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Remaining Ranchland

By Paul Higbee

Johanna Meier Della Vecchia (left) points to trails she rode with her friend, Rosalie Aslesen, on Oak Hills Ranch.

Johanna Meier Della Vecchia stood by the gate at one of Spearfish’s last ranches and looked out over the grasslands bordered by big patches of oak and pine. She traveled the globe as one of the top sopranos in the world of opera, and then came back to Spearfish — hoping her hometown could avoid some of the troubles she observed elsewhere.

“So many beautiful places are completely developed,” she says.”Wide open areas like this have been lost forever.”

Standing with her at the ranch gate was longtime friend Rosalie Aslesen. The two talked of riding their horses on the ranch, exploring the hills for hours and sometimes pondering what might become of the natural splendor.

When the two were children, Spearfish’s population was only about 2,500. Small farms and ranches still surrounded the town. Today, Spearfish ranks among the fastest growing communities on the Great Plains, and most of the agricultural land has been subdivided into ranchettes, commercial developments, hotels and golf courses.

Johanna and her late husband Guido Della Vecchia, who was also an opera singer, bought the 800-acre site years ago. Now she is working with the South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust to create a conservation easement so that it will continue as ranchland. When she made the announcement at a media event in 2022, a young reporter asked,”How long does perpetuity last?”

She still smiles at the question because she relishes the answer: forever, of course. The young man’s issue might have been as much about disbelief as vocabulary. It is difficult to grasp that a piece of land this spectacular will look and function just as it does now in a century, given the appetite for Black Hills real estate.

Lone Tree Hill is the name given to one of the highest points on Oak Hills Ranch.

However, the benefits go beyond just the scenery of cattle grazing on meadows and seeking shade under the oak trees. The ranch, which sits southwest of town on a high plateau, is a clean watershed for the community and home to deer, elk, wild turkeys, coyotes, mountain lions, eagles and rare pine martens. Black bears occasionally traverse the ranch, using it as a corridor between the Hills and surrounding plains. Photographs capture the ranch’s beauty, but no description is complete without mention of its scents: pines, grasses lush or dry, wild raspberries and the aroma of thunderstorms approaching from Wyoming.

“This is the land where I rode as a child, beginning with my Shetland pony and then full-size horses,” Johanna recalls.”Frank Thomson owned the land then and he knew I’d stay on the trails and close the gates.”

Johanna’s parents had moved to Spearfish in 1939 to start the Black Hills Passion Play. Her father, Josef Meier, built an outdoor amphitheater near the Thomson ranch. Meier loved South Dakota life, and he developed a herd of Hereford cattle. Johanna helped with the Passion Play even as she established herself as a major figure in 20th century opera. Best known as a Wagnerian soprano, she sang roles at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera and on storied European stages. Wherever performances took her, Johanna’s thoughts were seldom far removed from the Black Hills.

“I’m grateful for the career I had, and I loved it,” she says.”But I spent 37 years living in hotels and airports.” She and her husband always knew they would retire to the Black Hills. Johanna also knew her father had offered to buy Thomson’s land. But Thomson, who lived into his 90s, loved the land and showed little interest in selling.

When he died in 1975, a Spearfish friend called Johanna and told her she believed Thomson’s son, George, would sell the property if Johanna could fly home quickly and close the deal. Johanna was performing abroad, and the couple lived in New Jersey with retirement still a long way off. Still, they jumped at the opportunity. Johanna arranged for a fast South Dakota trip and acquired a property documented as a piece of micro-history like few others in South Dakota.

Frank Thomson lived a simple life on the ranch. His house, which still stands, was little more than a small barn. But he was respected by his fellow ranchers, and he served as president of the local cattlemen’s association for 52 years. He grew oats, wheat, barley and corn along with his beef cattle, and gardened for his family of five. He also harvested timber (it’s likely that what Johanna knew as horse trails were developed as lumber roads) and established himself as a noted historian and author. Whatever work Thomson did by day, it often figured into his writing at night. He described birds, including solitary thrushes,”that gave a peep-peep-peep, each peep being a single note after a short pause … the plaintive notes could be heard on clear, still nights, and they would carry your soul somewhere.”

Ranch manager Mark Weber (second from left) appreciates the history, heritage and natural environment at Oak Hills Ranch. His family includes (from left) grandson Oakley, wife Terri and daughter and son-in-law Cindy and Christian Raby.

Thomson marveled at the mountain air that seemed to magnify distant objects and kept Venus visible on bright days.”Such is the climate; the birds; and the sky that holds men to this enchanted land,” he wrote.

The ranch felt less enchanting through the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. Thomson wrote of clouds of grasshoppers, and he also observed clouds of windswept topsoil, both of which nearly obliterated the sun.”I stood and saw my field of winter wheat of seventy-eight acres, top soil and seed wheat, being lifted by a strong west wind and carried high over Lookout Mountain that towers eight-hundred feet above the city of Spearfish,” Thomson wrote. The date was April 24, 1937. To his great credit, Thomson worked to rehabilitate his land in the coming decades.

He did it well. Rosalie Aslesen first experienced the ranch nearly 50 years after that vicious wind of’37 and found it breathtaking. In school, she and Johanna knew one another, and they shared a love of horses though they had never ridden together. At a Spearfish High School reunion in the 1980s, Johanna asked Rosalie if she still rode. Rosalie said yes but added that she didn’t then own a horse.”I’ve got horses,” Johanna said, and suggested a ride together through her recently acquired Oak Hills Ranch. It marked the beginning of nearly 20 years of trail riding for the two friends.”I remember wildflowers in summer, fall colors, views from the high points, and staying cool on hot days riding in Hungry Hollow,” Rosalie says.”They were unbelievable rides, and we could take many without repeating one.”

Spearfish rancher and conservationist Karl Jensen (pictured in the doorway of the Thomsons’ now-dilapidated ranch house) believes easements are an important tool for the agriculture community.

Frank Thomson, like most South Dakota farmers, never named his land. Johanna and Guido called it Oak Hills. Some Black Hills neighbors said they liked the sound of it but wondered if it was a misnomer. Looking at hills leading up to the ranch, pines dominate.”But there are oaks, beautiful oaks,” Rosalie affirms.”From the ranch buildings you look over the oaks and see the pines below.”

Some days, Rosalie and Johanna packed picnic lunches for their rides, or they relaxed over dinner with their husbands back at the ranch cabin. In their discussions, Rosalie could tell how committed her friend was in finding a way to preserve Oak Hills Ranch forever from the encroaching concrete of civilization. Johanna considered national organizations, but she chose the South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust because it reflects the state’s values of keeping agriculture strong and respecting landowner rights.

“Johanna had an incredible opera career, and she did something incredible, too, in coming home to South Dakota and conserving land that would have been worth millions had she decided to sell to housing developers,” says Tony Leif, the Land Trust executive director.”It’s really humbling that she put her trust in our organization. It’s helping us to be seen as an entity that can and will get these things done.”

The South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust was incorporated in 2019. Leif says it is currently working with about 50 landowners interested in establishing conservation easements for properties ranging from 30 or 40 acres to 13,000.”We never contact landowners and solicit easements,” Leif says.”They have to make the first contact.”

Johanna appreciates how much latitude she had in structuring her easement, even the option of keeping some land open to development.”But for me,” she stresses,”it means absolutely no development whatever. People in the Black Hills are so accustomed to open space and natural beauty that they may think one more piece of development won’t hurt. But it’s easy to get caught up in the sweep of concrete, and when a piece of land is gone, it’s gone forever.”

