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David Wolff’s Black Hills

By Paul Higbee

David Wolff spent 17 years teaching history at Black Hills State University in Spearfish. His new “Black Hills History Tours” book series blends travel with the region’s most colorful historical stories.

Every mountain range needs a few curious historians. They help the rest of us appreciate the peaks and valleys.

David Wolff of Spearfish fills that role in the Black Hills, and now the former professor is embarking on a six-book project that will not only recount the region’s colorful history but also serve as a guidebook for those who share the author’s itch to explore.

Mountain towns also need pharmacists — and that’s where Wolff got his start. Forty years ago the Denver native who was raised in Wyoming was working the pharmacy counter at a Pamida store in Sturgis. He wrote a history paper as an amateur and took it to a conference organized by university historians.”Pharmacists wear ties and that’s what I wore to the conference, and the history professors moved toward me when I arrived, assuming I was one of them,” Wolff recalls. He sensed they were less enthusiastic in greeting an amateur when they learned his identity.

The pharmacist eventually left the Black Hills, off to greener medicinal pastures, people in Sturgis surmised. In fact, he left to study history, first at the University of Wyoming where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and then at Arizona State University where he gained a Ph.D. In 1998 he returned to South Dakota to teach at Black Hills State University. He became Dr. David Wolff not as a matter of pursuing a personal goal or for job security (no one will tell you a historian’s position is more secure than a pharmacist’s). Rather, Wolff became a historian because he considers the field vital, especially the multi-layered history of the Black Hills and its mining culture — a significant component to American history overall. And yes, the snub he sensed at that long-ago conference was a motivator in reinventing himself. He didn’t want the lack of academic credentials to limit his ability to reach the public through university offerings, writings and at local history society talks that are free and open to all.

“He comes across as an everyday person,” says photographer and author Paul Horsted, creator of books with photos that compare and contrast historic and modern images.”But he’s got such a depth and command of knowledge at his fingertips, especially gold rush history and what happened afterward. As I was feeling my way in learning that history, David was so kind in being a sounding board.”

When Horsted mentions Wolff’s depth, he could include his friend’s recognition of romance in even the gritty business of mining. Wolff remembers the soft glow of light emanating from windows in Deadwood and Lead’s mining mills, reduction plants and slime plant at night as his family vacationed there –“evidence of workers’ massive efforts, round the clock, in grinding out wealth from the earth,” he says. The Wolffs lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, when he grew up. His dad was a traveling salesman, mostly supplying drug stores. David sometimes tagged along and that was his introduction to pharmacists — nice people and important members of their communities. Wolff’s parents encouraged him to pursue pharmacy himself. Sure, they knew David’s interest in history and his love for Wyoming’s past as documented throughout the capital city and at nearby Fort Laramie.

“But nobody in the world I grew up in thought you could make a living in history,” Wolff says. Still, the idea briefly crossed his mind in college after reading Watson Parker’s classic Gold in the Black Hills. Wolff wrote to Parker, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and Parker replied. He thought Wolff might be better off using money that would cover tuition for building a personal library of good books delving into history.

If Wolff got a delayed start as a historian, he more than made up for it — and continues to do so with an agreement with the South Dakota Historical Society Press to author six books in the coming years that will combine Black Hills driving with learning history. He taught 17 years at Black Hills State, a period that overlapped 18 years as a member of the South Dakota State Historical Society board of trustees. Still, the term he feels best describes him is simply”a history buff.”

Which is exactly how he comes across sitting in downtown Custer’s Way Park talking to a couple friends about historic cabins. Specifically he mentions this park’s Daniel Flick cabin, long proclaimed as the first built in the Black Hills. And that may be, Wolff says, although it’s unlikely the structure would pass a test by modern historians for such designation. Judge Henry Way pretty much declared the Flick cabin as first while developing the park across the street from the county courthouse in the 1920s.”That was fifty years after the presence of gold in the Black Hills was first confirmed in Custer,” Wolff says,”and the men and women who were here soon after gold discovery were aging and wanted credit for what they built. Almost every town in the Black Hills had its cabin.”

Wolff met with author Paul Higbee (right) in Custer’s Way Park. Despite his long academic career, Wolff says the title that best describes him is “history buff.”

Wolff believes the demand for credit by pioneers is more interesting than whose cabin came first. And while the Black Hills claimed structures more impressive than those humble dwellings — especially its great mines — there was something uniquely American about log cabins. They seemed to assert the Black Hills had become part of America rather than uncharted territory.

“There are a lot of myths and mistakes in history,” Wolff says.”I started out thinking I could correct those things. But misinformation hangs on so tenaciously.” People tend to believe what their families told them as kids, whether they lived in the Black Hills or visited as tourists. Embellished tales survive because they incorporate good storytelling techniques. Deadwood, most South Dakotans understand, has spawned myths since its founding in 1875 and 1876, and the HBO series Deadwood, which ran from 2004 to 2006, took that mythology to new heights. Wolff, frequently asked to comment on the series during its run, understood it as historical fiction and not a history lesson.”Something I looked for in the show, though, was whether or not it remained true to the personal qualities of the historical characters it portrayed,” Wolff says.”And I think it mostly did.”

For example, take Deadwood’s first sheriff, Seth Bullock. The series’ writers and actor Timothy Olyphant created a lawman who was mostly hands-off when it came to little things.”That was authentic to Bullock,” Wolff says.”He didn’t go after the drunk and disorderly and thought that celebrating by shooting into the air was okay.”

Wolff accepted an invitation to discuss Bullock on the Discovery Network’s Gunslingers series. It turned out well although he had to tell producers there’s no evidence that Bullock slung his guns or engaged in shootouts. And the program prompted this question: What does a professional historian facing TV cameras look like? It seems there’s a school of thought that says anybody living in the West and writing its history must be so enmeshed in the culture that they dress in character.”The Discovery Network asked me to show up with my look,” Wolff recalls.”I don’t have a look,” and he didn’t invent one for the appearance.

Wolff accepted another invitation related to Bullock, this one from the state Historical Society Press to write a biography, Seth Bullock — Black Hills Lawman. The book came out in 2009 and addressed aspects of the subject’s life that were not fodder for a TV shoot-em-up: personal friend of Teddy Roosevelt, government official who worked to establish Yellowstone National Park, federal Black Hills Forest Reserve (today’s Forest Service) superintendent, ranching innovator and Belle Fourche founder.

