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Painting the Trophies

By Bernie Hunhoff

The Hatterscheidt trophy room has evolved at the Dacotah Prairie Museum, says curator Marianne Marttila-Klipfel (left). With her are the artists who painted the scenes: Lora Schaunaman (center) and Debra Many Carson.

“This traveling circus of ours lives off the country,” wrote Aberdeen safari hunter Fred Hatterscheidt.”We shoot to eat. We hunt for pleasure. We kill for trophies.”

Few South Dakotans ever hunted the world with the passion of Hatterscheidt, or left the public his guns, journals and taxidermy mounts. However, the staff and board of Dacotah Prairie Museum in Aberdeen soon grew uncomfortable with the collection that they inherited when the hunter bequeathed it to them along with a three-story building that became the museum in 1970.

“The mounts had to be displayed,” says Lora Schaunaman, a retired curator of exhibits. That was part of the agreement Hatterscheidt made with the board even though the lions, tigers and other exotic species hardly fit the museum’s mission of exploring northern South Dakota history.

Perceptions of safaris have also changed since Hatterscheidt died in 1973. When he was circling the globe in the 1950s and 1960s, trophy hunting was accepted as the sport of wealthy adventurers. Ernest Hemingway, one of the most famous American novelists of the 20th century, wrote extensively about his African excursions.

Other celebrities also popularized safari hunts. Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president who is remembered as a conservationist, embarked on an African safari soon after leaving the White House in 1910. He later bragged that he’d killed 296 animals, including nine lions and 15 zebras. John Wayne roped a 450-pound wildebeest while filming Hatari, a 1962 movie about hunters who captured wild animals for zoos.

Even as those famous hunts were occurring, some game species were nearing extinction. Also, the concept of safari hunting became entangled with the colonialism that exploited native peoples in African countries. The stereotype of the rich American or European flying to an impoverished Third World village to kill for sport was reenforced when a Minnesota dentist shot a beloved lion named Cecil that lived in a national park in Zimbabwe.

However, the staff of the Aberdeen museum had recognized the dilemma long before Cecil’s death in 2015. A 1990 museum report recommended that Hatterscheidt’s gun collection be removed because it gave the appearance of”promotion of big game hunting.” The report, titled”A Man of His Times,” noted that the museum benefactor lived and hunted at a time when sensibilities were quite different.

Even for his own time, Fred Hatterscheidt was unique. He was born in Cologne, Germany in 1893 and came to America as a child with his parents, who were looking for an opportunity to farm. They arrived in Aberdeen when he was 10.

Hatterscheidt was with Frank Scepaniak in Siberia when Scepaniak killed the polar bear, which was mounted in full.

He studied at the Aberdeen Business College and Northern Normal (today’s Northern State University). He joined the South Dakota National Guard in 1914, the same year he went to work for a local real estate firm.

Hatterscheidt married Ruth Kimble in 1922. They did not have children, but they embraced the greater Aberdeen community. Today, their Hatterscheidt Foundation continues to provide scholarships to students in the region. Hatterscheidt immersed himself in business and 30 years later the son of immigrants had the wherewithal to travel the world. Ruth accompanied him on a few of his trips. She collected fans. Her husband collected animal trophies.

Hatterscheidt kept detailed journals as he traveled. Like the taxidermy mounts, his thoughts and writings deserve to be judged in the context of the era. He wrote honestly and bluntly, at times questioning the customs of other cultures and in other instances, seeking understanding.

In September of 1952 he was hunting giraffe in the Tana Forest of Kenya.”We followed the wounded animal for miles and miles over mountain and desert,” he wrote.”We had to quit on account of the darkness and we were still ten or twelve miles from Camp.”

He continued on September 19:”Six boys tracking the animal over mountains and desert, and finally we had to give up spoor. We located four Giraffe feeding. We circled and came in against the wind. Smith designated the kill, and Bob, our gun boys and I, dropped out of the hunting truck which went on the prescribed 200 yards. I got in the first shot with the .416. Bob used his 30.06 immediately after. The heavy impact of the .416 knocked the Giraffe clean off his feet. He jumped up and ran after the herd. Bob shot five times and registered three hits, but the bullets were flattened out under the skin which is nearly one-half inch thick. I got in another shot with the .416 and this slowed up the Giraffe to where Captain Smith headed him off near the road. The animal was about 16 or 18 feet tall and weighed nearly two tons. It was all our truck could do to pull and turn him over.”

