Tag: missouri river

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The Art of Mushroom Hunting

By Bernie Hunhoff

Morel mushrooms will soon begin to grow in South Dakota’s river valleys.

Thousands of South Dakotans are now waiting for a warming of the soil that will sprout mushrooms in forested fields and river bottoms.

When the time is right, people who normally complain about walking across the street for a loaf of bread will crawl through brambles, wade across mucky creeks, scratch under rotted leaves and climb barbed wire — all in the height of tick season — to collect a sack full of mushrooms.

I hadn’t gone mushroom hunting since we escorted our elderly grandmother around the farmstead as she poked about for the fungi, so when longtime mushroomer Darold Loecker issued an invitation to search his favorite spot along the Missouri River I thought it might be a fun exercise.

“Meet me at the bait shop. And bring an extra pair of shoes,” he said.

Grandma never needed extra shoes. That should have been the warning I needed. But I wasn’t suspicious enough to ask.

Darold wasn’t there yet when I got to the bait shop. The girl behind the counter asked if I was going fishing. She had a tub full of minnows.

“Mushroom hunting,” I said confidently.

A Wonderbread man, who was filling the bakery shelf, said he found lots of mushrooms the night before. “But the ticks were thick. I had about 30 on me when I got home.”

Just as I was trying to leave, Darold showed up. I mentioned the ticks. He just laughed. “Did you bring extra shoes?” he asked.

We got in Darold’s pickup and as he turned the key he swore me to secrecy. Mushroomers, it seems, like to keep their favorite spots a secret. Unlike deer hunters, who will tell you the exact latitude and longitude where they bagged a big buck, mushroom hunters often won’t even tell you what county they hunt.

Darold trusted me for some reason. And it wasn’t long before we came upon some cottonwood trees in a river bottom. He gave me a bag and suggested I find a walking stick, which isn’t hard to do in a forest of cottonwoods.

He said the stick serves three purposes: It can be a cane, a marker when you find a good spot and a probe in underbrush.

Off we went. My eyes were trained on the grassy ground. I found empty shotgun shells and Mountain Dew cans, but no mushroom.

After about five minutes, Darold called me over. He pointed to a little fungus with a brown, spongy head atop a 2-inch stem. “That’s a morel mushroom. That’s what we’re looking for.”

He instructed me how to pinch the mushroom off at ground level. I was more confident now that I knew what we were looking for. I walked even slower, looking under every brush by every log. Darold has discovered that mushrooms seem to sprout around downed trees and branches.

Darold found a few more. I was still looking for my first one. Then he started tailing me and every now and then he would say, “You just stepped over one!”

That was the motivation I needed to really watch the earth and, before long, I found a few without backtracking. At last I was a full-fledged mushroom hunter.

We had good success along the riverside. But mushroom hunters are explorers and Darold pointed to a tiny island, which was separated from us by a swamp of stale water and cattails.

”There’ll be mushrooms there because nobody else will go there,” he said. That’s where the extra shoes came in handy. We put on our old sneakers and gingerly waded through the swamp to the island, where we found more pop cans but no mushrooms.

We returned to the riverbank, put on our dry shoes and resumed the hunt. In a few hours’ time we filled several bags with morel mushrooms. I felt like a gardener who reaped a bounty without pulling a weed. And we only brushed off a half-dozen wood ticks.

It seemed too easy to be legal. But it is.

Since that mushroom hunt, I have tried to learn more about mushrooms by asking other veteran pickers for advice. As long as you don’t inquire as to where they go, they are willing to talk. Here’s some of what I’ve learned:

Don’t use plastic bags when you hunt for mushrooms because they cause sweating and quicker deterioration. Use paper bags in the field, and wax paper or newspapers for wrapping.

Sandy soil (such as can be found along many rivers) is the best place to search early in the season because it warms earlier. The mushroom season usually arrives in mid-April in southeast South Dakota and may last only a week or two, depending on the weather. It may come later in northern South Dakota and has been known to extend to Memorial Day in the Black Hills.

If you are hunting mushrooms for the first time, be certain you are collecting edible fungi. Some are poisonous. The most popular South Dakota mushroom is the genus Morchella, commonly known as the morel. Guidebooks are available to help you identify your bounty. Veteran mushroom hunters are also happy to help.

