claim the title because real cowboys don’t brag.

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Petrified Giant

By Michael Zimny

An ancient petrified tree in Perkins County may be one of the largest ever discovered and may eventually tell us more about what kind of landscape existed here in the past.

“My father and a friend of his discovered it while herding sheep back in the 1930s,” recalls retired local rancher Clyde Jesfjeld. “They decided that it had to be a tree because of the way it appeared.”

Contemporary newspaper articles confirm that it was George Jesfjeld and Charles Murphy who first discovered the tree northwest of Bison. “Word got around, and back in those days the WPA was in operation,” Jesfjeld says.”There was a small crew that came in and unearthed more of it than what my father and his friend had uncovered.”

Over the years, there have been several efforts to partially excavate and examine the tree. In 1949, the Rapid City Journal reported that University of South Dakota Museum Director W.H. Over visited the site. He estimated the tree’s age at 60 million years. The same article listed its measurements as 9 feet in diameter at the exposed base, with 84 feet uncovered, extending to as much as 200 feet total as it disappears beneath the sloping ground.

Fred Jennewein, a Bison-area rancher who ran a small range relics museum in town, was active in the effort to excavate the tree. “In the 75 feet of exposed log,” Jennewein wrote, “there is no break thru [sic] the trunk of the tree altho [sic] in recent years there has been some vandalism by shelling off considerable sized pieces of the petrified wood.”

Today, the base of the tree — which is located on a School and Public Lands parcel, but not accessible by road — can still be seen, though much of tree has been re-interred with earth. We counted 37 paces walking along the depression where excavation once apparently occurred, before the earth above it slopes upward. Away from the exposed base, an occasional glimpse of petrified wood emerges from beneath the surface.

At one time, some locals hoped that the entire tree would be uncovered or excavated. “When the summer comes again we are going out with a bulldozer or some other kind of dozer and find out just how much farther that Oldest Old Timer goes back into that hill,” Jennewein wrote.

That does not appear to have happened. After the 1950s, newspaper articles about the tree are scarce. Though there had been some talk of removing the tree intact, that would have been difficult and expensive. In 1967, the state legislature allocated $1,200 to place a fence around the site, probably to prevent its gradual disappearance.

“I remember as a young boy taking a lot of different people down there so they could look at it,” Jesjfeld recalls. “A lot of people took a small piece.”

There is no fence in place, if one was ever built. Souvenir seekers may have forgotten about the tree and its remote location.

“There was discussion about getting the tree hauled out of there and placing it somewhere else where the public could view it,” says Mike Cornelison, Land Agent for School and Public Lands. However, any such effort would have to balance protecting the integrity of the native prairie against extracting the tree, a delicate task in its own right.

“If there was the right kind of supervision, it could be excavated,” Cornelison says.

So far, the funding has not come forward. Recently, several scientists at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology have expressed interest in visiting the site. Perhaps soon we will learn more about the tree’s history and potential future.

Is this the biggest intact petrified tree in the world, as some local enthusiasts claimed in the past? That probably depends on how bigness is measured. Maybe the tree can tell us more about the environment it thrived in, back in the days, to quote Fred Jennewein, “when the earth was young.”

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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South Dakota’s Sledding Hills

Local youth take to their sleds at Yankton’s Morgen Park. Photo by Bernie Hunhoff.

By Bernie Hunhoff

South Dakota’s reputation for geographic diversity holds true when it comes to snow sledding. Some of our eastern cities are too flat, and the slopes in some of our mountain towns are too rugged, steep and rocky.

In Aberdeen, where the terrain has been described as”flat as a barn door,” city leaders manufactured a 25′ hill so kids could enjoy winter. However, we discovered that most communities have a natural hill that becomes a hot spot when it snows.

Pack your sleds as you travel this winter because there are plenty of hills to explore. Most of the snow hills are unsupervised, so adults should be ready to act if they see something dangerous — a heavy toboggan sled, for example, that could carom out of control and hurt someone, or a motorized vehicle on the slopes. Sledding has long been a favorite winter tradition, even for our flatland friends. Let’s keep it alive.

Here’s our list of city slopes. Tell us what we’re missing. We’d also like to know where to find the closest and richest hot chocolate after a day on the slopes.

ABERDEEN — God created most of South Dakota’s hills and mountains, but man assisted with the modest slope in Baird Park (1715 24th Avenue NE), the most popular sledding spot in the Hub City. City officials created the gentle 25-foot just for kids.

BELLE FOURCHE — Slopes behind the Tri-State Museum (415 5th Avenue) are a favorite, though they may be too fast for younger kids and there is a walking path at the foot of the hill so watch for pedestrians.

CUSTER — Pageant Hill has been touted as one of the finest family sledding spots in the Black Hills. It may be too steep and long for younger kids, but you don’t have to descend from the very top. The hill is the summit of beautiful Big Rock Park, which also includes hiking trails and a disc golf course. It rises above the city’s south side.

HOT SPRINGS — Southern Hills Golf Course (1130 Clubhouse Drive) is fun and scenic.