On Sept. 29, 1952, he related an elephant kill.”Trailed Elephant for an hour or two (time means nothing in the African jungle). Elephant Camp on the Tana River. This was the highlight of our trip. Killed a six ton or more (7 tons) Elephant over 100 years old and carried 160 pounds of ivory (figuring both tusks). I fired three shots from the .416; the first one to the heart. He ran less than 20 yards and fell dead. Captain Smith stood silent in reverence to the dying giant of the Tana Forest. Tears ran from the Elephant’s eyes and perspiration formed in pools on his head.”

He also observed foreign commerce, noting in England on August 11, 1952,”There are men in charge of business who know nothing about it. They don’t even know what assets they have.”

A few days later he penned,”Sixty-eight colored natives were arrested in Johannesburg today.” It is one of several brief references to native Africans’ rebellions against apartheid and other injustices.

On the 1952 trip, he saw Hollywood movie star Spencer Tracy in a hotel lobby.”He is shorter than I, and his nose and cheeks are pot-marked,” wrote Hatterscheidt.”He is very homely and looked more like a tramp.”

In a 1959 trip to India, he scolded the leaders.”These ‘holier than thou’ politicians are no different than the Caesars of Rome as far as the masses are concerned. They wouldn’t let Bob and I walk on a street leading to the Palace of the President, nor take any pictures of Nehru’s palace. The people of India have never seen pictures of these in any newspapers. Nehru is always shown with (Hindu fashion) folded hands in greeting. Gandhi set an example of poverty but like our priests and ministers, those in power don’t follow Christ or Gandhi.”

He was more impressed with the rural people.”Bob and I have really experienced the life of an Indian Maharaja who used to have the exclusive right to kill a tiger. We have been waited on. We have been blessed and anointed with oil and sprinkled with rice, and a mark was put on my forehead. All good Hindus, especially the women, carry a red or black spot on their forehead. We were honored time and time again for being killers of the tiger, also their god. I can’t understand any of it.”

Aberdeen hunter Fred Hatterscheidt made the cover of a Minneapolis magazine in 1961.

Hatterscheidt welcomed publicity. In 1960, he offered his diaries to Farm Journal but the editor, Carroll Streeter, replied,”we are so terrifically crowded for space right now that I think it quite unlikely that we could.”

Regional newspapers were more receptive. In the museum files are several stories, including a 1959 account in the Aberdeen American News of a tiger hunt.”The Jeep lurched to a stop and as Hatterscheidt stepped down, the tiger was charging down on them,” wrote Sally Ross.”Hatterscheidt fired, but the tiger kept coming. Hatterscheidt fired again and again until the tiger reared on its hind feet and in one last roar, fell over backwards 20 feet away from the hunter.”

He told the Watertown Public Opinion that the 3,000-pound gaur he shot”represents a possible record kill.” He said it measured 6 feet, 1 inch at the shoulders ó 2 inches higher than the previously recognized record.

On March 5, 1961, the Aberdeen hunter was featured on the cover of the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune Magazine with a trophy Bengal tiger shot in India. He said the tiger was,”bagged by means of a beat, where natives form a huge circle and drive the animals forward,” while he waited in a blind, 16 feet above the ground.

His trophy kills were preserved by some of America’s best taxidermists in Chicago, Houston and Seattle. Once mounted, they were shipped to W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion, the oldest museum in South Dakota. Someone there had apparently assisted Hatterscheidt in gaining permission for some of the hunts.

However, in 1970 two of Hatterscheidt’s friends stopped at the Vermillion museum to see the trophies and were chagrined to discover that the heads were in storage and not available to the public. At that very time, historians in Aberdeen were looking for a permanent home for the Dacotah Prairie Museum.

Hatterscheidt and two partners, Herman Pickus and P.A. Bradbury, agreed to donate the historic, three-story Western Union Building on Main Street in 1970. However, the offer included a stipulation that the museum shall exhibit the wildlife collection ó including the aforementioned gaur and elephant.

