Posted on November 27, 2023 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Finding Frank Ashford

By John Andrews

Aberdeen’s Troy McQuillen became fascinated by the work of Frank Ashford at the K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library, which owns several oil paintings by the Brown County artist. McQuillen is searching the world for more of Ashford’s work, and hopes to answer at least some of the questions that remain about the quiet painter from Stratford. Photo by Stephanie Staab

There’s a painting in the Dacotah Prairie Museum in Aberdeen of a woman wearing a salmon-colored sleeveless dress, a floral print shawl, her left hand drawn to her chest as she gazes off the canvas directly at the viewer. Twelve years ago, when South Dakota Magazine assembled a list of paintings every South Dakotan should see, the late John Day — a widely respected art scholar and then curator of the Oscar Howe Gallery at the University of South Dakota — included Woman with a Shawl on his list of the 10 best paintings ever produced by a South Dakotan.

We know nothing about the identity of the woman and, for many years, very little about the man who painted her, even though Frank Ashford was considered among the best American artists of his time. Ashford grew up near Stratford and traveled the world, painting portraits of governors, Supreme Court justices, a U.S. president and the First Lady and other members of high society. He painted in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Paris and the banks of the James River in Brown County.

Ashford likely produced hundreds of paintings, many of which have been lost since his death in 1960, several years before a young Troy McQuillen began noticing the few Ashfords hanging in Aberdeen’s public library. Decades later, those childhood memories sparked a quest to find as many of the old artist’s paintings as he can, and maybe learn something about the man along the way. Among his early discoveries? He’s not the first Aberdonian to go looking for Frank Ashford.

***

Elderkin Potter Ashford was a Civil War veteran, serving with the 23rd Iowa Volunteers at Milliken’s Bend, Vicksburg and Mobile, among other prominent battles. He moved his family to a homestead in Rondell Township, southeast of Aberdeen along the James River near Stratford in 1893. The Ashfords included his wife Cassandra, who suffered from arthritis and spent many years confined to a wheelchair, daughters Grace and Helen, and sons Ward, Fred and Frank, who was born in 1878.

The elder Ashford never lost his sense of patriotism. He hosted a grand celebration at his homestead every Memorial Day. Hundreds of people met to decorate graves at nearby Oakwood Cemetery, then heard speeches delivered from the front porch of the Ashford home. Many locals believed that Frank’s interest in painting portraits of politicians stemmed from those annual gatherings.

Just before he turned 18, Frank left Brown County for the Chicago Art Institute, where he studied drawing under Frederick Frier and John Vanderpoel. After three years in Chicago, he spent a year at the Pennsylvania Art Institute in Philadelphia and another year at the New York School of Art, studying in both places under William Merritt Chase, an Impressionist painter perhaps best known for his portraits.

Ashford’s self-portrait.

Following his studies, Ashford established a studio in Paris, where he painted for seven years. He visited home in April of 1912, sailing on a French ship called the Bretagne, which passed through the same North Atlantic iceberg field that doomed the Titanic later that same day.”We passengers aboard could not grasp the full purport of the tragedy,” Ashford told the Aberdeen Weekly News when he arrived in town in May.”It was so overwhelming, and many did not believe it until we reached New York.”

As World War I embroiled Europe, Ashford returned to the United States permanently in 1914. He spent time painting in New York, Minneapolis and Seattle before settling down in South Dakota sometime in the 1920s. A Sioux Falls Argus Leader story from that decade referred to Ashford as,”such a simple, common, everyday person, friendly and unassuming, and not at all what one would think of an artist who had lived in Paris.”

Ashford was briefly married around that time to a model he’d met in New York named Marjorie Rickel, but they divorced in 1929. Locals around Stratford believed the marriage ended because Rickel could not get accustomed to South Dakota’s rural lifestyle and was bitter about supporting her husband, who excelled in making art but struggled with financial management.

Ashford painted several prominent politicians and judges beginning in the 1920s, including Louis Brandeis, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. He painted three South Dakota Supreme Court justices, as well as governors Andrew Lee and Charles Herreid. He later painted governors Leslie Jensen, Sigurd Anderson and Joe Foss twice, once as a politician and again as a World War II aviator.

His work was attracting an audience. In the late 1920s, he sold 11 oil paintings to be placed around the campus of the Dakota Hospital for the Insane in Yankton (today the Human Services Center). The purchase was an extension of the efforts of Dr. Leonard Mead, the hospital’s superintendent from 1891 to 1899 and again from 1901 until his death in 1920. Mead believed that creating a more welcoming environment through art and architectural beauty would help patients recover. He began an art collection with several watercolors in 1906, and the Ashford oils added to the campus dÃcor.

Perhaps Ashford’s biggest professional achievement came in 1927 when he learned that President Calvin Coolidge planned to spend the summer in the Black Hills. He asked his friend, state historian Doane Robinson, if it would be possible to have Coolidge and his wife Grace sit for portraits. The two exchanged letters, and eventually Sen. Peter Norbeck — among the architects of the president’s vacation to South Dakota — was added. The flurry of correspondence resulted in a sitting at the Custer State Park Game Lodge in July.

Remarkably, Ashford had the Coolidge paintings nearly finished by mid-August. He often said that he only needed to sit with a subject for three to five hours and could finish a nearly life-size portrait in about 10 days. Ashford produced two paintings each of the president and the First Lady. A portrait of Coolidge seated and wearing a light-colored suit and another of Grace Coolidge in a green dress hang in the lodge’s lobby. Another showing the president wearing a headdress and Grace in a red dress hang in the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum at Forbes College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Frank and his brother Fred (right), pictured in about 1940, were among five siblings who lived on the Ashford family’s Brown County homestead.

Ashford was happy with his Coolidge work.”The portrait of Coolidge, I think, is one of my best and it pleased him very much,” he wrote to a friend in Seattle.”Mr. Coolidge remarked that he thought it was the most satisfactory portrait that had been painted of him, which I considered a high compliment, as he had been painted by several noted artists.”

The following year, Ashford was commissioned to paint a portrait of William Henry Harrison Beadle, known in South Dakota as the savior of school lands because of his foresight to preserve two sections in each township for schools at a time when speculators gobbled up land at tremendously low prices. To commemorate the 90th anniversary of Beadle’s birth, the Young Citizens League and E.C. Clifford, the state superintendent of schools, created a plan to place Beadle’s picture in every South Dakota school. Ashford would paint the oil portrait and hundreds of prints would be made.

Ashford reportedly painted a portrait based on a photograph of Beadle, but the whereabouts of the original art and prints is a mystery.

Painting opportunities were slim during the Depression, World War II and the postwar years. Growing older and feeling lonely, he went to live with his brother and sister-in-law, Ward and Violet Ashford, in Salem, Oregon, in 1948. He became re-energized by the beauty of the Willamette Valley and painted several landscapes around the Ashfords’ farm. He also opened a studio, where he painted until returning to Aberdeen in 1956.

Ashford moved into the Boyd Apartments on the second floor of the Malchow Building downtown and settled into a routine. He met with locals for coffee and meals, and every afternoon stopped at Plymouth Clothing to visit a group of downtown business owners and friends. When he didn’t arrive on Nov. 21, 1960, they went to his apartment where they found him dead of a heart attack. Ashford was 82.

***

This story would be considerably shorter if not for the tireless work of Frances”Peg” Lamont. She spent more than a year researching Ashford for a paper presented at Augustana University’s annual Dakota Conference in 1990 and uncovered many of the aforementioned details about his life and career. Lamont served seven terms in the state senate from Aberdeen and was a longtime advocate for historic preservation, women, senior citizens and mental health. She was a founding member of the Dacotah Prairie Museum and Historic South Dakota, helped launch the Northeastern Mental Health Center and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Council on Aging, where she served three terms. She remained active in several endeavors until her death in 2008 at age 94.

McQuillen discovered Ashford’s Yellow Chrysanthemums at Pomona College in California.

Lamont was visiting the Black Hills with her parents, Fred and Frances Stiles, in the 1930s when she first saw the 1927 Ashford portraits of Calvin and Grace Coolidge hanging at the Custer State Park Game Lodge. It served as her introduction to Ashford, who was never far from her mind, even as she left South Dakota to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison and found work as a researcher and copy writer for the Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s in New York City.