Mark Weber, whom Johanna selected as ranch manager, shares that view and the belief that as a working ranch the property must limit public access. A former law enforcement officer for 37 years with Lawrence County and then the City of Spearfish, Weber knows how to handle trespassers. Increasingly, trespassers with no connection to ag lands pose threats to both livestock and themselves. Weber says there are plenty of public lands near Spearfish, including the national forest and Spearfish Canyon.

The public can get a closeup look at Oak Hills, however, by hiking the city’s historic Thoen Stone Trail, which stops just short of the ranch. The Thoen Stone is a controversial bit of local history that possibly dates back to gold miners who were there in 1833. Ezra Kind, the last of the ill-fated miners, reportedly scratched the story of their misadventure on a sandstone slab found across the valley. Frank Thomson believed in the stone and defended its authenticity throughout his long life. The short trail can be found at the end of St. Joe Street in southwest Spearfish, and Oak Hills Ranch stretches west of the trail’s end.

Corrals at the ranch feature stone walls built by the Thomsons.

Weber appreciates the history, heritage and natural environment of the ranch.”I love this place and it feels like I’ve gone full circle with it,” he says. He grew up in Spearfish and at age 9 earned”a nickel a bale” loading hay for the Thomsons. As a teenager, Weber sometimes spent nights during calving season on the ranch. His wife’s grandfather, Bud Sprigler, helped Thomson rehabilitate the land after the Dust Bowl, terracing fields with just a blade and horses for better water retention.

“But I didn’t really understand the ranch until recent years,” Weber says.”How it’s a watershed, how important healthy grass is, how the shape of cattle hooves aerates the soil. You hear some people gripe about farmers and ranchers, but there’s lots of land that wouldn’t have survived like this without them.”

Of course, nature contributed what can be seen as ranch amenities today, long before humans knew the Black Hills. It is bordered by two steep canyons, Fish Hatchery Gulch and Hungry Hollow, about a mile-and-a-half apart and forming a natural barrier to livestock movement.

South Dakotans who respect the importance of maintaining farmland can rest assured, along with Johanna Meier Della Vecchia, that these unique 800 acres will be part of South Dakota’s agricultural culture for perpetuity. However, even strangers to the state’s farm culture will benefit.

“Travelers on I-90 can see the ranch a couple miles off, turning into town at Exit 12 at Spearfish,” Leif says.”It’s the green plateau straight ahead. Everybody gets that view forever.”

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

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Summers Like Watermelons

By Stephanie Anderson

Illustration by Darya Tsaptsyna.

The summers were like watermelons: we split them open and dug our spoons into the red flesh, claiming no melon had ever tasted so good, the juice running down our chins. The summers were huge and round and bright green, too big to carry, containing everything.

We threw open the screen door and took off running. We ran everywhere. To the barn where wild momma cats curled around tight balls of kittens in the square straw bales. To the corral where the bum calves waited for their bottles. To the shelter belt of pine trees that stood like ladders to the sky. We climbed to the top, sap on our legs and hands, and surveyed the prairie like eagles.

In the summer we were best friends. We saw the town kids occasionally, the other farm kids even less. But we needed and missed no one. We had each other, and the land, and Mom and Dad, and animals: two dozen cats, a border collie, horses, cows, raccoons, rabbits, deer, antelope, badgers, songbirds, and coyotes howling at sunset.

We got up early and whisked powdered milk with hot water in a 1-gallon Schwan’s ice cream bucket and funneled the milk into white plastic bottles and stoppered them with red rubber nipples. We carried in hay and pellets and checked the water tank. We named the calves after Disney characters and rubbed their backs while they sucked milk.

In the evening we pitched hay and poured buckets of corn for the butcher steers in the corral. We scratched their necks and sang them songs, named our favorites and took their pictures with the FunSaver cameras Mom bought us. Someday the steers would be eaten, likely by us, but that felt far away. We didn’t feel anything about our role in fattening them for slaughter. The corral was across the gravel road from our house, at the bottom of a deep draw with a small marshy creek. The smell of sweet clover hay mixed with wet creek mud and the earthy scent of manure: that’s the aroma of summer evenings as a child.

We were 8, 5 and 3 years old. Then 10, 7, 5 and 1 (we got a baby sister that year). Then 12, 9, 7 and 3.

On Sunday afternoons we crammed into a’70s-era Ford pickup with Mom and Dad and set off to the pasture to”check cows.” We always hoped the cows were on the other side of a steep draw so we could gasp and cringe as Dad went off-roading. The cows gathered around the pickup as Dad filled the salt and mineral tubs, and by hand we fed the friendly ones cake, tasty pellets as round as cigars. When Dad parked the pickup truck by the stock dam, we leaped out and followed cow trails deep into the cottonwoods, tasted ruby red buffalo berries and wild purple plums, smelled sunflowers and sweet clover.

Most days we looked as wild as we felt. We wore slip-on shoes that were green inside from the grasshoppers we squashed under our heels while running in the grass. In the morning we put on whatever looked comfortable — our dad’s black T-shirts that fit like dresses, jeans cut into shorts, those free but too big XXL shirts from the annual Farm Safety Day Camp. We destroyed our clothes with dirt, cow manure, grass stains, popsicle drips and cat claws.

Some years we grew a big, shared garden of vegetables and flowers with our mom. Other years we divided it into personalized plots that reflected our individual tastes. Once we planted a corn maze. In the stalks we played hide and seek with kittens and munched on raw peas, pod and all, and dug our fingers and toes into the dirt. We were big on dirt.

On branding day, we watched our dad and uncles sort the calves from the cows and push them down the chute and onto the branding table. With a mix of curiosity and remorse we pressed our foreheads to the fence and watched Dad brand a calf, give it shots, notch its ears, and, if it was a male, castrate it. Blood and iodine, testicles and bits of ears, the smell of burning hair and skin. We got older and left the fence one by one to join the men. We filled the vaccine gun and angled the needle, pushed the calves down the alleyway while they kicked our shins and returned them to their mothers when the day ended.

The erratic prairie weather was our guiding force. On hot days we jumped into the little above-ground pool Mom set up for us. On cold days we fled to the barn. We wore knee-high black rubber boots when the corrals were muddy. We stayed up late watching lightning storms and huddled in the basement when the tornado warnings came. When hail destroyed the wheat, we stayed silent and serious like our parents. When it rained, we rejoiced with them.

We ate strange things: the chips that flaked off the tubs of Crystalyx, a sweet, crystallized blend of molasses, fat and minerals meant for cows; wheat kernels straight from the beard; starchy field corn before it ripened; the caramelized cracked corn and oat mixture we fed the bum calves. We opened our mouths wide and drank from the water hydrant.

But watermelon — that was the taste of summer. It seemed there was always one in the fridge. All summer we anticipated that perfect melon: sweet but not sugared, juicy but crisp, the kind that let out an audible”crack” when split open. And when we found it, we gorged.

Then we were 13, 10, 8 and 4, and everything changed.

That summer I went to the fields with Dad, and the season went from being a time of play to a time of work. I raked windrows of hay with a Farmall tractor and a twin rake, bouncing down the field, Dad following with the baler. Then I cut hay with a Hesston swather with no cab for a summer before graduating to a bigger machine that would be”mine” for the next four years. Dad and I would leave at 5 a.m. and take lunch to the field. I came home at night dusty and tired. Because I loved the farm, I loved the work.