Hatterscheidt died three years later, long before museumgoers began to balk at the mounted heads. However, by the 1990s, sensibilities were changing and the mounts, some now 40 years old, were aging. To make matters worse, the trophies were only separated from visitors by a rope, so some people were handling the mounts; bratty children were even pulling the whiskers from a leopard.

Schaunaman, an artist and art teacher, was then a curator.”The original exhibit was a trophy room with just the heads hanging on the walls,” she says.”It told the safari story of one Aberdeen businessman, but the reaction wasn’t always great. I didn’t even like to go in the room. People would bring their little kids and they would be afraid. Sometimes they would cry and scream. Our director back then was Sue Gates. She knew I didn’t like the room, yet we all knew the trophies had to be displayed. That’s when we came up with an idea.”

Sherri Rawstern, the museum’s longtime curator of education, urged her fellow staffers to consider two goals: show the animals in their native habitat, and do it in a manner that was more lifelike. That was the genesis of a major undertaking.

Schaunaman immediately reached out to Debra Many Carson, an Aberdeen wildlife artist.”I called her and said, ‘Have you ever painted an animal life-size?'”

Buster the Bison has long been the mascot of the Dacotah Prairie Museum, but he became even more popular when artist Debra Many Carson painted a body to match his fuzzy head.

The two women began by researching habitats and drawing sketches, which were later enlarged to fit the walls. They especially worked on the proportion of the actual heads to the painted bodies. Along with the art scenes, they incorporated real tufts of grass, soils, branches and a massive tree trunk.

Schaunaman tried to contact the original taxidermists, hoping to learn how to clean the mounts. Chris Klineburger of Seattle was deceased, but she was able to reach his son, Kent, who had continued in his father’s footsteps.”I only expected to get some advice, but when he heard what we were doing he insisted on coming to help,” she says.”He was on his honeymoon, actually. He came with his new bride, and she helped as well. They were here for about a week.”

During the 18-month transformation of the trophy room, museum staff also embarked on a major restoration of the handsome 1888 building that Hatterscheidt and his partners had given to them. Replacing the huge windows was an important part of the renovation.

“As they were taking out the big windows on street level, Sue Gates told us, ‘here’s your chance!'” Schaunaman remembers.”The window holes made it possible for us to get the big mounts outdoors for cleaning. Somewhere there’s a picture of me, standing on a step ladder and vacuuming a polar bear on Aberdeen’s Main Street.”

Other repairs were more subtle. Many Carson, the wildlife artist, had pet cats.”When I realized the leopard’s whiskers were missing, I watched for my cats to shed their whiskers and I saved them and glued them on the leopard,” she says.

A golden eagle, mounted on a rock, was especially difficult.”We had a terrible time getting him off the rock without breaking his talons,” says Many Carson.

The elephant head was also challenging.”They didn’t have the foam plastic models in those days, so it is framed with 2-by-4s and other heavy wood,” Schaunaman says.”The tusks are fiberglass, but they are heavy as well. We had to consult a structural engineer to see if the wall would hold it. We drilled through three layers of brick to the outside wall and bolted the mount to a steel plate.”

Using large chunks of material from Benchmark Foam in Watertown, they also sculpted two front legs for the gigantic elephant.

Though the murals span the continents of Earth, they blend together as if you were circling the globe on a jet plane.”It begins with sunrise of the Arctic, and then morning over the Rockies, noonday on the Great Plains, afternoon in Africa, a sunset in India and nighttime in the Himalayas,” says Schaunaman.

Many Carson and Schaunaman have slightly different styles, but their work blended perfectly. A casual observer might think it was all accomplished by a single artist.

Reaction from the public was immediately positive.”It changed by leaps and bounds,” Schaunaman says. And that has continued, even though public perceptions of big-game hunting are still evolving.

Marianne Marttila-Klipfel, who now serves as curator of exhibits at Dacotah Prairie Museum, says the safari murals and mounts have stood the test of time.”Now, with improvements made by Lora and Debra, the room tells a story in an educational context. The animals were placed back into their natural habitats and through artistic magic, life was brought to the exhibit. The rest of us get to benefit from their vision and talent.”†

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Seed on Fertile Ground

By Otto Neuhaus

W.H. Over led the search for Arikara village sites along the Missouri River during summers from 1917 to1919.