HURON — Toboggan Hill (6th Street & Lawnridge Avenue), aka Slide Hill, is a bluff above the Jim River valley on Huron’s east side.

LEMMON — The ever-resourceful people of Lemmon discovered years ago that it was less expensive to build a small hill for their new water storage rather than just build a taller tower. Then someone got the great idea or also making it into a sledding slope with a warming shack. Tank Hill is quite easy to spot on the city’s west side. Many years ago, when the water tower developed a leak during a cold spell, kids were able to slide on the ice flow all the way downtown.

PIERRE — The slopes above the soccer fields in Hilger’s Gulch are popular. The gulch is a scenic valley just north of the State Capitol building.

RAPID CITY — Meadowbrook School Hill (3125 W. Flormann Street) is a good spot, as well as the Civic Center hill that rises above the Holiday Inn Rushmore Plaza parking lot downtown.

SIOUX FALLS — Tuthill Park in southeast Sioux Falls is the site of weddings and parties in the summer months, but when the snow falls it becomes the domain of well-bundled children with sleds. Spellerberg Park (2299 W. 22nd Street), closer to the city center, also has a fair slope. Great Bear Ski Valley welcomes snow tubers, who get to ride the ski lifts.

SPEARFISH — Hills behind the Donald E. Young Center on the Black Hills State University campus are fast and fun.

STURGIS — Lions Club Park (off Lazelle Street) is a good place for younger kids, and Strong Field Hill on Ballpark Road is fun for older youth.

WATERTOWN — St. Ann’s Hill, a sledder’s delight, is so named because St. Ann’s was the original name of the nearby Prairie Lakes Hospital. Take Highway 20 to 10th Avenue and turn uphill.

WESSINGTON SPRINGS — It’s worth a drive to experience Ski Hill on the west edge of Wessington Springs. The natural setting in the Wessington Hills is idyllic, but the real attraction is an old, homemade invention with an electric motor that powers a 1,200-foot rope lift. Jokingly called the”Rube Goldberg ski lift,” the simple equipment has been lovingly cared for by handy volunteers, including Lloyd Marken, 85, who helped to build it in 1956.

YANKTON — Morgen Park (1200 Green Street) is the go-to sledding hill in town, however kids also like to slide down the earthen slope of Gavins Point Dam, where it rises above Pierson Ranch Recreation Area west of Yankton.

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From Lagos to Lemmon

By Michael Zimny

Artists Dotun Popoola (left) and Jonathan Imafidor collaborated on a mural to honor legendary cattleman Ed Lemmon.

Sculptor John Lopez is collaborating with two Nigerian artists to transform an empty lot in downtown Lemmon into a tribute to the town’s founder. Boss Cowman Square will be unveiled on July 9 during this year’s Boss Cowman Days Celebration and Rodeo.

The square celebrates the town’s agricultural heritage and the legendary cowboy-turned-cattle baron who gave it his name. Lopez is creating a larger-than-life sculpture of Ed Lemmon, which will sit on a pedestal in the square. Artists Dotun Popoola and Jonathan Imafidor have painted a mural that depicts Lemmon leading cattle across the Missouri River.

Popoola is a curator for the National Gallery of Arts, Nigeria. Imafidor is an artist and instructor at Obafemi Awolowo University.

Dotun Popoola came across John Lopez’s work on the internet. Trained as a painter, he was experimenting with sculpture. The work intrigued him. He sent Lopez an email and received a quick response. Before he knew it, he was on a plane from Lagos to Minneapolis, then a bus to Bismarck where Lopez picked him up.

Popoola had exhibited in Miami, but had never seen a Perkins County sunset or so much wide-open space.”Where I was coming from, you could have 20, 30 people in a flat,” he says.”So populated. Everything was strange.”

But he soaked in the local culture, riding horses and branding. He found similarities between Yoruba and Lakota cultures, as well as between the cowboy culture of the American West and Nigerian herdsmen.

Popoola is a practitioner of the Araism art movement, an indigenous Nigerian/Yoruba painting technique — originated by artist Mufu Onifade — that involves layering mosaics of color on a canvas painted black. The name is derived from the Yoruba word for”wonder” — ara. Though the movement was developed as an authentic African painting technique, Popoola has explored depicting South Dakota through the eyes of Araism as well as through other techniques. (The mural at Boss Cowman Square is not an example of Araism.)

Heads Men juxtaposes an American cowboy with a Nigerian herdsman.

When some Lemmon locals began to envision the idea of Boss Cowman Square, John Lopez invited Dotun to come back and create a mural as a backdrop for his sculpture of Ed Lemmon. This time Popoola enlisted the help of friend and fellow artist Jonathan Imafidor.

Together the two artists explored intersections of American and Nigerian art and culture. Some of their work is on display in an exhibit at the John Lopez studio.

Their mural depicts Ed Lemmon and another cowboy leading longhorn cattle across the Missouri River and a vast expanse of prairie. The mural will serve as a backdrop for a larger-than-life sculpture of Ed Lemmon seated on a horse. True to the Lopez style, the sculpture is a hybrid of cast bronze, plasma cut steel and found elements that represent the regional agricultural heritage — pieces cut from an old roller mill used in grain elevators to separate rocks from grain add texture among the smoother surfaces.