Wolff’s next book for the Historical Society Press profiled a remarkable Deadwood man, James K.P. Miller, strangely forgotten by history. Even Watson Parker told Wolff he never heard of him, although when Miller died at age 45 in 1891 a local paper predicted”his name will always be coupled with the prosperity of Deadwood and the Black Hills.” But it wasn’t, and no one was more instrumental in retrieving it than Wolff 130 years later. Among tools Wolff worked with in exploring Miller’s life and times was newspapers.com, technology that didn’t exist when he wrote the Bullock book. Miller was a native New Yorker, frontier grocery proprietor, builder of Deadwood’s Syndicate Block, and a wheeler-dealer who brought two railroads into Deadwood by setting up something of a competition between the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad and the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad.”Sometimes we forget,” Wolff says,”how competitive railroads were back then. They hated each other.” Miller apparently understood that industrial hatred and made it work for Deadwood, which became one of a select number of South Dakota towns served by two railroads. Very likely that saved Deadwood from deteriorating into something unrecognizable and beyond rehabilitation in the years after the gold rush.

Without Miller, would there have been Days of ’76 celebrations, today’s gaming industry or the Deadwood TV series? Maybe not. The Miller biography, The Savior of Deadwood, James K.P. Miller and the Gold Frontier, was published in 2021.

The Gold Rush and The Gateway to the Hills are the first two installments of Wolff’s “Black Hills History Tours” series.

Wolff’s new book, The Gold Rush, is far from a biography. It resembles the Works Progress Administration’s state guidebooks of the 1930s, with more detail yet retaining a thumbnail listing format. The book identifies driving routes from Custer northward (later volumes in the series will take travelers elsewhere through the Black Hills and surrounding plains), identifying historic locations along the way.”It is a travel book,” Wolff says,”but I don’t recommend places to stay or eat. It’s all history.”

It’s history that is found along roads accessible by regular cars — no ATVs required. Among the author’s favorite sites, most retaining an air of historical mystery, are the Flick cabin and the so-called China walls at Galena (on Galena Road off U.S. Highway 385 south of Deadwood). Galena was best known for its silver mines in the 19th century but in 1909 it was announced that the area held great quantities of copper. Construction began on a copper mill but only stone walls, impressively crafted, were completed.”It has become commonplace,” Wolff says,”to look at old rock work and mistakenly assume Chinese did it.” Indeed, Chinese laborers contributed to much construction during the Black Hills gold rush early on, but by 1909 few remained. Was there really a copper fortune to be mined at Galena? No, says Wolff.

There was no shortage of nefarious mine developers who attracted naÔve investors to sink money into operations that would never yield profits. Three-and-a-half miles below today’s Pactola Dam, about 10 miles west of Rapid City on Highway 44, the Fort Meade Hydraulic Gold Mining Company (perhaps named for Fort Meade army officers who invested) began blasting a tunnel to move water for a sluice box that would work supposedly gold-rich gravel. The company’s very real tunneling, done from 1879 to 1882, probably kept investors engaged, but it closed. Soon, another company picked up the work, also relying on investors, but disappeared in 1889. Not much gold was recovered. What remained was a tunnel moving swiftly flowing water and an underground falls, later illuminated with electricity and named Thunderhead Falls for tourists. The attraction is permanently closed now, but the inspiring natural setting of cliffs and rushing waters makes it easy to see how investors thought something good was bound to take root.

Another site Wolff introduces is one the Forest Service calls the”only gold mining site on the BHNF (Black Hills National Forest) with a standing mill frame.” That’s the Gold Mountain Mine, northwest of Hill City down Burnt Fork Road. Lots of infrastructure work was done there in the 1920s and ’30s.”There is, however, no record of production,” Wolff says. That didn’t stop the Black Hills Historic Preservation and Trust Society from deciding to preserve the mill, rock work and exterior boilers a few years back, with volunteers and students from the Boxelder Job Corps Work Center, joining the effort.

This is a travel book, yes, but it will undoubtedly reach armchair travelers around the world and find use as a well-organized reference. A glance reveals the remarkable range of historic personalities connected to the Black Hills across the years, from giant American industrialist George Hearst (who developed Homestake, the western hemisphere’s biggest gold mine at Lead) to Lakota traditionalists committed to retaining a modern presence. Wolff is certainly describing more authentic Indigenous historical views than the WPA writers and in part credits landing on the faculty of Black Hills State, a university committed to Native course offerings and its Center for American Indian Studies. In particular he appreciated his late colleague Jace DeCory, a widely respected Lakota elder and teacher.”She was invaluable in helping me understand Lakota perspectives, and was always balanced and thoughtful,” Wolff says.

The book was released this summer, and surely readers will want to collect the entire series of six. They won’t wait long. There’s a chance the second will come out later this year, and Wolff and his editor and designers are working at a pace that could see two more published in 2025 and the remaining two in 2026. Upcoming books will address the Lawrence County triumvirate of Deadwood, Lead and Spearfish, Rapid City and the central Hills, the southern Hills, the Belle Fourche River and Wyoming Black Hills, and what Wolff calls”unknown, under-told or under-appreciated stories.”

The Black Hills delight people who sometimes declare they’ve found a pristine natural environment. But travel with David Wolff and you’ll see it’s a rare patch of the Hills that hasn’t been touched profoundly by humans — Lakota defenders, the U.S. Army, railway builders, miners, loggers, engineers who transformed land and water, town builders and, after devastating fires, town rebuilders.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Fire Bomber

By Paul Higbee

Spearfish pilot Arnold Kolb (far left) and his crew used a fleet of refurbished B-17 bombers to fight forest fires.

A photograph shows a relaxed Arnold Kolb standing near his B-17 bomber the way other men pose with a newly acquired sports car. Yes, Kolb loved flying. But this airplane meant business. He and his crews used it to douse forest fires. Their daring adventures and remarkable record of success earned Kolb and the pilots of Black Hills Aviation a reputation that quickly spread from their base in Spearfish across North America.

Those who witness wildfires may say,”Better to face them from high in the sky than up close.” That’s not how Kolb worked. He swooped in so low that afterwards pine needles were sometimes found in his wing flaps.

“I looked out and saw treetops at eye level,” recalls Rick Plocek, who worked for Kolb on the ground out of high school and memorably flew to a Black Hills fire with him.”Then the load dropped, and it felt like being in an elevator when it starts, like you’re weightless for a second.”

