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Pheasant Tales from South Dakota

By Katie Hunhoff

Redfield recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of South Dakota’s first official pheasant hunt. Hundreds of men and women marched the cornfields of Spink County and then gathered for a prime rib dinner and some wonderful storytelling. The festive event prompted us to remember some of our favorite pheasant tales from the last 35 years of publishing South Dakota Magazine.

Madison wildlife artist John Green once told us the story of when he went afield with some out-of-state sportsmen who had only seen jackalopes in pictures and gift shops. As they neared the end of a corn row, a jackrabbit with tall ears — but, needless to say, no antlers — jumped from the corn and hopped away. One of the hunters yelled out,”Don’t shoot! It’s a doe!”

Lots of famous people have come to South Dakota to hunt pheasants. That makes for some interesting conversations, especially for the Zoss family. Adolf Zoss was hunting near Letcher in 1945 when an old Ford came down a dirt road. It was Lawrence Welk, the famous champagne music man, with members of his band. Welk asked Adolf if he knew where there might be birds, and the South Dakotan gladly guided them to several of his favorite spots.

Zoss couldn’t wait to tell his wife, Amelia, but unfortunately neither she or any of their 11 children believed him because he was known for telling stories.

As Welk gained greater fame and a national TV audience, Zoss told and retold the story to his doubting family until he died in 1957.

Imagine his survivors’ surprise, however, when an issue of Lawrence Welk Magazine was published in 1968 with stories about Welk’s days in the Dakotas and a picture and story about a successful pheasant hunt. There on page 56 was a photo of Welk with a shotgun, and sitting in the old Ford were his band members and a slightly bemused Adolf Zoss. No doubt they all had a”wunnerful” time.

The Brooklyn Dodgers came to Winner to hunt pheasants in the 1930s. After quickly limiting on birds, the players were looking for more to do so the hotel manager suggested they talk to David Busk, who told them about rattlesnake hunting. Busk was known for eradicating more than 3,000 rattlesnakes to protect local children. He took the ballplayers to the White River valley where they caught and killed quite a few snakes. The players came back for several years to help Busk in his mission, giving double meaning to the old Dodger saying,”Wait’til next year!”

Peggy Schiedel of Yankton remembers meeting Cary Grant when he came to their Faulkton farm to hunt. He was a friend of her uncle, who was a Navy captain in California.”My brothers and I slept in the mudroom so our guests could have our bedrooms, but we were still thrilled to have them because they brought boxes of La Fama Candy.” She says Grant taught them how to walk on stilts, and he showed her dad how to build them.

Monte James, a South Dakota farm broadcaster on the Ag Network, once guided some Coca Cola executives from Atlanta on a hunt near Vivian. Despite their enthusiasm, the Southerners couldn’t hit the proverbial barn. But they were determined to get some birds. Finally, James and his dog Ice Cream flushed some pheasants in some very high grass and the hunters emptied their shotguns to no avail. But James hollered,”You knocked a couple down!”

Then he and Ice Cream disappeared into the brush to look for the birds. He stealthily pulled a few birds from his own pouch. He sent one with Ice Cream and he carried the other himself. The hunters were giddy with excitement and left James a big tip, which he used in part to buy Ice Cream a buffalo ribeye.

Out-of-state hunters do, unfortunately, become the inspiration for some of our pheasant humor but they probably don’t mind — at least not any more than we mind the joke about the South Dakota cowboy who traveled to Kansas to see the Statue of Liberty.

These past 100 pheasant hunting seasons have been all about having a fun time and turning strangers into friends. Here’s to another 100 years, humor and all.

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Field of Dreams

By David Schoenfield

Redfield is the self-proclaimed”Pheasant Capital of the World.” That’s because in the summer of 1908, local entrepreneurs brought three pairs of ringnecks to Spink County from Oregon and released them in Hagmann’s Grove, just north of town. The birds adapted well to their new home, giving South Dakota a tourism boost and a multi-million dollar industry.

Redfield is where Hank Aaron went hunting and gave a baseball clinic to residents of the Redfield State Hospital and School (originally called the State School and Home for the Feeble Minded) when he played for the Milwaukee Braves.

It’s also my dad’s hometown. When I was a kid, every few years my parents would pack me and my three sisters into our station wagon and we’d head to Redfield from Seattle. I remember my grandparents’ big garden in their backyard behind the small white house with green trim. My sisters and I argued to see who slept in the screened-in front porch — cooled by the evening breeze — instead of one of the hot and stuffy bedrooms. And I recall old family stories, like when my grandfather ran the local creamery and hired women during pheasant season to clean the birds, pack them in ice and ship them around the country.