Then came boyfriends and beer cans and rodeos. Sundays at the lake with friends and late-night cruises in my pickup truck. Strongly worded declarations about moving to the city. The many forms of teenage trouble I got into during the summer. I spent those long days and nights with friends instead, and my siblings did the same. And then I was gone to college across the state, then to a job across the country.

No family stays young forever. But there are kind ways to grow up, and not so kind ways. As a teenager I was independent and quick to anger. I thought I deserved my space. Now I see that I pushed my family away to create that space, to create myself.

We are 30, 27, 25, and 21. We live in four different states. Though one sibling occasionally travels to visit another, Christmas is the only time all four of us are together. We text and call, but our lives are more complicated than we thought possible. The time accumulates like snow between phone calls and suddenly it’s been two, three, four months since we talked.

Sometimes I find one — a perfect melon. I eat a forkful and I’m sitting at the kitchen table on the farm. We’re 12, 9, 7 and 3 again. It’s Sunday afternoon in late July and we just ate Mom’s fried chicken and gravy and Dad is sprinkling salt on a watermelon slice, his funny habit. Our hair is bleached white from the sun and we’re making plans to check cows. The wheat is ripening in the fields. We dig into the watermelon and declare it to be perfect, the best one of the summer. We’ll never find one this good again, we say.

Editor’s Note: Stephanie Anderson grew up on a ranch near Bison in Perkins County. She lives and writes in Boca Raton, Florida. This story is revised from the July/August 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Trainer from Marcus

By Sentel Schreier

Bud Boudreau says every dog’s mind is different, “and it takes patience to understand each one.”

Bud Boudreau wakes at 3 a.m. on most mornings. He drinks a cup of black coffee, dresses and dons a cowboy hat and boots, strings a dog whistle around his neck and walks out to the barn to start another day of training border collie sheepdogs. He hasn’t missed a sunrise in 60 years.

One morning I rose early as well and drove down Highway 34, past Bear Butte and Union Center in Meade County, to learn more about a little-known man who is credited with changing the way we herd sheep on the Northern Plains. The daughter of a sheep rancher, I still remember the excitement of Boudreau arriving at our ranch with a mule named Lenore, a truck full of border collies and a lifetime of stories.

I spent the last 7 miles of my drive that morning on gravel roads. Admittedly, I had to call Boudreau to confirm I wasn’t lost. I arrived just in time to accompany him as he headed to the barn. A symphony of wagging tails, excited whines and barks greeted us. The old man fed the dogs and cleaned the kennels. Then he saddled his palomino horse, collected the dogs from their individual kennels and let them exercise for a while. He told them to sit and they sat. He called them by name back to the kennels. The dogs were quiet as they waited to see who would be the first to work. He called for Dot, and she waited triumphantly by the barn door.

Boudreau, who is now 84, rode his horse out to the pasture with Dot by his side. She watched him intently for a signal to bring in the herd of Targhee sheep. With one word,”Away,” he sent the dog counterclockwise in a graceful, wide arc around the herd. I squinted to see Dot’s dark silhouette against the sleepy horizon — about half a mile away.

With varying sounds from his whistle, Boudreau signaled Dot to go clockwise, counterclockwise, walk up, look, speed up, slow down, stand or sit. Dot interpreted the slightest change in tone of the dog whistle or pitch of Boudreau’s voice to mean a different command. Boudreau and his border collies have their own language.

“The dogs have such instincts bred into them,” he says.”It’s remarkable. It’s easy to teach them because a well-bred dog already has the instincts.” Watching Boudreau in the field with his dogs is like watching a music conductor. He makes the slightest sound and the dog bursts into obedient motion. The dogs are sensitive to his body language as well as the subtle movements of each animal in the herd.

“It was the strangest feeling for me,” Boudreau says of his move from Maryland to the open spaces of West River.

Border collies have been used for centuries to herd sheep. Today they are invaluable members of many sheep ranches in South Dakota and other states where herds are large, in part because Bud Boudreau came here 40 years ago.

It’s fitting that”collie” is Gaelic for”useful,” because a sheepdog can do more with sheep than several cowboys on horseback. The border collie breed can be traced back to the United Kingdom, to an era when wool was a big part of the economy.

Sheepdog trials also originated in Europe but soon became popular in the eastern United States. Trials are competitions that test a dog’s ability to herd sheep in cooperation with its handler. Dogs must successfully complete the”outrun” or initial gathering of the sheep and”drive” them through different patterns of panels. Typically dogs must then”shed” the sheep or separate a few from the rest of the herd, and then pen the sheep in a corral within a time limit.

According to Boudreau, Englanders literally wrote the book on how to train sheepdogs. He learned the basics by reading an English text when he was in his early 20s, but his fascination with border collies started long before that. When he was 10 years old, his aunt stole him away from the family dairy farm in Michigan to see a short film called Arizona Sheepdog. The black and white documentary kindled his lifetime fascination.

Several years later, a neighbor imported two dogs from Great Britain and brought them to the dairy. Boudreau was amazed by how they could round up cattle, just as he remembered seeing in Arizona Sheepdog. By then, Boudreau’s dad had converted the dairy farm into a racehorse training facility. He helped care for more than 40 racehorses and he broke thoroughbred colts. A fearless young horseman, Boudreau preferred to gallop the ornery young horses around the track in the early morning because they”weren’t so tough if they couldn’t see where they were going.”

Boudreau embraced his dad’s racehorse business and eventually took it over. But he also dreamed of training border collies. As a father of four — Dean, Jean, Jimmy and Susan — he marveled at the neighbor’s dogs’ habitual herding of his toddler children.”I got real excited one day when that dog was herding my kids around the yard,” he remembers.

Boudreau became well known in the horse racing world and ran the family business successfully for more than 20 years before his ambition led to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to train and shoe horses for Alfred Vanderbilt, owner of Sagamore Farm and Baltimore’s Pimlico Racetrack where the Preakness Stakes is held today. Alfred, a pillar in the horse racing community, was the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the world’s richest man in the late 19th century.

Sagamore Farm gave Boudreau the opportunity to work with famous trainers and fine horses like Kentucky Derby winner Native Dancer. However, Boudreau arrived in Maryland in a full body cast after a”brawl” with a young colt. Knowing Boudreau’s reputation, Vanderbilt waited a month for him to recover. He started his job caring for broodmares, shoeing horses and training 2-year-old colts.”I woke up at 4 a.m. and was done by mid-morning with nothing to do in a strange place. I was bored and had a lot of time to think,” he remembers of his Maryland days.”I thought a lot about sheepdogs.”

Bud Boudreau has trained dogs and horses. He prefers dogs, he says, because of their intelligence.

Life changed when a friend gave him a border collie as a gift. Boudreau took the dog to a sheepdog clinic in Virginia in 1982. Jack Knox, a famous Scottish dog trainer, led the program and was impressed with Boudreau’s self-taught knowledge and his ability to interpret a dog’s movement. Boudreau soon met Ralph Pulfer and Bruce Fogt, two of the most respected experts in the industry. He credits them with making him the trainer he is today.

He returned from Virginia determined to train sheepdogs. After working on the track each day, he spent time with his dogs and a small herd of Barbados black-bellied sheep he had purchased.”I would shoe horses for folks in exchange for time on racehorse farms to work my dogs. I would pull up with my trailer, unload my Barbados, then spend the afternoon training the dogs.”