She and her husband William Lamont, a Harvard-educated fellow South Dakotan, made their home in Aberdeen after their marriage in 1937. The Lamonts became entrenched in life in the Hub City while Ashford painted in and around Aberdeen and Oregon. When he died in 1960, Ashford left 23 paintings in his apartment and the family home near Stratford. Local attorneys Hugh Agor and Douglas Bantz became the executors of Ashford’s estate and struggled to sell the art. They bought several paintings themselves and donated others to the Alexander Mitchell Public Library (today the K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library) and the Dacotah Prairie Museum. Lamont ensured that the two Coolidge portraits made their way to Massachusetts. Others have simply disappeared.

Nearly 30 years later, with Ashford fading into obscurity, Lamont began to wonder what became of his paintings. She launched a worldwide search and tried to learn as much about Ashford as could be discovered.”For years, bits and pieces of Frank Ashford’s life had delighted me,” Lamont wrote.”Finally came the time to write about him, but libraries, art schools and records were scarce. The search for Ashford paintings has all the elements of untangling a mystery.” Fortunately, there were still several families in and around Stratford who shared their memories of Ashford. Those interviews, along with a smattering of publications and newspaper articles, revealed a prolific and energetic artist.”It seemed that wherever he stopped, even briefly, and found an interesting client, he established a studio and proceeded to paint with vigor and enthusiasm, turning out untold hundreds of artworks.”

Lamont successfully located several of those paintings, and today McQuillen is continuing her work. He is the owner of McQuillen Creative Group, an advertising and marketing business located across the street from the building where Ashford lived his final years. He also publishes Aberdeen Magazine and wrote a story about his Ashford quest in early 2018.”I used to go to the Alexander Mitchell Library a lot when I was a kid, and his paintings were all over,” McQuillen says.”The images were just burned into my brain. Then as an adult, I started a magazine and got on the library board and really started to wonder what these paintings were about. I learned about his national and international reputation for being a pretty good artist.”

The internet makes searching a little easier, with paintings occasionally showing up on online auction sites such as eBay (a seller in Portland, Oregon, is currently offering an Ashford portrait of a boy in a cowboy outfit for $795). But there remains a lot of sifting through historical paperwork. For example, a newspaper article from the 1950s mentioned that a couple donated two Ashford paintings to Pomona College in Claremont, California on behalf of a friend. McQuillen contacted the school, which had no record of it. But staff at the college’s Benton Museum of Art searched the archives and found a still life called Yellow Chrysanthemums, dated 1916 and signed”Ashford.” The second painting remains lost.

Woman with a Shawl, among Ashford’s most famous portraits, hangs at Aberdeen’s Dacotah Prairie Museum.

Another elusive painting is The Three Sisters, a critically acclaimed work that Ashford exhibited in Paris in 1912. Records indicate that he kept the painting, and a photograph from an exhibition in Aberdeen during the late 1950s shows it hanging on the wall. But The Three Sisters was not listed among the paintings in Ashford’s estate when he died.

Other works have disappeared even more recently. During Lamont’s search 30 years ago, she documented only five of the 11 paintings that were sold to the Human Services Center in Yankton. When McQuillen inquired in early 2021, he found just three: Modern Madonna, Lincoln the Lawyer and a portrait of former administrator George Sheldon Adams.

For South Dakotans wishing to see Ashford’s work firsthand, a trip to Aberdeen in the best bet. The Dacotah Prairie Museum owns a winter landscape and six portraits: Marjorie (his wife), Fred Hatterschiedt and Ole Swanson (both local businessmen), Woman with a Green Headband, Woman with Coral Necklace and Woman with a Shawl. The museum also has Ashford’s palette, easel, his lamp for portrait painting and his wooden traveling painting case, still filled with supplies.

The K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library has Woman in Pink; Abraham Lincoln (based on a rare ambrotype photograph that he owned taken of Lincoln in 1858 and similar to the Lincoln portrait at the Human Services Center); Governor Joe Foss, The Aviator and War Hero; Woman at Piano; and Ashford’s self-portrait, among other works.

McQuillen has also launched a website, which includes photographs of nearly 40 paintings that he has rediscovered, with more to come.”My goal here is that if people or antique stores have paintings by him, then at least they would know who he is and what they have,” he says.

It’s a modest goal to honor an equally modest man, who should always be remembered in South Dakota’s art world and beyond.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Murder of Patsy Magner

By Roger Holtzmann

Patsy Magner’s scrappiness served him well as a young boxer, and through life. He parlayed his sporting prowess into the gambling and liquor arenas of early-day South Dakota. Photo courtesy of the Dakota Territorial Museum.

Cold cases are often neatly resolved within an hour on television. In real life, they mostly stay cold. Families mourn without resolution. Perpetrators remain at large. Communities wonder whether a killer walks among them. Such was the murder case of Yankton’s Patrick”Patsy” Magner.

David and Mary (Creighton) Magner came to America during the great Irish migration of the 19th century. They married in Woodstock, Illinois, where David earned his living as a shoemaker. Patrick and his elder brother Michael were born in Illinois, but they came of age on the frontier because, like many of his countrymen during that era, David Magner was a restless soul. In 1872 he headed for Yankton, Dakota Territory, and set up his cobbler’s bench.

David passed away two years later, when Patsy was 7 years old, leaving Mary to raise two young boys.”Little is known of [Patsy’s] growing-up years,” wrote historian Bob Karolevitz,”but by his early 20s he was already a professional fighter.” Magner compensated for his slight build with ferocity, a characteristic that came to the fore during his most notable bout — in 1899, before a crowd of 500 at the Sioux City Athletic Club — against one-time world featherweight champion ‘Torpedo’ Billy Murphy.

“In the first round Magner used foul tactics, and Murphy also began to rough it,” reported the Sacramento Record Union.”In the second, when the police intervened, the men were fighting like dogs on the floor of the arena.”

Prize fighting was illegal in Sioux City, so Murphy, Magner and the fight’s promoters were hauled off to jail. This wouldn’t be the last time Magner ran afoul of the law. Almost by default, boxing put him in touch with unsavory types, especially gamblers; it is easy to see how he drifted into schemes and ways mentioned with disfavor in the statute books. From then on almost all of Magner’s various enterprises, even the strictly legal ones, had a whiff of malfeasance about them. His murder shocked Yankton, but few people in town would have been entirely surprised that he came to a bad end.

Yet he was always a popular, charismatic figure. In a rose-tinted recap of Magner’s life after he died, the editor of the Yankton Press & Dakotan wrote that,”many older citizens remember when, during his pugilistic career, he used to walk down the street and, seeing a group of boys pining to get into the theater, would pay the admission for the entire crowd.”

Magner did have one legitimate outlet for his athletic ability. Yankton’s fire brigade in the 1890s was organized around five hose teams,”and competition among these was very keen to see who could recruit the most prominent citizens,” according to the Yankton County History. As a well-known fighter, Magner would have been a prize recruit, and he was no mere show horse. At the South Dakota fireman’s tournament in 1896 Magner served as captain of Yankton’s winning hose cart race team, and he personally won the 100-yard foot race.

From the 1890s through the early 1900s, Patsy Magner split his time between Yankton and Sioux City. Both he and his brother Michael, who were 31 and 33 at the time, were listed as members of their mother’s household in the 1900 federal census. Michael’s occupation was”merchant,” and Patsy’s”button maker,” which is either evidence of a mother in denial or an inside family joke.

Michael and Patsy’s true occupation was operating saloons in Yankton and Sioux City, and they acquired their place in Sioux City after the previous owner was gunned down in the street.”Nobody ever connected them to the crime, but that was the kind of environment they operated in,” said Jim Lane, a Yankton native with a decades-long interest in Magner’s murder.

After Patsy Magner lost his farm in 1915, he bought this small house located along Old Highway 50 near Yankton.

Gambling went hand in hand with the saloon business, and not always harmoniously. Magner was hauled into court multiple times on related charges, most notably by T.D. Becker, who lost $12,000 in what he claimed was a rigged faro game.

In the course of their protracted legal wrangling, Becker”proceeded to catch the saloon men in a violation of the law [by] hiring Claude Klegin and William Grensel, minors, to purchase liquor from them,” reported the Sioux City Journal. Before the merits of that case could be argued, Magner was found in contempt of court and fined $200; to make matters worse, his attorney, after two hours of”a most bitter denunciation of Becker,” was forcibly removed from the courtroom.

