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Following Black Elk’s Good Red Road

By Bernie Hunhoff

ONLY 11 AMERICANS have ever been canonized as Catholic saints. The 12th could be Nicholas Black Elk, a thoughtful and humble Lakota holy man who lived in the Pine Ridge country of southwest South Dakota in a tiny community called Manderson.

Black Elk is remembered as a tragic 19th century visionary who, in his old age, despaired the loss of his lands and culture. That much is true. However, Catholic leaders say he was also an exemplary Christian who preached and practiced hope and forgiveness. There are disagreements over which part of his life was most meaningful, but of course his latter years prompted the Catholic Church to consider him a saint.

His road to canonization, which began in 2017, could span decades. The same process took more than a century for Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk woman who was canonized in 2012. First, Black Elk must be declared venerable by the Vatican. Then religious leaders will look for miracles attributed to him. However, the very fact that he is a candidate for sainthood has already brought bishops, religious pilgrims and other visitors to Manderson and the Pine Ridge.

*****

MANDERSON HAS 400 residents and one store. That is one store more that it would have if not for Emma Clifford, who for 40 years has operated Pinky’s, a social spot for youth and adults. As Black Elk’s legacy grows with the prospect of sainthood, travelers from far away now occasionally share the counter.

Sunday Mass welcomes worshippers at St. Agnes Church, which has become a centerpoint of the effort to canonize Black Elk.

“We are seeing not only Catholics, but non-Catholics, people of all faiths,” Clifford says.”But that is the story of Black Elk. When we pray to him today, we pray for people of all other faiths, hoping they will respect us.”

The town’s only other private business is Bette’s Kitchen, run by Betty O’Rourke, a great-granddaughter of Black Elk. She and her extended family serve meals in their home to locals and out-of-towners. Some days, they host meetings or gatherings on the hilltop residence, with its expansive views of the chalk-white bluffs that give the Pine Ridge its name.

The family’s land, on the southern edge of town, is where Black Elk famously welcomed Nebraska writer John Neihardt, author of the book Black Elk Speaks that brought literary attention to both of them many years after it was published in 1933. A one-room log cabin where the holy man spent some of his final years stands beneath shade trees halfway up the hill.

The busiest place in Manderson is a tribal school, the smallest of nine on the Pine Ridge with 152 students. Every year on Oct. 8, as the faculty and staff observe Black Elk Day, they track how many of the students are direct descendants of the holy man. At last count, there were 28.

St. Agnes Catholic Church, where Black Elk preached and prayed for decades, stands on the north side of town. The white church is plain even by rural standards. Below eight simple stained-glass windows are two rows of rickety pews — the same wood pews, no doubt, where Black Elk once sat and kneeled.

A brown tipi with a cross has been painted behind the altar. Statues of Mary and Joseph and a picture of Jesus stand at the front, but they share this church with Black Elk: his picture hangs above the sacristy door; prayer cards with his image lie in the pews; another photo of the Lakota holy man rests on a table with a sage bowl and an eagle feather; and just below the picture of Christ is a wood chair, colorfully painted by local artist Mark Anderson with Black Elk’s name and likeness.

*****

ON A WARM SUNDAY last summer, we departed Rapid City, turned left at Hermosa and drove two hours southeast, skirting the southern edge of the hauntingly beautiful Badlands country, to learn more about Manderson.

Black Elk descendants are numerous in Pine Ridge country. Betty O’Rourke, a great-granddaughter, ran a restaurant in Manderson with help from her grandchildren, Austin and Maisena. Photos of the man who may one day be a saint decorated the dining room wall.

When we arrived at 9 a.m., Betty O’Rourke and her family were busily preparing to serve a group of college-age missionaries who were scheduled to arrive for lunch. With her black hair drawn tightly back, you can see a resemblance between Betty and her famous great-grandfather, whose photos hang in the dining room of the restaurant and home.

“I was born a Black Elk,” she said, between checking casseroles in the oven.”My mother, Grace, was a Black Elk. They called her Gracie. My Aunt Kate was the first Native American woman in the U.S. Army.”

Betty says she and her husband, Chuck, are old enough to retire, but they keep running the restaurant for two reasons: the community needs an eatery and,”it teaches our grandchildren how to be in the world and run a business.”

She does not advertise or promote her connections to Black Elk.”Everything Grandpa said was that you should never profit from your culture,” she says.”We have certain people who do but I don’t think it’s right.”

Betty said she wouldn’t join us at Mass. She had to watch the casseroles.”When I was at Holy Rosary School, we would go to church every day. Sometimes two or three times a day, but you can’t get me to church today because I believe God is with me all the time. I don’t have to go to that building to pray to Him.”

She likes the priests from Holy Rosary, who often visit the restaurant.”They know how I feel and when they come here to eat, they don’t talk to me about going to church,” she laughs, and then she returns to the oven.

*****

MASS STARTS AT 11 a.m. on most Sundays. A priest and four Catholic nuns from the Holy Rosary Mission arrived just minutes beforehand because Joyce Tibbitts, the parish catechist, had already prepared the altar. Tibbitts does many duties that Black Elk performed for decades.