Lemmon, known alternately as”Dad Lemmon” and”Boss Cowman” was a legendary cowboy who rose through the ranks from ordinary cowhand to cattle baron, running the Sheidley Cattle Company, then the L7 operation that ran cattle from Texas to Canada. One of the feats that made him famous was one of the largest cattle roundups in history.

“The open range cattle industry was just coming to a close,” says Nathan Sanderson — a historian, Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s Director of Policy and Operations and author of Controlled Recklessness: Ed Lemmon and the Open Range. “There were still some really large cattle operations out there — 40, 50, 60 thousand head or larger. And in the spring of 1902, he bossed one of the largest cattle roundups on the Northern Great Plains — probably 50,000 head, several dozen roundup wagons, hundreds of cowboys — and he did it in only a few days.”

John Lopez’s scrap iron depiction of Ed Lemmon atop a horse will be the centerpiece of the town’s artistic tribute to its founder.

Thanks to his knowledge of the range, and of the Missouri River, Lemmon played an instrumental role in the first railroad crossing, by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad (or Milwaukee Road) of the Mighty Mo in 1907. Through his close relationship with the Milwaukee Road, he had an insider’s information on where new railroad towns would be platted, and bought some land in Lemmon. But unlike many railroad town founders, Lemmon put down roots.

“He was one of the few town builders who lived in the town of his name after the town sale,” says Sanderson.”As the community built up, he was an active participant in that. The citizens of Lemmon started calling him ‘Dad’ because he was the father of the town, and also because he was really good with kids. Lemmon’s annual Boss Cowman Celebration and Rodeo, and all of the various things in the community that are named after him testify to Ed Lemmon’s value to that particular region and to western South Dakota as a whole.”

If Ed Lemmon, literally, put Lemmon on the map, he also helped grow the cattle industry, and the legend of the American cowboy, into international exports. Now artists from his town and the other side of the world have come together to celebrate the Boss.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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The Ultimate Survivor

By Michael Zimny

John Lopez’s new sculpture captures the moment that an angry grizzly bear attacked frontiersman Hugh Glass.

On the last weekend in August, Lemmon-based artist John Lopez unveiled a new sculpture commemorating Hugh Glass, close to the spot where the legendary pioneer nearly lost his battle with an angry grizzly bear. The sculpture — depicting the pivotal moment in the Glass legend — comes at a time of renewed interest in his story.

A film biopic based on Glass’ life is scheduled for release around Christmas. The Revenant, directed by Alejandro Gonz·lez IÒ·rritu and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, features the legend of his fight with the bear, his struggle to survive and his quest to avenge the men who abandoned him for dead.

Having grown up in Lemmon, Lopez understands the fascination with the story.”I think [because of] the fact that it happened so close to our hometown of Lemmon, we have all heard the story since we learned about it in history class,” Lopez says. “And every time you drive by Shadehill or Summerville, you’re reminded of it. He’s the ultimate survivor.”

The sculpture was unveiled in front of a crowd gathered for the inaugural Hugh Glass Rendezvous at a South Dakota state recreation area also bearing his name, contiguous to the Shadehill Reservoir and Grand River National Grassland.

“Rendezvous” is the name given to a loose network of outdoor festivals for history buffs, where the facial hair and throwback clothing are reminiscent of modern day Brooklyn, but without the irony or the artisanal pickle stand. And for any group that celebrates the pioneer ethic, it would be hard to find a more rugged embodiment of frontier grit than Glass.

Lopez worked on the sculpture in his Lemmon studio earlier this year.

“The life that he had even before he was mauled by the grizzly bear, and then to crawl 200 miles after the grizzly attack, puts him in a category of frontiersman where he has a cult following among rendezvous-ers and historians,” Lopez says.

The visual aesthetic Lopez has employed echoes the chaos in the moment. While he incorporates his usual divergent mash-up of found objects, the energy of the piece is in the long flowing plasma-cut strips of sheet metal that form the grizzly, insinuating frenetic movement and fear.

What we know about Glass is steeped in the mythos of the American West. It’s probably impossible to know if he truly ate the half-rotten flesh of the same bear that nearly killed him — or the carcass of a buffalo calf he scavenged from wolves — to make it through the first few days after he was abandoned to the elements.

We know that he already had a reputation in the West as an adventurer — a tall, wiry man who wore buffalo skins and cut his hair with a knife — when he signed up for the”Ashley’s Hundred” fur trading mission, led by General William Ashley of the Missouri militia.

Frederick Manfred described his frontier ambition in the 1954 biography, Lord Grizzly. “The new, the old new, just around the turn ahead, was the only remedy for hot blood. Ahead was always either gold or the grave. The gamble of it freshened the blood at the same time that it cleared the eye. What could beat galloping up alone over the brow of a new bluff for that first look of beyond?”