How did a Perkins County homesteader with an eighth grade education develop a scientific career and become director of the University of South Dakota Museum?

It all began when young William Henry Over found an arrowhead in his father’s field near Albion, Illinois, where he was born in 1866. Like the seeds his father planted in that field, the chipped scrap of stone would produce many crops in a lifetime of collecting and learning.

While other boys entertained themselves in more conventional ways, young Over began collecting insects, plants and artifacts. “When I was 15,” he told a USD Volante reporter in 1942, “I exhibited my first archaeology items in a small showcase in my home in southern Illinois. It was then I knew my ambition was to direct a large museum.”

As a young man, Over moved to Minnesota to engage in business. But he continued gathering artifacts, a collection he exhibited in 1901 at the American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. During these years he lectured locally on topics from potatoes to primitive man.

By 1908, Over was living in Deuel County. His interests had extended to fossils, and his growing expertise enabled him to recognize unknown snail and crab fossils, two of which were subsequently named after him: Pisidium overi and Dakotacancer overani. Soon, Over, his wife and their two sons moved west to homestead in Perkins County.

Over’s occupation now was farming, but he never stopped collecting. In 1912, he published an article entitled “Notes from Northwest South Dakota” in the journal, Curio Collectors. He began to study natural history in Perkins County, ranging from freshwater shells and fossils to colossal triceratops bones. And he described artifacts left in Perkins County by the Arikara people.

The previous year, Over had written about the hard work of breaking rocks to obtain specimens of Sphenodiscus lenticularis. The essay came into the hands of University of South Dakota Dean E.C. Perisho, who also served as the state geologist. “This article was the means of getting me to Vermillion,” Over said. The family moved to Vermillion in 1912, and Over became assistant curator of the USD Museum.

W.H. Over supervised a dig at the Arikara site near LeBeau in 1932. The village is now under Lake Oahe.

In his new position, Over became especially active in archaeology, developing his interest in the history and culture of the Native peoples of South Dakota. In 1907, he had given a talk in Clear Lake about the earliest South Dakotans, the Arikara, whom he described as semi-civilized people who used fire, made tools and pottery, and cultivated the soil, raising corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and tobacco, semi-sedentary people living a “quiet and peaceable life” in earth lodges in permanent villages.

From 1917 to 1919, Over and his associates spent two months of each summer searching for prehistoric villages along the Missouri River, finding 125 such sites. Over’s article, “The Arikara Culture in South Dakota,” provided the earliest understanding of these people. A 1931 Volante article said the USD Museum had the largest collection of Arikara artifacts in the United States, a collection that Over said, “put the Arikara Indians on the map.” By 1934, he had concluded that their earth lodges, pottery, corn and other plants indicated the Arikara had originated in the Southwest.

Two years after joining the museum, Over began gathering live animals. Committed to attracting and educating young people, he obtained three live opossums, a snowy owl and some snakes, including a diamondback rattlesnake from Texas. In 1941, the Chicago Zoological Park bought all of Over’s snakes from the university.

Throughout his long career, Over’s interests continued to expand. His writings include Amphibians and Reptiles of South Dakota, Birds of South Dakota, Fishes of South Dakota, Mammals of South Dakota, Trees and Shrubs of South Dakota, Wild Flowers of South Dakota, Archaeology in South Dakota and the Life History of Sitting Bull. He left practically no sphere of knowledge about South Dakota untouched.

In 1936, the Board of Regents and the university recognized Over’s accomplishments by granting him the honorary degree of doctor of science. After 35 years of service to the university, Over retired in 1948 at age 82. The following year the regents renamed the university museum the W.H. Over Museum.

William Henry Over died February 20, 1956, having provided an incredible amount of knowledge about South Dakota’s natural and cultural history. The seed that fell on W.H. Over had truly multiplied.

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

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The Scent of Colome

By Michael Zimny

Outhouse curator Richard Papousek’s contribution to humanity is more olfactory than”The Factory.” His Outhouse Museum in Colome is a small shrine to the historic design of private spaces.

The project began about 15 years ago and a few miles down the road in Gregory, where Papousek formerly ran an antique shop. The museum came into being as a tourist draw, but according to some grew into something much more than that, and according to others is still just a tourist draw.