Among fellow pilots, Kolb held a reputation for being able to drop slurry on a dime and for being creative when necessary. One time, firefighters on the ground were trapped on a ridge with flames moving toward them. Pamela Parker recalls how her father made a drop so that slurry backsplash drew a line between the firefighters and the fire, saving their lives. Slurry dropped directly on people would have killed them as surely as flames, but with the steady Kolb at the controls, that would never happen.

Born in 1927 on the Kolb family ranch near Bison, Arnold was the fifth of nine children. Most of the siblings remained closely associated with one another through aviation over the course of their lives. It was a time when airplanes were transforming South Dakota ranching by reducing isolation, moving cattle, rounding up renegade horses, crop dusting and more.

Arnold’s older brother, Raymond, taught him to fly in 1945. Like so many of his generation, Arnold grew up fast. By age 21 he was vice president of a family flight enterprise in Lemmon. He married Florence Dutton, and they had four daughters and two sons.

The Kolbs bought lots of planes.”I know there’s money in aviation because I put a lot of it there,” Arnold once quipped. If he had an instinct for flying, he also possessed one for business. He would make back his investments many times over and survive considerable economic turbulence.

In 1958 Arnold and Florence bought How Kola Flying Service of Spearfish.”The concern,” reported a local paper,”which operates under a lease agreement at the county-owned airport, will be known in the future as Black Hills Aviation. Kolb is a flight instructor, a commercial pilot with instrument rating and an aircraft and engine mechanic …. Black Hills Aviation will sell and service airplanes, offer ambulance and charter service, do flight instruction and crop dusting.”

Spearfish was an airplane town, first intrigued by flight when Kansas City daredevil Crash-‘Em Up Smith thrilled it with stunts in 1912. Homestake Gold Mine’s Ed Curren led efforts to build the airport in 1922. The next decade saw Works Progress Administration (WPA) labor build a distinctive native stone administration building with a tower, and crowds gathered for an annual air show. Spearfish was home to Clyde Ice, a central figure in daring medical emergency flights and advisor to Henry Ford’s aviation production efforts. In short, there was no place in South Dakota better equipped with flight expertise and airplane mechanics. But in many cases Arnold had to look no further than his own brothers, especially Delbert, a pilot and gifted mechanic and fabricator.

Kolb’s first B-17 could carry 2,000 gallons of slurry, though federal regulations limited it to 1,800.

Still, Spearfish’s airport didn’t match amenities pilots take for granted today when Kolb arrived. Lighted runways were a few years away.”So when Dad flew in at night,” remembers his daughter, Theone Oliver,”Mom would take us to wait on the runway, in the car with headlights on. We’d watch for him to go into a landing pattern. He’d pass over the car and land, and she’d race behind with her brights on, lighting the way.” Kim Craig, another Kolb daughter, thinks the landing procedure epitomized Arnold and Florence’s tight partnership in all aspects of life.

In the 1950s Americans gained awareness of forest fires because much of the population was moving west where wildfires were common. In that environment, in 1955, Californian Nick Nolta made headlines by arranging a mission that deployed a single-engine Boeing Stearman 75 Kaydet to dump 170 gallons of fire retardant on a blaze at Mendocino National Forest in California. Nolta expanded to a fleet of seven Kaydets for the 1956 fire season.

Impressive. Yet the Kaydet was a light civilian plane typically put to work for flight instruction and crop dusting. Kolb, although he never served in the military, believed the best way to attack fire would be to use heavy-duty surplus military aircraft. In 1959 he flew a B-17 against the intense Deadwood Fire that forced the town’s evacuation and charred 5,000 forest acres. In 1963 he bought his own B-17 (more would follow), converted it to a tanker, and was ready for the 1964 fire season. The plane could carry 2,000 gallons of slurry although federal regulations limited it to 1,800.

No other World War II era plane was tougher than the B-17, also known as the Flying Fortress, and used extensively and aggressively both in Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s. Western South Dakota felt some ownership. Many B-17 war crews had first assembled at the air base that became Ellsworth and learned to maneuver the mighty, four-engine aircraft over ranch country. Some South Dakotans said they could identify the sound of B-17 engines without looking up.

But they never witnessed a B-17 in action like Kolb’s during fire season. Kolb described slurry as water thick with soils (including bentonite) that coated trees and other vegetation for protection. It was colored pink so firefighters on the ground and above could see its spread. Fertilizer to stimulate post-fire regrowth was often part of the mix. The U.S. Forest Service supplied slurry, part of a contract it established with Black Hills Aviation that paid Kolb a daily stand-by fee, payable whether he flew that particular day or not.

Kolb and his son Nathan traveled to Washington, D.C., where one of Black Hills Aviation’s B-17s was exhibited at the Smithsonian.

For much of Black Hills Aviation’s time in Spearfish, Rick Plocek says, there were two B-17s always available while a third sat in the hangar, undergoing a constant series of improvements that Kolb devised. In his business, Kolb believed, research and development”is where the competitive edge lies.” A significant development that inspired modifications everywhere stemmed from Arnold and son Nathan’s system that allowed slurry to be released in stages rather than one dump.

Black Hills Aviation grew but never ceased being a family business. For several years, the Kolbs lived onsite in the WPA building, upstairs in three small rooms, because”Dad and Mom made the decision to put profit back into the business instead of buying a house to start out,” says daughter Maurita Autrey. Florence ran the office from that building. She prepared meals and insisted Arnold eat them instead of working through dinnertime and was the family pillar of strength and faith.

The company was always prepared for emergency responses. Crews of two had 15 minutes to take off after an alarm came in, and in seasons when fire threat was greatest, they literally lived with tankers. Still, remarkably, there was a laid-back feel to Black Hills Aviation, thanks to Arnold.”He was a prankster, always pulling tricks on someone,” Plocek says. One time, he put worms in worker Bob Lamb’s Copenhagen to hopefully help the young man stop chewing.”Worms were often part of his pranks, but never done with malice,” Lamb laughed.

But then, in an instant, a phone call could shift the mood into intense work mode that might last days or even weeks. Arnold told the Bison Courier he didn’t consider his fire work more dangerous than other aviation, but there were differing opinions about that. Once he doused a burning train and it exploded. The blast rolled his plane over at low altitude, but he maneuvered to safety, flying upside down until he reached enough altitude to right the aircraft.”Anything he flew could become a stunt plane,” Maurita says. Arnold recalled a northern California forest fire when”the visibility was extremely low because of the volumes of smoke. We got trapped in blind canyons because of the visibility problems.” More than recalling fear when recounting that adventure, Kolb seemed to remember the frustration of not seeing where to drop slurry.