The simple but sturdy wood-frame church at Manderson was built by Black Elk and his friends in 1911.

The service began with Ave Maria, led by the nuns who had come from India to work as missionaries. One strummed a guitar. The church could hold a hundred people, but only a few dozen sat in the pews.

Father Edmund Yainao Lunghar, a priest from the Himalayan Mountain country in India, welcomed everyone with a smile. In a short homily, he told a story of a single mother who struggled to raise a troubled teenager. He said the woman steadfastly maintained that,”At the end of the day, no matter how much he misbehaves, he is still my son.”

Father Edmund asked,”How much greater is God’s love? How much will your heavenly Father forgive you if you turn to Him? Let us pray that we have a listening ear. The calling of the Good Shepherd, the whispers of the Good Shepherd, invites us to pastures where life is abundant.”

Midway through Mass, Tibbitts went from pew to pew, waving smoke from a bowl of smoldering sage toward each parishioner. It is a Native American version of the Catholic Church’s use of incense as ceremonial purification.

Rather than ring a bell, Tibbitts beat a drum as Father Edmund consecrated the bread and wine. A service at St. Agnes has the repetitive traditions of the Catholic Mass that bore the youth and comfort their elders, yet it is also like no other religious service in the world. During the Prayers to the Faithful, an appeal was made for a teen who had just died in a hit-and-run accident on the highway; another was said for a boy who was killed in a drive-by shooting that week.

One of the worshippers, a slender woman in her 50s, appeared to be intoxicated. During the Eucharistic prayers while everyone else was kneeling, she approached the altar. She’s not the first troubled person to do so at a Sunday service. It happens in other churches. But never was such a woman treated kindlier. Father Edmund gently assured her they could talk later. She returned to a pew.

At the close of Mass, the congregation recited a special Prayer for the Canonization of Nicholas Black Elk, which includes these lines:

Faithfully he walked the Sacred Red Road

And generously witnessed the Good News

Of our Lord Jesus Christ

Among the Native American people.

Open our hearts also to recognize

The Risen Christ in other cultures and peoples.

The congregation then stepped outside the old church building to socialize in an adjacent hall over coffee and baked goods. An artist’s drawings, featuring Black Elk with a halo, hang in the hall. Tibbitts says the art is considered inappropriate by the Church because halos are reserved for saints, and Black Elk is yet to be canonized.

*****

MANY SAINTS WERE imperfect early in life. Many suffered great injustices. Black Elk fits both categories.

He was born between 1858 and 1866. His tombstone in the weedy cemetery across the road from St. Agnes Church lists the former. The Catholic Church seems to have settled on the latter, while other historians cite 1863.

Black Elk nearly died when he was about 9 years old. He recounted the incident in great detail to Neihardt, whose daughter Hilda took copious notes for days and days during the summer of 1931. Her notes were published in Raymond DeMallie’s 1985 book The Sixth Grandfather. It’s considered more accurate than Black Elk Speaks, which is accepted as a more liberal translation embellished by John Neihardt’s own poetry and spirituality.

Black Elk used the missionaries’ Two Roads Map to teach children and adults about Christ’s life.

Black Elk recalled that his legs, arms and face became swollen and then he drifted into a dream state. He remembered being visited by grandfathers who instructed him in the good that comes from the harmonious red road and the evil that comes from the black road, including war and death. He realized that the sixth grandfather, a very old man with white hair,”was myself Ö at first he was an old man but he got younger and younger until he was a little boy nine years old.”

He saw a village of men, women and children who were dying.”I was frightened at the sight and tried to get away,” he said.”I passed in front of the tipi and all the people got up. The spirit said, ëThat’s the way you shall save men.'”

His recounting of the 12-day dream state took 22 pages in The Sixth Grandfather. Toward the end he notes,”They had taken me all over the world and showed me all the powers. They took me to the center of the earth and to the top of the peak they took me to review it all. I was to see the bad and the good. I was to see what is good for humans and what is not good for humans.”

*****

THREE YEARS LATER, Black Elk and his family were at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry were annihilated by the Lakota. Black Elk, then 12, was kept away from the main battle but he had close encounters with soldiers. At one point he was urged by an adult warrior to scalp a dying soldier. The Neihardt notes record him remembering,”Probably it hurt him because he began to grind his teeth. After I did this I took my pistol and shot him in the forehead.”

As the fighting concluded, he and about six other boys returned to the battle scene.”When we got there some [soldiers] were still alive, kicking. Then many boys came. And we got our arrows out and put arrows into the men and pushed some of the arrows that were sticking out in further.”

He took another scalp and handed it to a younger boy.”Then I got tired of looking around,” he said.”I could smell nothing but blood and gunpowder, so I got sick of it pretty soon. I was a very happy boy. I wasn’t a bit sorry.”

However, in the winter of his 17th year he felt a calling. He told the Neihardts that he heard a voice saying,”Your grandfather told you to do these things. It is time for you to do them.” He developed a horse dance.”After this ceremony was completed it seemed that I was above the earth and I did not touch the earth. I felt very happy and I was also happy to see my people, as it looked like they were renewed and happy. They all greeted me and were very generous to me, telling me that their relatives here and there were sick and were cured in a mysterious way and congratulated me, giving me gifts. I was now recognized as a medicine man at the age of 17.”