However, he felt he had a foot in two quite different worlds — horse racing and sheepdogs. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, but the decision to train dogs full time would be costly. He had spent years in the horse racing world, achieving credentials, connections and financial security. In six years, Boudreau had become Sagamore’s resident farrier and even shoed horses for the historic Green Spring Valley Hounds and Hunt Club.”I had it made, but I felt like I wasn’t fully committed to the horses or the dogs. I had to choose. I chose border collies.”

When he revealed his plans, the head trainer at Sagamore Farm told him he was,”making a big mistake.” Boudreau chuckles at the memory.”Everyone thought I was plum crazy.” Boudreau left the stables in the hands of his son, Dean, who had been his apprentice.

Not long after deciding to train dogs full time, Boudreau saw an ad for affordable land in South Dakota near the tiny community of Marcus, about an hour’s drive east of the Black Hills. In 1986, he loaded all his belongings, including nine border collies and eight sheep, in a homemade trailer and Toyota truck and headed west.”I moved with my dogs to a cabin on White Owl Creek,” he remembers.”It was the strangest feeling for me; I went from a very crowded area in Maryland to not seeing another human being for weeks at a time.”

In 1988, Boudreau’s three sons traveled there and built a log home for their dad from scratch, incorporating materials from the original homestead 2 miles from the house. Boudreau had spent the winter collecting stones from the dilapidated homestead shack for his sons to repurpose into a hearth and chimney. The original homestead stove sits in Boudreau’s kitchen, a tribute to the pioneers that lived at Marcus before him.”I still make my famous waffles on it from time to time,” he says with a smile.

Boudreau’s sons pooled their skills for the cabin construction. Local ranchers provided further assistance. For example, Boudreau traded help installing Sheetrock for dog training.”My boys had so much fun building the house and the neighbors got a kick out of it too. They would stop by to see the progress every now and then. It was a special time for me.” Boudreau also planted a tree grove behind his house that now provides protection from the strong prairie winds.

*****

With hill country, a river and expanses of land, the Marcus ranch proved ideal for training sheepdogs. Boudreau also fell in love with the resiliency of his neighbors. He believes South Dakotans are special.”People here understand hardship but are some of the most content people I’ve ever known. It’s because they’re doing what they want to do with their lives. Out here in the country, you have to love what you do to stay. I feel I have lived in the best generation that ever was in the U.S. and I couldn’t be luckier to end up in South Dakota.”

Bud Boudreau’s house includes a stone fireplace and a woodstove salvaged from a homesteader’s cabin.

Despite the rural location, sheepdogs have taken him on adventures he would have forfeited had he stayed at the racetrack. He has even competed at international competitions in Ireland.

One of his most memorable trips came in 1993 when he met his future wife, Sarah, at a sheepdog trial in Durango, Colorado. They have worked dogs together nearly every day since they got married in 2000 at nearby Sturgis. Sarah shares his love for sheepdogs and competes in trials. She also serves as a judge at competitions.

For eight years, the Boudreaus hosted a dog trial at their home near Marcus that attracted judges from Great Britain and competitors from all over the country. Bud and Sarah, along with help from Ross Lamphere and Jim Roth, also started the popular midwinter North American Sheepdog Trials at the Black Hills Stock Show. Apart from dogs, the Boudreaus also share a love for music. Sarah spent five years in Italy playing the French horn in Milan’s Pomeriggi Musicali Orchestra. Today, Bud’s old guitar hangs in their living room, and he says he knows he’s”doing okay” when Sarah recognizes a tune. He thinks playing the guitar has similarities to training dogs.”You never want to practice a mistake,” he explains.

The couple’s accomplishments also led to an adventure on a big ranch along the Rio Grande River, where Tommy Hayre raises more than 20,000 goats and sheep on 110,000 acres. Boudreau’s skill with dogs was an invaluable resource on the rough, West Texas terrain.”The goats were so smart, they’d hide in caves and you’d have to ride in with the dogs on horseback to gather them,” he recalls. During the drought year of 1998, Hayre sent Boudreau to his ranch in Argentina for two weeks to show Argentinian cowboys (gauchos) how to use sheepdogs.

Boudreau recorded the trip in a detailed journal that he shared:”We stood around the adobe kitchen, with a fire going in the fireplace. Later on I found out there was never an oven in a gaucho residence. There is always a fire in the fireplace, both summer and winter. On the table was a blackboard that had been purchased in town, with the commands — ëaway,’ ëcome,’ ësit,’ ëwalk up,’ and ëthat’ll do’ — written out in a way that they could pronounce.”

Boudreau drank mateÃÅ from a silver gourd and bombilla, ate mutton ribs from a 2-foot machete and rode countless miles in the pampas.”Living with the gauchos was an experience I’ll treasure forever,” he says. He left Argentina confident that his dogs had found worthy handlers in JoseÃÅ, Tabares and RamoÃÅn.

Sheep ranchers in South Dakota and around the world appreciate the talents of the man from Marcus. Boudreau was inducted into the American Border Collie Association Hall of Fame last September, an honor he considers a highlight of his life. He was”in shock” to hear the news, but western sheep ranchers believe the recognition was long overdue.

In a nomination letter, Montana rancher Kelly Bradley wrote,”This part of the country had big numbers of sheep running on it and yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, there were not many places using dogs and certainly not realizing the potential of a well-bred and trained border collie. Bud Boudreau almost single-handedly changed all that for us ranchers when he came to this country and went to work educating so many of us about border collies. For many, it was the first chance to see stock dogs that did more good than harm to their stock.”

My father, Gene Johnson, met Boudreau at a neighbor’s sheep shearing in Harding County. He’s become a reliable presence at our own sheep shearings ever since. Dad says the trainer brought better technique and finesse to our ranch.”I appreciate Bud’s knowledge of sheep and dogs,” Dad told me.”But I also appreciate him as a great friend and mentor to me. He has a way of making hard work more enjoyable because he’s there.”

Boudreau helps ranchers train their own dogs and he has sold dogs to others. Just as he did at our family’s ranch, he also taught sheep growers the benefits of dogs by just showing up to help. When he came to our place, we always offered him a room, but he preferred to sleep in the truck near the dogs, who had a strict bedtime of 7:30 p.m.

We loved his visits because the work always seemed to go more smoothly. Boudreau and a couple of his dogs could round up huge groups of sheep without help. Their movements were like magic to me and I wanted a dog of my own. Finally, Dad traded Boudreau some sheep for our border collie, Kate, after he took her to the National Sheepdog Finals in 2015. He also gifted me a dog whistle, and he came to the ranch to show us how to use the many commands.

He says every dog has its own peculiarities.”I won’t sell a dog I’m not confident in. Sometimes a dog will take years to get to the place where I feel confident in finding him a home. Every dog’s mind is different and it takes a great deal of patience to understand each one,” he says.

Because every dog needs hands-on attention, it’s an inexact and difficult business model.”I’ve been dead broke,” Boudreau admits.”Some people live paycheck to paycheck; I live border collie to border collie. Once a dog gets to be worth a certain amount, I can’t afford to keep him. If he gets hurt, there goes my paycheck.”

Still, he has never regretted leaving his better-paying career with East Coast horses.

“Training dogs has made training horses boring because of their intelligence. It’s a different kind of art form. It requires more finesse because the dogs get so fixated on the sheep, they have to rely on your voice only, and you have to hope they listen, and keep cool if they don’t.”