Once you bring home a sack full of mushrooms, you’ll wonder what to do with them. Most nutritionists would probably agree that mushrooms will never become a staple in the American diet. They are not easily digestible and should not be eaten in large quantities.

Furthermore they are fungi — closely related to athlete’s foot, green stuff on old cheese and corn smut. Nutritionally, they are about as good as a leaf of lettuce.

But also remember that mushrooms can cost $100 a pound dried in some specialty stores. And the morel we commonly enjoy in South Dakota cannot even be grown in captivity. They only flourish in the wild.

When you bring your mushrooms home, be certain to look for tiny worms that sometimes crawl into the pitted crown of the morel.

Some people store their mushrooms by drying them on wire trays or screens and then storing the pieces in tightly closed jars. When water is added later, the mushrooms return to their original shape, texture and taste.

Others can mushrooms by heating them for about 15 minutes in water and then packing them in pint or half-pint jars. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1/8 teaspoon of ascorbic acid to each pint and fill the jars with boiling water to cover the mushrooms. Process in a hot water bath for three hours or in a pressure canner for 30 minutes at 10 pounds pressure.

When it comes to preparing the mushrooms for the table, it is a matter of preference. Many people simply slice them up for salads, sauces and omelets.

But a favorite style, especially in South Dakota bars, involves dipping mushroom slices in an egg batter and frying them quickly in butter, turning them to brown both sides.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1993 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Island Winter

Two islands lie near Pierre — Farm Island and LaFramboise. They’re most popular in fair weather, when visitors most comfortably enjoy their lush nature, varied wildlife and miles of hiking. But snow and ice lend a different perspective to their beauty. Photos by Lance Bertram.

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The Burnt Hills

By Edward Raventon

Smoking hills of sulfuric acid emissions can still be found along the Missouri River in south-central South Dakota, but they should be approached with extreme caution.

In the late 1790s fantastic stories of burning hills and volcanoes on the upper Missouri were often repeated in the small village of St. Louis. Since only a handful of superstitious French voyagers had ever ventured that far up river, speculation was rampant as to what caused hills to burn, or if any such phenomena even existed.

Les Cotes Brulees, French for the Burnt Hills, bordered the west side of the Missouri River in Lyman and Gregory counties and covered an area stretching some 75 river miles from Scalp Creek (10 miles north of Fort Randall) to the mouth of American Crow Creek, (just south of Oacoma) with the heart of the smoldering activity centered at the mouth of White River.

This is an area of dark, gumbo hills with cut banks that drop precipitously to the river. The cut banks expose stratified layers of blackish gray Pierre shale, a petrified mud deposited millions of years ago by a shallow inland sea that once covered the western interior of South Dakota.

Interspersed amidst this 75-mile strip of rolling hills and bluffs are crevices in the earth that once emitted poisonous plumes of sulfuric acid, smoke and steam. Since the landscape features smoke and steam along with many bare shale outcrops that lack vegetation, the early voyageurs might naturally have assumed the charred looking hills had been burned by fires, some of which were still smoldering.

In St. Louis, Lewis and Clark had certainly heard the stories and from their journal entries it is evident that they were most eager to investigate this phenomena. On August 24, 1804, four and a half months out of St. Louis, they got their first look at a smoldering bluff along the Missouri River, about 8 miles below the mouth of the Vermillion River on the Nebraska side.

Clark described the bluff as 180 to 190 feet high noting that “it appeared to have been recently on fire.” He reported that the crevice was so hot they could not keep their hands in it. There was no fire or flame Clark reported, just searing heat and acrid fumes.

Captain Lewis, who had apparently remained longer than the rest of the party to make further observations, became ill after returning to the boat. Clark noted in his journal that Lewis was “obliged to take strong medicine to relieve the effects of the fumes.”

Scientists later discovered that the fumes Meriwether Lewis had inhaled consisted of sulfuric acid, which in large doses can seriously injure the lungs. The explorers referred to the toxic minerals from this bluff by the generic name of “cobalt” and through deductive reasoning, surmised that it accounted for the stomach disorders that plagued many members of the crew since passing the mouth of the Big Sioux River.