“He prayed with a pipe and a rosary,” says Father Daoust of Holy Rosary.

In 1886 he learned that Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show wanted to employ Indians to journey”across the great water” to Europe. He and about 10 friends joined, traveling by train to New York City where they entertained at Madison Square Garden for months.

“As we left New York I could see nothing but water, water, water,” he told the Neihardts. He performed for Queen Victoria in England, and later quoted her as saying that it was wrong for white people”to take you around as beasts to show to the people.”

He and three others became separated from Buffalo Bill’s entourage and found themselves lost in a strange country. None could speak English. Fortunately, London authorities linked them with another traveling show run by a man called Mexican Joe. They toured Italy and France for another year before returning home.

Back at Pine Ridge, he found his relatives and friends confined within reservation borders. Some were ill with strange diseases introduced by settlers and soldiers. Many were hungry and starving due to the demise of the buffalo culture and broken promises. Federal rules titled”The Code of Indian Offences” outlawed traditional dances and religious ceremonies. The rules also limited the practices of medicine men like Black Elk.

A new spirituality called the Ghost Dance was gaining strength. Black Elk heard that friends were dancing it below Manderson at Wounded Knee so he went to observe.”They had a sacred pole in the center,” he told the Neihardts.”It was a circle in which they were dancing and I could clearly see that this was my sacred hoop and in the center they had an exact duplicate of my tree that never blooms and it came to my mind that perhaps with this power the tree would bloom and the people would get into the sacred hoop again.”

The Ghost Dance’s popularity scared U.S. military leaders, and that led to Sitting Bull’s violent death on Dec. 15, 1890. It also contributed to the tragic confrontation between cavalry soldiers and the Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek on the morning of December 29.

Black Elk had spent a sleepless night because he sensed something was about to happen. He was walking at daybreak when he heard gunfire. From afar, Black Elk and a friend saw the wasicus (white men) coming with wagon guns. They heard shooting and cries. They saw women and children running to hide in the gullies. He and about 20 others rode to help. A bullet grazed his leg. He told Neihardt that he felt bulletproof, and that he heard bullets whizzing by.

In Black Elk Speaks, the holy man is quoted as saying that something died in the blood and mud and was buried in the blizzard that followed.”A people’s dream died there,” Neihardt wrote.”It was a beautiful dream Ö the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

That tragic poetry is not found in the actual notes, as published in The Sixth Grandfather. In DeMallie’s text, Black Elk describes the massacre and the aftermath. He laments that perhaps he should have died with the many others, and he says he prayed to the spirits above, saying,”Grandfathers, behold me and send me a power for revenge.”

*****

THIS IS WHERE Black Elk’s life story gets even more complicated. After the Wounded Knee massacre, he continued to serve his people as a medicine man. On many occasions, he found himself at sickbeds with Christian missionaries who were also there to serve. He had friends who had converted to Christianity. In fact, his first wife, Katherine War Bonnet, was a Catholic. She died in 1903.

This photo of Black Elk introducing the rosary to a Lakota child was widely used in Holy Rosary’s promotional materials in the 1940s.

In the autumn of 1904, he was tending to a sick boy who lived north of Holy Rosary when Father Joseph Lindebner arrived. The Jesuit priest, a native of Germany, was well-liked by many reservation residents, who called him”the Little Father.” Lindebner had baptized the lad earlier, and reportedly became upset that Black Elk was there with his tobacco offerings, drums, rattles and other items.

“Satan, get out!” Lindebner declared, tossing Black Elk’s belongings out of the tent. At least, that was the story told decades later by Black Elk’s daughter Lucy. She said her father did not return the anger. The priest obviously saw something special in the medicine man and invited him to accompany him back to Holy Rosary to learn more about Jesus Christ.

Black Elk, curious about the new religion, stayed two weeks at the mission. He found Catholic theology compatible with his traditional beliefs in the Great Spirit, wakan tanka, and on Dec. 6, 1904 he was baptized. It was the feast day of St. Nicholas, so he took the saint’s name.

The rest of Black Elk’s story is the era not covered in Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. He converted hundreds of people. He and his friends built the St. Agnes Church building that stands today. He traveled, sometimes long distances by horseback in stormy weather, to tend to the sick and dying. He served short assignments at St. Stephen’s Mission in Wyoming and Marty Mission on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, but most of his life was spent serving the Pine Ridge people.

Bill White, a descendant by marriage to Black Elk, is a member of the Sainthood Working Group. White is a permanent deacon of the Catholic Diocese, serving at Porcupine on the Pine Ridge. He believes Black Elk became comfortable with Christianity because it fit his childhood vision of unity among men.”He saw the same thing written in Revelation. We are all standing before the Lamb of God. He always was striving to unite people. He had many non-Native friends throughout his life.

“I am certain he fits the model of a man who lived a heroic life and a model life,” White says.”He remained fully Lakota, and he saw that as being compatible with Christianity.”

