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Scoping the Missouri

By Cora Van Olson

Members of the South Dakota Ornithologists Union look for birds at Union Grove State Park between Beresford and Elk Point.

Roger Dietrich was scoping along the shore of Lake Yankton when a Rapid City woman approached him with a question about the tiny Ross’s gull, which had been sighted in the area.

“I’ve gone to Alaska twice and I didn’t see the bird there,” she said.”Is it still around?”

Dietrich pointed to a gull, sitting on ice in the middle of the lake.

The Missouri River is a bird-watching paradise. Hundreds of species of ducks, geese, gulls, loons and other birds congregate in parks, woodlands and farm fields that border its 443-mile corridor. But it still helps to know for what you’re looking.

Every habitat attracts different birds, says David Swanson, professor of biology at the University of South Dakota and author of Birder’s Guide to South Dakota, and habitats vary dramatically along the Missouri as it winds from Nebraska to North Dakota.

Following is a guide, from south to north, of habitat patches and the surprises that await birdwatchers, both the serious birders looking for the rarest”lifer” bird and those who are happy spotting sparrows and swallows.

The Adams Nature Preserve attracts wading birds such as blue herons.

Adams Nature Preserve

Southeastern South Dakota

The Adams Homestead and Nature Preserve near North Sioux City includes many trails.”It has a variety of habitats,” Swanson says.”It has an extensive cottonwood forest that borders the river, and there’s also a little lake called Mud Lake that’s attractive to waterfowl. The ring of trees surrounding Mud Lake can be good for woodland birds, too.”

Mud Lake is approximately a quarter mile from the Adams Homestead parking lot, so a brief hike is required to access it. Wooden observation blinds lie along the trail with a view of the lake.

“The other habitat at the park is a restored open prairie,” he says.”It’s one of the few sites in the southeastern part of the state where you can find Eastern meadowlarks. The common meadowlark in South Dakota is the Western meadowlark, but the Eastern meadowlark is expanding its range in the southeastern part of the state and Adams Homestead is one of the places where you can find those.”

Since first being sighted in 2017 by Swanson and his ornithology students, the Eastern meadowlark has made regular appearances in the open-prairie habitat, often with multiple birds singing among the scattered trees.

“I wasn’t aware at the time that Eastern meadowlarks had started to expand their range, and I heard these Eastern meadowlarks calling,” Swanson says.”I go, ‘That is very unusual.’ We kept walking and saw them and everybody in the ornithology class got to see me geek out over it.”

Though birdwatching at the Adams Homestead is enjoyable year-round, it’s best in spring, summer and fall.”Mostly, it’s hiking the trails during migration and seeing a variety of birds at that time,” Swanson says.”It’s lots of warblers and sparrows, so the migration periods are late April to mid-May. Then in the fall, from mid-to-late August into about mid-September is probably the peak for warblers and vireos, some of which migrate all the way down to Central and South America.”

Sparrows that migrate to the southern U.S. and Mexico slightly later in the year can typically be seen at the Adams Homestead from mid-September to mid-October. Along the river and at the lake, birdwatchers encounter ducks and geese, as well as wading birds like herons and egrets.

“In the cottonwood forest, there are Eastern whippoorwills,” Swanson says.”Those are birds that don’t really get too much out of the southeastern part of the state. Of course, they’re nocturnal, so they don’t start calling until it starts to get dark.”

Least terns can be found on sandbars below Gavins Point Dam.

Gavins Point Dam

West of Yankton

Gavins Point Dam, the southernmost project on the Missouri’s system of six dams, is surrounded by unique bird habitats.

During the summer, hundreds of American white pelicans can sometimes be seen near the dam, while on the river itself, there are piping plovers, still considered a threatened species in most of the U.S., and the least tern, North America’s tiniest tern, often seen flying low over the river and hovering before plunging for prey.

“One of the reasons I like birding is the idea that it would be so cool to fly, and least terns are just the best flyers,” says Roger Dietrich, a local authority on ornithology.”They’ll fly and they’ll see a minnow, and then they dive straight down in the water — and splash!”

In winter, the 2-mile-long earthen dam creates an unusual condition for birds and birders.”Some years, when it doesn’t freeze, like lately, there’s been lots of open water above the dam,” Dietrich says.”Some years, we get lucky and even the Lewis and Clark Marina doesn’t freeze over real early. So, that’s a popular spot where some grebes and loons will stop.”

Black scoters, surf scoters, white-winged scoters and long-tail ducks, which are mainly ocean birds, are known to visit the lake and river in winter.

“I tell people from other places that we have those birds here and they’re just not believing it, because they don’t think of the center of the United States as a place where these birds would show up,” Dietrich says.”And when I say they show up every year, usually, for a fairly long period of time, they just can’t believe that we’re so lucky.”

The common loon migrates through the area, as well as a number of gulls — including Sabine’s gulls, kittiwakes, black-legged kittiwakes and even the Ross’s gull, which is associated with the remote arctic. Crest Road, which passes over the dam, is a good place to observe such birds. It requires no special pass or permit.

“Scan for the birds with binoculars or a spotting scope and chances are, you’ll find something different,” Dietrich says.”Sometimes there are huge flocks, and you can spend hours just scoping the birds there,” he says.”So, if you see somebody there with their scope out or binoculars, stop and ask them what they’re seeing. I’d say 99 percent of the people will be glad to point things out to you, and maybe even let you look through their scope to see what they’re seeing.”

Several snowy owls hung out along the dam road a few years ago.”They were feeding on the flocks of coots that were there.” Wintertime also brings large flocks of lesser scaup, which birdwatchers will scan for specimens of greater scaup, a polar bird that tends to prefer saltwater and is rarely seen inland, Dietrich says.

“It’s the same with the big flocks of common goldeneye,” he says.”People try to scope out the Barrow’s goldeneye, which is another species. It’s more of a West Coast bird, but once in a while, we’ll get one here — always a highlight.”

Bald eagles frequent Gavins Point Dam and some now nest year-round in the tall cottonwoods that border the Missouri.”They’re used to a lot of people around and some of the trees they perch in are right along the local roads,” Dietrich says.”You can see them in action, swooping down and picking up fish. I’ve seen eight or nine at a time on the ice up above the dam, eating the dead snow geese they’ve picked off.”

A pair of Barrow’s Goldeneyes at Fort Randall.