“As a kid, I grew up with outhouses,” Papousek says.”We had them at our school and on our farm, and they’ve all kind of disappeared. And I thought this would be kind of neat to make a little collection, so I did that behind my store.”

He put an ad in the paper.”People thought I was crazy, but they did come across with some unique outhouses.” His collection includes a double-door, a doggy outhouse and a shack reputedly frequented by Calamity Jane.

The Gregory museum opened to some national media fanfare, and then settled into its existence as an outhouse collection in a small town on Highway 18. After Papousek closed the shop, the museum spent a few years in a temporary home, and then went away.

The museum is making a comeback in its new digs in an alley behind Main Street in Colome. Papousek has brought back some of the classics, along with some new, old outhouses, locally acquired. Each is accompanied by a summary of collected oral histories about its provenance and notable visitors received.”Each one has a unique story,” he says, though,”sometimes it might get embellished a little. It’s outhouses, what do you expect?”

Perhaps this installation will set down roots.”Gregory didn’t really want to be known as the dump of the world,” Papousek says.”I come to Colome and they welcomed it with open arms.” The city even laid some new gravel in the alley.

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 Vinegar Man

By Jennifer Thom

It surprised both Lawrence Diggs and the reference librarian at the San Francisco Public Library that they couldn’t find any information on vinegar. He had recently purchased balsamic vinegar and wanted to find out how to make his own.

“It intrigued me that vinegar was so common and yet we know so little about it,” Diggs says.

His simple inquiry has led to research around the world. Working from his home in Roslyn, he is now one of the world’s best sources for vinegar information.

“I started tracking down information and borrowing books from around the world,” recalls Diggs, who started his search in 1984. “The information came in trickles at first, which is good, because it gave me time to absorb it. The more I found out, the more I got interested.”

Diggs interviewed vinegar makers and talked to professors employed at university wine departments (in some cases, vinegar is wine gone sour). His research has taken him to France, Egypt, Mexico, South America and the Philippines.

Diggs found out not only how balsamic vinegar is made, he has also researched the sociological, historical and economic aspects of vinegar.

“It’s turned around my way of looking at history,” he says. For example, the Bible reports that Roman soldiers gave Jesus vinegar while he was on the cross. Christians have considered this a cruel act, but Diggs says that Roman soldiers often drank vinegar. The gesture would be an act of kindness when seen in this light.

The ingredients of vinegar vary with the country and cultures of the creator. Vinegar is made from carbohydrates, for example, grapes, grains, coconuts, carrots, rice, milk, dates and wine.

To make vinegar, a cook needs a sugar that can convert to alcohol, which in turn converts to acetic acid, or vinegar. Instead of sweating over chemical reactions, Diggs suggests that cooks buy vinegar off the shelf and then personalize it with herbs, such as tarragon.

“Other people have already done the hard work,” he says. Blending vinegars will give you a new one, or you can age store-bought vinegar.

“What’s mediocre at two or three years will be excellent in ten years,” Diggs says.

The vinegar that started Diggs on his passion, balsamic, is made from wine. The best balsamic vinegars come from Italy’s Modena and Reggio regions.

“Balsamic vinegars is where you’ll taste the vinegar,” he says. “Don’t use a lot, just a few drops.”

Malt vinegars, made from grains, are traditionally used with fried foods, such as hush puppies or fish and chips.

Bacteria cannot survive in acetic acid, which is why vinegar is a famous pickler. South Dakota farm wives pickle cucumbers and beets using jugs of the common white stuff, made from apples, grains, potatoes or sugar beets.

Apples were abundant early in America’s history, so cider vinegar was manufactured. Cores and peels, leftovers from processing apples, are now used to make vinegar for pickling.

Vinegar has other uses in the kitchen. Biscuits, cakes, pies and cookies are all lighter and flakier when baked with vinegar. Vinegar causes baking soda to give up carbon dioxide, translating into lighter biscuits, and it acts on the gluten in flour, making flakier piecrusts. It adds tang to soups and sauces.

Before he could afford more expensive cuts of meat, Diggs used vinegar as a meat tenderizer for dishes such as Swiss steak. The sourness disappears while the meat cooks.