Clark noted that the crew had been in the habit of scooping its drinking water from the surface of the Missouri. However, after their timely discovery of the poisonous “minerals,” Lewis ordered the crew to take water from a greater depth and to agitate the water and dispense the foam and scum. The result was that some of their stomach disorders ceased while the boils that had afflicted the men completely disappeared. Lewis’ illness proved to be the key in identifying and alleviating the poisoning of the Corps of Discovery.

This was the only observation of smoldering outcrops that the explorers chronicled in their journals, suggesting that the “fires” in the Burnt Hills farther upstream were dormant that late summer of 1804.

In 1839, 35 years after the Corps of Discovery went up the Missouri, the Burnt Hills were again the subject of intense curiosity and investigation. This time the observer was the eminent 19th century French geographer and geologist Joseph Nicollet, who was able to travel in style, taking advantage of a Missouri River steamboat to make the long, arduous journey north.

Nicollet had been well educated in his native France and was a seasoned explorer, traveler and naturalist. He was also familiar with South Dakota, having only a few years earlier made the first scientific observations of the glacial topography of the rolling hills (Coteau des Prairies) of eastern South Dakota. In fact Nicollet, along with his naturalist assistant, John Fremont (The Pathfinder who would later win fame as a western explorer), had been the first to chisel his initials into the Sioux quartzite at the famous Pipestone Quarry in southwestern Minnesota as a lasting signature of that expedition.

Nicollet, always a keen observer of his surroundings, had begun his study of Les Cotes Brulees long before he saw them. In St. Louis he had chanced to pick up several pumice-like stones he found lying washed up on the levee. He correctly theorized that the stones were formed by an intense combustion process inside the earth and further deduced that this process had dissolved (burned) the substances filling the pores of the pumice stones, transforming them into cinders light enough to float down the Missouri.

“I don’t believe volcanoes are the answer,” he wrote in his diary, “but I do not intend to lose sight of this phenomenon as we approach the place of its origin.

On June 3, 1839, while hiking near Scalp Butte (north of present Fort Randall), Nicollet got his first good look at the Burnt Hills. In his diary he makes this entry:

“We begin to encounter black or burnt hills as they are called by travelers, thus originating the idea, often contracted, then revived that there are volcanoes in these parts ….

“It seems the subterranean regions of this zone sometime burn due to some reason or other and a thick smoke can be seen rising from the peaks and domes. It is a quiet smoke, there is no flame and it lasts for years. Travelers have indicated where they saw it and these places are easily recognized by the outward signs left by those that most recently burned ….

“When the combustion does go out in these smoldering furnaces provided by nature, the excavations that result from them cause ground depressions and sometimes tremendous cave-ins whence originate these deep trenches and pitfalls that are characteristics of this black zone compared to other parts of the slopes. The heat generated by these smolderings is hardly felt on the surface of the ground. There are not traces of fusion … or of any thing that might have flowed out of, been projected or carried out (of the ground). The crust of the ground is simply blackened and can no longer entertain any vegetation.”

Nicollet later theorized that the smoldering phenomenon was due to the meeting of shale and overlying coal beds that had been ignited by spontaneous combustion or lightning and other means. He gave these smoldering crevices an inaccurate and clumsy name of “pseudo-volcanoes.”

One of the most extensive prehistoric burn areas occurred near the mouth of the White River. Here, within a 5-mile radius, there is evidence of at least five smoldering pits. The red-baked cinder outcrops found here confirm that the pits once burned long and hot. This phenomenon undoubtedly created a sensation among the earliest Indians, beginning first with the Ree and later the Sioux. It probably accounts for the old Sioux name, Manki-Zatah for the White River. Manki-Zatah means Smoke Earth.

Today geologists have ruled out speculation that lightning strikes or prairie fires ignited Nicollet’s pseudo-volcanoes. The best scientific explanation for this phenomena of smoldering pits is based on the fact that some of the shale deposits along the Missouri contain oil, making the rocks carbonaceous and therefore flammable. Some of these rocks also contain sulfide minerals which are known for their spontaneous oxidation and combustion.