Fort Randall

Pickstown

Fort Randall Dam also hosts a large congregation of bald eagles. Below the dam is the Karl E. Mundt National Wildlife Refuge, which provides habitat for the eagles.

Kelly Preheim, a kindergarten teacher in Armour and a well-known local birding enthusiast, especially likes the wooded area around the Fort Randall Dam.”We’re mostly on agricultural grassland in southeastern South Dakota,” she says.”But the dams have a lot of woodland, forested areas, and I enjoy walking on the trails.”

She found 71 bird species on a recent camping trip to Pickstown.”In the morning, oh my goodness, the singing,” she recalls.”My husband’s like, ‘I can’t get any sleep. It’s so loud here!'”

A hike to the tailrace, the channel below the dam that carries water away, will often be rewarded.”Fish that go through the dam come out somewhat stunned in the tailrace,” Preheim says.”Then, all these birds, like gulls and eagles and certain ducks, eat those fish.”

Like nearby Gavins Point, Fort Randall Dam is also home to many types of waterfowl in autumn and winter.”There are a lot of different ducks on the scene, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of different ducks there at a time,” Preheim says.”I saw a brown pelican one time. That’s actually an ocean bird.”

Other surprise visitors at Fort Randall include a yellow-billed loon, typically associated with Alaska and America’s western coast, and a great black-backed gull, which is an Atlantic coastal bird, Preheim says.

Scarlet tanagers are often found in South Dakota but summer tanagers, a rare visitor, might also be seen around Fort Randall.

Pelicans near Big Bend.

Big Bend Dam

Fort Thompson

The best birdwatching at South Dakota’s northernmost dams — Big Bend and Oahe — occurs from April through May and from September to November, according to lifelong birdwatcher Ricky Olson, who lives at Fort Pierre.

Big Bend has fewer access roads and trail amenities than Oahe and the other dams, but it has its own charms. Ospreys nest below the dam and brown pelicans have been spotted.

“Once in a while, in the wintertime, you get a Brant goose at Big Bend,” a seacoast bird.”I run down to Big Bend at least every two weeks in the winter to see what’s there,” Olson says.

Big Bend also attracts smaller goose species, including snow geese and white-fronted geese, both of which are common to the area.”In the fall, it’s neater to go to Big Bend,” Olson says.”Also, the shad and minnow species will be in the shallows then, and you’ll get all kinds of cormorants and pelicans and hundreds of gulls in these frenzies where they’re all feeding, and the gulls are trying to steal from everybody.”

Canada geese along the Missouri River.

Oahe Dam

Central South Dakota

Ring-billed gulls, herring gulls and California gulls may be sighted at Oahe, as well as the arctic tern, a mega-find for birders.

A spectacle occurs during flooding when Oahe Dam’s hydraulic turbines are running.”It’s a feeding frenzy. You get thousands of gulls, maybe 20,000, below the tailrace in a half-mile stretch,” Olson says.”It’s like a snowstorm. Thousands of people come to watch the ‘gull snowfall.'”

Oahe also has cliff-dwellers.”In the sand layers in the cliffs, in the holes, there are barn owls nesting,” Olson says.”They dig their own holes, and often, they’re near where colonies of bank swallows have dug holes.”

In autumn, Sabine’s gull may be spotted.”It’s very pretty. It’s black and white with half a diamond on the wing,” Olson says.”We also get Bonapartes and Little gulls, which is a little gull, and we get some of the big ones. Once in a great while we get the great black-back, which is the biggest gull.”

Gulls breed on a few islands along Oahe, Olson says.”There are only a few places in South Dakota where that happens.”

Another rare visitor to Oahe, among the sea ducks like the scoters and the long tail duck, is the occasional coastal harlequin duck in the tailrace.

“We get loons,” Olson says.”Sometimes we get the Pacific or the yellow-billed or red-throated loon, which are rare for our state.”

Further north on Oahe, retired biology teacher Stan Mack says opportunities are available even in Mobridge’s city limits.”There’s a walking trail along the south side of town. Just follow Main Street to the river and walk west and you’ll see the ducks and geese and gulls that sit on the water.”

Mack says Indian Creek (east of Mobridge) and Indian Memorial (across the river to the west) offer trails and habitat.

Mack doesn’t walk well enough to explore like he once did, but the birds will come to him.”I’m doing a feeder watch for Cornell University. Right now, I’m looking at a collared dove — we never saw them before — and I see about 16 more picking up seeds on the ground.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Winyan

By Chuck Raasch

Elizabeth Winyan (standing) was long associated with the Riggs family, caring for young Thomas in Minnesota and later joining him at Oahe Mission.

On a spring day in 1830 a family, including a 3-year-old girl, was harvesting sweet syrup from maple trees along the banks of the Minnesota River near present-day Mankato. Suddenly and viciously, they were attacked by an unidentified rival tribe.

The girl’s father was one of several Dakota Sioux killed in that attack. The young girl’s mother realized she could not escape the deadly melee while running with two children, so she emptied a pot of boiling water and hid the girl underneath. She then picked up her son and ran to safety.

For two days and one night the little girl stayed silent under the kettle. Then, her mother crept back and retrieved her.

“Even in her old age,” wrote historian Thomas Hughes,”Winyan never forgot that terrible experience and how, when her mother lifted the kettle, the moonlight showed on the bloody faces of the outstretched dead, her father among them.”

Winyan, who would later be given the name Elizabeth while working with Dakota Territory missionary Stephen Return Riggs, spent the rest of her life serving others. In Dakota, Winyan means mother and protector. She lived the name. Winyan was a human bridge over the most difficult waters of Dakota Territory and early statehood, when the federal government sought to force rapid assimilation of Native people, in part by creating reservations. By the time she died six decades later, Winyan was a legend among Native people, white missionaries and settlers on the Dakota frontier of the 1870s and 1880s.

Oahe Mission Chapel, next to the Riggs family home, was built in 1877. When Lake Oahe flooded the site it was moved to the Oahe Dam Visitors Center, where it stands today.

She often traveled the preaching circuit with the Riggs missionaries, blending her mission work with knowledge and practices of her own Dakota people. The Sioux, with a rich oral history tradition, have tried to keep stories like Winyan’s alive, but in the written annals of Dakota Territory her works are sparsely mentioned.

“She was amazing in her time,” says Winyan’s great-great-great granddaughter, Lora Neilan, of Summit.”And it is sad that it got forgotten.” When Winyan died in 1890, the noted Dakota Territory missionary Mary Collins, a good friend, wrote,”She was one of the grandest women I ever knew.”