“In some places, vinegar is savored like wine,” he says. Diluted to 1 or 2 percent acetic acid, Diggs reports that a vinegar’s sourness will be that of lemonade without sugar.

Just as wine lovers have wine-tasting parties, vinegar aficionados can hold organized vinegar tasting events. As a perk for their employees, companies will hire Diggs to host a vinegar tasting party.

He also explains how to taste and score vinegars. Tasters need to use a sugar cube. The cube soaks up the vinegar, then the taster sucks the vinegar off the cube. This gives the taster the flavor of the vinegar, without shutting down the taste buds. The aficionado can then move on to the next vinegar.

He’s made numerous connections and acquaintances in the industry, so Diggs fields diverse requests. Vinegar manufacturers contact him to taste-test their vinegars and get his opinion on its strengths and weaknesses and how to market vinegar products. A gentleman requested Diggs’ help in exporting vinegar to India.

Diggs’ book, Vinegar, is the definite guide to that common liquid found in every cupboard. The 300-page tome is used as a textbook at the University of California-Davis in their winemaking classes.

“I want to make South Dakota the Vinegar Capitol of the World,” Diggs says. He’s done just that since moving to Roslyn in 1989. Diggs formed the Vinegar Connoisseurs International club and created the International Vinegar Museum on Roslyn’s Main Street.

CHICKEN ADOBO

This is a traditional dish of the Philippines, usually served with rice and the chicken’s head. Diggs encourages cooks to add cinnamon or nutmeg to this stew, and to make your own call on the chicken head.

In large pot, place the following ingredients:

1 chicken, cut into small pieces

1 cup vinegar

1 cup water

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 bay leaf

5 cloves garlic, crushed

2 tablespoons salt

5 peppercorns

2 mild red peppers

Chop the peppers if you want a hotter; spicier stew. Otherwise, add them whole near the end of the cooking time for a milder flavor. Cook slowly, until chicken starts to come off bones and gravy begins forming. If the stew is too sour, add a little more water. Remove some of the oil if desired.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The King Hits the Road

By Roger Holtzmann

One of the world’s greatest musical instruments, a 16th century Amati ‘King’ cello housed at the National Music Museum (NMM) in Vermillion, is part of a summer-long exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“The ‘King’ is one of the National Music Museum’s crown jewels, the ‘Mona Lisa’ of Italian stringed instruments,” said NMM Director Cleveland Johnson.”We are proud to share this treasure with The Met and its many visitors this summer. We’re especially grateful to the NMM’s corporate sponsor, Citi, for underwriting the expenses of this loan and making the King’s trip to New York possible.”

The Amati ‘King’ cello is the earliest surviving bass instrument of the violin family. Made in the mid-1500s by Andrea Amati, the founding master of the Cremonese violin tradition, the ‘King’ remains an iconic masterwork of the Italian Renaissance. The innovative craftsmanship of Andrea Amati, his sons, and grandsons directly influenced Antonio Stradivari and an entire lineage of renowned stringed-instrument makers.

The ‘King’ derives its name from its royal commissioning. In the 1560s, the instrument was painted and gilded with the emblems and mottoes of King Charles IX of France, son of Catherine de’ Medici. The cello formed part of a set of 38 Amati stringed instruments made for the Valois court. Evidence suggests that this set was dispersed by the end of the French Revolution, according to NMM Curator of Stringed Instruments Arian Sheets, and only a few of the instruments have survived.

“Years later, around 1801, the ‘King’ was ‘modernized’ and cut down in size, possibly by Parisian maker SÈbastian Renault,” said Sheets.”Wood was visibly removed down the center of the cello’s back, leaving the painted and crowned woman who represents ‘Justice’ without her waist, left arm, and her scales of justice. Despite the alteration, the instrument retains its beauty and rich sound.”

Given its rarity and value, the ‘King’ travels infrequently. The last time was in 2007, when it returned to its birthplace in Cremona, Italy, to headline the Andrea Amati Opera Omnia exhibition.

For the cello’s trip to the Met, only royal arrangements would do. It was swathed in protective cases to insure a proper, stable environment and trucked to New York in one climate-controlled 24-hour run.