*****

“BLACK ELK IS MY hero,” Joyce Tibbitts told us, as her congregation departed the church social hall on that Sunday morning. Actually, there are two halls behind St. Agnes Church — a Tekakwitha Hall, where Native American women once met in prayer groups, and a Black Elk Hall for the men. Today, Tekakwitha Hall is Tibbitts’ parish office, and a repository of information for the sainthood effort.

Tibbitts says the process began when relatives of Black Elk, who had attended the canonization service for Tekakwitha in 2012, asked Robert Gruss, then the bishop of the West River Diocese, if their grandfather might also deserve consideration. The working group was created, and it has already submitted a request to the Vatican Congregation of Saints.

Joyce Tibbetts’ tattooed arms reflect both Christian and traditional Lakota spirituality. Her pastoral duties at St. Agnes Church are akin to those performed by Black Elk in the early decades of the 20th century.

Though there are 10,000 saints, none are quite like Black Elk.”He prayed with both a pipe and a rosary,” says Father Joe Daoust, the superior of Holy Rosary Mission and a member of the group.”Some say he walked the two roads between Lakota and Catholic spirituality,” Daoust says.”But he actually blended the two into one red road to God.”

Tibbitts says she and others now walk that same road.”We are a swirl of religions — traditionalists, Christians and combinations of the two. We go to church and we also go to the sweat lodge or the big sun dance in summer.”

She says priests from Holy Rosary once distributed Holy Communion at the sun dance, but the practice was stopped — not by Catholic clergy but by traditional Native American leaders.”If a priest does show up at the sun dance today, the people will be respectful, but they cannot participate anymore.”

Tibbitts believes the challenges of everyday life on the reservation demand that anyone who wants to help — Christian or traditional — must be welcomed.”We’ve once again had a string of suicides,” she said.”The youngest was just 11, the oldest 18. We had a boy hit by a car. This week we buried a 20-year-old who died from illegal booze.”

Because liquor and beer sales are prohibited on the Pine Ridge, bootleggers are making home brews known as skips.”They use everything from hand sanitizers to rubbing alcohol, anything with an alcohol content,” Tibbitts says.”The result is a toxic brew that is killing our people.”

Poverty and health crises further complicate life in Manderson and the surrounding communities. Premature deaths are so frequent that plans are being considered to expand the parish cemetery, which lies just across the highway from St. Agnes Church.

Cynics might surmise that neither Native or Christian spiritualities have done enough to change a sad trajectory that has persisted since the buffalo were nearly exterminated and reservation borders were drawn. Optimists, on the other hand, would find hope among the good people who run the restaurants, stores, schools and churches of Black Elk’s home territory.

When Black Elk and Neihardt climbed Harney Peak (now known as Black Elk Peak) in 1931, the holy man spoke of the troubled times that faced his people.”The good road and the road of difficulties you have made to cross,” he said that day,”and where they cross, the place is holy.”

Seven decades after Black Elk’s death, it’s still easy to encounter holiness in his hometown. Sainthood might someday bring greater attention to the holy man’s humble, forgiving legacy. Maybe it would even bring about miraculous change.

However, the people we met in Manderson are not waiting for miracles. Like their town’s famous native son, they face the intersecting roads of good and bad every day.”I could see that it was next to impossible,” Black Elk said of his vision for a great flowering tree of unity in 1931,”but there was nothing like trying.”

Perhaps the beautiful miracle is that the trying continues today.

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

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Grottos of South Dakota

By Michael Zimny

The Midwest was host to a unique folk art movement in the early 20th century, as German-American Catholics brought with them the grotto tradition. There are two small grottos in South Dakota, on opposite ends of the state: Saint Peter’s in Farmer, and Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs.

The Midwestern grotto tradition was kickstarted by Father Paul Dobberstein with the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. Near-death experiences are a common theme in grotto-building origin stories. Father Dobberstein promised the Virgin Mary that if he survived a bout with pneumonia, he would build one. And he did. In 1894, he built a small grotto, Our Lady of Lourdes, at the Saint Francis de Sales Seminary outside Milwaukee.

He wasn’t done though. He began to amass a collection of boulders for his magnum opus, which he began in 1912 and continued until his death in 1954. A parishioner named Matt Szerence helped him from the start, continuing also until his death in 1959.

The two artists often made excavation runs to the Black Hills, returning with rocks removed by miners or railroads. They studded the surfaces with colorful minerals, gemstones, petrified wood and glass. The Grotto of the Redemption is actually a series of nine grottos that tell the Catholic story of Redemption, beginning with the Fall of Man and culminating with the Resurrection.

Perhaps the second most famous Midwestern grotto is the Dickeyville Grotto and Shrines, built by Father Matthias Wernerus in the eponymous small Wisconsin town between 1925 and 1930. Probably inspired in part by Dobberstein’s work, Dickeyville is a tribute to God and country, combining patriotic and religious themes. With his splashy use of color — utilizing semi-precious stones, glass and pottery shards — Wernerus prefigured later religious folk artists, working in different mediums, like Howard Finster at Paradise Gardens or Leonard Knight at Salvation Mountain.

The South Dakota grottos are neither as grand in scale as the Grotto of the Redemption, or as visually frenetic as Dickeyville.

Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs is the most austere, relying less on colorfully ornamented concrete, and more on the stone bounty of the Southern Black Hills to recreate a naturalistic cavern for the Virgin Mary. Father Gerhard Stakemeir, another German American priest, built the icon between 1932 and 1934, with help from parishioner Nick Bogner. According to the National Register of Historic Places, Stakemeir and Bogner utilized, “petrified wood and moss, and fossils taken from Wind Cave National Park.

“The car tunnels leading through Wind Cave National Park were being enlarged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which left vast amounts of debris … Bogner used a trailer and his Buick to haul the rocks from the passes to aid Father Stakemeir’s project.”

The bells no longer ring at Saint Martin’s, which closed as a church in 1999, a victim of rural decline. The property owner maintains the grotto, which receives few visitors.

Father Peter Scheier built the Byzantine-style Saint Peter’s grotto in Farmer between 1926 and 1933. Scheier may have been more influenced by his contemporaries in West Bend and Dickeyville than Father Stakemeir was at Oelrichs. The facade of the turrets and walls at Farmer are decoratively studded with thousands of fresh-water seashells and shards of colored glass, among the gathered stones. Like Stakemeir, and even Paul Dobberstein, Scheier made excursions to the Black Hills to gather materials. The Farmer grotto is cherished by alums and locals, some of whom took part in a restoration project in the early 2000s.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Lemmon’s Petrified Wood Park — one of South Dakota’s great folk art monuments, which could be seen as a secular take on the grotto movement, in which fossils and stone foster the contemplation of deep time (or at least put Lemmon on the map) rather than the glorification of God — was built during the peak of the Midwestern grotto-building era (1930-1932).

In its grandiosity of scale, Ole Quammen’s Petrified Wood Park shares more in common with the Grotto of the Redemption or Dickeyville than Stakemeir’s or Scheier’s smaller icons, nearly swallowed by the prairie and demography.

Saint Martin’s and Saint Peter’s remain modest reminders of an interesting moment in sacral folk art.

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

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A Lasting Legacy

Our July/August issue includes a story by John Andrews on Joseph Ward. Ward came to Yankton in the late 1860s to spread congregationalism, but his legacy in South Dakota extends far beyond the church. Andrews collected several photos from the Yankton College archives for the feature. Here are some that we couldn’t fit into the magazine.

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Spirituality: A Unique Summer Tour

By Katie Hunhoff

Grasshoppers swarmed our fields and towns, devouring everything in their path in the 1870s. Farmers were ruined and entire communities suffered. Kampeska City, the precursor to Watertown, became a ghost town after the plague.

Father Pierre Boucher took action to protect Jefferson in the very southeast corner of today’s South Dakota. He planned a spiritual procession to ward off the hated insects. He announced his plan in Mass on a Sunday in the spring of 1876. The next morning, both Protestants and Catholics convened south of Jefferson and Boucher led them on an 11-mile procession. They ceremoniously placed crosses at four points, and another in the Jefferson cemetery. Soon after, throngs of dead grasshoppers were found nearby at the Big Sioux and Missouri Rivers. The crosses later became spiritual relics to Jefferson residents. One, outside St. Peter’s Catholic Church, was replaced in 1967. Others can be found 4 miles northwest of town on County Road 1B near the Southeast Farmers Coop Elevator and another near the corner of 330th Street and 480th Avenue west of Jefferson.

The wooden crosses are just one of many spiritual places that we recommend exploring in our May/June issue. South Dakota residents have always been spiritual; currently we are listed as the 16th most religious state according to a Pew Research study based on time spent in prayer, church attendance, belief and”self-described importance” of religion. Early residents relied on their faith to endure the many challenges of life on the prairie — natural woes like drought and floods and storms and more personal challenges such as the mental strains of carving out a new life on the lonesome prairie.

South Dakotans have built beautiful churches in which to focus on our faith. But our story also explores some lesser-known spiritual sites. Reynolds Prairie, located high in the Black Hills, is one of five mountain places considered sacred to the Sioux. Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Interior declared the meadow is once again Indian trust land and will be managed as a sacred site.

Our story on spirituality also references the gravesites of two brothers, Michael and Joseph Hofer, in the cemetery at Rockport Hutterite Colony in Hanson County. The Hofers, who adhered to the Hutterite tenet of pacifism, refused to serve in World War I after being drafted. They were sentenced to military prisons and were tortured. Eventually both died of pneumonia. Hutterites throughout North America make a pilgrimage to pay their respects at their gravesites.

Many of the spiritual sites we selected are obvious — the Cathedral on the Prairie at Hoven, the Wounded Knee cemetery and Stavkirke in the Hills. But others may surprise you, including Black Elk’s log cabin, Wind Cave and the five Medicine Buttes in South Dakota.

A South Dakota summer is the perfect season to seek out some of these spiritual spots for reflection and contemplation. Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. once wrote,”The plains of the Dakotas are both hospitable and hostile to people. You must welcome their bounty but ensure that they do not sweep you up, taking your life and making you a part of their restless spirit.” We think Mr. Deloria, who died in 2005, would have liked our spiritual tour. We hope you do as well.

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Apostles on the Plains

By Roger Holtzmann

Thomas Riggs established Oahe Industrial School in the 1870s as a training school for girls. Funding difficulties forced it to close in 1904, but local support had helped it reopen for a brief period when this photo was taken three years later.

Stephen Return Riggs was determined to spread the Gospel just as his forebears,”a long line of Godly men,” had done. His only question was whether to head for the American West, or to China. Like most missionaries of the era Riggs thought the first would present greater hardships, so in true apostolic spirit he chose that path.

Stephen married Mary Ann Clark Longley on Feb. 16, 1837, and within a month they left their Ohio home for Lac Qui Parle Mission, amongst the Dakota Indians in what would one day be Minnesota. There were unevangelized souls aplenty in the neighborhood, but Riggs couldn’t rest knowing there were more just beyond the horizon. In the fall of 1840 Stephen headed west, crossed the Missouri River in a bull boat and delivered a sermon at Fort Pierre — the first documented Christian service in the future state of South Dakota.

“We communicated to them something…of the good news of salvation,” he recalled, though he also concluded,”we could not do much, or attempt much, for the civilization and Christianization of those roving bands of Dakotas.”

That would be left to the next generation.

Mary and Stephen Riggs brought eight children into this world. Three followed in their parents’ footsteps. Alfred, the first born, spent most of his working years as an educator among the Santee in Nebraska; Isabella, the eldest daughter, left for a mission in China on the day after her marriage and didn’t return for 30 years. Thomas Lawrence Riggs, the fifth child, born June 3, 1847, would one day return to where his father first preached to the Lakota.

The Riggs children grew up at Lac Qui Parle surrounded by, but purposely kept separate from, the surrounding native community.”Our children are in danger of becoming little Indians in their tastes, feelings and habits,” wrote Mary to her parents back East. That prospect horrified her, but she need not have worried: her children were equally appalled by their environment. Alfred remembered that growing up at the mission,”caused such a disgust for everything Indian that it took the better thought of many years to overcome the repugnance thus aroused.”

Thomas Riggs established Oahe Mission in 1872 and labored there for almost 50 years.

Stephen labored for years to bring written Dakota to life, but he refused to let his children learn the language while they were young lest they be contaminated by”impure thoughts and impure words.” When Thomas took his entrance examination for Beloit College in 1863 he was found to be exceptionally well-versed in Greek and Latin — he was more fluent in the languages of long-deceased Aristotle and Caesar than in the one spoken just beyond the door of his family home.

Over the years, three generations of the Riggs family lived, worked and made friends with many Dakota and Lakota, yet they never entirely lost their”us and them” attitude regarding the Indian people. They were hardened in that way of thinking by the traumatic events of 1862. Simmering Dakota resentment over white encroachments on their land and the theft of treaty goods reached full boil in late August, when the murder of a settler family by an Indian hunting party galvanized the tribe’s young, restless warriors to strike back against the whites. Roving war parties put scores of Minnesota River valley farms and settlements to the torch; more than 400 soldiers and settlers were killed, and thousands more fled in terror to better-protected towns. Among those put to flight were the Riggses, who traveled six days before finding safety at Shakopee.

Stephen Riggs assisted the commission which sentenced 39 Dakota to death after the uprising; he also ministered to the condemned men while they were being held awaiting execution. If he felt any disquiet about performing two such contrary functions he never expressed it, and his dual roles were, in a sense, symbolic of the family’s ongoing involvement with the Dakota and Lakota. Stephen, Alfred and Thomas Riggs devoted most of their working years to evangelizing and educating the Indian people, but they did so seemingly without remorse for their part in displacing the native culture, and for the pain and havoc such a drastic change wrought all around them.

Thomas Riggs left Minnesota for Beloit College after the uprising, and upon graduating in 1868 spent a year in Mississippi”attempting to be a teacher,” as he put it,”but I soon learned I was not likely to be a success at the profession.” He thought about architecture as a career, then rather abruptly changed the course of his life by enrolling at the Chicago Theological Seminary.

As a young man, Stephen Riggs experienced a profound spiritual awakening and divine call to the ministry. Thomas received no such summons — at least not from on high. He entered the seminary even though he admitted no particular inclination to missionary work, and when he recalled in his memoirs how he set upon this path, Thomas Riggs did so in one cryptic sentence:”In accord with father’s plan, I was to enter a new field among the Teton, or Prairie Dwellers, on the Upper Missouri.”

Thomas and his younger brother Henry established Hope Station, on the Missouri’s west bank across from Fort Sully, in 1872; they later relocated to the east bank about five miles above present-day Oahe Dam, midway between villages of the Two Kettle and Sans Arc bands. (This mission, originally known as Bogue Station, was later christened Oahe, after the Lakota name for the place.) Their new building had a large school room/chapel and kitchen on the first floor and family quarters that Thomas now needed on the second.

Thomas met Cornelia”Nina” Foster while he was in the seminary, and they married on Dec. 26, 1872, in Bangor, Maine. She came from a home of comfort and refinement, yet adapted readily to the rough conditions of Dakota Territory. Nina gave birth to their first child, Theodore Foster, two years later. The blessed event was accompanied by a nearby war party’s drum and random gunfire, one round of which tore through the home’s roof and lodged in the rafters. Their second son was stillborn in 1878, and thereafter”our dear one sank gradually out of reach,” wrote Thomas to his father. Nina was buried in the mission house yard, before her favorite window.