The combination of these minerals and their properties results in a complex interaction whereby the sulfides (pyrite and marcasite) interact with oil shale, air, water and possibly bacteria in creating a spontaneous combustion that, as Nicollet and early steamboat pilots noted, can keep these sites smoldering two or three years if conditions are right.

After the pits are fired up the heat in them, while subtle, can become extremely intense. Geologists, using indirect methods of measurement, estimated that interior bum temperatures deep within the crevice can reach a whopping 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures just below the surface of the gas vents can be 760 degrees, or about three times the boiling point of water.

However even these hot, poisonous pits in the earth have a delicate, fragile side to them. Geologists have found tiny, yellow sulfur crystals around the edges of some of the crevices. These crystals are formed near the vents where they precipitate out of the clouds of acrid smoke when it hits the cooler atmosphere.

Lewis and Clark’s historic “volcano hill” has now all but disappeared; a victim of nearly 190 years of river flooding and erosion. Most of the other bum areas near the river between Fort Randall and Chamberlain are either extinct or have been dormant for decades waiting for the proper mix of ingredients for activation.

Note: A few burn sites continue to be active on an irregular basis. One of the most recently active areas is near the Platte-Winner bridge both on the east and the west side of the Missouri. In the summer of 2015, one site was easily visible from the bridge looking south on the west side of the river and is best seen from a boat.

For those interested in seeing these sites, maps and other historical information on this area is available at the Snake Creek Recreation Area.

One final word of caution: Burn sites are dangerously unstable when dormant and hellishly hot and noxious when active. They are best viewed from a far safe distance.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 1992 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A River Town with Spirit

Our November/December issue includes a story on the clever characters in Springfield. The Missouri River town has been through more highs and lows than most South Dakota communities, but the overall effect has not squelched the town’s spirit or creativity. South Dakota Magazine sent intern Chloe Kenzy, editor-at-large Bernie Hunhoff and his grandson, Steven, to visit the folks who help give Springfield its unique personality. Here are some of Hunhoff’s photos that didn’t make the magazine.

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A River Road Called 1806

By Bernie Hunhoff

Highway 1806 cuts through the Lower Brule Reservation, where tribal preserves and wide open country teem with wildlife, including a captive herd of over 200 elk.

Writers and poets have compared South Dakota’s prairie to an undulating ocean.”Oh, the wonder of the wind from the wild, mysterious green sea to the west!” wrote Hamlin Garland in The Moccasin Ranch. O.E. Rolvaag expressed the same in his 1927 book, Giants in the Earth:”Pure color everywhere. A gust of wind, sweeping across the plain, threw into life waves of yellow and blue and green. Now and then a dead black wave would race over the scene … a cloud’s gliding shadow … now and then.”

Water and wild prairie dominate the landscapes along Highway 1806.

If the prairie is a sea of black soil, then the stretch that follows the Missouri River from Lower Brule to Fort Pierre has some of the Dakotas’ grandest waves of gumbo-laden hills and grasslands.

A two-lane, oil road known as Highway 1806 follows the river. The number commemorates the 1804-1806 expedition of explorers Lewis and Clark. Highway 1804 runs on the east side of the river across much of South Dakota, and 1806 is on the west.

The 59-mile route between Lower Brule and Fort Pierre is slowly but surely gaining popularity — not for travel amenities (nary a single store or rest stop lays along the way) but rather for its extreme lack of commerciality. Unspoiled by much of anything man-made except fences, wheat fields and an occasional farmstead, the road winds up and down and around the West River hills and knolls. On a few occasions, the Missouri is just outside your car window; more often it shows up as a glimmering ribbon of blue in the distance.

Highway 1806 is an asphalt crossbreed of California’s famous Highway One that follows the Pacific Ocean, Custer State Park’s Wildlife Loop Road and your typical West River town-to-market highway. Loftier hopes are now developing for 1806. It lies near the south end of a 550-mile stretch of road that is part of the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program.

Masses are no longer celebrated at this country church along the river road, but flowers are still placed on nearby graves.

The entire byway runs through four reservations, including the Lower Brule which owns most of the land on the west side of the Missouri between the city of Lower Brule and Fort Pierre.