And the baseball field. I have never forgotten that field. When I played baseball as a kid, all our fields had dirt infields, so I thought the diamond in Redfield, with its grass infield a dark shade of emerald, was the most wonderful place in town, the perfect place for a kid obsessed with baseball to pass a few minutes of his summer vacation.

When my dad was growing up there in the 1940s and’50s, the Redfield diamond had a grandstand that wrapped around the field from first base to third base, with bleachers extending down the foul lines. It sat around 2,500 people — nearly the entire population of the town at the time — and was often packed when the Redfield town team played. Before television exploded, local baseball was a primary source of entertainment in small towns across the Midwest.

My dad’s family moved to Redfield from Watertown when he was 7 years old. He remembered rooting for the Watertown team that summer, but he eventually switched his allegiance. He sold peanuts and popcorn at games as a kid, and can still reel off many names of the players on the 1949 team that lost the state amateur championship game to the Aberdeen Preds.

Ed Carter, a right-handed pitcher, was the star of that team. In 1950, Watertown picked him up and went on to win the national amateur championship. Carter died in 2010 at age 86, still living in Redfield. He’s a member of the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

South Dakota was once home to minor league baseball. The Class C Northern League operated from 1946 to 1971 and Aberdeen, 42 miles north of Redfield, fielded a team each year — the Aberdeen Pheasants. My dad’s grandfather loved baseball and often took Dad and his older brother, Ray, to games. My dad said the Aberdeen park was even better than Redfield’s, and he remembered seeing Don Larsen and Bob Turley pitch, long before they became World Series heroes with the New York Yankees.

My dad got to play on the field at Redfield one summer when he played for the American Legion team. But he also worked at the garage across the street from his house, and during a particularly busy time of the summer he had to miss some games.”Dale,” said the owner of the shop,”I’d let you play if you were any good, but we both know that isn’t the case.”

By then, my dad had other interests besides baseball. He’d known since he was 13 that he wanted to be an engineer. Besides working on cars in high school, he also learned to fly, getting lessons from old Doc Perry, who ran the local airstrip when he wasn’t treating patients. My dad worked there one summer and on one slow day, Doc turned to my dad and said,”Dale, go ahead and take a plane and get up there.”

My dad wanted to build airplanes. After getting his degree from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, he got a job at North American Aviation in Los Angeles. He later got a job at Boeing and worked on the second-stage Saturn rocket for the Apollo space program. A few years ago, he was at Cape Canaveral in Florida with my sisters and their kids and got to show his grandchildren the rocket he had helped to build.

In December of 2013, my dad had surgery for thyroid cancer, which added more meaning to our latest trip to South Dakota. It was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and they wanted to make one last trip to celebrate (my mom is from Rapid City). My wife and I flew out a few days early to meet my parents and drive across the state to Redfield.

We had dinner at Terry’s Bar — a steak dinner and salad bar for $9.95. We ran into two of Dad’s old high school classmates. The garage across the street from my dad’s childhood home was still there, now called Schroeder Motors. The little warehouse my grandfather built to store beer when he owned the Pabst Blue Ribbon distributorship was still there as well.

We drove out to the baseball field. The light standards, looking like they were from the 1950s, stood high above the field. The grandstands were gone, replaced by a newly constructed wooden platform along the third-base line for lawn chairs. Maybe they don’t draw crowds of 2,500 any longer, but two amateur teams and the American Legion team still play there — and they’re every bit as good as those teams from my dad’s childhood. Redfield Dairy Queen won the state tournament in 2000 and 2006.

And the field? The field was beautiful, exactly as I remembered it, with thick, dark green grass.

I walked out to the pitcher’s mound and I could hear my dad and his brother talking about Ed Carter, Kenny Phillips and Barney Clemens. I could smell the popcorn, and I could see the people of Redfield and a young kid selling them bags of peanuts.

Editor’s Note: David Schoenfield’s father passed away in 2016. Schoenfield has been with ESPN since 1995 and is currently a senior writer for ESPN.com. This story is revised from the May/June 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Crossing the James

The James River meanders and oxbows for 474 miles across eastern South Dakota. Our March/April issue includes a feature on our state’s efforts to maintain its many bridges, many of them century-old relics. Bernie Hunhoff explored the backroads of Spink County to get the story. Here are some of his photos that didn’t make the magazine.