Magner’s checkered history was no obstacle to landing a gambling concession in Bonesteel during the land lottery of 1904. He operated a saloon and managed to thrive while the bad men ran riot; an article in the Norfolk Weekly News-Journal asserted that”crooks reaped a rich harvest of $75,000 for their three weeks trouble. Patsy Magner made $20,000.”

Yet when the town’s troubles multiplied and its citizens sought help they turned to Magner, who adroitly managed the transition from big-time gambler to municipal savior. Account after account of the conflict hailed him for his role in returning control of Bonesteel to”the respectable element.”

Magner shot himself in the foot during the commotion, but in the flush of victory no one seemed to care. He traveled to Sioux City on the same train as Chief Clerk John McPhaul, and according to the Sioux City Journal, the crowd that greeted them,”gave the gambler who cleaned out the town … an ovation upon his arrival.”

George W. Kingsbury published Volume IV of his epic History of Dakota Territory in 1915. He included a short biography of Patsy Magner that made no mention of gambling, liquor or anything unsavory. Kingsbury’s Magner was a progressive farmer who followed”advanced scientific methods” and sent more cattle and hogs to market than all but a few producers in the state.

Magner started with 160 acres in 1902, according to Kingsbury, and added to his holdings until his ranch comprised 520 acres,”on which he has one of the finest sets of farm buildings in Yankton County or in South Dakota.” What Kingsbury neglected to mention was how that increase occurred.

“Magner came into [his land] the old-fashioned way,” Lane says, laughing.”He married Maude Paul, who owned it.”

Maude A. Paul grew up on a Nebraska homestead. After moving to Yankton she purchased a 320-acre farm — an unusual step for a single woman in that era — and ran it successfully before she married Patsy in 1905. Kingsbury conceded that Maude’s,”knowledge of agriculture and stock-raising is equal to that of her husband,” but that assessment would seem to be a considerable sop to Patsy, who was more familiar with saloons than barns.

Nonetheless, Patsy did find ways to contribute to the bottom line.”One of the stories my dad told me was that Patsy used to pay his workers at the farm in cash, then he’d play cards with them, and a lot of times win it back,” Lane says.”Well, one week these two brothers cleaned house, beat him pretty bad, and he flew into a rage. They had to hide out in a cornfield until he cooled down.”

Patsy and Maude also owned a thousand-acre grain farm west of Yankton, but when the census taker came around in 1910 Magner listed his occupation as”liquor wholesaler.” He and Mike operated what they called a”Family Liquor Store” on Yankton’s Third Street, while Patsy and another partner owned a saloon in Bonesteel, where he carried on as he always had.

On Jan. 27, 1910, Bonesteel’s city commission met to discuss whether Magner’s liquor license should be revoked. They were charged with,”selling liquor to men who were blacklisted by their wives [and] carrying on gambling in a rear room,” according to the Norfolk Weekly News-Journal. He managed to retain his license after a vote by the commission, but that result led to one alderman bitterly denouncing another for yielding to Magner’s pressure.

Patsy Magner wrangled a gambling concession in Bonesteel, where the 1904 land rush attracted 104,000 men.

Magner’s career as a big-time farmer was short-lived. In 1915 he and Maude mortgaged their home place, perhaps to raise money and expand to take advantage of the spike in commodity prices caused by war in Europe. Whatever the reason, it didn’t pan out. Their farm and its fine buildings were sold at a sheriff’s sale just three years later; they moved to a small property on the east side of Yankton, and Patsy began raising show horses.

Worse yet was on the horizon. Prohibition came to South Dakota in 1918, two years before the nationwide ban took effect. Magner’s liquor store and saloons had to close, which likely abetted what happened next. Trapped between their accumulated debt and diminished income, Patsy and Maude were forced to declare bankruptcy in 1921.

Magner listed his occupation as”manager of a soft drink parlor” on the 1930 census form. Given his record, it is difficult to believe he spent the Roaring Twenties serving Yoo-Hoo while fortunes were being made in illicit liquor, especially considering the wide open situation in Yankton, where the county sheriff was reportedly in league with the bootleggers.

In any event, Magner opened a card room and beer parlor, the Blue Fox, in the spring of 1933, just days after President Roosevelt signed a law allowing the sale of 3.2 percent beer. Prohibition ended later that year. To Magner, it must have seemed that happy days were indeed here again.

Patsy Magner’s death was reported beneath a headline which spanned the Press & Dakotan’s front page on Dec. 31, 1934:”Patrick (Patsy) Magner, well-known businessman, age 65, was instantly killed about 10 o’clock while sitting in the parlor of his home … peacefully listening to the radio and talking with his wife.”

A coroner’s inquest was convened the next morning, and the first witness was Maude, who appeared”stoically calm” as she testified.”Mrs. Magner said her husband jumped from his chair as he was hit and said, ‘What the H— is going on here!’ and that as she started to arise from her chair two more shots were fired at her.” Patsy managed to stagger into the bedroom, where he collapsed and died within minutes. Maude ran onto the highway and flagged down a passing motorist, who called the sheriff.

Sheriff William Hickey had little to offer when he testified. He used string to determine that the shots were fired from outside, through a window, but the ground was frozen and so yielded no footprints. All he found at the scene were four casings from a Colt .32 automatic.

Magner’s funeral, officiated by Msgr. Lawrence Link, pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, was held at his home. By the Press & Dakotan’s reckoning, “the procession to the cemetery was a mile long.”

That very day the newspaper published a fire-breathing call-to-arms entitled”Smoke Out The Rat.” In the good old days, wrote the editor, men confronted each other”on the street, in plain view of the town’s people.” Magner, in contrast, was slain from the shadows by a perverted, cowardly rat,”the most stinking, furtive, unsocial and unclean [form] of animal life …. We wish to insist that this is more than a murder. It is the beginning of an obnoxious form of crime that must not be permitted. This ‘rat’ must be found and destroyed.”

By chance, new sheriff William J. Limpo and new state’s attorney Frank Biegelmeier took office one week after the murder. They vowed to vigorously investigate the case, and the county commission offered a $500 reward. But days, then weeks and months went by with no progress.

Scant physical evidence was no impediment to rampant speculation, of course; as with many murders, the first suspect was close to home.

“Grandma said Maude did it,” Lane says.”That’s my family tradition.”

Don Tucker and his wife, Ava, have restored the Magner home east of Yankton. Tucker points to the window through which the murder happened in 1934.

Patsy and Maude had a notoriously stormy relationship, according to this theory. Maude either did it herself or hired a guy, who left town right after the murder. In line with that explanation, the .32 caliber gun that was used indicates an amateur job rather than a big-time criminal conspiracy, according to Lane.”It’s not a very powerful weapon. A professional hit man probably wouldn’t choose it as his first option to shoot through a window.”

Magner’s past and current business dealings provided ample material for rumormongering. At the inquest, Maude testified”that her husband had intended to dissolve his partnership in [the Blue Fox Saloon] with Fred Fincke,” according to the Press & Dakotan.”She said there had been friction between the two men for some time and that the dissolution was to have taken place that very day.”

Fincke wasn’t called to testify,”and was not questioned by officers aside from being asked if he knew of any acquaintances who might possibly have had a motive for the slaying.” If he had any suggestions to offer they led nowhere.

Fred and Maude, as Patsy’s widow, sold the Blue Fox soon after the murder. That may have been Magner and Fincke’s plan all along, but it’s doubtful everyone in Yankton accepted such a benign explanation. Not when it became known Aage Christensen was the buyer.

“My dad was a big bootlegger,” says Aage’s son, Marvin ‘Pal’ Christensen.”He was partners with the sheriff. They did business all over Iowa, South Dakota and a lot of Nebraska.” Christensen senior owned a barn that served as the pair’s warehouse during Prohibition.”Whenever there was going to be a raid by the state they’d always let the sheriff know. So then he’d call my dad, and he’d get everything cleaned up before they came.”

Christensen went to work as a bartender at the Blue Fox after Prohibition ended. Buying the bar made for a simple transaction on both sides, but Frank Yaggie, one of Aage’s lifelong friends, couldn’t shake the idea that there was more to it.

“When Frank was on his death bed he called me in and said, ‘You know, I got to get this off my chest. We always thought your dad shot Patsy Magner,'” Christensen says.”So I told him, ‘Frank, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I doubt it.’ Then he died about 10 minutes later.”