The road begins at Chamberlain and runs on the east side of the Missouri along Highways 50 and 47 to Fort Thompson, where motorists cross the Missouri and travel 1806 to Fort Pierre. The byway departs from the river, following Highways 14 and 63 to Hayes and Eagle Butte before returning to hug the western side of the Missouri all the way to Bismarck.

Lower Brule leaders wish the byway — and particularly their 59-mile corridor — could become a two-way path to reconciliation between the races in South Dakota. That seems like an odd goal at first glance, because reconciliation would seem to require face-to-face exchanges. Unless you make a special effort, you’re unlikely to meet anyone as you travel 1806. This is a land occupied by elk, deer, buffalo, antelope, turkeys and ever-chattering prairie dogs.

Can wilderness bring about reconciliation? The Native American leaders’ hope is that people of all races will share an appreciation for nature, and that it will be a starting point for better relations.

Dakota Scultze-LeCompte takes his dogs, Minnow and Yo Yo, for a bath at the Iron Nation Recreation Area.

Lower Brule Tribe and the three others — the Crow Creek, Cheyenne and Standing Rock — do offer some recreation and tourist opportunities along the road, including wildlife tours, fishing excursions, hunting trips, lodging and, of course, casino gambling. Just a few miles southeast of Fort Pierre, the Lower Brule Tribe has opened a Buffalo Interpretive Center with exhibits, films and local arts and crafts in a small gift shop.

But promoters of the highway stress that economics are not driving the development.”We’re not selling Indianism,” says Clair Green, who works as a cultural resource consultant for the tribe.”We’ve tried to enter the tourism business carefully and reflectively and slowly. We truly are more interested in education than anything else.”

“The idea is to educate and to further the commonality of the people of South Dakota,” added Michael Jandreau, who led the Lower Brule tribe for nearly three decades before he passed away in 2015. Serving as tribal chair is possibly the most precarious job in American politics, so Jandreau’s longevity in office was a testament to his patience and tact. But he didn’t mince words when it came to racial healing:”We want to make real the concept of reconciliation in South Dakota. It should not just be a figment of someone’s imagination.”

Jandreau believed the pristine and wild landscapes found along 1806 are ideal for finding common ground between two cultures. Maybe. Rolvaag and Garland showed that you don’t have to be Native American to understand a land’s peace and beauty.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Bickering Over Brandy

By John Andrews

Jamison Rounds traveled to Europe to become a priest. Instead of returning with a collar, he had a plan to create the state’s first distillery. Today his brothers, Tom and Pat Rounds, plus Tom’s son A.J., manage Dakota Spirits on a Missouri River bluff north of Pierre, where they create whiskey and brandy with ingredients culled from South Dakota fields.

The Rounds family had dabbled with beer and wine making, but they didn’t get serious until Jamison began researching distilleries while in seminary. They realized that South Dakota’s resources could produce a product as good as any on the market.

“Everybody talks about how they are unique because of their water source,” says A.J. Rounds, the head distiller.”We’ve got the Missouri River right outside our door. South Dakota grows corn, wheat, everything you need to produce good whiskey and vodka.”

They turn water, corn and wheat into two types of whiskey, a vodka and two brandies: Coteau des Prairies and the award-winning Bickering Brothers, a name that A.J. coined in honor of his family’s harmless business squabbles. The brandy has become their signature product.”We’re the only ones in the world making an aged, neutral brandy,” he says.”We’re setting the standard for it.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Making Memories

By Christian Begeman

On my way to Selby to watch my nephews play in the high school football playoffs earlier this month, I took a side trip to Swan Creek Recreation Area on the mighty Oahe. That’s what my Uncle Jack used to call it –“The Mighty Oahe.” The last time I was at Swan Creek I was with him, and the water was so low it was one of the few places you could get a boat in on the northern part of the lake. As usual, we didn’t catch a lot of fish that day, but we enjoyed being on the water. Jack loved that lake, or more specifically, he loved catching walleye out of its waters. We didn’t get to go as often as he would have liked, but we did go enough to create many memories of fighting 5-foot swells, tangled lines and snags that seemed to take hours to undo. Every once in a while we’d catch a walleye or two to make it all worthwhile.