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Of Birds and Baseball

By John Andrews

What comes to mind when you’re asked to think about South Dakota? Two images rise to the top of my list: the iconic ring-necked pheasant and amateur baseball on a summer night, and it seems that no where in South Dakota are these more ingrained in the local culture than in Spink County.

Many other cities in South Dakota call themselves”The Pheasant Capitol of the World,” but Redfield has claimed the title since June of 1908. That’s when a group of city leaders acquired three pairs of pheasants from Grants Pass, Oregon, and released them in Hagmann’s Grove, just north of Redfield. The newcomers seemed to do well in Spink County, and in 1919 the first one-day open season on roosters was held. Pheasants have since become the state bird and have transformed the state’s outdoor tourism industry. Thousands of resident and non-resident hunters will roam the fields when pheasant season opens on the third Saturday of October.

The national pastime has also been an important part of life in Spink County, and affects those who are only tangentially connected to the area. ESPN.com writer David Schoenfield wrote a tribute to baseball in Redfield that appeared in our May/June issue. Schoenfield’s father grew up in Redfield, and later brought his wife and children back to his hometown. Among the memories that still stand out for Schoenfield are baseball games on Redfield’s emerald green diamond.

Pheasants were introduced near Redfield in 1908. Now they come in fiberglass.

His article prompted a reader to share the memories he has of watching Redfield win the state amateur baseball championship on its home turf in 1954. Redfield had amassed an early 10-0 lead, but Aberdeen slowly chipped away until it was 10-9 in the ninth inning. Aberdeen had the bases loaded with their most feared hitter, Blackie Engelhart, coming to bat. With one out, Engelhart crushed a ball that seemed destined to be a grand slam, but Redfield’s center fielder leaped and caught it before it sailed over the fence. Then he wheeled around and fired the ball to the second baseman for a double play (the runners had been certain Engelhart would at least have a base hit, and took off running as the ball soared into the outfield).

Redfield is the hub of activity in Spink County.

Spink County was also the site of a unique baseball battle in 1920. Redfield had secured a professional team, but because the Congregational church owned the field and grandstand, no games were allowed on Sundays. Ten miles south in Tulare, Mike Anderson, editor of the town newspaper and manager of the Tulare baseball team, invited the Redfield squad to play its games there, provided Redfield would finance the cost of a new grandstand.

Both towns agreed, the grandstand was constructed in record time and games began. That’s when the Methodists of Tulare began to suspect something might be amiss. They thought the charging of admission on Sunday might violate one of South Dakota’s”blue laws.”

Six Methodist church members agreed to attend a Sunday game. Once they had purchased tickets, they filed a statement at the courthouse in Redfield. The judge ultimately ruled that Sunday baseball could continue, and admission could be charged, provided a separate area was maintained for those who wished to watch the games for free.

Chief Drifting Goose was a thorn in the side to Spink County’s early settlers.

Spink County has even produced a Major League Baseball player. Deacon Phillippe grew up learning to play baseball in the small town of Athol. As a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Phillippe defeated Cy Young in the first World Series game ever played in 1903. He won 189 games in a 13-year career that began when he was 27.

Long before the days of pheasants and baseball, the settlers who trickled into Spink County as early as the 1850s had to contend with the notorious Chief Drifting Goose. His Hunkpati band of Yanktonai was headquartered at Armadale, an island in the James River four miles northeast of Mellette. He’s remembered as a peace-loving leader who preferred pranking homesteaders to violence. Legend says he once stole the clothes from a settler and then made him run back to his sod shanty naked. When railroad surveyors marked a line through his encampment, he moved the stakes. Eventually the rail was routed through Northville, a more respectful 10 miles west of Drifting Goose’s camp.

Locals tell Drifting Goose stories with a chuckle, but they also respect the leader who never signed a treaty and, in his mind, never ceded any land. Historians have named a bridge that spans the James River on Highway 20 after Drifting Goose.

Redfield’s Carnegie Library is the oldest of its kind in South Dakota that has been continually used as a library.

Of course, the colorful leader’s tricks couldn’t stop the eventual settlement and organization of Spink County, created by the territorial legislature in 1873. The area was named for Solomon Lewis Spink, a New York native who worked in law and journalism before President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of Dakota Territory in 1864. He also served in Congress and practiced law in Yankton until his death in 1881.