“Nothing scared him,” says Gary Coe, who knew Kolb as his flight instructor.”I had learned to fly from my dad in Perkins County but had to go someplace to make it official, and my family knew the Kolbs. In the air Arnold was relaxed because he had thousands and thousands and thousands of hours flying, and I think that helped beginning pilots relax, too.”

Speaking of relaxed, Kolb’s son-in-law, GB Oliver, called Arnold”the best pilot I ever knew at flying a plane at high altitude while taking a nap. When he made an adjustment, he did it without opening his eyes.” Oliver often accompanied Arnold as co-pilot but said,”When you flew with him you were really mostly a passenger. There was no plane he couldn’t fly. In fact, I always said he didn’t just fly a plane. He wore it.”

He recalled flying with Kolb in Mexico, where flames climbed a steep mesa and threatened a resort up top.”He flew right at the mesa wall, and we lost sight of it as he rolled the plane and released slurry,” Oliver says.”I can’t explain how he did that, except to say he had an instinct. Flying, for Arnold, was as natural as walking.”

Arnold and Florence’s worst business turbulence came in the 1970s. Parts for old B-17s became hard to obtain so they decided to switch to Lockheed P2V planes, used mostly by the Navy. The Kolbs were in a position to do that, but there was nothing they could do to alter South Dakota’s routing of Interstate 90. The new highway cut their runways, making them too short for slurry tankers. In 1972, Black Hills Aviation relocated to Alamogordo, New Mexico. The recognized and respected company name was retained even though the Kolbs were now based 900 miles south of the Hills.

The move went well. Arnold and Florence envisioned a long-term future for their company as their youngest, Nathan, born in Spearfish in 1965, demonstrated remarkable piloting aptitude. In short order the young man held single and multi-engine licensing. In 1984 the Smithsonian Institution put Black Hills Aviation’s last B-17 slurry tanker on display and Nathan was at the controls as the plane flew into Washington, D.C. The welcoming committee was visibly surprised to see a teenager descend from the pilot’s hatch.

Kolb was a thorough pilot who did his own inspections, mechanical work and creative renovations.

But three years later Spearfish and Alamogordo were stunned when 21-year-old Nathan died in the crash of a company Lockheed Neptune while fighting fire. Co-pilot Red Miller was also killed. The news got worse. It was revealed that the Neptune was shot down. The U.S. military had summoned Black Hills Aviation to attack a fire on the White Sands Missile Range in southeastern New Mexico. The military had fired a missile that ignited the blaze, and then, after a tragic miscommunication, fired more that brought down the Neptune.

The day Nathan died, September 10, 1987, Florence stood once again as the family pillar of faith.”Oh honey, don’t cry,” she told Theone when her daughter broke the news to her.”We know when these airplanes go out, they may not come back, but when we’re Christians it is not the end.”

Over the decades, a total of nine pilots and co-pilots didn’t come back, none by pilot error or mechanical failure. Five tankers were lost.

Kolb’s daughters believe that Nathan’s death broke their father’s enthusiasm for Black Hills Aviation, but he flew a few years more because he had contracts to fulfill. It’s possible he found some solace in the sky where he always felt at home. Arnold and Florence sold their tankers and the business in 1993. They bought a house in Spearfish and spent much of their retirement there, while also visiting their daughters across the country. Arnold died in 2011 at age 83. Florence followed in 2017.

More than 50 years have passed since Kolb slurry tankers took off from Spearfish. But Black Hills Aviation lives vividly in the minds of longtime Black Hills residents. Last summer, as smoke drifted south from terrible wildfires in Canada, they could almost hear the engines roar and see Kolb slowly ascend into the sky, ready to fly anywhere to put down a fire.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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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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Rocky Road

By Paul Higbee

Photos by John Mitchell

In some places, the modern Spearfish Canyon Highway closely follows the route of the old Spearfish Canyon railroad, especially approaching Spearfish Mountain from the south.

THE JOKE ALREADY felt stale when I was a teenager in Spearfish:”No one grows up on the wrong side of the tracks here because there are no tracks.”

No tracks, no whistles, no rattling train cars through Spearfish nights. When the town lost rail service of any type in 1933, its population was under 2,000, yet Spearfish ranked as the biggest community in the United States where no locomotives rolled. Most people didn’t seem to care. During the same decade in which Spearfish said goodbye to trains, it gained mail and passenger service by air and developed an outdoor drama (Black Hills Passion Play) that would soon draw 100,000 travelers annually who were”tin can tourists”– packed into automobiles.

Within just a few years, the Spearfish Canyon railroad became a Black Hills legend: the train that had to be tied down at stops so it wouldn’t roll away down the steep grade, a friendly rail service that dropped off passengers at their favorite fishing spots in the morning and picked them up again in the afternoon, the transportation that President Theodore Roosevelt selected for his sons so they could access the rugged West.

This summer I spent two beautiful but futile days searching for signs of the railroad in the canyon’s heart. I splashed along Spearfish Creek’s banks hoping to see just a piece of one of the 33 railway bridges that crossed this water and its tributaries. Nothing. The railroad boasted that by necessity it built remarkably well in the canyon, that”ties are bedded in rock the whole way.” Probably so, but in the heart nothing survived a railroad salvage contractor in 1934 and the relentless erosion that is the essence of any living canyon.

Out of the canyon’s heart, on its fringes, I’ve seen photographs of surviving abutments for great trestles that dropped trains off Bald Mountain and into the canyon, but I haven’t found them myself yet. In Spearfish a cycling and walking trail utilizes the old rail bed. A feature all Spearfish Canyon highway drivers recognize is a cut through which they pass 3 miles from Spearfish, considered by many to be the canyon’s north entrance. Originally, the cut was blasted for Grand Island & Wyoming Central trains (later known as the Burlington & Missouri River, or just the Burlington).

The first locomotive steamed through that rock cut and into Spearfish in December of 1893. Engines had to be powerful to handle the steep grades but were limited to 25 mph when moving passengers and 15 mph when passenger cars and freight cars were combined.