Don and Ava Tucker now live in the house where Patsy was murdered. The house and its matching red-brick barn have both been beautifully maintained and restored. Tucker raises Rhode Island Red chickens and goats on the property, which sits on the eastern outskirts of Yankton.

Tucker is well-acquainted with the Patsy Magner story.”He was sitting right where I sit to watch TV,” he says.”I figure it’s safe enough. It’s not like lightning is going to strike twice in one spot.”

Tucker has had many conversations about Magner over the years, including several interesting discussions with Jerry Bienert, now deceased, a long-time county commissioner and storehouse of local history.

“Jerry said he tried to follow up [Magner’s murder] and figure out who did it, but he just kept getting stonewalled,” Tucker says.”It never went anywhere.”

Bienert did come across a rumor that the shooting was over Patsy Magner’s involvement with a young woman from a well-connected Yankton family, which could explain why the investigations always stalled.

So it goes when a crime remains unsolved. Every theory sounds plausible to someone, and they all have only one thing in common.

“Somebody just did it,” Tucker says,”and went on with their life.”

Editor’s note: This story is revised from the January/February 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Who Lies in the Custer Graves?

By John Andrews

Six members of the Seventh Cavalry, dead since 1873, lie in the Bon Homme Cemetery, though their identities and their exact connection to the Seventh remains a mystery.

On a summer’s evening in 2011, a retired stonemason from Yankton toiled on his hands and knees in the Bon Homme Cemetery. Behind him stood a cracked granite tombstone marking the graves of six men whose brief sojourn through Dakota Territory in the spring of 1873 gave rise to legend and mystery.

The men are said to be soldiers from Lt. Col. George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, who passed through Dakota on a 400-mile march from Sioux City to Fort Rice, south of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. An inscription on the stone reads,”In memory of six unknown soldiers,” because the men were apparently hastily buried and left with no indication of who they were.

After the cracks on the gravestone were repaired, we began to think more about the men buried in its shadow. It seems a cruel fate to lie anonymously for nearly 150 years in a prairie cemetery far from your home and family. Because of Custer’s ignominious end at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, and his regiment’s later presence at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, he and the Seventh are among the most researched and written about soldiers in the United States. Could it be possible to find mention of the six men who died along Snatch Creek and end their century and a half of anonymity? As it happens, we aren’t the first to try.

Our search began at the University of South Dakota’s I.D. Weeks library. The second floor houses microfilmed rolls of the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan, which began publication in June of 1861, making it the oldest newspaper in the Dakotas. A weekly paper in 1873, its April 16 issue included an announcement of the Seventh Cavalry’s arrival on the outskirts of town beginning April 9.

The Seventh had been created during an Army reorganization after the Civil War and tasked with protecting settlers, travelers and railroads as they filtered into the Great Plains. George Armstrong Custer, still known throughout the country for his heroics at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, was chosen to be its lieutenant colonel. The new unit was based at Fort Riley, Kansas, and while it had been designed to be a peacekeeping force, the Seventh became embroiled in more than 40 fights with Indian tribes in the three decades after its inception, including the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn in June of 1876 that decimated the Seventh and killed Custer.

In 1873, the Seventh was reassigned to the Army’s Department of Dakota, with orders to depart Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory on an expedition along the Yellowstone River during the summer. The War Department began planning the Seventh’s springtime route from the southern United States to Fort Rice. It included an encampment of several weeks either in Sioux City, Iowa, or Yankton to allow time for prairie grasses to grow enough to feed the livestock.

Yanktonians can thank Walter Burleigh, the town booster and often-unscrupulous politician and businessman, for bringing Custer their way. Burleigh was a Pennsylvania native and a Republican who helped Abraham Lincoln win the state in the election of 1860. As a result of his new connections in Washington, D.C., Lincoln appointed Burleigh to be the Indian agent for the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory.

He used his position to line his pockets whenever possible, and that remained true in 1873. Burleigh had purchased a steamboat, the Miner, several years earlier, and stood to profit nicely if he could convince the War Department to use his boat to carry supplies for the Seventh up the Missouri River from Yankton to Fort Rice. He also owned land east of Yankton near Rhine Creek (today called Marne Creek) that would support a spacious campsite for the regiment’s 800 soldiers, 40 laundresses, 700 horses and 200 mules. Burleigh successfully lobbied military brass all the way up to General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri. When the final plans were revealed, they included a stay at Yankton.

Yankton’s Third Street, pictured in 1875, appeared much as it had when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry paraded through two years earlier. The Seventh spent nearly a month encamped east of Yankton on its way to Fort Rice in northern Dakota Territory. Photo courtesy of the Dakota Territorial Museum.

In the days after the Seventh arrived, a city of tents sprang up on the prairie about a mile east of Yankton, just across Rhine Creek. The camp had barely taken shape when a severe spring blizzard (still known as the Custer Blizzard), nearly buried it under several feet of snow.

Several soldiers made it into Yankton before conditions worsened. They sought shelter for their horses, then found their way into the saloons and hotels along Third Street. But there were many other soldiers, wives and laundresses who hunkered down under blankets as the snow slowly weighed down their canvas tents. Custer and his wife endured the storm inside a log cabin, which they had rented from a local upon their arrival.

The storm slowed business to a trickle for several days and pushed the Seventh’s scheduled departure into early May, as they waited for the snow to melt and the grass to turn green. The delay allowed the citizens of Yankton to host a ball for Custer and his officers on the second floor of Stone’s Hall at Third and Capital. Felix Vinatieri, Yankton’s town bandmaster, assembled a group of musicians to provide entertainment. The talented Vinatieri, a graduate of the music school at the University of Naples in Italy, played every instrument except piano. Custer noticed his vivacity, and asked if he would serve as the Seventh’s chief musician on their journey to Fort Rice.

Vinatieri accepted, and when the Seventh finally departed on May 7, he led a 16-member band as the cavalry paraded from their campsite down Third Street and west out of Yankton along the Sioux City to Fort Randall Military Trail. Burleigh’s Miner was loaded with the regiment’s supplies and followed the column upriver.

The Press & Dakotan reported that the first day’s march took them to Lakeport. The second day, the regiment advanced to Owen’s Ranch along Snatch Creek, 19 miles from Yankton. But flooding had swelled both Emanuel Creek and Chouteau Creek farther west. Custer sent soldiers ahead to bridge both waterways, and the Seventh was delayed.

Soldiers tried to make the best of the delay. Local women brought fresh bread and kolaches, a traditional dessert from their native Czechoslovakia. Soldiers and their wives spent time aboard the Miner, which anchored along the riverbank not far from camp each night. Custer and his wife, along with several officers, took meals daily at the Cogan House, a hotel in the village of Bon Homme run by Bridget Cole Cogan, an Irish immigrant.

Finally, after four days, the regiment continued its 400-mile march to Fort Rice. What they left along Snatch Creek became a local legend and a mystery that remains unsolved.

Greg McCann’s Cogan House overlooks the Missouri River not far from where his great-aunt, Bridget Cogan, housed Custer and his officers.

Greg McCann is the great-nephew of Bridget Cogan. Her hotel and restaurant stood just a few hundred yards northeast of the current Cogan House, a bed-and-breakfast and hunting lodge that McCann and his late wife, Diana, built along a Missouri River bluff in 2008.

His riverfront property has seen plenty of history over the last 225 years. Lewis and Clark paddled past in 1804. Private Shannon, a member of their Corps of Discovery, famously became lost a short distance downstream and was reunited with the group near the mouth of the Niobrara River. Several years later, trappers like Jim Bridger and Hugh Glass followed the same path, as the Missouri River became a highway of sorts.

McCann also knows well the story of the Seventh Cavalry’s visit. He says during their delay, Custer and his officers entertained the people of Bon Homme with shooting contests (they were reportedly good shots). According to his family’s oral history, a depression in the earth just a few paces from the modern day Cogan House marks the site where Custer himself camped, chosen because of its ideal views of the river, the military trail and the village of Bon Homme.

As a caretaker of the Bon Homme Cemetery, he also knows the story of the six soldiers who supposedly contracted typhoid fever and died at the regiment’s main encampment along Snatch Creek. According to local legend, two graves were quickly and quietly dug on the creek’s western bank. Six of the men were buried in one and an officer named Abraham Hirsch was supposedly placed in the other. The regiment moved north the next day, and the bodies remained there until 1893, when they were disinterred and moved to the Bon Homme Cemetery. In 1922, William Thomas Harrison crafted the large tombstone that was carefully repaired in 2011 by Yankton brickmason and historian Bob Hanson and his friends.