Even my introduction to Winyan was accidental, a result of research into an entirely different woman on the Dakota frontier. In 1989, I spent a year studying political migration during a journalism graduate fellowship at Stanford University. While there, I did considerable research on the American frontier, which included paging through countless editions of 19th century newspapers in the archives. One advertisement in an 1888 edition of Minnesota’s St. Paul Daily Globe caught my eye. In huge type, I read:”SHE LOVES A SAVAGE!” It was an advertisement for a dime museum appearance of Corabelle Fellows, a young white missionary, and her new husband, Sam Campbell, a mixed-race man of Dakota Sioux and white blood.

I suspected there was a good story behind this headline. I tucked away a copy of the ad and years later, decided to investigate. I have often been surprised by how few female and Native voices are used in the telling of the history of Dakota Territory. I thought Corabelle may have something to say. This hunch — and years of research — resulted in my book Life Painted Red: The True Story of Corabelle Fellows and How Her Life on the Dakota Frontier Became a National Scandal.

The book follows young Corabelle and Sam as they set out on the sideshow circuits and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to make ends meet after Corabelle’s family disowned her for marrying a man of mixed blood.

During my research I also discovered Winyan, who had played a role in Corabelle’s early missionary work. In the winter of 1885-1886, she was in her third year of teaching and serving in missions in Nebraska and Dakota Territory. That winter, one of the coldest and harshest on the Plains, she lived and served with Winyan from a rough-hewn cabin at the Oahenoua village on the Cheyenne River, northwest of present-day Pierre. It was one of the most isolated posts on the frontier, serving people who had recently returned from exile in Canada with Sitting Bull. By then, Winyan had gained a reputation as one of the physically strongest women in the territory. She built the log cabin she lived in, hauled water uphill from the river and traveled long distances through harsh conditions to nurse the sick or dying.

Thomas Riggs.

Living with Winyan that winter, Corabelle, whose mother immediately disowned her after the marriage to Campbell, began calling Winyan”Ina,” or mother. Winyan had initially gained notoriety when, as a young woman during the bloody Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862, she secretly swam food to an island in the Minnesota River where Riggs and a small band of fellow missionaries and Sioux friends had hidden with their families. After her father died, Winyan had been taken under the tutelage of Riggs and his fellow missionary Thomas Smith Williamson. When the Dakota people in Minnesota were pushed west to reservations, the missionaries went with them, so Elizabeth gave up her life among the lush fauna of the Minnesota River valley to the harsher, starker and more expansive high plains of western South Dakota.

The granddaughter of the legendary Dakota leader Sleepy Eyes, she had grown up with a strong connection to the natural world. Winyan helped raise several generations of Riggs children, nursed the ill with herbs and practices passed on to her from her ancestors and sat with the dying when others were too afraid of evil spirits.

Tales of her physical strength spiced Sioux oral histories. Stories of her quiet mercies were also abundantly shared.”Winyan was a woman of strong character, fine mind and a natural leader,” the historian Hughes wrote.”Her great desire was that her people should hear the Gospel, so as the years went by, her work widened, and she was sent to various fields. She held meetings, discussed the Bible, visited the sick, buried the dead, and occasionally addressed conferences of white people. Even the Indian men held her in the highest esteem.”

Collins, the missionary, was struck by Winyan’s loyalty, her knowledge of her people’s past and her understanding of the natural world, particularly the constellations in expansive prairie night skies.”She is a faithful friend, true to her character as a Dakota,” Collins recalled.”She enjoys camp life with us, and evenings, as we sit by the campfire, she will tell stories of her early life, or fables, or legends of the stars. She is quite an astronomer. She reads the sky like an open book.”

Together, during that rough winter of 1885-86, the broad-shouldered Winyan teased Corabelle — barely 5 feet tall — about being able to keep up with physical work. Hauling water from the river to the cabin, Winyan would balance two large buckets on her shoulders, often while plowing through new fallen snow. Corabelle would follow with one pail, struggling, but rejoicing in Winyan’s eventual approval.”She always looked me over skeptically when we reached the house” after hard work outdoors, Corabelle recalled.”Invariably, when she found me unbroken, she would put her hands on her hips and laugh so hard that I was obliged to join her.”

Thomas Riggs established Oahe Industrial School in the 1870s as a training school for girls.

One night in the middle of that winter, Winyan fell asleep while Corabelle was teaching a group of young Sioux men. One of the men later returned to kidnap the bewildered Corabelle, catching her as she came outside to do a chore before bed. Winyan, awakened by a rush of ice-cold air from an open door, plowed through snowbanks to catch up with the young man, who had wrapped Corabelle in a blanket and was carrying her to his home.

“What bad thing is this!” Winyan shouted, shooing the man away.”Now you stop!” Her unwelcome suitor dropped Corabelle in the snow. Winyan wrapped her in a blanket and escorted her back to the cabin, where she consoled and soothed her with an herbal bath. Winyan scolded Corabelle for carelessly ignoring her warning to never go outside alone.

Corabelle and Winyan talked long into that night, marveling at how this white missionary and the Native missionary ended up together after growing up in such different worlds of culture, customs and religion.”How we talked,” Corabelle remembered.”Really talked, there in that crude cabin, shut away from the rest of the world. She asked and answered, and I asked and answered until that day, with its closeness of spiritual touch, became a highlight of my whole life.”

Missionaries and newspaper reporters alike simply called her Winyan. Eventually, she had a son, Edward Phelps, a minister, who along with his wife, Ellen, became missionaries and served rural South Dakota churches.

In her 50s, Winyan began speaking more frequently to donors and churches, traveling as far as Chicago. Neilan, Winyan’s descendant, has collected photos and articles that highlight her impact. Winyan’s life spanned the great events of the 19th century frontier: the government’s many treaties with the Sioux; the 1862 uprising in Minnesota, in which hundreds of white settlers and Native people were killed, and which ended with the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men; the many battles and massacres between U.S. Army forces and Native people on the Northern Plains in the mid- and late-19th century; the last stand of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry on the rolling Montana hills in 1876; and the rapid settlement and statehood of South Dakota in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Louisa Riggs considered Elizabeth Winyan (standing) a colleague. She is pictured with Mary Collins (second from right), another missionary.