Several towns emerged along rail lines that passed through Spink County. The largest is Redfield (pop. 2,385), where the state legislature placed the Northern Hospital for the Insane in 1902. Called the South Dakota Developmental Center, the facility still cares for roughly 145 people with disabilities. Redfield is also home to the state’s oldest continually used Carnegie Library. Built in 1902, the red brick building with a sandstone foundation and domed cupola stands at 5 E. Fifth Ave.

Hubert Humphrey as a boy in Doland.

Fisher Grove State Park, east of Redfield near Frankfort, straddles the James River. It’s where the old Watertown-Pierre stage line crossed for the first time using a traditional rock crossing used by Native Americans. Further east on Highway 212 you’ll find Doland, the hometown of Hubert Humphrey, vice president of the United States under Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to 1969.

Follow Highway 37 north of Doland to Turton, (pop. 49) home of the Frogs. The tiny town still holds a Frogtown Festival every June, even though the Jim River is 15 miles away and the closest stream is called Dry Run. The pillar of Turton is the St. Joseph Catholic Church, where St. John the Baptist’s birthday is celebrated in June. The tradition dates to 1899, making it one of the nation’s oldest birthday parties for a saint (besides St. Patrick and St. Nick).

Five generations of Glenn Overby’s family have grown wheat in Spink County.

Spink County covers 1,500 square miles, and much of it is ideal wheat growing country. Farms are plentiful and elevators dot the horizon, especially along Highway 20 through Conde, Brentford, Mellette and Northville in the northern third of the county. The South Dakota Wheatgrowers’ Co-op at Mellette can store 5.5 million bushels, but chances are good you’ll see the overflow of this year’s harvest piled outdoors.

Several years ago we visited the Glenn Overby farm near Mellette. Glenn’s father, John, was a self-taught agronomist who developed his own varieties of wheat: Marvel Wheat and Spinkcota. You can see an exhibit about John Overby and his other inventions at the South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum in Brookings.

Wheat farming requires long hours, but we noticed this summer while attending the state amateur baseball tournament in Mitchell that the Northville team’s roster included A.J. Overby, the fifth generation of Overbys to work the Spink County land. That means there’s still time for baseball, and probably pheasants in October, too.

Editor’s Note: This is the 10th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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Dressed for Calving

By June Ohm

This morning a newsman told of a fireman who rescued a kitten from a burning building and gave it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When asked what it tasted like, he answered,”fur.”

The story reminded me of Dress Up Day 1960 at Redfield School. In an age where girls always wore skirts to school, Dress Up Day was a big deal. I wore the brown tweed suit I’d made in home economics class (and got an A, by the way). My outfit was completed with a white ruffled blouse, button earrings, a necklace, high heels and nylons with a garter belt. The boys wore suits or dress pants and sport coats.

It was Friday, so instead of changing clothes and preparing for an evening of triple deck Mexican Canasta with Celia and her friends (Celia was my landlord/friend/surrogate grandmother with whom I stayed during the school week) I packed a suitcase and rode home with the neighbors, Zelda and Quentin. Zelda was the older of the two siblings. She worked at the Spink County Bank and had a car. Quentin was my age and kind of an older brother. We had a love/hate relationship. Zelda was known to stop the car during the 20-mile trip and make us get out and walk until we stopped arguing.

Despite the walks, I arrived home well dressed and ready for a family weekend. We planned to drive to Orient to visit Grandma and Granddad Stoner, so I kept my good clothes on. We were eating supper when my younger brother, Chuck, ran into the house and cried,”There’s a foot sticking out!”

That might seem like a really strange comment, but we knew he had been checking his pregnant heifer, Sandy. Dad and I jumped from the table and ran for the barn. Dad surveyed the situation and got out his trusty calf puller. He put his hand into the womb to try and straighten the calf out so it could be born normally; he seemed to have the job done, but nothing happened.

Sandy looked tired and stressed — straining hard to bring her offspring into the light of day. Finally, Dad tied the bands of the calf puller to the calf’s legs, handed me the rope and said,”When I say ‘Pull,’ you pull with everything you’ve got.” Chuck grabbed the rope behind me. Finally Dad was ready and said,”Pull!” All three of us strained and slowly that little calf slid from its mother’s womb unto the golden straw where the new mommy stood. Dad knelt down beside the calf while Chuck and I held our breath. The calf was very still. Was it dead?

Dad took his handkerchief and cleaned the calf’s mouth out. Nothing. Then he held the mouth shut, put his mouth over that nose and started blowing big breaths into the lungs — once, twice, three times — and rubbing the calf’s side. Now Sandy started licking her baby and Dad was blowing into the nose again — once, twice, aha! At last, a breath on its own. Movement. The baby was alive!