We know that over a brow of the beyond, near the forks of the Grand River, Glass surprised a mother grizzly with her cubs. How exactly he survived is the stuff of lore, but he did survive, though mutilated and broken. Expedition leader Andrew Henry left Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald to give Glass a proper burial when he succumbed to the inevitable. The pair dug him a grave, then abandoned him, afraid of being caught in hostile territory. They didn’t have to steal his rifle and knife to leave him even more helpless, but they did.

Hugh Glass faces his adversary.

After the bear fight, his struggle to survive his abandonment is what entrenches the Glass legend in the frontier narrative. Though his memorialization is in some ways an American update on the sacred iconography that has kept the memory of martyrs like Saint Sebastian alive for millennia, Glass parts ways from the ancients. His ordeal is more the consequence of wanderlust than unwavering faith or innocence. Though he would learn virtue later, he’s been enshrined in the American memory for brute frontier badassery.

His road to Fort Kiowa confirms in an excruciating tableau of hardship and pain what he’s made of. Desperately, he employs maggots to eat the dead flesh from his mangled back. Recalling the biblical allegory of Job, without emulating his patience, Glass fights buzzards, wolves and coyotes, eats rattlesnakes, fashions a splint out of bear skin for his broken leg and crawls more than 200 miles.

“Three months of plain hell,” is how Manfred’s Glass describes his torment when he finally arrives. From there, legend says he embarks on a whiskey and hate-filled quest to avenge Fitzpatrick and Bridger. But by the time he finds their trail, the grizzled old mountain man has learned forgiveness, adding a moral component to his fabled resilience.

These scenes have lived in literature, and an obscure western corner of the American conscience, for nearly two centuries. With a new monument by one of South Dakota’s most innovative artists — to communicate the raw terror in his defining moment, and his stubborn will to survive — the legend of Hugh Glass is secure in the Grand River forks foothills.

The new sculpture will be on permanent display at the Grand River Museum in Lemmon.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Boss Cowman’s Own Words

By Roger Holtzmann

Ed Lemmon had several mishaps on horseback, but none that kept him out of the saddle for long.

George Edward Lemmon was 13 when he went to work for the Bear Creek Ranch in Cheyenne, Wyo. He lived in the saddle for much of the next 40 years, holding down every job in the cattle business, from trail hand to running a ranch bigger than Rhode Island. Some said he rode over every square foot of West River, and if that was an exaggeration it wasn’t by much. The son of a railroader, he became one of the most respected cattlemen of his generation.

Books have been written on his exploits — most notably, Boss Cowman by Nellie Snyder Yost — and he is referenced in every respectable history book on South Dakota and cowboy life. But a 400-page book, The West as I Lived It, tells Lemmon’s story in a refreshingly blunt and first-person style. It is nothing more or less than a collection of weekly newspaper columns the old cowboy wrote for the Belle Fourche Bee from 1932 to 1936, compiled into a book by Belle Fourche historian Phyllis Schmidt.

“Writing the stories gave him a chance to relive the many memories he had of his friends and events of the good old days,” Schmidt observed in the introduction. Schmidt, who serves as curator of the Grand River Museum, spent three years on the project. Her result is a history of cowboy life quite unlike anything else that has been published — recorded in an earthy and colorful prose that only a real, wise cowboy could achieve.

“In the cow business one is exposed to all kinds of dangers and hardships,” wrote Lemmon in one column. His life was a case in point. A horse fell on him when he was 17, crushing his right leg above the knee and landing him in bed for four months. Less than a year later, he suffered an even more serious mishap while he and another hand were training a horse.

“Tom [McCumskey] was riding a young mare…while I rode [alongside] with a rope around my 1,200 pound mount’s nose. After running about 200 yards both flew the track, which was a wagon road, each bolting outward. As we pulled them inward they clashed together with terrific force, piling Tom’s mount up to a heap and killing my mount on the spot, and crushing my partially healed leg in a similar manner as the year before, and rendering me unconscious for an hour. I was rendered a cripple for life, for besides the breaks, rheumatism set in, drawing my defective leg all out of shape.”

Lemmon and other pioneers competed in an old-timers race at a 1927 fair in McLaughlin.

Over the years he was knocked unconscious several more times and broke numerous bones, but Lemmon was nothing if not tough. When he busted his collarbone,”I took up my duties the next morning with my right arm in a sling, which necessitated roping my mounts with my left hand.” Another time his horse spooked and took an ill-advised leap, causing them to roll down a steep embankment together. When Lemmon returned to camp, his partner”noticed my next to little finger on my right hand swinging loosely and out of place. So he had one of the boys hold my right arm while he pulled it back, and really, this was the most severe punishment I ever underwent. I came near fainting, and the knuckle is still low.”

As a ranch hand, Ed Lemmon drove longhorns up from Texas for two decades, until the railroad’s spreading tentacles made such epic treks unnecessary. He passed through the rowdy cow towns of Kansas, patrolled by Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, and likely never ran afoul of either, for he avoided the trail hand’s bane, liquor. Lemmon never drank anything stronger than lemonade.