Boudreau’s philosophy on raising dogs sounds like parenting advice.”You have to be somebody that commits. A collie’s mind is like a growing child — you can’t miss a day. You have to be prepared to exercise their mind daily.”

He also emphasizes positive reinforcement.”I want them to stop doing wrong because they love the outcome of doing right. I want them to think of me as a safe place to look to. In order for that to happen, you have to keep calm. You can’t lose your cool. I want my dogs to look forward to training as much as I do.”

Spend a morning with Boudreau and his dogs and one thing becomes as clear as a Meade County sunrise: The dogs live to hear his gentle voice saying,”that’s a good boy.”

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

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Accidental Rancher

The view from the north pasture on Eliza Blue’s ranch west of Bison. Photo by Christian Begeman.

South Dakota was supposed to be just another stop on Eliza Blue’s journey through life. The singer/songwriter had lived in Minneapolis, New York City and Portland, Maine. Then, about 10 years ago, she found herself in Perkins County, a self-professed urbanite gaining a small taste of rural life. Where she might have gone next, we’ll never know. She met and married a local rancher, and proceeded to fall in love with the land, the sky and all the joys and sorrows of West River life.

These days, she’s busy raising two children and tending to a menagerie of chickens, goats, sheep, cows and cats on the ranch west of Bison. Still, she manages to find time to contemplate and write about life on the Plains — the devastation of drought, the sense of community, the closeness of death and the wonderment of nature.

South Dakota Magazine collected several of these stories in a book called Accidental Rancher, released one year ago. The glimpses into Blue’s world are poignant and written with the uniquely lyrical perspective of a folk singer turned modern-day homesteader. Readers find themselves with Blue in her laundry room feeding bum lambs, following the antics of a rooster named Fancy Pants or, as in this excerpt called”Pigeons,” teaching her young son, affectionately called the Bean, about the miracle of life.

Pigeons

In the midst of several of our old outbuildings stands a grain bin. Years ago, a spring storm ripped two of the roof panels loose, the rain soaking and spoiling the small amount of grain pellets left inside. Since we run a predominantly grass-fed operation, it wasn’t a great loss, and fixing the roof didn’t rank high on our perennially insurmountable to-do list. So the grain bin, and the few inches of grain inside, have been left untouched by human hands.

Blue with her husband, Max Loughlin, and children Wesley and Emmy Rose, aka “The Bean” and “Roo.”

Who wants an abundant supply of grain, housed in a predator-free location, accessible only from the air? Pigeons, we discovered one day this summer, when my curious son asked to see what was inside the bin. The sound of the creaking door frightened them, and the small flock that now calls the grain bin theirs came exploding through the holes in the roof in a flurry of squawks and beating wings, frightening us as well.

That did not dissuade us from peeking inside, however, where we found, in addition to feathers and poop, several tiny nests, each holding a rosette of gleaming white eggs.

The Bean is an avid bird watcher and also a big fan of hunting for chicken eggs, so for the rest of the summer, we couldn’t pass the grain bin without a request to check on the nests. From time to time I’d humor him, and we’d crack open the metal door for a quick peek. Thus, we got to watch several of the eggs hatch and then transform from nestlings into fledglings.

One day, however, when we peered in, I could tell something was awry. A mother pigeon, thinking herself quite clever, had laid her eggs inside the large plastic bucket used as a scoop when the bin was still in service. The high walls of the scoop had hidden the babies from our view, and now, half-grown and ready to meet the world, they were too big to spread their wings in the cramped circle of the scoop, and were permanently trapped.

I crept in as quietly as I could, and turned the bucket over gently. The birds tumbled out. Two righted themselves and wobbled limply away from me, their panic evident, but the third, its muscles too atrophied to carry its own weight, couldn’t walk at all, and lay fluttering weakly with fear.

“Babies,” said the Bean.”Big babies.”

“Yes,” I replied,”but we better leave them be. They are so scared.”

The next day, the Bean asked to see them again, and I had to admit, I wanted to see them, too. I feared the worst, however. Indeed, one of the babies was dead, never having moved from where we’d last seen it. The other two were huddled against the tin wall of the bin, pressed hard against each other. Their terror was plain, and the Bean made no protest as I closed the door, saying,”They are still too scared.”

This continued for a few days. Each day I grew more certain we would find the two remaining babies dead, but each day, they looked about the same; hunched and miserable, not moving much. I considered trying to borrow a birdcage and taking them out of the bin, but I worried it would be too much for the poor creatures. It seemed it wasn’t just their muscles, but their spirits that were stunted. They were living in pigeon heaven, but they were slowly dying because they didn’t know how to do anything else.

I also wasn’t sure if they had any source of hydration. Presumably their mother was in charge of that, but these two were nearly full-grown, and I wondered if the period of depending on the flock for sustenance had expired.

Just in case, the next time we visited, I brought them a little fresh water in a plastic dish. As I laid it inside, they scuttled away from me, the first movement we’d seen since I’d freed them. I closed the door, and thought,”Well, it’s progress.” And I finally had an idea of how to help them.

Wesley reads to his sister and an injured lam that is recovering indoors.

When we returned the following morning, I brought water and a large stick. The day after, more water and another stick. I didn’t really have a plan, but I figured seeing new things might wake up their brains a little. The Bean would wait at the door, guarding against barn cats and dogs, while I followed the babies around for a few minutes, forcing them to explore the new objects we’d brought. They grew stronger and more agile with every visit, until, four days in, one of the birds hopped, wings fluttering, onto the crook of a branch. She perched there for a moment, teetering slightly. I looked back at the Bean, who was peeking through the crack in the open door. He smiled wide, and neither of us made a sound while the pigeon wrapped her tiny toes around the branch, testing for the first time how it felt to leave the ground.

And then one day when I entered the bin, instead of simply hopping, both birds spread their wings, and slowly, so slowly they seemed to be defying physics, they both pulled themselves into the air. One landed a few seconds later with a bounce, but the other drifted for a moment, circling my head in slow motion, reaching and pulling, reaching and pulling, until she was at the hole in the roof, and then outside it.

I rushed out, picking up the Bean as I scurried past.”Did you see her? Did you see her?” I asked him.

“Baby bird flying!” He shouted in reply. We circled the grain bin, looking for the baby. I was scared she had fallen into the grass, easy prey for cats, but instead she was perched on the circular rim of the bin, head cocked, scanning the horizon.

She peered up for a few more seconds, the whole world a giant bowl over her head, before ducking down and diving back into the safety of the bin. The Bean, his eyes as blue as the sky, turned to me, and said,”Baby bird, not a baby anymore.”

I often fear I am a foolish woman. Sometimes I know that I am. Like when I am climbing into a stinky, old grain bin to chase sensory-deprived baby pigeons around. But every once in awhile my foolishness pays off. How else would I have gotten to see the look that appears on a small boy’s face when he sees a fledgling bird fly for the first time? The look of surprised delight as he falls a little more in love with the world and all its wonders.

For my part, I value the reminder that small kindnesses are rarely small and learning to fly comes in many forms.

Editor’s Note: Accidental Rancher is available for $14.95 plus shipping and handling. This excerpt is revised from the May/June 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Meet an Accidental Rancher

By Katie Hunhoff

Accidental Rancher is a collection of poignant stories gleaned from Eliza Blue’s life on a Perkins County ranch.

When Eliza Blue mailed me her manuscript about life on a West River ranch, I admit that I had some skepticism. The document sat unread in my inbox for a few days. Did readers want another perspective on ranching life?