As Sandy continued licking her baby, she looked at us as if to say,”Thank you,” and”I can take care of it now.” The baby was struggling to right itself — the prettiest little Jersey calf you ever saw. The three of us all stood in amazement at the miracle. After allowing ourselves a few minutes of wonder, we went back to the house and reported on the new birth. I washed my shoes off. Dad had to change clothes. Finally we got in the car to leave for grandpa’s farm. What a story we had to tell.

Grandma Stoner wasn’t sure I had been dressed appropriately for such an event. Almost 50 years later, I remember the brown tweed outfit more in conjunction with the calf’s birth than I do for getting a good grade at school. I also remember that I learned a lot about Dad that night. I never asked him what his resuscitative efforts tasted like, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have said”fur.”

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

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Treachery in the Treasury

By John Andrews

William Walter Taylor (or Walter William Taylor, depending on which records you consult) seemed like a stand-up guy when he arrived in Redfield in 1885. That’s why his friends, co-workers and thousands of South Dakotans were shocked when they learned that Taylor — as the state’s treasurer in January 1895 — had taken $367,000 of the state’s money and fled to Latin America. It put the young state in a precarious financial position, but it also adversely affected the lives of those close to Taylor, particularly Arthur C. Mellette, the former governor and one of the fathers of South Dakota.

William Walter Taylor became the most wanted man in South Dakota when he absconded with $367,000 from the state treasury in 1895.

Taylor came to Redfield from Lafayette, Indiana, where he had worked with his father in the wholesale and retail coal business. He became president of the First National Bank and the Gettysburg State Bank and general manager of the Northwestern Mortgage Trust Company. Taylor was elected state treasurer in 1890 and was re-elected in 1892. Facing term limits, he was forced to relinquish control of his office after the 1894 election.

On the surface, the state’s financial situation appeared solid. Records indicated deposits of well over $200,000 at Taylor’s bank in Redfield. But in reality, Taylor had fallen victim to the financial Panic of 1892 and its aftermath. He’d lost $232,000 through the failure of his trust company, a South American mining venture, wheat speculation and real estate investments in several states. On Jan. 9, 1895, the day Taylor was to turn over control of the treasury to his successor, he failed to appear in Pierre. He was gone, along with $367,020.59 of the state’s money.

Fortunately banks, businesses and South Dakotans themselves came to the state’s aid. Two banks in Deadwood offered $75,000 loans. Two railroad corporations paid their property taxes in January, two months before they came due. The state auditor raised $40,000 by asking county treasurers to submit anything they owed to the state and the legislature authorized the new state treasurer to sell $98,000 in bonds to make up the shortfall.

Attorney General Coe Crawford was hot on Taylor’s tail. He asked the legislature to offer a $2,000 reward for information on his whereabouts and he hired the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency. They pursued Taylor on a long, winding journey that began in Chicago and meandered through Key West, Havana, Vera Cruz, up the Mexican coast, back through Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica and, finally, the United States.

Taylor was eventually apprehended, and the state recouped about $100,000 from him. The rest had to come from several bondsmen who had vouched for Taylor’s veracity. Among them was South Dakota’s first governor, Arthur Mellette.

Mellette had done as much as any man to shepherd South Dakota to statehood in 1889. He served as the last governor of Dakota Territory and presided over state constitutional conventions in Sioux Falls. When South Dakota was finally granted statehood, he was easily elected the new state’s first governor.

Arthur Mellette, South Dakota’s first governor and a founding father of the state, was financially ruined by Taylor’s shenanigans.

As his second term came to a close in early 1893, Mellette was already suffering health problems. The financial scandal of 1895, and Mellette’s responsibility to keep the state solvent, left him a physical, emotional and financial wreck. He turned over all his assets to the state, including his handsome brick home atop Prospect Hill in Watertown. The Mellettes moved to Pittsburg, Kansas, where the former governor died in May of 1896.

The state eventually returned to home to Mellette’s widow, Margaret, after it was determined that Mellette’s debt had been settled, but the damage to her husband and family had been done. The Mellette House remains open for tours today, a reminder of the man who sacrificed so much for his state.

After serving 18 months in penitentiary, Taylor moved to Chicago, where he became involved in several business ventures, none of which proved lucrative. He died of alcoholism in New York City in December 1916, a shadow of the promising young banker who had ridden the rails into Redfield 30 years earlier.