The identities ó and even the correct number ó of the soldiers interred there have stumped historians for decades. For years, Abraham Hirsch was believed to have been an officer in the Seventh Cavalry. But Mark Chapman, of the Seventh United States Cavalry Association, says no Abraham Hirsch is listed in the regimental records. Similar searches by historians in the National Archives also come up empty.

When South Dakota historian Herbert Hoover wrote his history of Bon Homme County, he found paperwork that showed $6 paid for a coffin for A. Hirsch, but the date was April 17, 1873, nearly a month before the soldiers died at Snatch Creek. Given the evidence, it seems likely that even though Hirsch has long been associated with Custer’s soldiers, he was not part of the Seventh.

As for the other six, the only accounts of their deaths seem to be in the stories that have been passed down through the generations. Chapman says there are no deaths recorded in the May 1873 regimental record (although it does note 46 desertions). Only five fatalities were noted during the months in which the Seventh was transferred from the South and sent to Fort Rice: one in Charlotte, North Carolina; two en route from Memphis to Cairo, Illinois; one between Louisville, Kentucky, and Cairo; and one on May 4, when Private William Donovan of B Troop drowned.

Retired Yankton stonemason Bob Hanson repaired the worn and cracked Custer tombstone in 2011.

Contemporary accounts are equally fruitless. The Press & Dakotan reported on such details as the songs played during the grand ball in downtown Yankton, but after the regiment moved out information grew scarce. The newspaper told readers about the delay along Snatch Creek, but said nothing about the deaths of six soldiers. Its final mention of the Seventh came on June 18, with a report that the regiment had safely reached Fort Rice.

Custer’s wife, Elizabeth, wrote about the trip through Dakota in her memoir called Boots and Saddles. Her chapter describing the march out of Yankton focused on subjects such as the cold weather, wildlife, food preparation and sleeping accommodations. Second Lieutenant Charles Larned wrote regular letters home to his mother during the journey from Sioux City to Fort Rice and provided articles for the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Neither penned a word about any soldiers dying.

So if other deaths were reported in the regimental record, why the secrecy surrounding the men who died along Snatch Creek? McCann was always told Custer wanted the deaths kept quiet because if word leaked that he had lost six men, it would reflect poorly on his leadership. Another argument is that medical records were only sporadically updated while the regiment was on the move. For example, in their new book called Health of the Seventh Cavalry, P. Willey and Douglas Scott note that the number of men who suffered frostbite and endured subsequent amputations during the Custer Blizzard at Yankton was far more than what the record actually reveals. Several soldiers in the early stages of frostbite stumbled into the Custer cabin, where Elizabeth Custer helped treat them, yet those and other cases are absent from the official record.

But the most widely accepted theory is that Custer did indeed want the deaths kept secret, though for a different reason. The regiment relied heavily on cooperation from local settlements throughout the journey to Fort Rice. Custer was concerned that if word of a contagious disease such as typhoid fever within the Seventh became public, friendly relations with both Indians and non-Indians could be compromised. It seems the success of the march took precedence over the memories of six soldiers.

Bon Homme Cemetery lies along the bluffs of the Missouri River, on a county thoroughfare quaintly named Apple Tree Road. It was established in 1859 and is the final resting place of several Czechoslovakian pioneers who began trickling into southeastern Dakota Territory in the 1860s.

Local families keep the grounds and the graves well tended ó including the anonymous Custer six. McCann believes if they can confirm that the men belonged to the Seventh Cavalry, federal funds may be available to help maintain the cemetery, but so far all paper trails have gone cold. And it’s not as though no one has tried. Hazel Belle Abbott, a Bon Homme County native who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University, spent her last years compiling a history of the county and tried earnestly to uncover more information about the Custer soldiers, but could never identify them. She died in 1971, and her research is housed in the state archives in Pierre, waiting for someone else to build upon it.

Perhaps somewhere a family diary notes a son or brother who marched off with the Seventh and never returned. But for the citizens of Bon Homme County, the six bouquets of flowers and American flags that decorate each grave have always been ó and may continue to be ó”in memory of six unknown soldiers.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Turtle on Snake Butte

By Michael Zimny

The stone turtle atop Snake Butte. Photo by John Mitchell.

There are runic legends written in stone on hilltops across South Dakota — giant snakes, turtles, mythical beasts, human-like forms, sacred symbols. The meanings within these hieroglyphs are a mystery to most of us. Do they commemorate the deeds of flesh-and-blood beings of our corporeal world? Cosmic or supernatural events? If you could stand on a mountain and read the land like a topographical novel, would it read top-down, left-to-right?

Archaeologists try to unlock the secrets in the stone through methodical research. Others make like Moses drawing water from the rock of Horeb and listen to the voices in their heads.

In any case, you can’t get a handle on Black Elk Speaks or Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Their Eyes Were Watching God without bothering to read them. How many of the stories once held in the collections of the vast land library have been lost to the elements, vandals or time? We’ll never know, but plenty remain.

One such story-writ-in-stone is the Snake Butte turtle effigy near Pierre — one of hundreds of petroforms depicting animals, humans and mythical creatures that have been documented in South Dakota. Some have disappeared or been altered. Most — including the turtle effigy — are on private land and not officially protected.

A marker directs visitors to Snake Butte, near Pierre.

The Snake Butte turtle effigy site is accessible; though it’s on private land, the owners welcome considerate visitors. Take Highway 1804 about 4 miles north of Pierre. The turn off (which is a private driveway) is on the left just past Grey Goose Road. At the corner, you’ll see a South Dakota State Historical Society sign with the heading, “Sioux Indian Mosaic.” From there you can drive to the top of the driveway, park your vehicle (without blocking the driveway) and a sign to the left will direct you to a quarter-mile walk to the top of Snake Butte, overlooking the Missouri River just downstream from Oahe Dam. The effigy is inside a fenced enclosure.

Archaeologist T.H. Lewis was the first to non-verbally document the site in 1889. He described the outline of a turtle (or possibly a beetle in his estimation), 15 feet long from nose to nail, and 8 feet wide, with four legs and a tail. “Running in a northerly direction along the edge of the bluff for from 500 to 800 yards there is a row of bowlders [sic], placed at irregular intervals. According to Indian tradition these bowlders mark the places where blood dripped from an Arikara chief, as he fled from the Dakotas, who had mortally wounded him.”

Lewis also described, “many squares, circles, some parallelograms, and other figures” along the bluff.

In 1904, Thomas Riggs — a missionary who lived among the Dakota — related the story that he said a Dakota elder had told him about the stones “thirty years ago.”

To paraphrase: An Arikara scout attempted to raid a Dakota camp on Snake Butte. He was discovered at dawn by a Dakota guard, who shot him with an arrow.

“The arrow,” Riggs said, “had entered the hip in such a way as to render the leg useless and an incumbrance. He ran, or hopped rather, with marvelous swiftness, falling to the ground again and again; in agony and desperation he rose and continued his hopeless flight till overtaken and slain.”

This illustration appeared with an article written by archaeologist T.H. Lewis in 1889.

“The victorious Dakota,” said Riggs, “was filled with wonder and admiration, and that such astonishing spirit might have a fitting memorial, retracing his steps, he carefully placed a stone over each drop of blood and along the course where the wounded man had fallen he gathered small piles of stones, and larger piles to show the starting in the race and the end.”

Recalling Riggs’ retelling, state historian Doane Robinson wrote that the memorialist placed the turtle at the end of the line of stones, “to show the tribal lodge to which he belonged.” The SDSHS sign near the site agrees with this interpretation of the turtle as a signifier for the Dakota band.

“As for which Lakota band is identified as the attackers, some say It·zipƒçho, some say Hokwojus,” says Sebastian LeBeau, a BIA archaeologist and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Either way: “It’s an authentic Lakota story.”

One difference: in the version he knows, the Arikara warrior was defending his village, not the other way around. “He was running for his life to warn his people of an impending attack.” There is plenty of archaeological evidence of Arikara village sites in the area around Oahe Dam, though there is no historical record of a particular battle between the Arikara and the Dakota/Lakota connected to this event. “Even in the oral tradition, there is no specification on whether or not a raid was carried out. It just stops with the creation of the turtle effigy.”

“What’s important is the commemoration of the great deed demonstrated by the dying Arikara.”