“We are delighted to host the King cello this summer,” said Ken Moore, Frederick P. Rose Curator in charge of the Department of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum.”This collaboration with The National Music Museum provides an opportunity for thousands of our visitors to see and study this rare and important masterwork alongside other instruments by Andrea Amati, his family and other great Cremonese makers like Antonio Stradivari.”

While in New York, the ‘King’ will be an ambassador for The National Music Museum said Director Johnson.”We work unceasingly at the NMM to introduce new audiences to our nation’s preeminent collection of musical instruments and archives. We are supported at present almost completely by local and state resources, so we need music-lovers across America to support our mission too — especially with a much-needed new museum facility in the works.”

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Leaping Around the World

By Laura Andrews

The South Dakota Cultural Heritage Center is saying goodbye to one of its most beloved artifacts this weekend. The Sioux Horse Effigy dance stick, a three-foot-long carved wood sculpture, is going on tour with the traveling exhibit”The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” appearing at museums in Paris, New York and Kansas City before returning home to Pierre in mid-2015.

“I am really excited about this opportunity for us to share this magnificent piece with a much larger audience,” says Dan Brosz, Curator of Collections at the Cultural Heritage Center.”It is truly a national treasure, and I do not use that term loosely.”

The dance stick was created as a tribute to a fallen friend and as a storytelling aid.”Men carved horse sticks to both honor their horses killed in battle and for use in telling of their own actions within the fight. In the retelling of the battle stories, the warrior would handle the horse stick much like a club, or often straddle it as if riding the horse. Only warriors that lost a horse in battle were allowed to use the horse sticks in this manner,” says Brosz.

Ralph T. Coe, former director of the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, once called the Sioux Horse Effigy one of the finest pieces of horse sculpture in the world. It’s unusual because it shows all four of the horse’s limbs — most horse sticks included only the rear legs. Only one other full-horse effigy exists, and that’s in a private collection. The artist who made Pierre’s effigy, perhaps a Hunkpapa Lakota man named No Two Horns, depicted his steed with blood oozing from bullet wounds as he made a final leap from life into death. “I really hope the people who see it in Paris, Kansas City and New York will appreciate the brilliance of the Horse Effigy’s creator and gain a better understanding about the Lakota people, if only this little bit of their robust culture,” says Brosz.

Stop in at the Cultural Heritage Center this Saturday to say goodbye to the Sioux Horse Effigy. The send-off party goes from 1-4 pm, with presentations at 2 pm, plus cake and refreshments. The Cultural Heritage Center is located at 900 Governors Drive in Pierre.

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Eavesdropping On History

By Laura Andrews

A treasure trove for historians lurks in the basement of Dakota Hall at the University of South Dakota. The South Dakota Oral History Center contains thousands of recordings that document bygone ways through conversations with ordinary people.

I spent an afternoon there recently, orange headphones clamped to my head and notebook at the ready, listening to interviews conducted with regular people in their living rooms and at their kitchen tables years before my birth. Clocks long stilled ticked and chimed in my ears; grandchildren now grown raced around making a racket, only to be scolded and sent in the next room.

Between the interruptions, I listened — and learned what life in South Dakota used to be like. Interviewees were from a wide range of ethnicities and represented every county in South Dakota, though the collection is especially rich in Native American history. During my visit, I learned about using horses to excavate the Carthage bank’s basement, hard times in the early days of Miner County and of Powell, a Welsh settlement in Edmunds County that was wiped out by tornado in 1911. Through the headphones, Angelique Pretty Weasel of Marksville described skunk medicine and moccasin making, and Ione Lawrence, a great-great granddaughter of Chief War Eagle, remembered nursing the sick through the influenza epidemic of 1918.

There’s a wealth of information on the center’s bookshelves full of reel-to-reel tapes, but it’s not always easy to hear. Many of the interviews were conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when recording equipment was still somewhat primitive. Transcripts are available for some of the interviews, but not all. Jennifer McIntyre, the Oral History Center’s Collections Digitizer, offered to tweak the audio she’d digitized from the original reel-to-reel tapes to make it more easily understood, but I didn’t find it necessary.

Conducting an oral history interview is much easier now that many cell phones can be used as recording devices. Oral History Center staff members periodically offer a class that gives tips to would-be interviewers. The most recent class was cancelled due to weather, but it’ll be rescheduled for sometime in late April or early May. Contact 605-677-6386 or sdohc@usd.edu to learn more.