In late November of 2011, Uncle Jack passed away. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving. In hindsight, that could be why I took the 8-mile drive west of Akaska to see Swan Creek and the Oahe again. With normal water levels I hardly recognized it. I sat on the lake’s edge and watched a few anglers come into the dock while the sun set behind gathering clouds to the southwest. The slight wind was fresh and clean. I snapped a few photos and then drove on to the game.

November has a way of making me pause and think about those, like my uncle, who have been important in my life. Uncle Jack made his living as an artist. In my college years, I’d come home for the summers to help Dad farm, and it didn’t take long to get the call from town that Jack wanted to get together. When we didn’t go fishing, we’d often go into the Dewey and Ziebach County countrysides to scout scenes for his next painting. He had a nice camera and would often ask me to take photos of things that I normally wouldn’t think twice about — the play of light on the shoulders of a butte, or the deep shadows tucked into the folds of the creeks and waterways. It seems he also had an uncle who inspired him when he was young. I remember him saying a time or two after a particularly beautiful sunset that Uncle Orly painted that one for us in heaven.

Now that I’m older and Dad is retired, we’re the ones taking drives into the countryside when I go home to Isabel. Over the years, I’ve been able to capture some scenes that I think would have inspired Uncle Jack’s paintings. So in honor of him, I wanted to show a few of these images that remind me of him and our times together. Whether it’s the subject, like horses galloping across the prairie, or a classic South Dakota sunset, or various views of the Mighty Oahe, I think Uncle Jack would enjoy these photos, and that makes me feel good. May your Thanksgiving be filled with keeping and creating memories that your family members can cherish for many Novembers to come.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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Across the Wide Missouri

Missouri River Map Print by Mike Reagan

Our new map prints are in! Renowned watercolor artist Mike Reagan’s latest work depicts the Missouri River as it flows through South Dakota, along with a few of the fish that draw sportsmen to its waters. We’re proud to offer his work as an unframed 16″ x 20″ art print for just $24.95 plus shipping and handling. Click here if you’d like to buy the new Missouri River map print for your home or office, or purchase it as a set, along with Reagan’s South Dakota and Black Hills prints, for just $64.95.

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Moved by Water

By John Andrews

The Missouri River forms the western border of Campbell County, in the far northwest corner of what South Dakotans call East River. The Big Muddy has affected the lives of everyone living along its course through South Dakota, but the river’s role in shaping Campbell County is unique. The Missouri’s bank was home to an early Plains Indian village that is still studied today. It’s where explorers Lewis and Clark first heard a curious Indian legend. And its waters caused an entire town to relocate.

Indigenous people have inhabited the Great Plains for thousands of years. Archaeologists study their lives at various village sites, one of which remains on the shore of Lake Oahe in Campbell County near Pollock. Called the Vanderbilt Archaeological Site, the village dates to about 1300. When it was first examined in 1979, researchers found 22 depressions believed to be house rings, trash pits and collected over 200 pieces of ceramic, stone chips, tools and other projectile points. Archaeologists say that despite erosion due to wave action from the lake, they’ve been able to learn a lot about the movements and living patterns of the region’s earliest inhabitants.

Campbell County’s stone idols stand among the hills of the Missouri River valley near Pollock.

More than 500 years later, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their Corps of Discovery paddled into present day Campbell County. On Oct. 10, 1804, the explorers met with the leaders of three Arikara villages and presented them with clothes and flags. Three days later, Lewis and Clark first learned of the Stone Idols.”Two stones resembling human persons and one resembling a dog are situated in the open prairie,” Lewis wrote in his journal for Oct. 13.”To those stones the Arikaras pay great reverence, make offerings whenever they pass. Those people have a curious tradition of those stones. One was a man in love, one a girl whose parents would not let marry. The dog went to mourn with them. All turned to stone gradually, commencing at the feet. Those people fed on grapes until they turned, and the woman has a bunch of grapes yet in her hand. On the river near the place those are said to be situated, we observed a greater quantity of fine grapes than I ever saw at one place.”

The stone idols are there today, though it takes a bit of work to find them. Take Highway 1804 a mile south out of Pollock to the West Pollock Resort. Take the road through the cabins and you’ll see the idols on the northeast corner of the resort.

Spring Creek, renamed through the years, runs through Campbell County.

Lewis and Clark camped along Stone Idol Creek, which doesn’t appear on maps today. That’s because at some point in history, it was decided that the creek needed a new name. For reasons unbeknownst to us, it became known as Hermaphrodite Creek. Eventually someone else came along and renamed it Spring Creek, which is what maps show today. The residents of Campbell County remain eternally grateful.

Campbell County as we know it today was organized in 1873 and named for Norman B. Campbell, a territorial legislator from Bon Homme County. Campbell remains somewhat of a mystery. He served in the legislature in 1872-73 and died quite young. His father was the Civil War Brigadier General Charles T. Campbell, founder of the town of Scotland.

The county seat was originally located at La Grace, along the Missouri River. The election of 1888 transferred that status to Mound City, where it remains despite the town’s current estimated population of 65. That makes Mound City one of the smallest county seats in the nation. Townspeople fought battles with nearby Herreid in the 1960s over the possible relocation of certain offices, but they stayed in Mound City. Perhaps politics is simply in the blood of Mound Citians. The town’s most famous daughter is Alice Kundert, who served as state auditor from 1969 to 1978, secretary of state from 1979 to 1986 and then ran for governor. She lost the election, but went on to serve in the state House of Representatives from 1991 to 1994. She died in 2013.

The construction of Oahe Dam and the resulting Lake Oahe forced the relocation of the town of Pollock.

The federal government’s attempt to tame the Missouri River in the mid-20th century led to a life-altering decision for the people of Pollock. The town had been founded in 1901 along the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Saint Marie Railroad. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers unveiled plans for a series of dams along the river, the resulting reservoir that became Lake Oahe would inundate the town.

On Jan. 27, 1953 a town meeting was held to determine the fate of Pollock. A vote was taken to determine which direction the town should move. The results were: west, 2; north, 20; east, 39; south 139. A second unanimous ballot was cast for the southern site, which was one mile away on a hilltop. E.L. McKay, editor of the Pollock Pioneer, cleverly used the headline,”A city built on a hill cannot be hid” as part the next week’s newspaper.

After the new town site was platted, people made their lot choices and sealed them in an envelope. Lots were assigned by drawing, and only a handful of duplicate choices were settled by a coin toss.”Nearly everyone was satisfied,” reported the Pioneer.

Pollock’s brick schoolhouse was demolished before the original town site was flooded.

The official groundbreaking of the new town took place on June 4, 1955, making Pollock one of the only towns in America that celebrates two founding dates. The community celebrated its centennial in 2001, and then followed with a 50-year celebration in 2005.

Not surprisingly, Pollock today is a fishing community, nestled between Lake Pocasse (named for one of the Arikara leaders who met with Lewis and Clark) and Pollock Bay, which leads into Lake Oahe. The Pollock Visitor and Interpretive Center houses an impressive collection of historical artifacts and memorabilia from the town of 217.

Though Mound City is small, it’s hardly sleepy. For decades, Bernie’s Beefstro served meals so good that diners drove 60 miles just to eat there. Longtime owner Bernie Huber decided to sell the bar in July after 40 years of ownership, but hopes to help the new proprietors make the transition.

Mound City is also home to the headquarters of Wild Dutchman sunflower seeds. Three generations of the VanderLaan family run the business that began as a fluke. Wayne VanderLaan started by dehydrating small batches of seeds on his wife’s stovetop. Today their seeds are found throughout the Upper Midwest. The exact recipe is a secret, but part of Wild Dutchman’s appeal comes from the low salt content.

Inside the Campbell County courthouse in Mound City.

If you think you might like to live in Campbell County, check out the town of Herreid, pop. 403. The town’s economic development corporation offers up to $5,000 for families purchasing an existing home or building new. Once you’ve relocated, you can research a Campbell County mystery we’ve been trying to solve for years.

We first heard about the Kiss Me Quick Hills in a book called South Dakota Geographic Names. They supposedly rise east of Pollock and are named for the”series of short, sharp rises in the road, which almost cause a person to meet himself.” Several years ago, a South Dakota Magazine editor was traveling through Campbell County. He asked a local about the Kiss Me Quicks.”I’ve heard them called lots of other things by people trying to get over them, but never that,” he replied.

So our writer came home without so much as a kiss. Here’s hoping you’ll be luckier.

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