The Burlington’s interest in the canyon stemmed from a series of proposed mines and ore processing mills that investors believed would utilize new technologies to extract gold and other precious metals. These canyon mines did indeed take form, but their production lives were short. The canyon railroad also carried passengers seeking tent camping, berry picking and steep hikes to spectacular vistas. There had been no outcry against sacrificing natural splendor to make way for mines and mills. Prior to the railroad, very few Black Hills people knew anything about Spearfish Canyon. Even in the town of Spearfish, only the most intrepid game hunters ventured into the canyon because its lower end was tightly packed with great boulders.

Spearfish-bound passengers from Deadwood knew they were more than halfway to their destination at Elmore and that they had descended into the canyon proper.

Thanks to the Burlington, Spearfish Canyon burst into consciousness. Modern South Dakotans don’t like reading early Black Hills historian Annie Tallent’s racist views, but it’s hard to dispute that in 1899 she wrote a perfect description of riding the rails through Spearfish Canyon:”A trip over this marvelous piece of mountain railway — up the dizzy heights to the extreme summit of Bald Mountain, around a labyrinth of lofty crags in perfectly bewildering curves, and a plunge down into and through the most beautiful canyon in the world (the Spearfish) — is a revelation of grandeur and beauty unsurpassed and the treat of a lifetime.”

Six years later passenger James Doyle wrote in Spearfish’s newspaper, the Queen City Mail, that the canyon,”has no common place in it. It everywhere plays homage to omnipotence.” And much of it could be observed, through all seasons, from the comfort of passenger cars. Changing seasons, others noted, could sometimes be experienced in a single day due to the variance of elevations along the route. It wasn’t out of the question for passengers to board at Deadwood in a spring mist, encounter drifts and even blowing snow in the canyon’s middle, then step into summer-like sunshine down the grade at Spearfish.

An industrial aspect of the line remained through its four-decade history, chiefly lumber and wholesale deliveries to Spearfish, and farm produce and livestock shipped up the hill from Spearfish. But by the time the railroad merged into the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy in 1904 there could be no doubt that excursions were the main function. Recognizing that the average patron was now more likely to board with family members than livestock, the line stressed safety.”The passenger takes no risk when he rides,” read company publicity.”The history of the line proves this. Collisions are out of the question because there’s nothing with which to collide. One train has the canyon to itself all day.”

While no other train could cause a wreck, engineers had to watch for boulders that came bounding down the canyon walls. There’s no record of one hitting the train, but now and then passengers were asked to climb out and help clear the tracks of rocks.

It was about 40 miles one way between Deadwood and Spearfish, but just as often the rail line was referred to as a 32-mile run — the distance between Englewood and Spearfish. In the early 1900s, round trip tickets cost about $2.50. Passengers boarded at Deadwood’s Depot 47 on Sherman Street, a couple blocks east of the Franklin Hotel, in the morning and arrived in Spearfish early that afternoon. The Spearfish depot was a wood frame structure where the community’s main fire station stands today, on Canyon Street. By mid-afternoon the train had been turned around and was headed back up the canyon. Today, almost universally, the railway is recalled for its Deadwood to Spearfish and back runs, strangely inefficient because the geography forced the engine to actually steam in the direction opposite of its destination much of the trip.

Remnants of trestles that were part of the Seven Mile Bend can still be found near Annie Creek. The train dropped (or climbed) 800 feet in elevation over those 7 miles.

Less well remembered is the fact that passengers could disembark and connect with another Burlington train at Englewood. That route (today the Mickelson Trail) took them south through the heart of the Black Hills and, in many cases, out of the Hills to distant cities.

Spearfish Canyon developed as a destination in its own right with construction of overnight lodging early in the 20th century. Deadwood’s Glen and Doris Inglis first opened the Glendoris Inn (now the storied Latchstring Inn) mid-canyon at Savoy where the train passed dramatically over a trestle across Spearfish Falls. Later, Martha Railsback and Maude Watts journeyed into the canyon by rail, bought the inn and brought it to full fruition. Sometimes elfin-sized, bewhiskered gold prospector Potato Creek Johnny greeted rail passengers at the inn and played his fiddle late into the night.

The canyon railroad had a role in one of South Dakota’s boldest engineering and construction feats ever between 1909 and 1912. Homestake Gold Mine diverted creek water through Spearfish Canyon’s west wall by way of 23,862 feet of tunnels it cut through solid rock. The diverted water spun turbines in a new state-of-the-art plant at Spearfish, generating electricity that powered mine operations for the next 90 years. The canyon rail bed was a reference point that surveyors used in determining the tunnels’ course, and the rails delivered drills, laborers and supplies. Canyon rail passengers were among the first to notice Spearfish Creek’s diminished flow in the lower canyon after the power plant went online.

A bit later Homestake built a second, smaller hydroelectric plant in the canyon, with water mostly channeled to it through an above-ground pipeline. Today, people sometimes mistake the pipeline path, visible along a ridge north of Savoy, for the old Burlington bed.

In the 1920s, Spearfish Mayor James O’Neill advocated for an automobile road through Spearfish Canyon. In fact, his enthusiasm led him onsite to work with the road crew some days after funding was secured. This first version of the Spearfish Canyon highway opened with ceremonial dynamite blasts and a speech by Gov. William Bulow in August of 1930. Hard as it is to imagine today in narrow parts of the canyon, the highway and train co-existed for two years and nine months.

Then on May 20, 1933, according to railroad records,”Engineer Steinberg and Fireman Kaup” made what proved to be the Spearfish line’s final run. Three days later a raging Spearfish Creek wiped out rails and bridges. In July, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy filed a request with the Interstate Commerce Commission, seeking to abandon the line rather than rebuild. The Queen City Mail grumbled and Spearfish gasoline retailers stepped up to state they got better rates for customers when their product was delivered by rail. But the railroad had no difficulty documenting it was losing money, and called passenger service”not important,” because travelers preferred”moving principally over the highways.” That was exactly what Mayor O’Neill had sensed a decade earlier. The Commission authorized abandoning the lower 25 miles into Spearfish but told the railroad to continue serving mines in the Bald Mountain vicinity.

In coming years Spearfish leaders sometimes contemplated re-establishing a rail connection, not through the canyon but by way of a northward spur to Belle Fourche. Nothing came of it. Then in the 1960s the community decided it wanted to be an interstate highway town. Leaders were successful in getting Interstate 90 routed past town in the 1970s, just as new Catholic priest Father Eugene Szalay arrived. As a hobby, he sought out people who recalled the old canyon line and preserved their stories.