“She was a legend,” Neilan says.”What I found out, in the time frame that she lived, with the racism she faced and everything that had happened, I am most proud of how she rose above that, of how she left her mark and how many other ones did as well.”

Even while helping Native people adapt to relocation to the reservations, she often quietly longed for her childhood life along the Minnesota River.”She missed it so much,” Neilan says. Once, when sitting with fellow missionary Collins, Winyan told of something she had just seen that”well represents our present condition as a race.

“A man named Longfeather, dressed in Indian dress paint and feathers, was teaching some boys the Indian dance and song,” Winyan told Collins. There were three boys: One with long hair and painted face and Indian dress, one with shirt and leggings and a white boy’s shoes and stockings on, the third dressed well in entirely white men’s clothes.”One represents the past, the second the present, and the third the future,” Winyan said.”I know it has to be, but to me the one dressed all in the Indian child’s clothing looked the best, but I’m only an Indian.”

Neilan finds inspiration in her ancestor even today. She says she and her daughters (Lauren, Bailee and Falon) have also begun to study native plants, and to learn about the constellations that illuminate our prairie nights.

“She was a beacon,” she says,”a beacon of power in her own self.”

Chuck Raasch is a native of Castlewood and a graduate of South Dakota State University. He has written for the Huron Daily Plainsman, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and USA Today. Raasch has also authored two books, Imperfect Union: A Father’s Search for His Son in the Aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, published in 2016, and Life Painted Red: The True Story of Corabelle Fellows and How Her Life On the Dakota Frontier Became a National Scandal in 2023.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Catch, Move and Release

By Bernie Hunhoff

Steve Nelson and grandson Howie pull a fish from a stock dam before relocating it to a new pond suffering from die-off.

Fish inhabit about half of South Dakota’s 100,000 stock dams and small ponds, thanks in small part to longtime South Dakota promoter Steve Nelson and his grandson, Howie.

Nelson, who lives in Pierre, became a fan of stock dams nearly a half-century ago when he explored Roy Houck’s buffalo ranch, northwest of Fort Pierre in Stanley County. The Missouri River reservoirs hadn’t yet developed as world-class walleye fisheries, so anglers were then more likely to search for small bodies of water to fish.

As a tourism leader, Nelson often worked with the state Game, Fish & Parks Department to help families find a place to cast a line. Today the Glacial Lakes country and the four Missouri reservoirs get most of the attention from tourism officials and anglers, while stock dams are unappreciated treasures.

Nelson continues to do what he can to promote the dams — not by publicizing them, these days, but by catching fish in dams that are overstocked and transferring them to new dams or to ponds that suffered a die-off. Usually, he’s assisted by his grandson Howie, 12, and by some of Howie’s friends.

Three years ago, they learned about a dam that suffered a fish kill because a farmer accidently sprayed an alfalfa field nearby.”We restocked it the next year, and the fish are doing really well,” he says.

Winter kill is the most common threat to fish life in smaller ponds.”Ideally a pond would be 15 to 20 feet deep, but if they get under about nine feet and you have a hard winter with a lot of snow cover on the ice then you don’t get photosynthesis and the water can become oxygen-dead,” he explains. When that happens, Nelson and his young associates wait until the water level is once again high enough to sustain aquatic life and then they introduce more fish.

Walleye fishing can be complicated and tedious for some youth, while pond fishing is exhilarating.”Howie and his friends just like to catch fish,” he says.”They don’t always care what kind of fish or how big. They want some action. One day we caught 50 bluegills in an hour. As soon as the bobber hit the water it was going down.”

Most of South Dakota’s stock dams are on private land, so permission may be required to fish them. However, Nelson says South Dakota has five million acres of public land with hundreds of ponds — including three national grasslands in West River country and state-owned lands scattered throughout the state. Some of the public waters now have boat docks, restrooms and fishing piers.

Most small ponds and dams can be fished from shore, although Nelson says a small boat may be helpful in late summer when the water warms and fish concentrate in the deepest part of the pond, which is usually the center.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A 66-County Tree

By Steve Riedel

Steve Riedel turned weathered wood gathered from across the state into ornate Christmas ornaments representing every county.

I was stranded at home during the bitter cold winter of 2020-2021 and the isolation that came with the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse. I desperately needed something to do. My thoughts turned to Christmas at the Capitol. My wife Marietta and I rarely missed the annual festival in which dozens of colorful and brightly illuminated Christmas trees fill the halls of the Capitol in Pierre. I thought,”I wish I could decorate one of those trees.”

My boredom collided with inspiration. What if I made a collection of wooden Christmas ornaments, crafted out of wood gathered from each county in South Dakota, in the hope of displaying them in Pierre? As soon as the weather allowed — and being mindful of social distancing — Marietta and I set out to visit the 66 counties in the state and ask South Dakotans if they would donate a piece or two of old wood.

Asking for our first donation was an anxious moment. I was so nervous that I planned the first stop at the home of acquaintances in Beadle County not far from our home in Huron. We drove into the farmyard and parked in front of the house. Nervously, Marietta asked,”You aren’t really going to walk up there and ask for wood, are you?”

Riedel’s Minnehaha County ornament.

I nodded and walked timidly to the home’s front door, where I found myself talking to both husband and wife.”That’s actually a good idea,” they said, and then gave me directions to two large piles of old wood.”If you don’t find enough wood this time, you can come back for more.” We scoured the piles and left with four posts and a sense of optimism.

I quickly learned that I needed to explain what I meant by”old wood.” While I was merely hoping to collect short pieces of wood that most people would think to be rotten and useless, folks seemed to think I was asking for more. I also learned that people almost universally liked my idea. While I sheepishly laughed at myself when explaining my project, others listened intently and took the idea to heart. Before we finished, people had donated weathered wood from broken fence posts, fallen barns and buildings, cattle corrals, rodeo grounds, original family homesteads, broken telephone poles, horse tack and collapsed bridges.

One rancher plucked several fence posts from a retired manure spreader. Another gave me a horse yoke complete with a double tree. We also came home with a few dozen fresh eggs, though we turned down some turkeys that were free if we butchered them ourselves.

As we traveled door to door, we marveled that people placed such trust in us. We were often sent off on our own, completely trusted on private property. At one farm, I knocked on the door and explained my purpose.”We’d love to help you,” said the gentleman who answered the door,”but I can’t right now. We need to go to town to have our picture taken.” He got in his car and, speaking through his car window, encouraged us to search through his old wood pile.”Take a look around and if you see something that will work, help yourself. If not, there’s more wood behind the barn,” he said as the family drove away.