Once up north, the cattle were fattened over winter on ranges along the Republican River, then in the Platte River country of central Nebraska. In contrast to the trail drives, a staple of Western mythology and popular entertainment, no screenwriter ever penned a script about tending”beeves” over winter, though they might have in Lemmon’s case.

Lemmon was working the Rush Creek Ranch near Sidney, Neb., when Red River Red, a grizzled veteran of the frontier,”covered with scars from both gun and knife wounds… which he displayed apparently with much glory,” showed up on foot, looking for a job. Ranch owner George Green took Red on, and the three men settled in for the winter. When they divvied up the housekeeping chores, most of the cooking duties fell to Lemmon.”I prided myself on keeping the kitchen and cooking paraphernalia in neatness, especially the drying cloths,” recalled Lemmon in the Belle Fourche Bee.

“One morning I forgot to fry [Red’s] bacon, and he rather peevishly jumped up, grabbing the slab of bacon and knife and slicing half a dozen slices of bacon,” wrote Lemmon.”He had previously slammed the skillet on the stove rather far back and when he had the bacon ready he grabbed the drying cloth instead of the dish rag with which to handle the hot receptacle. When I drew his attention to the fact that he should use the dish rag instead of the drying cloth he flared up, saying he would not be dictated to by me. Accusations flew back and forth across the breakfast table and finally our epithets became so heated we both started to draw our six-shooters.”

Whenever West River cowboys gathered for real or ceremonial purposes, Ed Lemmon (second from left) was eager to participate.

Green trumped their pistols with his Winchester rifle and defused the situation, but Red wasn’t about to let the matter drop. Later that day the three men journeyed to nearby Lodge Pole, and along the way Red told Green that he meant”to get a row going” with Lemmon and kill him. To forestall him, Green enlisted Tex Matthews,”a gunman of the first magnitude,” to have a word with Red. Matthews’ persuasive powers, and the six-gun hanging on his hip, convinced Red that his health would be best served by boarding the next train for Cheyenne. Thus the drying cloth incident, a little-known epic of the west, ended peacefully.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 brought an end to Red Cloud’s War and established the Great Sioux Reservation. In exchange for peace and renouncing claim to all lands outside said reservation, the tribes accepted a number of government promises, including a guarantee to provide”one pound of meat and one pound of flour per day” to every member who settled there. At a stroke, this created a demand for 30,000 cattle per year.

Major Seth Mabry, a Texan who earned his rank serving the Confederacy, was one of those who recognized the business opportunity. Lemmon was working for Mabry in 1877 when Mabry contracted to deliver 800 head from his Platte River spread to the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies in northern Nebraska.

For whites on the Northern Plains, this was an unsettled time, just a year after the Seventh Cavalry’s annihilation at Little Big Horn; even well settled areas were thought to be at risk, and every Indian was viewed as a threat. A rider overtook Mabry’s crew with orders to send a hundred cattle 160 miles further on to an Army encampment on the Cheyenne River; it was not a journey to be taken lightly.

Though Lemmon was just a month past his 20th birthday, the youngest of three men tasked to get the Army its beef, he was put in charge of the detail.”I can’t recall I felt… the least worried about the outcome of that expedition,” wrote Lemmon many years later. His confidence was well founded. The Army got its beef without losing a man or an animal.

The Sheidley brothers, William and George, appreciated Lemmon’s experiences working cattle on the open range and his ability to handle men. When the Kansas City buggy manufacturers decided to enter the cattle business in Dakota Territory, they hired the 23-year-old Lemmon as their foreman. Ed, as he preferred to be called, settled on the Flying V Ranch, at the confluence of French Creek and the Cheyenne River in the Badlands.

After gold was discovered in the Black Hills, within the Great Sioux Reservation’s boundaries, it was only a matter of time before the Indians lost what had been granted to them in perpetuity. The government relieved them of the great wedge of land that lay between the Cheyenne and Belle Fourche rivers in 1877. The Flying V lay just within this Black Hills cession, but no fences kept the cattle confined. During the winter months especially, cattle were allowed to drift and forage where they could, even on the surrounding, unceded Indian lands.

“We were all trespassers,” said Lemmon of himself and the stockmen whose herds grew fat on grass that belonged to others, but knowledge of the law didn’t deter him from taking advantage of the situation.

In his later years, Ed Lemmon transitioned from brash young cowboy to an elder in the town that bears his name.

As cattle from different herds drifted over winter, they inevitably mixed together. That made necessary one of the great operations of the era, the spring roundup. In late winter notices were published in stock papers about gathering points, usually the heads of streams, and in mid-May the general roundup began. Wagons from every outfit in the area were loaded with supplies and dispersed across the prairie, trailing a dozen or more cowboys. Each hand needed eight to 10 horses, for they would be riding hard, for a month or more, driving cattle that were spread over thousands of square miles to collection points.

Every roundup was an event, but for Ed Lemmon and other old-timers the spring of 1897 stood out from all others. That winter had been especially hard. Early season storms coated the prairie in glistening ice, then blizzard followed upon blizzard, burying the grass and making it impossible for cattle to graze. From northern and central South Dakota, thousands of cattle drifted south in search of feed.”There was hardly an animal left north of the Cheyenne River,” wrote Lemmon, and getting them back promised to be a monumental undertaking.