Apparently no one confessed to Father Szalay what the railroad knew: Poachers at least once”borrowed” hand cars to sneak out-of-season bucks from the canyon. Much of what the priest heard came from former employees who recalled their canyon railroading as a grand outdoor adventure. Roger O’Kieff, for example, was hired at age 14 and sometimes tied one of those hand cars to the back of the train. He was pulled along until spotting snow or rocks to be cleared away from the track. Then he cut himself loose to tackle the job.

That would have been a dream job for any teenager during the golden, but short-lived, era of railroading through Spearfish Canyon.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Our Case for History

By Paul Higbee

Leland Case lived and worked around the world, but always considered South Dakota home.

Young South Dakotan leaves home, heads east to Chicago, earns a masters degree in journalism at Northwestern University and lands a job writing for the New York Herald‘s Paris edition. The year is 1927 and he loves Paris, where he interviews Charles Lindbergh just after the aviator makes history by flying solo across the Atlantic.

Conventional wisdom might tell you the South Dakotan would never return to his home state after Paris, might not even give South Dakota another thought. But there was nothing conventional about Leland D. Case. After a year in France, he was back in the Black Hills, researching a man he considered a true Christian martyr, Methodist preacher Henry Weston Smith, found murdered outside Deadwood in 1876. Most historians believe Smith’s attackers were Lakota defenders, although alternative theories have circulated over the years. In 1929 Case published a pamphlet about Preacher Smith, read widely by locals and Black Hills travelers alike. If the name Preacher Smith still resonates among South Dakotans, Case deserves a big part of the credit.

“If you put Leland Case on an unchartered jungle island at midnight,” said his friend and colleague Herman Teeter,”he would discover a Methodist connection by dawn.”

That might surprise contemporary Leland Case fans who think of him primarily as a historian of the American West, or perhaps as a newspaperman and national magazine editor. And Case does have fans, more than three decades after his death, in part because he left significant legacies on two South Dakota university campuses.

For all that, however, he is regularly confused in discussions for his older brother, Francis H. Case, who represented South Dakotans in Washington, D.C., for 25 years as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

But back to the Methodist Church. That was the institution that brought this remarkable family to South Dakota from Iowa in 1909, when Leland’s father, the Rev. Herbert Case, accepted a position at a Sturgis church. Leland, 9 at the time, never forgot the trip, crossing the vast treeless prairie by train. His family had arrived in the West. That meant two things — adventure and treasure. He found both when the Cases took up residence on a little farm at Bear Butte’s foot. Leland and Francis, sometimes accompanied by one or more of their three sisters, explored the butte’s draws and scaled its heights, hunted small game and found souvenirs that included cavalry buttons and artillery remnants from nearby Fort Meade maneuvers.

The Cases became friends with their neighbors, the Bovees, who ranched Bear Butte acreage. The butte was sacred ground to many Great Plains Native peoples, but in those years federal law forbade practice of Native religions. The Bovees snubbed their noses at the government, said the butte was theirs, and any Native people were welcome to pray and participate in religious ceremonies. It was South Dakota defiance of federal policy at its best. The Bovees’ young neighbor, Leland, grew up to write of the Lakota culture as something alive in the contemporary world, not just historical memory, in ways that would startle national audiences in coming years.

Case worked to establish The Westerners, clubs across the nation dedicated to study and celebration of the Midwest. At a Westerners function in Hot Springs, he displayed a bison skull, the symbol of the organization.

The Case family later lived in Mitchell, Hot Springs, Spearfish and Rapid City. Not surprisingly, the children grew up to enroll at South Dakota’s Methodist college, Dakota Wesleyan at Mitchell. That included Leland, although after a couple years he transferred to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from that school but then, as always, headed back to the Black Hills. He wrote for the Rapid City Daily Journal (Francis had bought into the paper’s ownership) and then the Lead Daily Call before Northwestern University beckoned. By this point it was apparent that Leland and Francis had evolved into remarkably similar men — journalists professionally, and thoroughly engaging personalities who were persuasive both in person and in print. What’s more, each was fearless. Francis’s sometimes-adversary in the U.S. Senate would be Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, and often colleagues cowered before Johnson. Not Francis Case. As for Leland, if he found himself or an institution he was part of disparaged, he’d likely show up on the critic’s doorstep and ask for an explanation.

Among institutions sometimes disparaged in the 1930s was Rotary International, the network of community service clubs. In 1930, a year after publication of his Preacher Smith pamphlet, Leland began writing for The Rotarian, a Chicago-based magazine sent to club members worldwide. Within months he was named editor and for nearly 20 years published quick-paced features, delving into everything from sports to science, but mostly themed around the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for their communities. As Americans struggled through the Depression, Case believed it was vital for everybody to polish skills that would benefit the community as a whole — very much in line with Rotarian philosophy. That felt small-town and unprofessional to some Americans who considered themselves well educated and perhaps elite, including author Sinclair Lewis. Lewis had dismissed Rotary clubs a decade earlier in his classic novel, Babbitt, so he was perhaps overdue for a visit from the editor of The Rotarian. According to Jarvis Harriman, who published a fine Leland Case biography in 1994, Lewis told Case sure, come by for a talk, fully intending to send the editor on his way after a few minutes. But Lewis found Case so engaging that the men talked for hours, and Lewis agreed to write a story for The Rotarian. It was a classic Leland Case encounter.

Other writers came much easier, including South Dakota poet Badger Clark, who found a national audience through The Rotarian. Babe Ruth, H.G. Wells, and Winston Churchill were published during Case’s time at The Rotarian’s helm. Case considered it imperative that Albert Einstein’s byline should appear in his magazine. He met the scientist at Princeton, New Jersey, and found him courteous but leery. Other American journalists and editors had mangled his words — not intentionally, Einstein knew, but because he thought in German and his concepts were, to say the least, complex. Case proposed what he called a”new idea” in magazine composition.

He would submit questions in writing to Einstein, involve a translator, and build a feature from the scientist’s typed responses, unaltered. Einstein joined the long list of people who found it impossible to say no to Leland Case.”Quite frankly,” Case later wrote,”I recall working up no feature that generated more personal satisfaction.”

Leland Case’s artifacts are preserved at Mitchell’s Dakota Discovery Museum, the former Friends of the Middle Border Cultural Center advanced by Case in the 1930s.