The Oral History Center is open from 8-5 Monday through Friday. Currently housed in Room 12 of Dakota Hall at USD, the collection is scheduled to move to the I.D. Weeks Library later this year. To find out more about the South Dakota Oral History Center or to search its online database, visit their website. Highlights from their collection are regularly featured on their blog and Facebook page.

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Save a Museum

By Bernie Hunhoff


Is there a national “Support Your Local Museum” Week?

I don’t know, so I’ll just say this today. Shame on you if you’re not already doing it.

In our travels around South Dakota, we’ve come to believe that there is no group that works any harder for their communities than the ragtag little group of folks who try to protect, conserve and hoard our history and culture. And they do it with little or no pay, recognition or glory.

Somehow they just operate from an innate feeling (gut feeling, they would explain) that saving Jack Sully’s revolver, Governor Mellette’s winding stairway or Wild Bill Hickok’s third gravestone is important to our future.

Not our past. Our future.

I thought of this on Saturday afternoon when my son, Chris, and I were driving to Valley Springs to buy an old snooker table. We were pulling a borrowed trailer that didn’t have current license plates, so we thought it would be safer to drive the backroads so as not to infringe upon the workload of the already overburdened State Highway Patrol.

That placed us on 272nd Street through the no-longer-so-little city of Tea. The community now has 3,800 people. We were happy to see that the Tea Steak House is still going strong, and we also passed a sign pointing to the town’s museum.

The median age in Tea might be the youngest in the Midwest, so it’s particularly encouraging to see that the museum bug has bitten there. The Tea Historical Society will grow in importance with every passing year.

Here in Yankton, the local museum is working to restore the Mead Building on the historic state hospital campus where Jack McCall was hung in 1877. Historians are collecting tractors in Kimball and shoes in Webster, among many other things. On Wednesday of this week they’ll meet in the Moody County Extension Building in Flandreau to talk about preserving country schools.

God, Family, Life, Death and Taxes come first. But beyond those priorities, preserving our stories should rank fairly high. And we’re glad to see that it does in Tea and countless other South Dakota towns.

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Central South Dakota’s Playground

“Fort Pierre has become central South Dakota’s playground,” says attorney John Duffy.”I don’t want to say that nothing fun ever happens in Pierre, but it’s hard compete with everything we have here.”

The town has the Stanley County fairgrounds, a youth center, a hockey rink and gymnasium. Horse races, rodeos, bucking matches, circuses, concerts and numerous other events are held there. The Missouri River draws boaters and fishermen.

Fort Pierre’s nightspots enjoy a reputation for being the scene of late-night political hijinks and compromises during Pierre’s annual legislative sessions. Since Fort Pierre operates on Mountain Time, it was once a tradition for some lawmakers and staffers to cross the river at 1 a.m. to continue their revelry. Mountain Time is still observed in the city after midnight, but earlier in the day townspeople generally set their watches to Central Time to stay in step with Pierre.

A less rowdy gathering spot is the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center. It includes the Mattie Goff Newcombe Conference Center, a hilltop meeting facility that offers an expansive view of the Missouri River and the capital city of Pierre.

Rodeo legend Casey Tibbs in action.

Tibbs is still regarded as one of the top rodeo stars of all time. Much of his memorabilia is on exhibit at the center, along with exhibits from South Dakota’s other national champs as well as other rodeo characters.

Mattie Goff Newcombe was a famous trick rider in the 1920s. She perfected the Back Drag, a dangerous stunt in which she placed her feet in loops on either side of the saddle and then bent over backwards until her hands dragged on the ground.

She and her husband, Maynard, ranched for many years along the Cheyenne River. After she died in 2005 at age 98, a bequest from her estate made it possible for the Tibbs museum to finally become reality after 20 years of planning.

“Casey’s the reason it got started,” says Dayle Tibbs Angyal, Casey’s niece and a longtime board member,”and Mattie’s the reason it got finished.”

For information on the rodeo museum, call 605-494-1094. To learn more about Fort Pierre’s attractions, contact the Pierre/Fort Pierre Chamber of Commerce at 605-224-7361.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.