The more people donated, the more meaningful my ornament project became. People proudly gave us pieces of South Dakota history. We were given the very wood that our ancestors used to build South Dakota. In some cases, I suspect the wood helped build South Dakotans. As a rancher handed me an old fence post, he said,”You can take this. It was hand-split by my grandfather when he was a young man.” His grandfather was former Governor Tom Berry.

Faulk County ornament.

Another elderly donor, while digging through a small collection of posts hiding under a rusty truck fender, came up with a unique piece.”Would this post work? I’ve been saving it forever but don’t know what I will ever do with it.” As it turns out, it was a post he had saved from the World War II era.”We couldn’t get round posts during the war,” he said. Remarkably, the ornament I made with it has two dark holes left behind by a staple driven into it sometime during the war years.

When cold weather did not permit traveling, I worked obsessively at making 66 ornaments. Creating one to represent Lake County was especially meaningful. My ancestors settled there in the 1890s, and I was raised on a homestead established by my grandfather in the early 1900s. I had searched his homestead nine years earlier to find a post to make an ornament that would be our only grandson’s first Christmas ornament. That was one of the first ornaments I ever made. The post I found was comprised of wood with a rich burgundy color. I made Lake County’s ornament from that same post. The wood was so brittle that during my first attempt, it imploded in my lathe. Fortunately, I learned a lighter touch, and I have since made an ornament to give to both my son and daughter from that same old post.

After thousands of miles on the road and as many hours in my workshop, the only question that remained was whether my Christmas at the Capitol wish would come true. Marietta and I summarized the project and our experiences on the road and sent it to the committee in Pierre. Their approval arrived shortly thereafter. I got misty-eyed when I read the news.

The abundance of wood I collected actually allowed me to make more than one ornament from some counties. By the time I was finished, I had crafted finial ornaments, candles, Christmas trees, snowmen, bells, candy canes, Christmas baskets, bird houses … all related to the spirit of Christmas. Some aren’t perfect, but each ornament — like the many South Dakotans we met — is unique.

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.

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Goodnight, Mrs. Pierre

By Lance Nixon

Pioneer radio broadcaster Ida McNeil used her microphone to creatively assist rural South Dakotans who had limited opportunities for communication in the 1920s and 1930s.

Winter settled into the West River country as if it had come to stay. Ranchers couldn’t escape from their own yards for the drifts. Even the mailman couldn’t make his rounds. It was the 1950s, and communication was the first casualty of bad weather.

“The roads were completely blocked. We were having lots of snow that winter, and we hadn’t had the mail for well over a week,” recalls Phyllis Fravel, who still lives in the Orton Flat area near Mission Ridge.

Fortunately, ranchers had one slim connection to the outside world. Several times a day, a woman’s voice came crackling across all that cold and distance in the friendly static from radio station KGFX. Many listeners couldn’t have said who she was — she never gave her name over the air but once, from the time she started broadcasting in 1922 until the time she sold the station in 1962. They called her Mrs. Pierre.

Her name was Ida McNeil. She was a widow by then, broadcasting from a studio in her house in Pierre, just the way her husband, Dana, had taught her when they were puzzling out this new gadget, radio, together. One of the things she quickly learned is that people needed public service news — if the post office was planning to use extraordinary measures to deliver the mail, for example.

“Carl Kerr decided to deliver the mail by airplane and he told us through the radio — Ida McNeil — that they would be out with the plane,” Fravel recalled.”Cecil Ice was the pilot and Carl Kerr was the mailman. They landed just a short distance from the house and he left our mail and some of the neighbors’ mail at our place.”

For Fravel, watching a ski plane land on her ranch because Mrs. Pierre had said it over the radio was nothing unusual. It was just the way people communicated about many things, including the doings at Orton School, where Fravel herself had been a teacher. You talked to Mrs. Pierre; she talked to central South Dakota.

Residents who remember her said Mrs. Pierre was invaluable, inventing a service that didn’t exist before radio.”I would make up a message and get it to Ida McNeil, and she would put it on the radio that we were going to have a party on such and such a date. That’s the way we got the word around,” Fravel recalled.”If there was somebody that was in town and got stranded, they would send a message that as soon as the snowplow got out, they would be home.”

“She was a groundbreaker. There was nothing to model after,” said Mark Swendsen of Pierre, chief executive officer of Ingstad Family Media, the company that has owned KGFX since 1968.”She had a keen sense for what the community needed.”

And the community stretched far and wide. Carol Jennings recalls that when she was growing up on a farm south of Highmore, about an hour east of Pierre, her parents were always tuning in to KGFX.”I remember Mom had the radio on all the time to listen to ‘Ma Pierre,’ they called her.”

They listened because the news was curiously intimate. Ida McNeil carried messages from wedding parties worried about forgotten dresses and from sons in the Navy who’d come down with diphtheria, asking KGFX to pass word to the family back in the Plains that everything was going to be all right.

“She did a great service for the people in this area at that time,” adds Betty Harding of Pierre.”What they appreciated so much with KGFX is that she would give the hospital report and tell who had had a baby, who was in the hospital, who was being discharged.”

Mrs. Pierre couldn’t pass a message from one party to another because of federal rules. But what she could do, and did, was announce it to everyone. An article by Ida B. Alseth in Coronet magazine in March 1947 described why that sort of news item mattered to central South Dakota:”There are some 221,000 persons in Mrs. McNeil’s listening audience, and they seldom miss one of her broadcasts. For them, KGFX is not just another radio station; it’s an over-sized country party line where they may listen in for the latest bits of news and gossip — and often a deep chuckle.”

A chuckle, and maybe a sigh of relief.”During the bad winters, Mrs. Pierre was a vital thing for the whole community. Everybody listened when she came on. They counted on her,” said Willie Cowan of rural Pierre.

“I don’t know what my Virgo horoscope would say, but it seems to me I must have been born under a star of communication — which included rivers, railroads and radio, from the Mississippi to the Black Hills,” Ida McNeil said at the outset of a speech she gave in 1970 to the Minnilusa banquet in Rapid City, where she moved in the 1960s after she had sold the station.

“My mom was the oldest of five girls and her father was a riverboat engineer. That’s how they got to Pierre,” remembers Richard McNeil, the younger of Ida’s two sons, now 92 and living in Rapid City.