But even when working with personalities who would go on to be regarded internationally as 20th century giants, Case’s thinking never strayed far from South Dakota. He traveled home regularly, accompanied by his wife Josephine, a musician and teacher he met in Chicago. In South Dakota, Case worked on his brother’s political campaigns and spent time, in the 1930s, in Mitchell successfully advancing his idea of a Friends of the Middle Border cultural center. Part of the Dakota Wesleyan campus, it would preserve the arts, humanities and artifacts of the Great Plains which, at the time, appeared in danger of blowing away completely during the Dust Bowl. Carl Sandburg and Laura Ingalls Wilder, fellow Midwestern writers who felt the same urgency for cultural preservation, agreed to sit on an advisory board.

In the 1940s Case wrote a popular Black Hills travel guide, revised and reprinted over the years by the Black Hills, Badlands and Lakes tourism association. The same decade, with Chicago friend Elmo Watson, Case founded The Westerners, a network of clubs (or”corrals”) across the country where members met, ate, drank and swapped tales about the Old West. Amateur historians who discussed family lore were as welcome as academics and published authors. Many corrals still celebrate the West today.

In 1950 Case left The Rotarian and soon had an idea for National Geographic Magazine. How about a feature combining Black Hills history and travel tips? National Geographic wasn’t about to say no to Leland Case writing about his favorite place. It assigned him a photographer. Case visited significant locales and looked up old friends, including the Bovee family at Bear Butte.

National Geographic ran the feature in its October 1956 issue. Rather unfortunately, the magazine titled it”Back to the Historic Black Hills,” a play on Doris Day’s popular Black Hills song three years earlier. The story’s content was less playful. Of the region’s history Case noted:”A single lifetime bridges it — Custer to Coolidge, gold stampede to uranium rush, Sioux travois to jets at Ellsworth.”

But most striking about the feature, read more than 60 years later, is Case’s anecdote about a contemporary Lakota man, fined $25 in court for some infraction. Case quoted the man telling the judge,”I owe you $25. You owe me for the Black Hills. When you pay me, I pay you.” Nearly two decades before the matter exploded into national consciousness, who but Leland Case was telling Americans that the federal government had seized the Black Hills and owed compensation?

By the time the story was published, Case was once again behind an editor’s desk in Chicago, producing a new Methodist magazine called Together. Under Case’s leadership it grew quickly to a circulation topping a million. Like The Rotarian, its writing style was easily accessible and fast moving. The magazine featured profiles of personalities both well known and every day. Tips for activities that families could enjoy together were a staple.

In 1962 Case’s world changed when his brother, Senator Case, died in office, hit by a heart attack. Leland was 62 years old and the loss seemed to tell him that if he had projects he hoped to wrap up, now was the time. Over the next few years he began looking for a college or university that would work with him to establish a Western studies library.

Case retired from Together magazine in 1965. He and Josephine spent most of their time in Tucson, Arizona, partly because the climate was good for a respiratory condition Leland developed, and also because they liked Arizona. But Case’s search for a school that would support his project drew his thinking back to South Dakota, once again. He would contribute his personal history library, materials about the Case family (including some of his father’s sermons) and dollars to establish a history scholarship. He would encourage colleagues to donate their personal libraries, too. Case struck a deal with Black Hills State in Spearfish, in the center of the region where significant Western history played out.

Case’s personal office has been recreated at the Dakota Discovery Museum in Mitchell with artifacts and books brought from Tucson, Arizona.

Case told Spearfish newspaperman Art Mathison,”I was in college here, even though nobody knew it.” His father worked in Spearfish in 1917, Leland’s junior year in high school, before the community had a high school. As was common practice in state college towns then, students wishing to pursue high school diplomas were granted credits if they succeeded in college courses. Case was proud of his success, academically and socially, among older students, and the experience seemed to spark the love he always had for colleges and universities.

The Leland D. Case Library for Western Historical Studies, located within Black Hills State University’s E.Y. Berry Library-Learning Center, was dedicated in April of 1976. Case delivered a heart-felt speech, calling for volunteer”field historians” who would help determine”how bits and pieces of Hills history may be saved from fire, flood, and the city dumps.” Like the old editor he was, he had story tips for historians willing to tackle overlooked history, including the Black Hills’ many connections to the Alaska gold rush. Another story waiting to be told, he said, was how the Black Hills National Forest pioneered federal policy about scientific tree cropping (today his library houses the Black Hills National Forest Historical Collection). Later, Case told Mathison that historians might be better off forgetting Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Poker Alice and Fly-Speck Billy, and focusing on more important figures.

Leland and Josephine visited Spearfish several times after the library’s opening, and Black Hills State awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1980. Case didn’t stop researching and writing until the very end of his life. He died in 1986, at age 86, in Tucson.

There are spots across South Dakota where anyone who knows Leland Case’s story can’t help but sense his spirit: Bear Butte tops the list, along with any clapboard Methodist Church on the prairie, and any ridge overlooking the Middle Border plains that recovered beyond his hopes after the Dust Bowl. But a special spot is his recreated office in the Dakota Discovery Museum, the modern name for his Friends of the Middle Border center in Mitchell, on the Dakota Wesleyan University campus.

There are furnishings, photos and artifacts from his Tucson office, and best of all some of his books that reveal his many passions. Volumes on the shelves include Black Elk Speaks, Louis L’Amour novels and books detailing vigilante justice, Chicago history and South Dakota’s role in World War I. And not surprisingly Case collected books that approached the Methodist Church from every angle — John Wesley’s life, the church’s roots in England and development across America, Methodist poets, and even a guidebook to Methodist tourism.

“Leland’s interests were vast and varied,” says Bobbi Sago, special collections librarian and archivist for the Case library at Black Hills State. She calls the library”a tremendous legacy from a fascinating man. It is a wonderful gift to the residents of South Dakota.”

Case was a driven man who understood American culture and who never doubted that South Dakota’s contributions were important to the nation’s character. His brother’s name may be more prominent in state history. On the other hand, Leland Case sat at his typewriter and composed much of that history.

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

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South Dakota’s Sledding Hills

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

By Bernie Hunhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The One That Got Away … Briefly

By Michael Zimny

A unique sculpture in Spearfish reminds us of a time when a national public art program was possible.

Fish Story — a tri-part set of sculptures — was created by artist Marion Overby for the old Spearfish post office. The New Deal’s rural post office murals brought art that dignified rural life to accessible settings.