Finally, I opened Eliza’s manuscript and I changed my thinking after reading just a few paragraphs. Her writing, like her songs, pulled me in. Even tales of mundane tasks, such as milking a cow or searching for missing livestock, fascinated me. Somehow, her words transform ordinary life in South Dakota into something enchanting. For days after I read the manuscript, I found myself narrating my life inside my head as if Eliza Blue was writing my story.

To make a long story short, South Dakota Magazine has proudly published Eliza’s book, Accidental Rancher. We worked on it through the winter, knowing South Dakotans would appreciate her storytelling.

Eliza’s fresh perspective comes perhaps from her background of being both a storyteller and singer/songwriter. She is now also a Bison rancher’s wife and mom. Eliza grew up in suburban Minneapolis, but much to our benefit she landed in Perkins County a few years ago and dived into ranch life. Somehow, she also finds time to contemplate and write about life on the high plains.

Too often, rural America’s stories and culture are interpreted by writers who visit for a day or a week, often to write only about the latest catastrophe — most likely a blizzard, a drought or a trade war. Trouble and woe are usually their themes, though there is so much more. A handful of rural West River writers have worked to dispel such myths. Linda Hasselstrom, Kathleen Norris and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn are good examples. Eliza Blue is a new voice, and she brings a musician’s grace. Her stories, like her songs, have a catchy way of grabbing attention.

One of my favorites is titled”Pigeons.” Eliza and her son discover baby pigeons in an abandoned grain bin. The mother had laid the eggs inside a plastic bucket, and her babies became trapped after growing too big to spread their wings. Eliza freed the birds, but noticed something amiss. The birds’ muscles hadn’t developed enough for them to stand, let alone to walk or fly. She and her son visited every day, and employed some therapy techniques to encourage them to move. You can imagine the joy — both of the humans and the birds — when the little wings grew strong enough to fly.

“I often fear I am a foolish woman,” writes Eliza.”Sometimes I know that I am. Like when I am climbing into a stinky, old grain bin to chase sensory-deprived baby pigeons around. But every once in awhile my foolishness pays off. How else would I have gotten to see the look that appears on a small boy’s face when he sees a fledgling bird fly for the first time? The look of surprised delight as he falls a little more in love with the world and all its wonders.

“For my part,” she finishes,”I value the reminder that small kindnesses are rarely small and learning to fly comes in many forms.”

Accidental Rancher is available for $14.95 plus shipping/handling. To order, call (800) 456-5117 or visit our online store.

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An Irrigated Valley

Our September/October issue includes a feature on the Belle Fourche River valley. Butte County is a West River oasis, thanks to the Belle Fourche Irrigation District, a century-old project that can be traced back to 1885. Bernie Hunhoff took several photos in the area last summer while working on the story. Here are some that didn’t make the magazine.

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Rounding up the Herd

Thousands gathered to watch the 51st annual Buffalo Roundup last weekend at Custer State Park. Employees and volunteers corralled about 1,200 bison for branding, vaccination and pregnancy checks. Between 200 and 500 will be auctioned off on November 19 to help manage the herd size and generate money for park operations. Photos by Joel Schwader.

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Spring Branding in Gregory County

Branding season is in full swing across South Dakota’s colorful cattle country. Family and neighbors gather to”work the cattle,” which includes not just the brand but vaccinations, castration and anything else that may need attention. The work is done amidst the soulful background bawling of momma cows who are temporarily separated from their babies. Here are some photos from the Sutton Ranch, northwest of Bonesteel in the beautiful breaks of the Missouri River in Gregory County. Photos by Bernie and Katie Hunhoff.

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Boss Cowman’s Own Words

By Roger Holtzmann

Ed Lemmon had several mishaps on horseback, but none that kept him out of the saddle for long.

George Edward Lemmon was 13 when he went to work for the Bear Creek Ranch in Cheyenne, Wyo. He lived in the saddle for much of the next 40 years, holding down every job in the cattle business, from trail hand to running a ranch bigger than Rhode Island. Some said he rode over every square foot of West River, and if that was an exaggeration it wasn’t by much. The son of a railroader, he became one of the most respected cattlemen of his generation.

Books have been written on his exploits — most notably, Boss Cowman by Nellie Snyder Yost — and he is referenced in every respectable history book on South Dakota and cowboy life. But a 400-page book, The West as I Lived It, tells Lemmon’s story in a refreshingly blunt and first-person style. It is nothing more or less than a collection of weekly newspaper columns the old cowboy wrote for the Belle Fourche Bee from 1932 to 1936, compiled into a book by Belle Fourche historian Phyllis Schmidt.

“Writing the stories gave him a chance to relive the many memories he had of his friends and events of the good old days,” Schmidt observed in the introduction. Schmidt, who serves as curator of the Grand River Museum, spent three years on the project. Her result is a history of cowboy life quite unlike anything else that has been published — recorded in an earthy and colorful prose that only a real, wise cowboy could achieve.

“In the cow business one is exposed to all kinds of dangers and hardships,” wrote Lemmon in one column. His life was a case in point. A horse fell on him when he was 17, crushing his right leg above the knee and landing him in bed for four months. Less than a year later, he suffered an even more serious mishap while he and another hand were training a horse.

“Tom [McCumskey] was riding a young mare…while I rode [alongside] with a rope around my 1,200 pound mount’s nose. After running about 200 yards both flew the track, which was a wagon road, each bolting outward. As we pulled them inward they clashed together with terrific force, piling Tom’s mount up to a heap and killing my mount on the spot, and crushing my partially healed leg in a similar manner as the year before, and rendering me unconscious for an hour. I was rendered a cripple for life, for besides the breaks, rheumatism set in, drawing my defective leg all out of shape.”

Lemmon and other pioneers competed in an old-timers race at a 1927 fair in McLaughlin.

Over the years he was knocked unconscious several more times and broke numerous bones, but Lemmon was nothing if not tough. When he busted his collarbone,”I took up my duties the next morning with my right arm in a sling, which necessitated roping my mounts with my left hand.” Another time his horse spooked and took an ill-advised leap, causing them to roll down a steep embankment together. When Lemmon returned to camp, his partner”noticed my next to little finger on my right hand swinging loosely and out of place. So he had one of the boys hold my right arm while he pulled it back, and really, this was the most severe punishment I ever underwent. I came near fainting, and the knuckle is still low.”

As a ranch hand, Ed Lemmon drove longhorns up from Texas for two decades, until the railroad’s spreading tentacles made such epic treks unnecessary. He passed through the rowdy cow towns of Kansas, patrolled by Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, and likely never ran afoul of either, for he avoided the trail hand’s bane, liquor. Lemmon never drank anything stronger than lemonade.

Once up north, the cattle were fattened over winter on ranges along the Republican River, then in the Platte River country of central Nebraska. In contrast to the trail drives, a staple of Western mythology and popular entertainment, no screenwriter ever penned a script about tending”beeves” over winter, though they might have in Lemmon’s case.

Lemmon was working the Rush Creek Ranch near Sidney, Neb., when Red River Red, a grizzled veteran of the frontier,”covered with scars from both gun and knife wounds… which he displayed apparently with much glory,” showed up on foot, looking for a job. Ranch owner George Green took Red on, and the three men settled in for the winter. When they divvied up the housekeeping chores, most of the cooking duties fell to Lemmon.”I prided myself on keeping the kitchen and cooking paraphernalia in neatness, especially the drying cloths,” recalled Lemmon in the Belle Fourche Bee.