Mrs. Pierre was born Ida Anding in 1888. In 1896, Chicago Northwestern railroad officials asked her father to go to Pierre to supervise the overhaul of the machinery of a steamer, the Jim Leighton, Ida told in her speech. The Jim Leighton is well known in local history as a ferry that operated between Pierre and Fort Pierre. Ida and her sisters and their mother came out to Pierre that June and found the South Dakota capital hot and dry.

Eventually Ida went to work for what was then South Dakota’s Department of History from 1906 to 1921 as clerk, legislative reference librarian and finally as an assistant to Doane Robinson, secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society, who saw that she found her niche in state history in small ways. She left there about the time she married a widower from down the block, Dana McNeil.

KGFX, the 12th radio station to be licensed by the federal government, was operated from the big McNeil house on West Broadway in Pierre. Radio was such a new concept that the local newspaper reported on some of Ida’s unusual broadcasts, especially when she assisted rural families in times of crisis.

“My dad was much older than my mom. She was his second wife,” Richard McNeil says.”He got his interest in things electrical when he was in high school. He grew up in Clarence, Iowa, on a farm, and the railroad had a siding there. They parked a boxcar there with a guy who was a telegrapher. My dad learned to read code, and when he got out of high school, he got a job as a telegrapher with the railroad and gradually moved west and ended up in Chadron. He was involved in a lot of the railroad building in those days.”

But telegraphy was a 19th century invention; the next big thing had already arrived.”When he got to Pierre, he got interested in amateur radio,” his son said. He also became interested in Ida, who was about 20 years younger.

As Ida told in her Rapid City speech in 1970,”On June 16, 1916, Dana McNeil was licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to operate a radio station he had built. The call letters were 9 Z P, later becoming 9 C.L.S., with 200 watts of power. We were married in November of 1921 and my radio work began in February of 1922.”

And it all began in the McNeil home — what some Pierre residents remember as the big yellow house at the top of the hill on West Broadway in Pierre.

Dana taught Ida to read Morse code, and then they experimented with her broadcasting voice. Because Dana had moved into a position as a conductor on the route between Pierre and Rapid City, she started transmitting short messages to him; soon they learned that others were listening.

As Ida told in her speech,”One morning a young woman came to see me and asked me if I would tell her mother by radio how she was getting along after the operation she was to have at the Pierre hospital. Of course I did — but thereupon all the patients wanted me to tell their folks how they were doing. At first the doctors were dismayed and thought it was unethical to make such public announcements, but eventually when they found what a useful service it was they gave us their complete cooperation.”

Ida’s hospital report became a big deal in the middle of South Dakota.”Her main thing was ‘resting fairly well,'” says Loretta Cowan, of rural Pierre. But there were variations, open to interpretation; such as ‘doing as well as expected.'”If she said that, you might be in a little bit of trouble,” Cowan said.

It wasn’t all public service announcements and weather. There was live local music, too. Danny Hall of Fort Pierre remembers when he was asked to sing and play guitar on KGFX when he was about 10 years old in the 1950s. The station’s most important days came with the flood of 1952, Ida later recalled. And the greatest honor might have come when McCall’s magazine announced in early 1957 that Ida was one of seven women in radio and TV who had won the McCall’s Golden Mike award for 1956. Ida was recognized for service to the community.”The personal impact of her broadcasts is so great that her listeners, among them Governor Joe Foss and Mayor A.E. Munck of Pierre, refer to her affectionately as ‘Mrs. Pierre,'” the magazine reported.

Newspaper clippings stored at the state archives show what a stir Ida’s broadcasts made. Radio was so new that even the newspapers reported on what the McNeils were broadcasting.

The Potter County News noted on Jan. 20, 1926:”In giving the hospital report Tuesday, the Pierre radio station announced the birth of a child to Mr. and Mrs. Jay Eidom of Forest City. Another item broadcast was that a Highmore school teacher had passed away from the effects of small pox and that the school at Highmore had closed as a result.”

The Pierre Daily Dakotan carried this item on Feb. 15, 1926:”Philip, S.D. — An unusual use of the radio was made near here when Mrs. R. B. Trenchard of Milesville was notified of the death of her father at Janesville. A telegraph message was sent to the McNeil broadcasting station at Pierre and was broadcast from there. It was picked up by receiving sets in the vicinity of Milesville and Mrs. Trenchard was notified. She left the next day for Janesville to attend the funeral.”

The McNeils’ station became KGFX on Aug. 15, 1927. It was approved as a 200-watt station, and the 12th amateur station licensed by the federal government.

“We made no charges for any of our radio services until 1932 and only once, on my 50th birthday, did I ever announce my name,” Ida recalled.”I would have felt very self-conscious to that all day long, since practically all the announcing was mine.”

The station started a longer broadcasting schedule and commercials in 1932. Ida became sole director after her husband died in 1936.

The McNeils’ eldest son Robert — who retired as a colonel after a military career that included teaching at West Point — also became interested in broadcasting. Richard, the younger, was more interested in the technical aspects.”That was the founding interest for me in becoming an electrical engineer,” he says. He taught at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City for 35 years.

Through the years, many newspapers — Pierre, Rapid City, Sioux Falls, even the Minneapolis Tribune — sent writers to watch Ida do her thing. She sold the radio station in 1962 to Black Hills Broadcasting Co. and subsequently watched as it grew to a 10,000-watt station. Ingstad bought it in 1968 and the family has owned it ever since.

South Dakota State University recognized Ida as a broadcast pioneer in 1970. Her peers elected her to the South Dakota Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1972. She died in August 1974.

Perhaps the greatest reward for Ida Anding McNeil as a broadcaster might have been the work itself. Perhaps that’s why she snapped back into her old role in her 1970 Rapid City speech.

“I will never forget the solemn wonder I felt at the marvel of radio — knowing that your voice, unseen, was reaching people far away, perhaps with a message of comfort or cheer,” she said.”Perhaps I should close by saying what I have said for many years — ‘This is Station K.G.F.X. at Pierre, operating on an assigned frequency of 630 kilocycles, now leaving the air. Goodnight.”

And to you, Mrs. Pierre.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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We Winter With Eagles

By Bernie Hunhoff

Eagles were a rare sight in South Dakota just decades ago. The pesticide DDT got in their food (fish) chain and decreased the birds’ fertility. Then, 522,000 acres of their favorite habitat along the Missouri River was flooded by the Corps of Engineers’ six big dams. Eagle sightings became rare.

I was working for the Madison Daily Leader in 1975 when a bald eagle showed up on a sunny morning and perched in a tall tree near Lake Madison, just east of town. Word spread, and by midday there was a steady parade of cars to the tree, where the big baldy patiently sat tall like a kindly king on a wooden throne.

That was just a few years after DDT was banned. As the eagles repopulated they discovered that the tailwaters of those big Missouri River dams were excellent places to winter because the constant discharges kept the water open even on the coldest days of January and February.

While eagles might be seen in any of our 66 counties, as winter deepens and most rivers and lakes freeze they now concentrate along those downstream waters. They roost in the tallest cottonwood trees, sunning themselves on brisk mornings and enjoying the surroundings.

As the sun warms the air, they will leave their perches to”float” on the thermals that develop. While it may appear that they are just at play in the sunshine, it’s likely they are also keeping watch for fish doing the very same thing in the river below.

Watch as they drop into a slow and deliberate glide to the river’s surface, talons outstretched like the wheels of an airplane. Usually they grab the fish in a graceful swoop, but no species is perfect; sometimes they take on too big of a fish and the ascent is less graceful. A few years ago, some Yanktonians were confused to find a large carp lying on a sidewalk a few blocks from the river. Apparently, one of the local eagles tackled a fish bigger than he could carry and dropped it on the sidewalk.

The noble birds are adapting to living near humans. Particularly in Yankton and Pierre, they roost in cottonwoods or other large trees in parks along the river, watching parka-clad pedestrians on the paths below. Still, it’s best to keep your distance. They may be napping or fishing, and it’s not nice to interrupt in either case.

Here are tips on eagle watching along South Dakota’s four dams, from south to north.

Gavins Point at Yankton — Eagles now nest here year-around, but 100 or so”snowbirds” arrive every December. As other waters freeze, they concentrate along the river from the dam and into the city of Yankton where they can be seen on treetops in Riverside Park. Grab lunch or a hot chocolate at several diners near Levee Street and then walk along the river or across the Meridian Bridge. If the birds aren’t in town, head west on Highway 52 and take any of the roads south to the river. Sisters Grove, a nature area just below Chalkstone Hill, is a good place to see deer. The forested areas just east of the dam are particularly good spots to look.

Fort Randall Dam by Pickstown — A top spot is the campground and recreation area on the west side of the dam. A 780-acre eagle refuge, created decades ago when the birds were on the endangered species list, is closed to the public. A few years ago, a strange carp kill caused a smorgasbord of carp for the eagles (see the unique photo by Michael Zimny). Generally, the”baldies” have to work harder for their lunch. Check out the remains of the old chalkstone chapel and the historic fort cemetery, all within a mile or so of the river.

Big Bend at Fort Thompson — Visit an area locals call”the Teardrop,” a recreation and campground complex on the west side of the dam. But like other tailwaters, the birds might be found anywhere. You might also find the Crow Creek tribe’s buffalo herd grazing a few miles north of Fort Thompson on Highway 47.

Oahe Dam above Pierre — Oahe Downstream, the campground area just below our biggest dam, is an excellent spot. However, the big birds also like to visit our state capitol in winter. Take a walk in Steamboat Park, which borders the Missouri, stroll forested LaFramboise Island or cross the river to old Fort Pierre and look for the birds in Fischer’s Lily Park, at the mouth of the Bad River. The park marks the spot where explorers Lewis & Clark had their first encounter with the Lakota people.

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South Dakota’s Sledding Hills

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

By Bernie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Traveling with a Classic Guidebook

By John Andrews

An arch that once spanned Highway 12 at Ipswich was moved to facilitate the road’s expansion in 1973. It now stands in a nearby park. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

Perhaps the oldest book in my office is a maroon hardcover copy of the South Dakota Guide. Published in 1938, the book was a project of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. Out-of-work writers were hired to explore the 48 states and compile a travel book for each one, pointing out interesting places along the main-travelled routes.

In the summer of 2018, in honor of the book’s 80th anniversary, we decided to see what remained of the sites chronicled in the original guidebook. Some no longer exist, but we discovered several points of interest that drew the attention of the travel writers of 1938. In this summer of social distancing, perhaps a drive with the South Dakota Guide as a companion might be in order. Original copies of the book are hard to find, but the South Dakota Historical Society Press published a new version in 2005.

Here are a few examples of entries as they appeared in the original guide, along with our present-day observations.

Memorial Hall, Pierre

  • 1938: Memorial Hall is dedicated to South Dakota soldiers and sailors who lost their lives in the World War and houses the State Historical Society, Department of History and State Museum. Constructed of Hot Springs, S.Dak., sandstone, the building is stately and of classic design.
  • 2020: Memorial Hall still stands, though the historical society has moved to the Cultural Heritage Center. The building is now home to the state military and veterans affairs departments.

Graceland Cemetery, Mitchell

  • 1938: Left of the road is the Israel Greene Monument, a large red stone marker bearing the coat of arms of the Greene family — Nathaniel Greene of Revolutionary War fame and Israel Greene who captured John Brown at Harpers’ Ferry in 1859 while a lieutenant under Gen. Robert E. Lee. When the Civil War was over, Israel Greene came to Mitchell as a surveyor, living there the rest of his life.
  • 2020: The cemetery is obviously larger, but it’s easy to find the Greene memorial in Old Part Block II-A.

Highway Arch, Ipswich

  • 1938: The promotion of the Yellowstone Trail from”Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound” was begun at Ipswich by Joseph W. Parmley. A World War Memorial Arch spans the highway, bearing the name of the Yellowstone Trail and its founder.
  • 2020: The arch had to be removed when Highway 12 was expanded in 1973. You’ll find it today in a nearby park.

Main Street, Aberdeen

  • 1938: The site of the drug store in Main Traveled Roads by Hamlin Garland is at the corner of Main St. and First Ave. SE, across from the Alonzo Ward Hotel.
  • 2020: The building across from the Ward Hotel, a downtown landmark since its construction in 1928, is now a law office. Garland homesteaded in Brown County with his parents before becoming a noted novelist.

The Jump-off, Harding County

  • 1938: The Jump-Off is really a fault in earth’s surface extending N. and S. for many miles, the country is much like the Badlands on a smaller scale. It was in the heart of the Jump-Off that Tipperary, South Dakota’s most famous bucking horse, lived his entire life on the ranch of his owner, Charlie Wilson.
  • 2020: Tipperary is still famous in rodeo circles. A life-size bronze of the horse, sculpted by Tony Chytka, stands in Centennial Park in Buffalo.

Washington High School, Sioux Falls

  • 1938: Between Main and Dakota Aves., and 11th and 12th Sts., known as the”million dollar high school,” was constructed of native pink quartzite stone, with the north wing trim and column portico of a black quartzite so rare that it has been occasionally dismantled and exhibited at expositions.
  • 2020: The old Washington High School is now the Washington Pavilion. The black stone is actually Corson diabase, a billion-year-old molten rock that flowed into fractures in the pink quartzite and was mined at Lien Park in northeast Sioux Falls.
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The Ghost Forests of LaFramboise Island

By Michael Zimny

Wildlife abounds on LaFramboise Island near Pierre, but its cottonwood forests are in jeopardy.

LaFramboise Island in Pierre is a ghost forest. South Dakota is full of ghost towns — little towns that were on the cusp of middlin’ until the railroad changed course or the county seat went elsewhere. Now they’re in transition, possibly into the absence of any sign of ever having been a town at all.

The Lewis and Clark expedition passed this island in September of 1804, calling it “Good Humored Island.” Clark wrote in his journal of seeing many elk and buffalo here. Later, the isle was named for fur trader Joseph LaFramboise, who established a trading post at the mouth of the Bad River. The sliver of forest on the Mo can be seen in artist Karl Bodmer’s 1833 depiction of Fort Pierre.

From at least the late 19th century, LaFramboise was partially cultivated. In 1962, the Army Corps of Engineers purchased all of the land in preparation for construction of the Oahe and Big Bend dams.

LaFramboise Island hosts a surprising diversity of habitat in its 580 acres, with (potentially doomed) cottonwood forests, grasslands, dense tangles of juniper forest and cattail marshes.

There are over 7 miles of trail. You can hike along the Missouri River with views of the snowy Western bluffs, great-horned owls hooting from cottonwoods overhead, then cut through dark juniper forests where, in winter, deep cracks furrow the thick sheets of ice you’re walking on. The forests open on to a central meadow where deer browse on brome while hawks and coyotes hunt for rabbit or vole. Then back through the forest to a tiny isthmus with views of the Capitol dome across the river.

According to a 2004 study by the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department, the cottonwood forest is in decline, as part of a “successional sequence” on the Missouri River floodplain, that generally “begins with colonization by cattails or sandbar willow, develops through transitional phases to a plains cottonwood dominated forest, and finally, in the absence of stand replacing floods, develops into a mixed deciduous forest.” The study predicted that “junipers are clearly the future forest of LaFramboise Island.”

Walking the island, copses of downed cottonwoods do have a funerary feel, as they recede before the encroaching cedar tunnel. The ghost forest is still in mediation with the forest future on this river island that has survived a flood some did not, where change is everywhere underway.

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

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Turning to the River

By Bernie Hunhoff

Emily and Uriah Steber sat on the tailgate of their pickup and imagined how their restaurant, Drifters Bar and Grille, might fit along the banks of the Missouri River.

American rivers were once treated as the backyards of our cities, convenient places for unsightly factories, meatpacking plants, city dumps, salvage yards and such. South Dakota was no exception, even along the fabled Missouri River. Sioux Falls architect Tom Hurlbert saw that paradox when he traveled to Fort Pierre to assist with plans for a new riverside restaurant called Drifters Bar & Grille.

“It was a bit surprising that for as much as Pierre and Fort Pierre, and South Dakota for that matter, are influenced by the Missouri, that much of the city and state has turned its back to the river,” Hurlbert says.”Drifters was an opportunity to turn back toward the water.”

The vision, says Hurlbert, came from the Zarecky family — especially Emily Zarecky Steber, a Pierre native who grew up on the river.”We spent our summers on the water, sometimes from sunrise to sunset,” she says.

Her parents, Mark and Glennis Zarecky, bought the property 12 years ago and had development plans”shovel ready” in 2011 when the great flood hit the Missouri, swamping the river valley for months. Emily always thought the riverside location would be perfect for a restaurant. She went off to college at the University of South Dakota where she gained restaurant business experience while working at Chae’s, a then-popular Vermillion eatery. After graduation, she continued to learn the trade at top restaurants in Denver and Sioux Falls.

As the riverfront property recovered from the flood, Emily longed to go home. Her family redrew plans for the development — which include a 78-slip marina, commercial and residential space — and then her fiancÈ, Uriah Steber, also grew enthused about the dream of a restaurant.

“We sat down here when it was all dirt and had dinner on the back of my pickup truck and envisioned what we wanted,” says Emily.”Uriah and I got engaged there where that middle booth would be.” The restaurant opened in May of 2016 and they were married in June of 2017.

“Clearly our major theme is nautical,” says the young restauranteur,”but we wanted to have western and industrial elements as well, along with an outdoor fireplace and cedar siding.”

Hurlbert says the Zareckys’ love of the Missouri was inspiring.”Emily and her family had lots of experiences and ideas that came from being on and around the Missouri, but they were also influenced by travels around the country, particularly from the architecture and landscape around other bodies of water. They saw an opportunity to help create and capture a river identity.”

Emily’s love of the water is reflected throughout the 13,000-square-foot restaurant and event space. Her father stamped a nautical compass on the concrete floor. Boat cleats serve as purse hooks. An authentic wooden canoe from Steber’s home state of Wisconsin was repurposed and wired for lighting over the bar. Exposed ceiling beams were shaped like the hull of a large ship.

Aficionados of both beer and boating seem to enjoy the Brewski, a wood water ski with 16 holes that hold 5-ounce sampler glasses. Visitors also love to pose for pictures with Mojo, a giant steel pelican created by a Florida artist.

Immense windows offer views of historic LaFramboise Island, Griffin Park and a sandbar known as Discover Island where waterfowl and eagles often gather.

Drifters soon became a popular part of the Pierre-Fort Pierre dining and entertainment culture, and the satisfied customers include the architect.”I’ve had the opportunity to sit outside on the patio on a cool summer evening with a fire going and enjoy a great meal with the sounds of the river in the air and the silhouette of the capitol against the Missouri Hills,” says Hurlbert.”It’s a beautiful place. Of course nature and the kitchen did most of the heavy lifting on that night. All we had to do was create a nice space to land and get out of the way.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.