From the Nebraska state line to Fort Pierre, cowpokes drove the wayward cattle toward Peno Flat on the Bad River. George Jackson was supposed to oversee the sorting operation, but when he sized up the job ñ 45,000 cattle, 24 wagons, 500 men, 5,000 saddle horses — he asked Lemmon to take over. Though he was in charge, Lemmon didn’t leave the grueling work of separating the cattle to others. Such was not his style. He personally cut 900 animals in a single day, a record never equaled, and cemented his reputation as a cowboy’s cowboy.

Ed Lemmon was made general manager of the Sheidley Cattle Company, with an ownership stake, in 1891. As part of his new duties he made his first cattle-buying trip to Texas in the spring of that year.”I naturally thought to look the part of a wealthy cattle buyer,” he wrote,”so I borrowed a gold watch and chain from our range boss, and a handsome gold ring from one of our sympathetic boys.”

Lemmon might have lacked the accessories for his new position, but most assuredly not the attitude. On that first trip south he arranged to ship 5,000 cattle back to Belle Fourche, the nearest railhead to Sheidley’s home place on the Moreau River. He wired ahead to foreman John Currington for an outfit to meet the initial consignment, only to have the Sheidley company president, R.C. Lake, countermand the orders. Several thousand cattle were left untended for two days.

When Lemmon arrived in Rapid City on the next train and the mix-up was discovered, there were”hot words flying, to be sure.” Lake was supposed to give Lemmon cash to pay off the shipper,”and while we were jangling over the matter the train had gotten under motion,” wrote Lemmon.”I let [Lake] trot along beside the train near… 100 yards, panting like a lizard, for he was a 200-pounder and office soft. All the time he was trying to poke the roll of bills to me through the car slats. Finally he says, ëIf you want this money you better take it for I am about to drop in my tracks.’ It was not only R.C. Lake that got a bawling out but Currington. I gave them both to understand that I was running that end of the business, and never again did Mr. Lake change any of my orders in any manner.”

Another indication of Lemmon’s rising status came in the winter of 1892 when he gathered in Rapid City with other notables of the Dakota cattle business, including James”Scotty” Philip, and founded the Western South Dakota Stock Growers Association. He paid his $5 membership dues, and when the group formally organized Lemmon was elected to the executive committee, a seat he held for 23 years.”In the early days of the organization my name was often mentioned as president,” he wrote,”but as I could not address an audience, I most emphatically declined.”

Among the WSDSGA’s foremost concerns was the prevention of cattle rustling. To that end they hired a range detective, Joe Elliot, one of a notorious group of gunmen previously employed by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association to rid the Powder River area of rustlers. They undertook the task so vigorously that President Harrison was forced to declare martial law in the region and dispatch Army troops to send Elliot and company on their way.

“There is no evidence Elliot ever drew his gun in anger while working for the [WSDSGA],” wrote Bob Lee and Dick Williams in Last Grass Frontier, but the association obviously knew what they were getting when they hired him.”[Elliot] always gave the other fellow the first shot,” wrote Lemmon.”That way he always had the law on his side when he dropped him.”

In 1893 Lemmon sold his share of the Sheidley Cattle Company and went into partnership with Richard Lake and Thomas Tomb. At its peak around the turn of the century, Lake, Tomb & Lemmon employed 300 men and ranged up to 53,000 head along the Moreau and Belle Fourche rivers.

Lemmon and his partners were operating on the scale of the barons of old, but the cattle business as it existed when he started was gradually passing away. In 1887 the Dawes Act effectively whittled the Great Sioux Reservation down yet again and defined western South Dakota’s Indian reservations more or less as they are today. Outside those boundaries the land was opened to homesteaders, which complicated life for the big cattle operators by pock marking the open range with small holdings. The cattle kings appealed to Congress for a measure to allow leasing of the last large tracts of unencumbered land on the Indian reservations.

Murdo MacKenzie of the Matador Cattle Company and Burton”Cap” Mossman of the Hanson Land and Cattle Company, who already controlled vast swaths of land from New Mexico to Saskatchewan, obtained leases of a half-million acres each on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Lemmon proved equally adept at working the system. With the assistance of South Dakota’s Senator Alfred Kittredge, he wrangled an invitation to the White House in 1902 to discuss leasing grass on the Standing Rock Reservation. President Theodore Roosevelt had owned a spread in North Dakota’s Badlands during the 1880s, and though he was an absentee owner, he often participated in spring roundups and fancied himself a rugged cattleman of the West. Lemmon brought the president up to date on conditions in the Dakotas, and the schmoozing paid off.

“The interview resulted in Roosevelt’s order to the Secretary of the Interior to approve my lease of 865,529 acres on the reservation,” wrote Lemmon.”I fenced it with a three-wire fence … giving me 270 miles of fence and cross fence. It was said by the National Livestock Association to be the largest pasture in the world, being larger than the state of Rhode Island.”

The town of Lemmon started the Boss Cowman Rodeo in 1971.