“One morning I forgot to fry [Red’s] bacon, and he rather peevishly jumped up, grabbing the slab of bacon and knife and slicing half a dozen slices of bacon,” wrote Lemmon.”He had previously slammed the skillet on the stove rather far back and when he had the bacon ready he grabbed the drying cloth instead of the dish rag with which to handle the hot receptacle. When I drew his attention to the fact that he should use the dish rag instead of the drying cloth he flared up, saying he would not be dictated to by me. Accusations flew back and forth across the breakfast table and finally our epithets became so heated we both started to draw our six-shooters.”

Whenever West River cowboys gathered for real or ceremonial purposes, Ed Lemmon (second from left) was eager to participate.

Green trumped their pistols with his Winchester rifle and defused the situation, but Red wasn’t about to let the matter drop. Later that day the three men journeyed to nearby Lodge Pole, and along the way Red told Green that he meant”to get a row going” with Lemmon and kill him. To forestall him, Green enlisted Tex Matthews,”a gunman of the first magnitude,” to have a word with Red. Matthews’ persuasive powers, and the six-gun hanging on his hip, convinced Red that his health would be best served by boarding the next train for Cheyenne. Thus the drying cloth incident, a little-known epic of the west, ended peacefully.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 brought an end to Red Cloud’s War and established the Great Sioux Reservation. In exchange for peace and renouncing claim to all lands outside said reservation, the tribes accepted a number of government promises, including a guarantee to provide”one pound of meat and one pound of flour per day” to every member who settled there. At a stroke, this created a demand for 30,000 cattle per year.

Major Seth Mabry, a Texan who earned his rank serving the Confederacy, was one of those who recognized the business opportunity. Lemmon was working for Mabry in 1877 when Mabry contracted to deliver 800 head from his Platte River spread to the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies in northern Nebraska.

For whites on the Northern Plains, this was an unsettled time, just a year after the Seventh Cavalry’s annihilation at Little Big Horn; even well settled areas were thought to be at risk, and every Indian was viewed as a threat. A rider overtook Mabry’s crew with orders to send a hundred cattle 160 miles further on to an Army encampment on the Cheyenne River; it was not a journey to be taken lightly.

Though Lemmon was just a month past his 20th birthday, the youngest of three men tasked to get the Army its beef, he was put in charge of the detail.”I can’t recall I felt… the least worried about the outcome of that expedition,” wrote Lemmon many years later. His confidence was well founded. The Army got its beef without losing a man or an animal.

The Sheidley brothers, William and George, appreciated Lemmon’s experiences working cattle on the open range and his ability to handle men. When the Kansas City buggy manufacturers decided to enter the cattle business in Dakota Territory, they hired the 23-year-old Lemmon as their foreman. Ed, as he preferred to be called, settled on the Flying V Ranch, at the confluence of French Creek and the Cheyenne River in the Badlands.

After gold was discovered in the Black Hills, within the Great Sioux Reservation’s boundaries, it was only a matter of time before the Indians lost what had been granted to them in perpetuity. The government relieved them of the great wedge of land that lay between the Cheyenne and Belle Fourche rivers in 1877. The Flying V lay just within this Black Hills cession, but no fences kept the cattle confined. During the winter months especially, cattle were allowed to drift and forage where they could, even on the surrounding, unceded Indian lands.

“We were all trespassers,” said Lemmon of himself and the stockmen whose herds grew fat on grass that belonged to others, but knowledge of the law didn’t deter him from taking advantage of the situation.

In his later years, Ed Lemmon transitioned from brash young cowboy to an elder in the town that bears his name.

As cattle from different herds drifted over winter, they inevitably mixed together. That made necessary one of the great operations of the era, the spring roundup. In late winter notices were published in stock papers about gathering points, usually the heads of streams, and in mid-May the general roundup began. Wagons from every outfit in the area were loaded with supplies and dispersed across the prairie, trailing a dozen or more cowboys. Each hand needed eight to 10 horses, for they would be riding hard, for a month or more, driving cattle that were spread over thousands of square miles to collection points.

Every roundup was an event, but for Ed Lemmon and other old-timers the spring of 1897 stood out from all others. That winter had been especially hard. Early season storms coated the prairie in glistening ice, then blizzard followed upon blizzard, burying the grass and making it impossible for cattle to graze. From northern and central South Dakota, thousands of cattle drifted south in search of feed.”There was hardly an animal left north of the Cheyenne River,” wrote Lemmon, and getting them back promised to be a monumental undertaking.

From the Nebraska state line to Fort Pierre, cowpokes drove the wayward cattle toward Peno Flat on the Bad River. George Jackson was supposed to oversee the sorting operation, but when he sized up the job ñ 45,000 cattle, 24 wagons, 500 men, 5,000 saddle horses — he asked Lemmon to take over. Though he was in charge, Lemmon didn’t leave the grueling work of separating the cattle to others. Such was not his style. He personally cut 900 animals in a single day, a record never equaled, and cemented his reputation as a cowboy’s cowboy.

Ed Lemmon was made general manager of the Sheidley Cattle Company, with an ownership stake, in 1891. As part of his new duties he made his first cattle-buying trip to Texas in the spring of that year.”I naturally thought to look the part of a wealthy cattle buyer,” he wrote,”so I borrowed a gold watch and chain from our range boss, and a handsome gold ring from one of our sympathetic boys.”

Lemmon might have lacked the accessories for his new position, but most assuredly not the attitude. On that first trip south he arranged to ship 5,000 cattle back to Belle Fourche, the nearest railhead to Sheidley’s home place on the Moreau River. He wired ahead to foreman John Currington for an outfit to meet the initial consignment, only to have the Sheidley company president, R.C. Lake, countermand the orders. Several thousand cattle were left untended for two days.

When Lemmon arrived in Rapid City on the next train and the mix-up was discovered, there were”hot words flying, to be sure.” Lake was supposed to give Lemmon cash to pay off the shipper,”and while we were jangling over the matter the train had gotten under motion,” wrote Lemmon.”I let [Lake] trot along beside the train near… 100 yards, panting like a lizard, for he was a 200-pounder and office soft. All the time he was trying to poke the roll of bills to me through the car slats. Finally he says, ëIf you want this money you better take it for I am about to drop in my tracks.’ It was not only R.C. Lake that got a bawling out but Currington. I gave them both to understand that I was running that end of the business, and never again did Mr. Lake change any of my orders in any manner.”

Another indication of Lemmon’s rising status came in the winter of 1892 when he gathered in Rapid City with other notables of the Dakota cattle business, including James”Scotty” Philip, and founded the Western South Dakota Stock Growers Association. He paid his $5 membership dues, and when the group formally organized Lemmon was elected to the executive committee, a seat he held for 23 years.”In the early days of the organization my name was often mentioned as president,” he wrote,”but as I could not address an audience, I most emphatically declined.”

Among the WSDSGA’s foremost concerns was the prevention of cattle rustling. To that end they hired a range detective, Joe Elliot, one of a notorious group of gunmen previously employed by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association to rid the Powder River area of rustlers. They undertook the task so vigorously that President Harrison was forced to declare martial law in the region and dispatch Army troops to send Elliot and company on their way.

“There is no evidence Elliot ever drew his gun in anger while working for the [WSDSGA],” wrote Bob Lee and Dick Williams in Last Grass Frontier, but the association obviously knew what they were getting when they hired him.”[Elliot] always gave the other fellow the first shot,” wrote Lemmon.”That way he always had the law on his side when he dropped him.”

