Tag: perkins county

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The Ultimate Survivor

By Michael Zimny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh Glass faces his adversary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Not Just Ranches and Rodeo

By John Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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South Dakota’s Best Breakfasts

By Katie Hunhoff

“A timid salesman has skinny kids,” quipped a sales consultant at a recent business meeting in Sioux Falls.

That may be especially true for salesmen in sparsely populated South Dakota, where you can literally run out of prospects and even restaurants. So the smart traveling salesman of the prairie makes the most of every day, every town, every mile.

And the experienced salesman knows the advantages of starting the day right, with a tasty breakfast enjoyed in a place where the locals meet — so we asked a few road veterans to share their favorite breakfast establishment as a travel tip for the rest of us.

Joie’s Cafe — Winner

Although Wayne Hopkins of Brookings sells electrical and air conditioning parts for Nielsen’s in a four state area, he chose a restaurant in his home town of Winner. “In the winter I’d go in the cafe, just a block from my school, to have a hot chocolate and warm up. It still looks the same as I remember it 30 years ago,” Hopkins says. His favorite item is the breakfast burrito.

Brock Green succeeded his father-in-law at Joie’s years ago. Special recipes for biscuits and gravy and made-from-scratch pancakes haven’t changed. He even has his own specialty sausage, made just for Joie’s at the local Super Duper Store.

The 140-seat Main Street cafe is a Winner mainstay that was called Sargent’s when Hopkins was growing up. Visitors are welcome to sit at the businessman’s roundtable, where locals shoot dice to see who picks up the noon tab. But be careful.”Usually it’s the new guy or the guy who only had soup that gets nailed,” laughs Green. Call 605-842-3788.

ALASKA CAFE — Lemmon

Lemmon is South Dakota’s northernmost city, but it’s still a far cry from the tundra so travelers are surprised to see the Alaska Cafe sign on Highway 12 and they often stop to pose for pictures.

Inside, they get an even better taste of the Land of the Midnight Sun. Pictures of grizzly bears, moose, the Bering Strait and North Pacific fishing boats grace the walls, and proprietor Laura Casey — who runs the cafe with her daughter, Breanna Thomas — has a big compass, the only surviving artifact of her father’s commercial halibut boat that was lost in a storm. Several years after the accident, Laura’s parents moved to Lemmon and she followed seven years ago and opened the restaurant.

Amy Pravecek of Winner chose the Alaska Cafe in Lemmon as her favorite breakfast spot because “everything on their menu is wonderful and the cafe is full of friendly locals who are always willing to visit,” she says.

Pravecek is the territory manager for Phizer in western South Dakota. She travels West River back roads visiting veterinarians, animal health distributors, farmers and ranchers, telling them about Phizer’s vaccination programs.

Alaska Cafe serves breakfast from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. The big breakfast is a country fried skillet with scrambled eggs, hash browns, chicken fried steak, country gravy and cheddar sauce. Pancakes are the size of big plates.

Pravecek likes to dine on the biscuits and gravy and then take a little walk through the petrified wood park across the street. She also recommends visiting Lemmon Livestock sale barn if you are in town on a Wednesday. Call 605-374-7588.

SPARKY’S — ISABEL

Sparky’s operates from a nondescript building on Isabel’s Main Street, which is busier than you might expect because it also sits along S.D. Highway 65, a north-south corridor that cuts across West River country.

Operated by Ryan Maher, a young entrepreneur and Republican state senator, the restaurant serves three meals a day and sometimes even provides the evening entertainment, which has ranged from karaoke and country bands to pool tournaments, goat-roping and an ugly sweater contest.

Monte James of Yankton chose Sparky’s for their “All American Breakfast” — two sausage patties, two eggs, wheat toast and homemade hashbrowns. “The food is off the charts,” says James, a territory manager for Sioux Steel Company. Sioux Steel is a fourth generation family-owned business that opened in 1918 and makes grain bins, livestock equipment and other steel supplies for farmers and ranchers across the world.

James also frequents Sparky’s while announcing for the Isabel Rodeo, which he has done for the last ten years. “The locals are friendly and fond of visitors,” he says. ” They will want to know all about your comings and goings. And as the name indicates, it is not only a grill but a bar as well and the nightlife at Sparky’s is legendary.” Call 605-466-2131.

Editor’s Note: You can find more delicious South Dakota breakfast options in our January/February 2013 issue. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Grand River Grasslands

By Christian Begeman

One of the greatest legends of the early American West was born somewhere near the convergence of the north and south forks of South Dakota’s Grand River. Frontiersman Hugh Glass was mauled by a female grizzly bear with cubs while he was out hunting alone in August of 1823. His companions left him for dead. Yet somehow he survived the ordeal and proceeded to crawl and float some 200 miles to the nearest fort on the Missouri near present day Chamberlain. The story is amazing if not epic. Those two adjectives could also describe the region of land that surrounds those same forks of the Grand River today.

The Bureau of Reclamation created the Shadehill Dam and Reservoir in 1951 at the joining of the forks. The reservoir and much of the adjacent land is part of the state park system and comprised of three different units (including one named after Hugh Glass). The Grand River National Grasslands is just beyond the parkland. For a wandering photographer like myself, it doesn’t get much better than spending a late May weekend drinking in the fresh air and wide open spaces these protected lands and waters have to offer.

I grew up about an hour east and a little south of the area. Occasionally my friends would make their way to Shadehill for waterskiing and general fun. The waters haven’t quite warmed up for that kind of recreation yet, but cold waters won’t stop dedicated anglers. On my first afternoon at Shadehill I met some fishermen who traveled from the Black Hills area for the weekend. They proudly showed me a stringer full of a variety of fish. Later that night, I set my alarm for three a.m. in order to capture the Milky Way above the waters. One of the first things I saw as I rubbed my blurry eyes in the darkness was a blazing falling star lasting almost two seconds. I was wide awake after that. If you’ve never experienced the night sky where there is very little light pollution, you are missing out. There is simply a sense of wonder in western South Dakota’s dark night skies.

Later on, I positioned myself above the bluffs of the dam to get some sunrise shots. It was a chilly morning — 37 degrees with an accompanying stiff breeze. I noticed mists coming off the waters of the Grand River below the dam as the light bloomed in the horizon. The water from the reservoir’s release tube was much warmer than the brisk air above it and the result was a foggy steam that hung low on the river. This kind of scene is photographic gold. I took a few shots from the bluffs and made my way down to the river to shoot the steam against the rising sun. At this point I was in the zone, focused and intent on the scene in front of me. I walked briskly along the tall grass and sage on the riverbank when something happened I don’t think I will ever forget. I suddenly felt the ground, or at least what I thought was the ground, start to move under my right foot. A squawk erupted from under that foot, followed by a loud rustling commotion. A bellowing war whoop erupted from my deep inside my chest and my heart rose to my throat. I had stepped on a slumbering hen pheasant and she scared me half to death in her haste to get away. The good news is she was in flight before my full weight came down, so nothing but my pride was hurt. I’m glad no one saw or heard the ruckus as I’m sure”war whoop” is a very generous description of what actually came out of my mouth.

Later that morning I hiked five or six miles along the Blacktail trail in the Grand River Grasslands, enjoying prairie flowers, wildlife and bird sightings. Like I said before, the whole area is a photographer’s dream — at least this photographer’s dream. But don’t take my word for it. Why not take a weekend to check the area out yourself? My only caution is to simply watch where you step.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing our prettiest spots around the state. Follow Begeman on his blog. To view Christian’s columns on other South Dakota state parks and recreation areas, visit his state parks page.

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Lippman was Lemmon’s Hero

By John Andrews

South Dakota has produced some amazing veterans. Jean Mehegan, founder of Medary Acres greenhouse in Brookings, survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Don Smith (Belle Fourche) was a member of Doolittle’s Raiders, who launched the first retaliatory attack against Japan after the surprise Hawaiian bombing. Walter Herrig, who taught in SDSU’s Army ROTC program, was a prisoner of war for much of the conflict. He was on the island of Corregidor when the Japanese captured it in 1942. Clarence Wolf Guts was a Lakota code talker.

Recently I learned about Gordon Joseph Lippman of Lemmon. Lippman was one of 54,000 American servicemen and women who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He enlisted following his junior year at Lemmon High School, and it didn’t take long for others to realize he had incredible courage and battlefield instincts. He was credited with saving his patrol against German resistance in southern France. As a member of the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment, he was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.

Lippman was a battalion operations officer during the Korean War, where he was again wounded near Do Chung in April 1951. Lippman was leading his men across the Hantan River in darkness when an enemy outpost spotted them. Lippman and his troops came under fire in the middle of the water, but he rallied them and led a charge that destroyed the outpost. Then he reorganized and led his men toward their objective: a hill whose perimeter was ringed with enemy gunners. Only a single platoon made it under heavy fire. Lippman, realizing his soldiers faced annihilation against overwhelming odds, created a diversion. For 45 minutes, armed with a pistol and grenades, he darted within yards of the enemy, drawing their fire so his soldiers could gain a better position and take the hill. He earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest military decoration, awarded for bravery.

A soldier might think himself lucky to emerge from one war alive. Surviving two could be considered miraculous. Sadly, Lippman didn’t survive a third. He was sent to Vietnam in September 1965, where he served as the executive officer of the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division. Four months later, Viet Cong snipers infiltrated his camp near Lai Khe. Lippman died from small arms fire while trying to personally locate them.

His sister Marlys was fortunate enough to spend a week with Gordon at his home in Washington, D.C., in May 1965. She remembered he spent evenings working on his master’s degree at Georgetown University, which he earned shortly before his deployment.”My last memory was that I had sent him for Christmas 1965 a fruitcake plus other edibles and a felt bookmark which I made for him per his request [to] ‘only send very small things that can travel with me.’ In February, two months after he was killed, the package was returned to me with DECEASED written on it — with a very spoiled fruitcake. I wept. It was so little, and he didn’t even receive it.”

South Dakotans should be proud of Gordon Lippman and veterans like him. They possess courage the rest of us only imagine we have. Days like Veterans Day or Memorial Day are fine times to honor them, but they should be remembered the other 363 days as well.

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Bygone Days On Your iPad

By John Andrews

John Penor was a Perkins County rancher who took photos as a hobby. The historic images he captured around his hometown of Bison from 1907 to 1957 were published in a book in 2005 and are now available as an iPad application.

“It’s a voyage into South Dakota history,” says Zach Smith, who created the application with Penor’s great-nephew Steven Sebring. “It emphasized the story of the Penor family, but it also emphasizes the ways in which that part of the world was critical in the history of America.”

Sebring discovered hundreds of negatives in Penor’s home and created a book called Bygone Days in 2005. The iPad application of the same name includes photographs, early Black Hills film, newspapers and audio from an interview with Penor. Download the application here.