Elizabeth Winyan (standing) had a long association with the Riggs Family. She cared for young Thomas in Minnesota, and later joined him at Oahe Mission.

By 1877 the Oahe congregation had outgrown the first floor meeting room and Thomas decided the mission needed a proper chapel. Lumber arrived on a steamboat captained by legendary river pilot Grant Marsh, and before long a”sweet-voiced organ” and bell donated by the Central Congregational Church of Bangor rang out across the prairie, drawing the faithful to Lakota language services. (Oahe Mission is covered by Lake Oahe today, but the chapel was salvaged and moved to the Oahe Dam visitor center; the organ is in the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre.)

With Oahe’s spiritual side accommodated, Thomas Riggs turned to education. A workshop was established to teach the men carpentry skills,”but the shavings underneath do not prevent study. All begins with the A B C,” Thomas reported to the mission’s donors back East.”We have to teach them other things as well — the women to wash and iron and the men to work. The gospel of cleanliness is emphatically taught. When a dirty hand is put out to take a book the boy is told to wash himself. A woman is advised to comb her hair, another is told to wash her gown and to clean her house.”

Classes were held in the chapel to start, and in due time Oahe Industrial School got a two-story frame building that could accommodate 50 girls for classes in academic subjects and”the domestic arts.” Boys were admitted later, and the school reached a peak enrollment of 70 pupils in the 1890s. Funding the operation was an ongoing problem, however: when the American Missionary Association withdrew support in 1904, the school was forced to close its doors.

Attendance at the Oahe Mission services was”fitful and uncertain, [one day] a full house and then but one or two dirty children,” recalled Thomas.”Then, as they would not come to us, I went to them.”

Riggs and Dr. Thomas Williamson translated the Bible and a school textbook (above).

In his time at Oahe, Thomas established 25 meeting places at settlements across the far-flung Cheyenne River Reservation. Making one circuit of these outstations meant a round trip of over 500 miles. Thomas also traveled to missions as far east as Sisseton, south to Crow Creek and north to Fort Yates. In one stretch he averaged an amazing 6,000 miles a year, mostly across trackless open country.

The treks were demanding and, at times, dangerous. On one trip to Sisseton with his eldest son they made camp after fording the James River,”and in the morning we could smell smoke,” recalled Theodore.”As we drove on our way we could see that there was a real fire off to the northwest, driven by a fairly strong wind…When the fire came upon the high land where we could see the flames, father stopped the team, got out of the buggy and set a fire of our own. When we were sure that the ground had cooled enough so as not to be too hot for the horses’ feet, we turned, and going far enough to be out of the heat of the main fire, we waited until it had passed.”

On another trip to see his brother Alfred, Thomas and his team went through the Missouri River ice near Springfield. He made it to shore and somehow righted his rig,”but by the time I had driven the three miles to the Mission my clothing was so tightly iced my brother had to call for help to get me out of the buggy and into the house.”

Thomas continued making mission trips throughout his ministry, but from the beginning he emphasized recruiting and training native catechists to take up the work. He firmly believed Indian preachers were”a great deal more effective … among their own people than any white man could be.”

Riggs’ belief in the value of native ministers was ironic because he equated conversion with putting away their traditional ways. Men who wanted to preach the Gospel were expected to cut their hair and wear suits and ties; most adopted”white” names as well. A thornier issue for native catechists and converts in general was that of polygamy. When they became ministers Indian men had to discard all but one wife if they had more than one, as many did.

“Yellowhawk came out boldly [as a Christian],” Nina Riggs reported in a letter home.”He put away one wife and dresses like a white man.” Her rosy report veiled a painful reality for the Indian women involved. To make his choice easier, Yellowhawk pitted his two wives against each other, and vowed to keep the one who more completely mastered the white methods of cooking, washing and ironing.

Thomas Riggs never expressed any doubt that such pitiless treatment was warranted to achieve a greater good. The women who had to deal with being rejected, who went from positions of security and status to uncertain lives on the fringe of society, were part of a heathen past and impediments to their husbands’ salvation. They had to go. It was as simple as that.

Aside from spiritual considerations, Thomas Riggs believed that history’s tide was running against the Lakota: he was convinced they had to adapt and live as white men did in order to survive. He helped Indians file homestead claims, and worked to get them the cattle they were promised when they were”disarmed and dismounted” in the wake of Custer’s defeat in 1876. Riggs tried to teach by example as well.”Whatever [my father] did was primarily for the purpose of teaching the Dakotas — whether it was planting a field of oats or corn, or building a log house,” wrote Theodore.”He did it to show the natives how the work could be done and the purpose for which it was done.

When the Riggs family’s modest frame home burned down in 1898, Thomas replaced it with this magnificent structure of native stone, which took nearly three years to complete.

In the winter of 1880-81, Lakota living along the Cheyenne and Moreau rivers organized a great buffalo hunt, which turned out to be the last of its kind. A party of about 60 hunters and 40 women gathered at Frederick Dupree’s Cheyenne River ranch on Thanksgiving. Thomas Riggs was the only white man among them.