In 1893 Lemmon sold his share of the Sheidley Cattle Company and went into partnership with Richard Lake and Thomas Tomb. At its peak around the turn of the century, Lake, Tomb & Lemmon employed 300 men and ranged up to 53,000 head along the Moreau and Belle Fourche rivers.

Lemmon and his partners were operating on the scale of the barons of old, but the cattle business as it existed when he started was gradually passing away. In 1887 the Dawes Act effectively whittled the Great Sioux Reservation down yet again and defined western South Dakota’s Indian reservations more or less as they are today. Outside those boundaries the land was opened to homesteaders, which complicated life for the big cattle operators by pock marking the open range with small holdings. The cattle kings appealed to Congress for a measure to allow leasing of the last large tracts of unencumbered land on the Indian reservations.

Murdo MacKenzie of the Matador Cattle Company and Burton”Cap” Mossman of the Hanson Land and Cattle Company, who already controlled vast swaths of land from New Mexico to Saskatchewan, obtained leases of a half-million acres each on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Lemmon proved equally adept at working the system. With the assistance of South Dakota’s Senator Alfred Kittredge, he wrangled an invitation to the White House in 1902 to discuss leasing grass on the Standing Rock Reservation. President Theodore Roosevelt had owned a spread in North Dakota’s Badlands during the 1880s, and though he was an absentee owner, he often participated in spring roundups and fancied himself a rugged cattleman of the West. Lemmon brought the president up to date on conditions in the Dakotas, and the schmoozing paid off.

“The interview resulted in Roosevelt’s order to the Secretary of the Interior to approve my lease of 865,529 acres on the reservation,” wrote Lemmon.”I fenced it with a three-wire fence … giving me 270 miles of fence and cross fence. It was said by the National Livestock Association to be the largest pasture in the world, being larger than the state of Rhode Island.”

The town of Lemmon started the Boss Cowman Rodeo in 1971.

Lemmon returned from Washington in early May to what he called a”most pleasant” experience.”I was crossing my immense lease for the first time since it was awarded to me,” he wrote.”As I approached Leaf-On-the-Hill, which is about 12 miles northeast of the present city of McIntosh, I drove on top of the very highest pinnacle and stopped my team, stood up in my buggy, drew a long breath of fresh air and shouted to the universe that I was Lord of all. I surveyed for as far as my eyes could reach. I could not see the end of my domain … and when fenced, no man could trespass on me as had been the case on the open ranges I had just occupied.”

Since his days as manager of the Sheidley Cattle Company, Lemmon had stayed part of every winter in Chicago, where most of the cattle raised in Dakota were sold. While there he lodged at the Great Northern Hotel, and rubbed elbows with some of the city’s notables; among them was R. M. Culkins, general development director of the Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad.

CM&SP’s line from Aberdeen reached the Missouri River in 1900, and the company was looking to extend it westward. After a number of surveys, the company still couldn’t settle on a route. Culkins asked Lemmon’s advice, for he knew that country as well as any man, and the next day Lemmon returned with a government map of the Standing Rock Reservation he just happened to have along. A red pencil line marked a route from the mouth of the Grand River, present-day Mobridge, to Reeder, N.D., which incidentally skirted the Lake, Tomb & Lemmon holdings.

“As soon as I was advised that the proposed route had been found satisfactory… I got busy at once and purchased several hundred acres of land along the proposed route, the purpose being to ëcoppe’ a good town site not far from the reservation line,” wrote Lemmon.

Such was the stuff of western dreams: Lake, Tomb & Lemmon got a railroad connection close to its holdings, which helped the operation immensely, and Lemmon profited by knowing beforehand exactly where the rails would run. Last but not least, Culkins agreed to name a town on the new line after Lemmon.

Lemmon acquired nearly 1,300 acres along and near the CM&SP line with so-called railroad”script.” Scripting was a malodorous scheme engineered by Frederick Weyerhaeuser of the Santa Fe Railroad, which enabled him to exchange some of the line’s worthless land grant acres for other, more valuable homestead land in the West. When the prime timberland Weyerhaeuser wanted was all gone,”or he became ashamed to take more,” in Lemmon’s words, Weyerhaeuser sold his remaining rights.

“Every acre I scripted made good money,” wrote Lemmon. Some in north Lemmon bought for about $8 an acre, later sold for $100; a tract of 163 acres in and around the town site that was resold to the railroad brought $3,260, and Lemmon saved a corner lot for himself.

Lemmon’s first choice as a town site was about 4 miles east of present-day Lemmon, but there was a problem: it was in North Dakota, which was 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 wrote. Lemmon ended up locating what he jokingly called”the new El Dorado” astride the state line, in hope that it would become the county seat for both Perkins County, S.D., and Adams County, N.D. Lemmon ended up being neither, but the town nonetheless proved”a hummer,” wrote Lemmon.”It was wide open and wild and wooly, however, not a single life was lost, though fights of all kind were frequent and furious.”

In 1908, after four decades in the cattle business, Ed Lemmon sold his interest in Lake, Tomb & Lemmon. He was 51 and ready for a second career. Lemmon founded and served as president of banks in Lemmon, Davison and Meadow, among other business ventures. When Perkins County was organized in 1909, he became one of its first commissioners; he also served as a commissioner for Adams County, N.D. How he could simultaneously be considered a legal resident of both states has not been recorded, and he didn’t explain in his newspaper columns 21 years later. Most likely no one was so impolitic as to mention it.

“Dad” Lemmon, as one and all referred to him, was a familiar figure around”his” town — familiar enough that citizens knew it was best not to be anywhere nearby when he got behind the wheel of his Model T.”He’d rev the engine up to 4,500 rpm, you could hear it all over town, then drop the clutch,” recalled one old-timer.”He went through a lot of clutches.” At some point Lemmon moved out of his house and into the Yellowstone Hotel. Each morning he would come downstairs, wind his engine to beyond its limit, back up at full speed with nary a glance behind him, make”a bootlegger turn” and cross the street to park in front of the cafe.

He drove his car like he rode his horse, according to the Lemmon town history. On the wrong side of the street. Over hills. Into gullies. His automobiles repaid the abuse by getting stuck numerous times, and on one occasion, the car ran over Lemmon while he was cranking it. The mishap broke his left shoulder blade and threw it out of place, where it remained for five months,”before I went to the Aberdeen hospital and had it broken down and silver wire stitched in place.”

In 1941, four years before Ed Lemmon passed away at the age of 88, Life magazine featured South Dakota in one of its famous photo essays. The photographer found Lemmon on Main Street, dapper in a white shirt and tie, but also ungainly, with his right leg misshapen and foot twisted inward; with the aid of his gnarled cane he managed to stay upright, but just. Lemmon was in the town he founded, among people who knew and loved him, but he wasn’t truly home. That was beyond the end of town, in the grass, endlessly shifting in the breeze.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Ranching Peoria Flats

Colleen McCurrin shared photos from Peoria Flats north of Pierre. “My parents have ranched in this area since 1964 and my husband Lee and I are fortunate to live next door to my childhood home,” McCurrin says. “These photos were taken on Good Friday while riding with my brother, Casey, as he put out salt blocks in the calving pasture.”

McCurrin bought her first camera in 1984 while working for Miller’s Photo Studio in Pierre. She’s been interested in photography as a hobby ever since. She works as a truck broker for North Central Logistics.