Lemmon returned from Washington in early May to what he called a”most pleasant” experience.”I was crossing my immense lease for the first time since it was awarded to me,” he wrote.”As I approached Leaf-On-the-Hill, which is about 12 miles northeast of the present city of McIntosh, I drove on top of the very highest pinnacle and stopped my team, stood up in my buggy, drew a long breath of fresh air and shouted to the universe that I was Lord of all. I surveyed for as far as my eyes could reach. I could not see the end of my domain … and when fenced, no man could trespass on me as had been the case on the open ranges I had just occupied.”

Since his days as manager of the Sheidley Cattle Company, Lemmon had stayed part of every winter in Chicago, where most of the cattle raised in Dakota were sold. While there he lodged at the Great Northern Hotel, and rubbed elbows with some of the city’s notables; among them was R. M. Culkins, general development director of the Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad.

CM&SP’s line from Aberdeen reached the Missouri River in 1900, and the company was looking to extend it westward. After a number of surveys, the company still couldn’t settle on a route. Culkins asked Lemmon’s advice, for he knew that country as well as any man, and the next day Lemmon returned with a government map of the Standing Rock Reservation he just happened to have along. A red pencil line marked a route from the mouth of the Grand River, present-day Mobridge, to Reeder, N.D., which incidentally skirted the Lake, Tomb & Lemmon holdings.

“As soon as I was advised that the proposed route had been found satisfactory… I got busy at once and purchased several hundred acres of land along the proposed route, the purpose being to ëcoppe’ a good town site not far from the reservation line,” wrote Lemmon.

Such was the stuff of western dreams: Lake, Tomb & Lemmon got a railroad connection close to its holdings, which helped the operation immensely, and Lemmon profited by knowing beforehand exactly where the rails would run. Last but not least, Culkins agreed to name a town on the new line after Lemmon.

Lemmon acquired nearly 1,300 acres along and near the CM&SP line with so-called railroad”script.” Scripting was a malodorous scheme engineered by Frederick Weyerhaeuser of the Santa Fe Railroad, which enabled him to exchange some of the line’s worthless land grant acres for other, more valuable homestead land in the West. When the prime timberland Weyerhaeuser wanted was all gone,”or he became ashamed to take more,” in Lemmon’s words, Weyerhaeuser sold his remaining rights.

“Every acre I scripted made good money,” wrote Lemmon. Some in north Lemmon bought for about $8 an acre, later sold for $100; a tract of 163 acres in and around the town site that was resold to the railroad brought $3,260, and Lemmon saved a corner lot for himself.

Lemmon’s first choice as a town site was about 4 miles east of present-day Lemmon, but there was a problem: it was in North Dakota, which was then a dry state.”In order to make [Lemmon] a real boom town, the saloon with its attendant evils would have to be tolerated,” he wrote. Lemmon ended up locating what he jokingly called”the new El Dorado” astride the state line, in hope that it would become the county seat for both Perkins County, S.D., and Adams County, N.D. Lemmon ended up being neither, but the town nonetheless proved”a hummer,” wrote Lemmon.”It was wide open and wild and wooly, however, not a single life was lost, though fights of all kind were frequent and furious.”

In 1908, after four decades in the cattle business, Ed Lemmon sold his interest in Lake, Tomb & Lemmon. He was 51 and ready for a second career. Lemmon founded and served as president of banks in Lemmon, Davison and Meadow, among other business ventures. When Perkins County was organized in 1909, he became one of its first commissioners; he also served as a commissioner for Adams County, N.D. How he could simultaneously be considered a legal resident of both states has not been recorded, and he didn’t explain in his newspaper columns 21 years later. Most likely no one was so impolitic as to mention it.

“Dad” Lemmon, as one and all referred to him, was a familiar figure around”his” town — familiar enough that citizens knew it was best not to be anywhere nearby when he got behind the wheel of his Model T.”He’d rev the engine up to 4,500 rpm, you could hear it all over town, then drop the clutch,” recalled one old-timer.”He went through a lot of clutches.” At some point Lemmon moved out of his house and into the Yellowstone Hotel. Each morning he would come downstairs, wind his engine to beyond its limit, back up at full speed with nary a glance behind him, make”a bootlegger turn” and cross the street to park in front of the cafe.

He drove his car like he rode his horse, according to the Lemmon town history. On the wrong side of the street. Over hills. Into gullies. His automobiles repaid the abuse by getting stuck numerous times, and on one occasion, the car ran over Lemmon while he was cranking it. The mishap broke his left shoulder blade and threw it out of place, where it remained for five months,”before I went to the Aberdeen hospital and had it broken down and silver wire stitched in place.”

In 1941, four years before Ed Lemmon passed away at the age of 88, Life magazine featured South Dakota in one of its famous photo essays. The photographer found Lemmon on Main Street, dapper in a white shirt and tie, but also ungainly, with his right leg misshapen and foot twisted inward; with the aid of his gnarled cane he managed to stay upright, but just. Lemmon was in the town he founded, among people who knew and loved him, but he wasn’t truly home. That was beyond the end of town, in the grass, endlessly shifting in the breeze.