Another difference in LeBeau’s version of the story is what the turtle symbolizes. “As I was told, the significance of the turtle goes back to creating kinship. Through the brave act of the Arikara — the Lakota in respecting him and honoring him, created a kinship recognition. In some tellings, I’ve heard old people say they recognized this one as a relative because of his bravery. His concern was for his people and he struggled mightily to try and warn them.”

“The central aspect of why one shares that story is to acknowledge not a great deed of the Lakota, but a great deed of an enemy. You measure your own self-worth or cultural worth as a warrior by who you fight with,” says LeBeau, laughing. “The Arikaras were good fighters. They couldn’t whip us, but we respected their ability in combat.”

“What made me feel sad about [the effigy] when I first went to it, was that the actual stone path — elements of it are still there, but the whole path isn’t.”

While the turtle figure is protected by the enclosure, many of the stones the stories say symbolize the blood trail left by the brave warrior have disappeared, along with the geometric shapes and figures documented by T.H. Lewis.

The physical work itself isn’t imposing — it’s a big (by-turtle-standards) stone outline of a turtle on a hill — dwarfed by panoramic views of the river valley below. Conceptually, it stands alone. Memorials to fallen warriors, built by their enemies, are hard to find.

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.

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Our Water Stories

By Katie Hunhoff

The Muskegon was once hailed as the handsomest boat on Big Stone Lake. It capsized in 1917 with nine passengers aboard.

For a state once considered a desert, South Dakota has a lot of water, thousands of feet of shoreline and a veritable treasure chest of lake and river adventure stories — some dating back a century and more.

The Kampeska Monster is among the wackiest. Boat-builders at Lake Kampeska were building a steamer in 1886 when they reported seeing a”20-foot long snake-like creature.” They were not taken seriously until several days later when four prominent Watertown area businessmen claimed they also saw it.

The foursome said it swam for quite a distance before disappearing into the depths. Perhaps worried about their reputations, they admitted it might have been an unusually large lake sturgeon. Big-city journalists came to see for themselves. Some poked fun at the very idea of a Loch Ness on the prairie, but one writer concluded that,”sturdy, virile Dakotans were not given to superstitious fears.”

Some of our water stories are fun, but others end in tragedy. At Big Stone Lake on July 10, 1917, nine people stepped aboard an excursion boat called The Muskegon. They never reached the other shore. Heavy rain fell and then, said a survivor, it seemed that two storms met in the middle of the lake, capsizing the 60-foot boat.

A heart-wrenching struggle ensued, as passengers and crew tried to save themselves and one another. In the end, the captain and six passengers drowned, including two young sisters. A poet memorialized the dead with a long piece that included these lines:

Those were the ties severed

In those seven peoples’ lives

Lost on this boat Muskegon

Sinking to rise no more.

But the Muskegon did rise; it was pulled from the water and restored 10 years later by a wealthy businessman who renamed it the Golden Bantam. Today it is docked at a museum just across the South Dakota border in Ortonville, Minnesota, along with memorabilia and news clippings.

Not many South Dakotans have prospered as professional fishermen, but there was a time when you could make a living by clamming on the James, Big Sioux and Vermillion rivers. Button-makers wanted the shells in the early 20th century. Clams were so abundant in the James that a particular spot called Tuscan in Hutchinson County was dubbed the”Mother of Pearl Capital of the World.”

The clam industry dwindled in the 1940s due to over-harvesting, environmental changes in the rivers and, of course, the invention of plastic buttons.

Despite the placidity of today’s tamed Missouri, adventures still occur on its waters. In 1992 a young Yankton couple saw a small object with a yellow flag on top being pulled upstream by a nylon rope. The object kept disappearing and surfacing around their boat, until the rope got tangled in the propeller and killed the engine.

They began to be pulled upstream, backwards, and to the husband’s horror the boat was slowly being pulled down into the water. They traveled about 300 yards, with their transom only inches above the water’s surface before he was able to cut the rope.

Their experience was witnessed by other fishermen and was soon published in the Yankton paper. The city was abuzz with news of the river monster. Writer Marilyn Kratz concluded that a sturgeon, which can grow to 1,000 pounds, could have been the culprit.”Their slender body and long snout, covered with bony plates, would be a terrifying sight at that size,” she wrote.”They certainly would be large and powerful enough to pull a boat about their same size.”

Huge fish were also reported by dam-builders when the reservoirs were built along the Missouri. Some divers saw fish 15 feet long floating at the bottom of the muddy river. Mysteries are still unfolding on land and in the waters of South Dakota.

Posted on October 19, 2017 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Autumn Mysteries

By Katie Hunhoff

Visitors have long reported strange occurrences at Sica Hollow in Roberts County. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

South Dakotans are no-nonsense folks, so we always struggle to find supernatural tales for our October issues, but we have heard a few through the years. One of my favorite spooky stories, published in our September/October 2014 issue, is about a mysterious bright, white light in Miner County that appears out of nowhere. Locals call it the spooklight. It can be seen along a particular stretch of dirt road between Carthage and Fedora. The story’s author, Donna Palmlund, talked to family and neighbors to get their spooklight accounts.

Palmlund’s father grew up on a farm west of Spooklight Road. His grandfather would say that sometimes the spooklight was so bright they could sit inside and read by it. After the Hass family moved off the farm, a man named Joe Spader lived there. “After I moved to that farm it wasn’t long before I was aware of this light that was very peculiar,” Spader said. He described the light as looking like a bright spotlight cresting a hill and then going down the hill, but a car would never materialize. Before he heard about the spooklight, he was worried someone was trying to steal something.

Another mysterious light has been seen in southeast South Dakota, looking over Nebraska’s Crazy Peak, which rises above the chalkstone bluffs on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. Sometimes the view gives South Dakotans an unexplainable light show. “I’ve seen all sorts of UFOs there in the past,” said Carvel Cooley, a longtime local historian. “It’s just lights. They don’t make any noise and they can stop, start, zap out of sight, disappear and reappear.” Although a lot of locals have seen the lights, most don’t talk about it. Some give credit for the lights to swamp gas. Others bring up the Santee Sioux legends of seeing “little people” in the neighborhood of Crazy Peak.

Another well-known eerie South Dakota spot is Sica Hollow in Roberts County. Reports of strange voices, lights flashing in creek bottoms and bubbling red bogs along the Trail of Spirits make Sica Hollow a spooky place to visit any time of year. Its first Indian inhabitants dubbed the forested area”sica,” meaning bad or evil.

We visited with Chris Hull several years ago. Six generations of Hull’s family have lived near Sica Hollow. He has spent countless hours hunting or camping in the forest and has seen the glowing lights. Once he also had a more mysterious experience while camping with friends. They realized they had forgotten supplies, so one friend drove home to get them.

“We were hiking and heard him yell from down in the hollow,” Hull told us. “He must have yelled five or six times. We wondered if his truck had gotten stuck and he had started walking. So we walked for a mile and got down to the bottom, but there was nothing there. We climbed a hill to search for lights and found nothing. Finally we went back to the campsite and he pulled in at the same time. He said he was at home and he had all the sleeping bags and things he’d gone to get. But all five of us heard him yelling that night.”

When the leaves fall and Halloween is close at hand, we all like a good South Dakota ghost story. If you have one to share, let us know in the comments below or email editor@southdakotamagazine.com.

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Bon Homme County’s Oldest Mystery

Our November/December issue includes a story on six members of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry interred in the Bon Homme Cemetery. An inscription on their tombstone reads,”In memory of six unknown soldiers.” John Andrews visited the area to see if he could reveal their identities. Here are some of the photos we gathered that didn’t make the magazine.

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Spooklight Road

By Donna Palmlund

The Hass family homesteaded on this land along Spooklight Road south of Carthage.

For as long as people living near Carthage and Fedora can remember, there have been stories of the spooklight — a mysterious light that appears out of nowhere and then vanishes. The light can be seen along a short stretch of seldom-traveled dirt road between the two small Miner County towns.

A farm that once stood on the west side of Spooklight Road is no longer there. All that remains are a gate with a no-trespassing sign, a driveway and a grove of trees. It was once the home of George and Lizzy Hass, and later their son, Harry. My father, Lester Hass, is Harry’s son.

Lester grew up on the farm, and seeing the spooklight was commonplace. The light appeared at least every other night. His grandfather told him that sometimes the spooklight was so bright they could sit inside the house and read by it. Lester’s stepmother Agnes once told him that she watched one night as he drove right through the light, but Lester didn’t see it.

A salesman used to stop by the farm twice a year to service Harry’s hearing aid. The salesman was there late one winter afternoon shortly after a blizzard. The road to the north of the farm was open, but eight-foot high snowdrifts covered the road to the south. The salesman stayed for supper and was invited to spend the night. When he went outside to get his suitcase he noticed a bright light from the south, and commented that the snowplow must be opening the road.

“No,” Harry told him matter-of-factly.”That’s just the spooklight.” After hearing a little more about it, the salesman decided not to spend the night after all, and made a hasty retreat.”Dad never saw him again,” Lester says.

Joe Spader lived on the former Hass farm from 1984 to 1988.”After I moved to that farm it wasn’t long before I was aware of this light that was very peculiar,” Spader says. It appeared to be a bright spotlight cresting a hill and going down below the hill, but a car would never show up. Before he heard about the spooklight, he worried someone was out trying to steal something.

Finally Spader was asked by his neighbor Jim Kothe if he had seen the spooklight.”After asking him a few questions, I realized that the strange light I had been seeing fairly regularly had a story behind it,” Spader says. He soon heard more spooklight tales at the Fedora Coop, a local hangout. After a while the light became such a regular sight that it wasn’t a big deal. As a bachelor he even hosted spooklight parties at the farm.

Spader sometimes saw the spooklight nightly, and then went weeks without a sighting. But usually he noticed it at least once a week if he was outside late in the evening.”On several occasions, I would jump in the pickup and drive like a madman to see if someone was messing with me and would come up empty-handed,” he says. One night when snow blocked the road to the south and there was no possibility of a car coming from that direction, Spader said it was very bright and looked like a bonfire.

Spader noticed that the light would change radiance, beginning low and surging into big brighter bursts. Sometimes it would be so bright it reflected off buildings in the yard as if a super bright headlight was shining on the place from down the road. During his four years on the farm he never found an explanation.

Taylor Calmus is an actor and filmmaker living in California, but as a high school student in nearby Howard, he and a group of friends filmed a short spoof of a scary movie on Spooklight Road. On another outing, Calmus had a real spooklight sighting.”We drove down to the house and were turning around when we saw a car coming from the south — or at least we thought it was a car,” he said.”It followed the hills up and down until it finally never came back up.”

Calmus and his friends assumed the car had stopped on the bridge south of the hill, and they thought it would be fun to drive down there with their lights off and scare whoever it was.”We started down the road and found no one at the bridge. We kept going until we got to the highway. That’s when we realized it was the spooklight. There are no outlets to that road or any way a car could have disappeared without us seeing at least a taillight,” he said.

One summer night about five years ago, sisters Becki Mommaerts of Howard and Jacki Austerman of Carthage went with friends around midnight to look for the light. They stopped their cars and stood on the road near the bridge.”I believe we saw it after we had been there for over a half hour,” Austerman says.”It looked like a bright train light coming toward us and then took a sharp turn and disappeared. We knew it wasn’t a car or anything when it turned. It was very bizarre and a little creepy, but I’m glad we saw it. There is seriously no explanation for it.”

People who have never witnessed the spooklight might think it is just local lore. Mona Robinette of Fedora heard many stories about the spooklight, but never saw it.”My grandpa said when he was a kid he heard the spooklight is actually the lantern from a wagon train of settlers that were caught in a blizzard and perished. They were warned not to head out because of the weather, but they did and sadly met their demise,” she says.

Others try to find an explanation for the phenomenon. One idea is that people are seeing reflected car headlights from a distant road. But Lester says that theory doesn’t hold water.”When I was a kid, people had dim, yellow lights on their cars, but this was usually a bright, white light.”

There is also speculation that methane gas might cause the glow. But local Lee Lewis doesn’t see that as a possibility.”The thing is, people have also seen it in the winter,” he says.

I may have seen the spooklight in the early 1970s. We had just left my grandparents’ house where I listened to their spooklight tales. Sitting in the back seat, I looked out the window and either I saw the light, or my imagination conjured it because I wanted to see it so badly. By the time I told my parents and they turned around, it was gone.

My dad recently went to the road with me. We pulled off near the old homestead and waited as the sun went down. Soon, we saw a bright white light that looked like it was coming down the road about a mile south of us. We couldn’t say for sure if it was a vehicle or the spooklight. We decided to drive down the road to check it out. It shone brightly for a while, but then there was nothing. As we pulled onto Highway 34, I asked my dad,”So did we see it?”

“Well, we saw something,” he replied.

Directions to Spooklight Road from Carthage: Drive 7 or 8 miles south on 425th Avenue. There is a road (230th Street) going west at 7 miles, and another (229th Street) at 8 miles (either road works). Go west one mile and turn south onto 424th Avenue, which is Spooklight Road. The light always comes from the south.

From Fedora: Drive 3 miles east on Highway 34, then north on 424th Avenue (Spooklight Road).

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

Lake Legends

By John Andrews

Native American legends, passed to each generation through oral history, are behind the names of many of South Dakota’s glacial lakes. Painting by Ron Backer.

Punished Woman’s Lake and Enemy Swim Lake are just a few of the beautiful names assigned to the Glacial Lakes in northeast South Dakota.

Legends behind the names include tales of lost love, bountiful hunts and bloody battles. And the stories preserve an important part of Indian and South Dakota culture.

The last huge glacier, during the Wisconsin Period (between 75,000 and 10,000 years ago), created the Glacial Lakes that dot the Coteau des Prairies, a rise that covers much of South Dakota’s eastern quarter. In A New South Dakota History, geographer Ed Hogan explains that two glaciers sat on either side of the Big Sioux River, which drains and bisects the coteau. The glacier on the east side melted quickly, leaving valleys, while the western glacier melted more slowly, resulting in lakes and sloughs.

Many lake legends originated in prehistoric times, making them impossible to trace.”Most of what was thought to be reality in those days got changed, or became legends,” says Elden Lawrence, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe and former president of Sisseton Wahpeton College.”Legends are kind of a safe haven. They don’t have to be true or false, they’re just there. So a lot of them, we don’t know for sure what they’re based on. Some of them go into mythology, which was part of the old culture. It’s hard to track down what’s authentic.”

Lawrence says legends were an important part of oral history, an integral component of Native culture.”We didn’t have any written books. History was passed down from one generation to another. It’s just like any modern school system. You can tell people things and they’ll forget. But you always remember a story, or a legend. It was a way of preserving a record of certain events or places. To oral history, legends were like a library, and the more you could remember the more knowledge you had. It was their one way, maybe their only way, of preserving history.”

Legends are still revered by tribal elders, but Lawrence believes younger generations don’t have the same appreciation. For years elders and youth gathered on the shore of Enemy Swim Lake so the elders could tell the lake’s story, but that tradition ended.”An elder told me that young kids no longer sit at the feet of the elders, they sit at the feet of the TV,” Lawrence says.

If that’s the case, then perhaps we’re fortunate that history isn’t always oral today. Here are written versions of some favorite South Dakota lake legends.

Enemy Swim Lake

Warring bands of Sioux and Chippewas fought in 1812 at Enemy Swim Lake, northeast of Waubay. Today the battle makes a captivating campfire story for visitors to NeSoDak Bible Camp, which sits on the site where the battle began.

Sioux men danced and sang around a campfire built on a peninsula jutting from the lake’s southern shore. A group of Chippewas on a hunting trip saw the firelight and planned a surprise attack as the Sioux slept.

Sioux warriors guarded the peninsula, so the Chippewas made rafts and floated quietly to a nearby island, then waded in waist deep water. The Sioux heard their splashing and attacked, shouting”Toka nuapi” (the enemy swims) as the Chippewas swam north toward Shepherds Point. The Sioux chased them over land and eventually killed the entire party.

In 1918 Jack Rommel built Camp Dacotah, a hotel and fishing resort, on the peninsula and decorated it with Indian artifacts found around the lake. The site became NeSoDak Bible Camp in 1942, one of five camps operated by Lutherans Outdoors. Rommel’s hotel is NeSoDak’s main lodge and Rommel’s cabin houses campers. A stone fireplace in the lodge features grindstones and arrowheads, and the cabin boasts a large native stone chimney.

Punished Woman’s Lake

When homesteaders settled around Punished Woman’s Lake in Codington County, they found two huge stone effigies lying atop a grassy mound three miles south of the lake. Indians had used 104 boulders to create a 13-foot outline of a man lying on his back with outstretched arms. About 40 feet away was the slightly smaller figure of a woman, lying in the same position. They likely memorialized the sad tale of Wewake and Black Bear.

The two were in love, but Wewake’s father opposed the union. Four times Black Bear brought gifts to Wewake’s father, but he refused them. Instead he accepted offerings from White Tail Wolf, a 60-year-old chief, and gave his daughter to him. The young lovers eloped and fled to the knoll south of the lake, where warriors from the tribe captured them. White Tail Wolf killed Black Bear and tied Wewake to a tree. She declared her love for Black Bear until the old chief stabbed her in the heart. White Tail Wolf prayed that the two be buried dishonorably, and crafted the stone effigies as a reminder of his unfaithful wife. The Great Spirit heard him and sent a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky that killed him.

Archaeologist T.H. Lewis sketched the effigies in 1883, but they were almost completely destroyed by 1914. Today South Shore community members re-enact the legend at the Punished Woman’s Pageant. An Indian chief tells the story to children as local actors recreate the scenes. An exhibit is also displayed at the Overland Country School and Museum in South Shore.

Lake Kampeska

When the water is low around Stony Point, on the southeastern shore of Lake Kampeska near Watertown, you can see a rocky island surrounded by buoys to protect unsuspecting boaters. It is a popular resting spot for water birds and the place where centuries ago a young Indian maiden named Minnecotah was left to die.

Many warriors from her tribe wanted to marry Minnecotah, but she was in love with a Wahpeton hunter. To satisfy the locals, Minnecotah said she would marry the man who could throw a stone the farthest into the lake. The men spent days heaving tiny pebbles and huge rocks, but the waves tossed them until no one could tell who won. They threw so many stones an island formed. By then they realized the contest was a ruse, so they kidnapped Minnecotah and placed her on the rocky island with no food. She survived with help from a white pelican that brought fish and berries. Her lover returned to rescue her and they went to live near his home in Wahpeton country. The warriors, discovering that Minnecotah was gone, believed that the sun god had sent the white pelican to take her away.

Stony Point was once an Indian campsite; arrowheads are still found there. And the legend of Maiden’s Isle has become an important part of local culture. Florence Bruhn, a former high school art teacher, adapted it to establish Ki-Yi Days, Watertown’s homecoming celebration.

Lake Tetonkaha

Lake Tetonkaha is one of eight connected glacial lakes that surround Oakwood Lakes State Park, northwest of Brookings. The place was once a summer camp and popular gathering place for Indians. One summer a group of Sioux warriors stayed late into autumn because a large buffalo herd was there. They became trapped when an early blizzard caught them off guard. Wood was scarce, so the hunters built a huge community tent.

They stayed the entire winter. When spring arrived they removed the buffalo hides they used for shelter, but left the poles standing. Indians who saw the poles called the place Tetonkaha Bde (the standing of the big lodge house), and the lake became known as Lake Tetonkaha.

In 1869 settler Samuel Mortimer built a cabin nearby that still stands, and the park visitors center displays Indian artifacts found around the lakes.

Long Lake

There are several Long Lakes in South Dakota, but the one northeast of Lake City in Marshall County might hold treasure. A Santee Sioux named Gray Foot told his sons on his deathbed in 1910 that he buried a flour sack full of gold coins worth $56,000 between two willow trees on the lake’s east shore.

A group of Santees, including Gray Foot, raided the agency in Martin, Minn., on payday during the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Some soldiers were killed and the government payroll chest looted. When Gray Foot heard the War Department declare that anyone found with gold from the chest would be hanged, he buried it. His sons tried many times to find the hidden gold, but left Long Lake none the richer.

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

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Andrea Maibaum — Leave a comment

The Disappearance of Fred Fyle

By Roger Wiltz

Two thousand dollars was a small fortune in 1924. But when Dr. Fred Fyle of Geddes disappeared, his family and friends eagerly offered that sum for his return. After all, what’s a doctor worth to a small town? Thousands of circulars with Fyle’s photograph were sent to every corner of the country and radio stations broadcast news of the search from coast to coast.

Dr. Fyle was a Canadian who graduated from the University of Toronto School of Medicine in 1907 at age 36. He had practiced in Ontario for a year when he met a stranger on a train who encouraged him to start a clinic in South Dakota.

He took the advice seriously and visited several South Dakota towns. Immediately attracted to Geddes and its people, he purchased a home there to convert into a hospital. His new practice opened Oct. 29, 1909 and was an immediate success. Soon he needed more space and converted the Padley Hotel into the Charles Mix County Hospital. Before long even the hotel became too small.

In 1917 Fyle built the hospital he needed, a three-story brick building with a full dining room in the basement, said to be the most beautiful dining room in the state. The new hospital had 24 patient rooms and three operating rooms. He took on a partner named H.E. Allen and together they operated the biggest hospital in the area. Despite the new hospital’s size, they were soon planning a 20-room addition and a new nursing school.

Dr. Fyle settled easily into life in South Dakota. Soon after moving to Geddes, he became a prominent and well-liked citizen. In 1909 he married Emma Belle Gallagher at the Congregation church parsonage. She was the eldest daughter of Dr. Gallagher, the Congregational minister. The doctor was on the city council and belonged to several area organizations.

He earned enough money to buy small parcels of land, including a summer cottage at nearby Lake Andes where he entertained guests who swam and fished in the pristine lake with its white sand bottom. He often would allow youth groups to use the cottage. A sister and brother followed him from Canada, and they both helped him manage his business affairs.

Fyle worked tirelessly for his community and he prided himself on making late night house calls in any weather. He lived in the hospital so he could be on call whenever he was needed. His devotion gained him admirers and made him vital to his community.

Then, one December evening in 1923, Dr. Fyle did not return home. His family wasn’t too concerned. Maybe he’d stopped at the lake cottage. Maybe he was visiting friends. But he didn’t return the following day; and days turned into weeks.

The doctor was last seen in Sioux City on Dec. 11.‚Ä® He left for home around 4 p.m. after consulting doctors in Sioux City about an ear case. The weather and‚Ä®roads were clear when he left in his Model T Ford coupe for the 140-mile trip to Geddes.

Yankton, the largest town between Sioux City and Geddes, would have been a logical place for the doctor to refuel and have supper. Dr. Fyle was large in stature and not easy to forget, but no proprietors recalled the doctor when shown a photo.

Winter ended and the grass turned green. On May 1, 1924, two local farm boys, Joe and Edward Cap, were fishing in Marne Creek about five miles northwest of Yankton. At the junction of Marne Creek and the Sunshine Highway, a major gravel road that led from Yankton to Utica and on to Scotland, the brothers saw something that looked like the roof of an automobile about two feet beneath the water’s surface. They mentioned it to their father, Joe, at supper that night.

The boys’ discovery didn’t impress Joe Cap, Sr. If it was a car, it wouldn’t be the first time an auto sank into Marne Creek. A flash flood the previous September had destroyed the approach. The washout measured 10 feet deep and 15 to 20 feet across.

After Sunday dinner on May 4, Joe Cap called his brother, John.”The boys mentioned what might be a car in the creek. Let’s go have a look.” Upon examination, the adults agreed; a coupe’s roof sat just below the waterline. The men floated a stout log over the roof, and one of them crawled onto it while the other secured it from the bank. After punching a hole through the fabric roof, the man on the log reached in and felt the remains of a human body. He removed a hat from the head of the victim and crawled back to the bank.

Authorities soon pulled the coupe out of the water and found a badly decomposed body, hands clutching the broken steering wheel. The vehicle’s license plate number confirmed that the auto belonged to the doctor from Geddes. The young Cap brothers received a $2,000 reward from Fyle’s family.

Dr. Fyle’s wristwatch had stopped at 9 p.m., recording the exact time that Geddes lost its much-loved physician and friend.

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

Tag: mysteries

Finding Frank Ashford

The Murder of Patsy Magner

Who Lies in the Custer Graves?

The Turtle on Snake Butte

Our Water Stories

Autumn Mysteries

Bon Homme County’s Oldest Mystery

Spooklight Road

Lake Legends

Enemy Swim Lake

Punished Woman’s Lake

Lake Kampeska

Lake Tetonkaha

Long Lake

The Disappearance of Fred Fyle

Thank you for your response. ✨