After four weeks of slogging through heavy snow the party reached Slim Buttes, where they sighted buffalo on the day before Christmas.”There is nothing which changes the appearance of a human being quite like the expression on an Indian’s face when he starts to run and shoot buffalo,” recalled Riggs.”I have heard the Indians speak of it, but I never really understood until I saw it myself. They look fearful ñ like demons.”

Thomas participated in all phases of the hunt, even the ritual repast of raw meat. Another hunter”cut off a hunk of raw liver and passed it to me,” wrote Riggs.”I cut off as small a piece as I thought was respectable and put it in my mouth, but it was an awful job for me to chew and swallow it.”

After almost two months afield, Riggs took home seven robes and a greater appreciation of Lakota culture.”I was able to study their habits and language, to learn to think as an Indian and to understand his point of view,” he wrote.”I [also] learned the term ëlazy Indian’ had no proper application.” Riggs was impressed by the diligent and”thoroughly professional” way the hunters and the women who processed the carcasses went about their work, which was so different from their approach to domestic chores in the settlements.

Oahe Mission Chapel, next to the Riggs family home, was built in 1877 from a load of lumber delivered by legendary riverboat pilot Grant Marsh. When Lake Oahe flooded the site it was moved to Oahe Dam Visitors Center, where it stands today.

In the course of ministering to his widespread outstations, Thomas Riggs often spent weeks at a time away from Oahe Mission. On one occasion tragedy struck while he was absent. The family’s log home burned to the ground on Nov. 26, 1898; no one was injured, but”everything made dear by long association” was lost. Thomas was able to indulge his architectural streak in the aftermath, at least. He designed a new, larger home built with stone from the surrounding pastures which endured until it was inundated by the waters of Lake Oahe in the 1950s.

Raising a family of his own while he was away so much would have been impossible without the unstinting hard work and support of a good wife. Thomas was among the luckiest of men for he was blessed with two such women in his life. Margaret Louisa Irvine came to Oahe Mission as a lay helper in the 1870s. She and Thomas worked together for many years, and after Nina’s death their relationship gradually deepened. They were married on the last day of March, 1885.

Louisa (as she was known) was warmly welcomed into the family fold by Theodore.”She was a remarkable person — highly educated, a gifted musician, deeply religious and wholeheartedly interested in mission work,” he wrote of his stepmother.”No boy could have had a more loving mother.”

Thomas and Louisa had four children together. Their two daughters both came to sorrowful ends: Cornelia died while an infant, and Muriel succumbed to rheumatic fever, the scourge of that era’s children. Lawrence went on to be a Rhodes scholar and teacher, Robert a mathematician and auditor.

Theodore’s education”was partly ëhome grown’ in the Wild West and partly in civilization,” as he put it. He lived with relatives and attended school back east, and spent his summers in Dakota. When he’d completed his education at Johns Hopkins Medical School and a surgical residency in New York, Theodore returned to South Dakota to practice. Pierre’s medical facilities were somewhat primitive in 1909, even by the standards of the day, and he set about changing that. Theodore played a leading role in recruiting physicians to town, and in time the Catholic Benedictine Sisters built St. Mary Hospital, a five-story, modern structure worthy of the state capital.

Thomas Riggs’ ideal for the Indian people was perfectly represented by these prim and well-scrubbed schoolgirls, who were attending classes in an environment that could hardly be more different from their parents’ world.

As Thomas advanced in age, maintaining the ranch and keeping up with his ministerial work became too much for him. Robert returned to help run the ranch in 1910 and brought the next generation with him.

Betty (Riggs) Gutch and her twin sister Jean”are 180 years old,” says Betty with a laugh: they were born in 1920, while the family lived in the big stone house at Oahe. They might have been delivered at home, as was common at the time, but because they were twins, Robert and his wife Florence decided it would be safer in the Pierre hospital.

Betty recalls her Grandpa Thomas saying grace before every meal and reading a chapter from the Bible after, and the many Indian friends who stopped by to see him. Beyond that, he spent most of his time upstairs or in his carpenter shop”because we made too much noise,” says Betty. Louisa tried to ride herd on the grandkids and keep them from causing too much chaos, but Robert eventually had to put up his own house nearby.

In 1919, after 47 years of missionary work, Thomas became,”keenly conscious of nearing the limit beyond which it was not safe nor wise to venture,” and he resigned his position. For the first time in more than 80 years, there was no Riggs in the active ministry.

After enjoying almost two more decades of relatively good health, Thomas suffered an incapacitating accident and began to fade. Theodore and his family went on a trip in the summer of 1940, and while they were gone Thomas began refusing food, taking only a little water. When Theodore returned he was shocked by how bad his father looked.”I might have given him intravenous fluids, but he looked straight at me and held up his hand, palm toward me,” wrote Theodore.”I understood.”

Within the hour, on July 6, 1940, Thomas Lawrence Riggs was dead. His earthly remains were laid in a wicker basket and buried next to Nina in the Oahe Mission’s family plot. His soul rose up to heaven, there to give an account of his life to the Lord he had served long and faithfully.

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