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

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Not Just Ranches and Rodeo

By John Andrews

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles profiling each county in South Dakota. Click here to read other installments.

Two things came to mind when I started thinking about Perkins County: ranches and rodeo. It worked out perfectly for alliteration’s sake, but as I investigated further I realized there’s much more.

Perkins is one of 10 West River counties created after statehood, and one of six organized in 1909. The county is named for Henry E. Perkins, a Vermont native who moved to Deadwood in 1883 to take a job with Seth Bullock and Sol Star at their hardware store. By the end of the decade he had settled in Sturgis as bookkeeper of the Meade County Bank. Perkins eventually became mayor and served several stints in the South Dakota Senate. He was instrumental in passing legislation to carve what would be called Perkins County from Harding and Butte counties in 1908.

Perhaps no one had greater influence on the area than Ed Lemmon, a rancher and founder of the town that bears his name. Lemmon was born in Utah and trailed cattle from Canada to Texas as a teenager, but he found a home in western South Dakota.

Cowboy Ed Lemmon helped create the town that bears his name in 1906.

As the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad snaked west, Lemmon bought several thousand acres of land along the proposed route, hoping to cash in on a new town site. His first choice was about four miles east of the present-day town, but it sat in North Dakota, then a dry state.”In order to make Lemmon a real boom town, the saloon with its attendant evils would have to be tolerated,” he later wrote. The town ended up on the South Dakota side.

Lemmon died in 1945, but his legacy is still evident in town. The Grand River Museum sells copies of The West As I Knew It, a collection of newspaper columns Lemmon wrote for the Belle Fourche Bee from 1932 to 1936, and another book called Boss Cowman. The town’s annual summer celebration borrows Lemmon’s nickname. Boss Cowman Days, held every July, includes a supper, fireworks, parade and a three-day rodeo.

Boss Cowman Days pays tribute to the town founder with a three-day rodeo. Photo by S.D. Tourism.

Spend more time digging around Perkins County and you’ll discover an artistic spirit that you may not have expected. In the 1930s, amateur geologist Ole Quammen had a vision of an outdoor museum that would showcase the region’s unique stones and fossils. It may have been a low priority for others living through the Great Depression, but money became available through federal programs designed to put men to work. Soon Quammen and a team of workers were gathering petrified wood, unusual rocks and fossils and bringing them to downtown Lemmon. They built cone-shaped trees, waterfalls and other oddities. Today Quammen’s Petrified Wood Park is among the biggest tourist attractions in northwest South Dakota.

Lemmon is also the hometown of John Lopez, an artist who has become known for his uncanny ability to turn scrap iron into lifelike sculptures. Our current issue has a lengthy feature on Lopez and photos of many of his creations, including Triceratops Cowboy, which stands outside the Grand River Museum.

Ole Quammen’s Petrified Wood Park is like a moonscape in the middle of Lemmon. Photo by Paul Horsted.

Twelve miles south of Lemmon on Highway 73 near Shadehill Reservoir stands another unique sight. Frank Rosenau and his son, Joel, used a crane to lift a Cessna 310 to the top of an old radar tower. It could be the world’s largest wind vane.

Head south and west and you’ll find Bison, population 338 and the Perkins County seat. People across the county took notice of Bison in 2007 when a book called Bygone Days was published. It featured the photography of John Penor, then 97 years old and living in the same sod house in which he’d grown up. The photos provided a glimpse into everyday life in Perkins County all the way back to the early 1920s. They showed picnics, parades and local youth goofing around. They were charming in their innocence, and caught the attention of celebrities from New York to Los Angeles. But he didn’t attend book signings in either place.”It’s no place for an old sheep herder,” he told us, before saying he’d never been east of Minneapolis or west of Montana.

Perkins County has also been the setting for two of South Dakota’s great literary works. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography captures the essence of rural life. The book is based on the experiences of Kathleen Norris, who moved into her grandparents’ home in Lemmon in the 1970s and immediately became immersed in the nuances of small town life.

Hugh Glass’ ordeal began near Shadehill Reservoir, a 5,000-acre lake created in 1951. Photo by Lemmon Economic Development Corporation.

Lord Grizzly, by Frederick Manfred, is a novel based on mountain man Hugh Glass’ extraordinary fight for survival after being mauled by a grizzly bear. Glass was part of a fur trading expedition along the Grand River when the bear attacked. Glass was gravely injured, and the rest of his party left him for dead. Incredibly, Glass crawled 200 miles across West River to Fort Kiowa along the Missouri River. To see the historical marker, take Highway 73 south of Lemmon for 13 miles, watching for Hugh Glass Road. Go west about 3 1/2 miles. The monument will be on the right, overlooking the Shadehill Reservoir.

One thing you won’t find in Perkins County, or anywhere close for that matter, is a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. Several years ago I discovered that people in Perkins County lived farther from the nearest McDonald’s than anyone in the country. I guess they still do, since no one has seen any golden arches going up in Prairie City. Don’t let that dissuade you from a visit, though. A thick steak beats a Big Mac any day.