An alumnus of the influential Cranbrook Academy of Art who later worked alongside designers Charles and Ray Eames, Overby received commissions from at least two small town post offices during the New Deal era. Her terra-cotta relief mural Early Postman is still on display at the post office in Mason, Michigan.

The old Spearfish Post Office was built in 1940, as part of an accelerated federal building program. The simple style and brick facade are typical of “Class C” post offices built in small towns during the era. The sculpture was commissioned in 1943. Overby wrote that she named the piece Fish Story because, “I am sure the country around Spearfish is full of tall tales of fishing and record-breaking catches.”

Carved from California walnut, the sculpture depicts a Native American fisherman with a spear and a non-Native fisherman in waders with rod-and-reel. Despite their differences in hairstyle and dress, both men look nearly identical. A fish trio swims between them.

“When this building was abandoned by the post office in 1996, the Smithsonian came and took it to D.C.,” says Kathy Standen, a personal banker at Great Western Bank, which occupies the old post office building today. “When the bank reopened in 1999, our bank president went to Senator Daschle and asked him if we could have that artwork back. Senator Daschle made it available for us and then they brought it back and put it back up on the wall.”

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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Snowy Mountain Winter

Photographer John Mitchell shared these photos of the snowy season in Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills. See more of his work at SoDakMoments.com.

Photos from Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills, taken January 2019 by John Mitchell.
Photos from Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills, taken January 2019 by John Mitchell.
Photos from Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills, taken January 2019 by John Mitchell.
Photos from Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills, taken January 2019 by John Mitchell.
Photos from Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills, taken January 2019 by John Mitchell.
Photos from Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills, taken January 2019 by John Mitchell.
Photos from Spearfish and the surrounding Black Hills, taken January 2019 by John Mitchell.
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A Beardless Hobo & Other Homecoming Traditions

By John Andrews

I cannot grow a beard. Whenever I try, it looks like those photos we all have of our children the first time they grab a pair of scissors and give themselves, or their favorite doll, a haircut: bald spot here, 3 inches of scraggly growth there.

That’s why I sadly never took part in one of my alma mater’s most time honored homecoming traditions. The One Month Club at South Dakota State University is for students who want to look their hobo-est by the time Hobo Day arrives. Exactly a month before the homecoming game, men stop shaving their faces and women do the same with their legs. It’s all in good fun and a fine way to show school spirit, but I could never compete with my classmates who looked like the guys in ZZ Top after 30 days.

It’s homecoming season at colleges and universities around South Dakota, and when I thought of the One Month Club I wondered what unique traditions students observe at other schools. So I asked around.

One that warms my Scandinavian heart happens at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, where the students nominated for Viking Days king and queen don Norwegian sweaters. It seems appropriate for a school founded by Lutheran Scandinavians, and practical, too. I bet those sweaters take the chill off the cool October morning air on parade day. Incidentally, to celebrate Augustana’s 100th year in Sioux Falls, the school unveiled its version of the popular Monopoly board game called Augieopoly. One of the game tokens is a Norwegian sweater modeled after one owned by the late Dr. Lynwood Oyos, a longtime history professor.

Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell crowns not one king and queen, but two. In addition to the royal pair that reigns over Blue & White Days, two members of the freshman class are chosen Beanie King and Beanie Queen. They perform many of the same duties as the homecoming court, but wear blue and white beanies, festooned with optional decorations. The tradition began in 1926 and included all members of the freshman class, but over the years has been whittled down to just two.

Students at Dakota State University in Madison enjoy a citywide scavenger hunt. The Student Services department hides a small statue called the Traveling Trojan somewhere on the DSU campus or around Madison. Clues are given on local radio and on the school’s Facebook page. Whoever finds the statue receives a prize package.

West River students incorporate the Black Hills in their homecoming traditions. During Swarm Week at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, students make an annual pilgrimage to a giant letter H that sits on a mountainside near campus. Visitors to Rapid City may have noticed a similar M on a hillside above the city. Students at the School of Mines make a homecoming trek to whitewash the M, a tradition that dates back to the very first M-Day on October 5, 1912.

Alumni of other colleges and universities surely have their own favorite homecoming traditions. Hobo Day will always hold a special place for me. I’m pretty easy to spot watching the parade along Main Avenue or at Dana J. Dykhouse Stadium for the football game. I’m the clean-shaven one.

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A Man and His Guitar

By Jami Lynn

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Jami Lynn and Jake Jackson perform Jackson’s “Once in Awhile” for the fourth Dakota Duet.

A musician’s attachment to their first real instrument is magical. Finding my first beloved instrument took years, multiple guitars and two banjos. To find the guitar that flat-picker Jake Jackson affectionately refers to as his”workhorse,” took him a few days tooling around guitar shops on Colorado’s front range.”It was actually the first guitar that I played out of the whole trip,” Jackson says.”I probably played 30 guitars, and for whatever reason, that was just the one.”

Years of hard playing indoors and outdoors, a stint in the Lawrence County evidence locker following the guitar’s theft from his truck, and several major tune-ups still haven’t shaken his attachment to his instrument.

But for Jackson, it wasn’t always about the guitar. In second grade, the Black Hills Chamber Orchestra visited his school. After the performance, he went home and announced that he was going to play the violin. He started in the Rapid City Schools’ orchestra program and took private lessons. Eventually, he joined the bar scene in Rapid City and Tuesday night old-time jam sessions with the Black Hills Bluegrass Band. During those Tuesday night sessions, he moved from the fiddle to the banjo, and soon settled into picking the guitar in the bluegrass style called flat-picking.”We didn’t play anything really fast, but we played all the traditional tunes,” Jackson says.”It’s kinda how you know someone’s got their old-time chops: If you walk into the room and say, ‘Hey, let’s play Sally Goodin,’ and they know how to do it.”

In 1998, he met banjo player Trappor Mason, bassist Dave Curington, and mandolin player Dan Cross, which led to the formation of his Spearfish based band, Six Mile Road. Twenty years of playing together has refined their progressive bluegrass sound, and given Jackson an outlet for his songwriting.

While he’s not one to sit down and intentionally try to write a song, they seem to find him just the same.”If it doesn’t happen for eight months, then it just doesn’t happen. It’s important to just let them come on in their own way.”

For our Dakota Duets collaboration, we chose Jackson’s original song”Once in Awhile.” Like most of his songs, it was conceived and finished within 30 minutes. It showcases Jackson’s straightforward style of writing, easygoing tenor and that workhorse of a guitar.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman