Tag: sturgis

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Pretty and Practical

By John Andrews

Hats were practical on the ranch near Newell where Dusty Kirk grew up. A real old school cowboy might even use it to water his horse. The hats that come from Dusty’s Sturgis studio are handmade to suit your lifestyle, but sometimes customers commission one simply to decorate their home or office.

Dusty’s Originals has become known for hats that combine function, fashion and art. It’s a lifelong dream for Dusty, who worked in the medical and fashion industries before returning to South Dakota 12 years ago to care for her aging parents. A love of hats — especially top hats — led Dusty to her current career.”I used to do one-of-a-kind hats for runway shows, and then a friend who worked with Ralph Lauren encouraged me to learn how to make all kinds of hats,” Kirk says.”When I first started doing top hats, I was buying the bases and reworking them, and I didn’t want to depend on anyone else for that, so I learned how to start making them.”

Dusty’s hats are made from a fur felt combination or pure fur — usually beaver, mink or chinchilla — and accentuated with beadwork, custom dye bands or other flourishes. Though her background is West River and she’s developed a hat line called Black Hills 605 to honor the region’s culture, she can create any style.”I had a gentleman from Texas send me photos of two of his favorite hats and told me to mash them together into one,” she says.”I love to chat with my customers and get a feel for what they’re looking for. A lot of people don’t tell me exactly how they want things. They might tell me how they want the crown or the brim, but then they just let me go.”

Dusty’s hats are available at Jewel of the West in Hill City and Just for Looks in Sturgis. Fittings are by appointment at her home studio or online.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Riding on Air

By John Andrews

Jesse Jurrens leads Legend Suspensions, a Sturgis business specializing in smooth rides.

You could say that Legend Suspensions got its start on the dirt bike trails of Codington County. Jesse Jurrens grew up outside of Watertown, riding and modifying bikes. He continued tinkering after he got his first Harley, but when it came to the suspension system, he looked far and wide for an air spring system similar to what was being used on hot rods.”When I couldn’t find it, I decided to make my own,” Jurrens says.”That sent me down the path of fabricating prototypes, thinking in the back of my mind that maybe there was a market for it.”

The ultimate result was an air suspension system that has become the bedrock product for Legend Suspensions. Made using state-of-the-art rubber, the system provides a smoother ride, increased load capacity and adjustability mid-ride. The systems are now in use around the world, but it took a lot of time, testing and patience.

Jurrens began in the basement of his parents’ house in Watertown in the mid-1990s. He soon met Dan Dolan, now a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, who specialized in vehicle dynamics.”I wasn’t a student but he was intrigued by what I was trying to accomplish,” Jurrens says.”He helped me to emulate a million miles of testing on that first product, which took quite a bit of time, but it was important to build that safety if I thought I was going to sell these in the future.”

The key came when the Gates Rubber Company agreed to share its Aramid fiber rubber air spring technology.”Aramid fiber is almost like a bulletproof vest,” he says.”When we run a lot of air pressure into these air springs, they can only grow about a millimeter at most, because it’s such a tight compact area underneath these bikes. The rubber has to stay its size and be able to handle extreme use. This is the only material that holds up. It makes our product work.”

Legend Suspensions now employs around 35 people at its headquarters in Sturgis. Parts are machined at a plant in Watertown and other components come from smaller companies in South Dakota and around the Midwest. In addition to air suspensions, they also produce high-end coil and front-end suspensions.”No matter what the customer is looking to do with that motorcycle, we’ve got an option,” Jurrens says.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Retracing Roads to Our Round Barns

By Bernie Hunhoff

A barn-like pavilion is the centerpiece of the two-county fairgrounds near Nisland.

South Dakota Magazine staffers crisscrossed South Dakota 25 years ago in search of that rare architectural treasure — the round barn.

With help from the State Historical Society, we eventually found 29. They included livestock sales barns, the Butte-Lawrence county fairgrounds pavilion, two octagonal machine sheds and a charming, vertical-log barn near Sturgis. South Dakota never had many round barns, so forgive us for loosely interpreting the term.

We also learned that circular barn construction dates at least to the Bronze Age (hundreds of years B.C.), when boulders were used not just for castles in Britain but also for barns.

George Washington was among the first American farmers to build a barn in the round. A reconstruction of his original 16-sided barn, based on the first president’s own drawings, is a popular attraction at Mount Vernon.

The Shakers were the first Americans to experiment with round construction. A Shaker stone barn built at Hancock, Massachusetts, in 1824 is among the country’s oldest.

There’s just something about roundness. Eric Sloane, author of An Age of Barns, wrote,”Farmers made circular designs on their barns and their wives sewed circular patterns on quilts. They took delight in round hats, rugs and boxes, and they made round drawer pulls and hand rests for their severely-angled furniture.”

Anton Anfinson, a contractor from Wakonda, promoted the round barn concept in southeast South Dakota. Anfinson believed a round barn was the most efficient way to feed cattle. Many round barns featured a silo or a hole in the hay mow at the center. Livestock stood with their heads to the center at feeding or milking time, making it easier to feed the animals and clean their waste.

Most farmers who constructed round barns must have believed in Anfinson’s economic theory, but it’s likely that they were also intrigued by the thought of having something out of the ordinary.

They got what they bargained for. During our 1990s search, we found that if we got within 10 miles of a round barn and asked for help, somebody would soon have directions. Any well-kept old barn gets people’s attention, but a round barn becomes a neighborhood landmark.

“A man’s barn bespoke his worth as a man,” wrote Bob Lacy in a foreword to his book, Barn.”It expressed his earthly aspirations and symbolized the substance of his legacy to his children.”

Rural historians estimate that fewer than 3,000 round barns existed in North America, and most were built in Canada. South Dakota never had more than three or four dozen.

Twenty-five years ago, it was heartening to learn that someone cared about nearly every round barn we discovered. Over the past year, we retraced our travels and found that most of those barns still stand. Following are stories about the barns and the people who care for them in the 21st century.

Watertown

The Corson Emminger barn south of Watertown along Highway 81.

East River’s most visible round barn stands just south of Watertown along U.S. Highway 81. Corson Emminger came to South Dakota in 1905 from Wisconsin, where round barns were popular with dairy farmers, and built the 50-foot diameter barn with concrete blocks in 1910. He added an attractive cupola for good measure. The barn served as a milking parlor for decades. Today, the Emminger barn is missing a few shingles but it remains in good shape thanks to the Moeller family, its longtime owners.

1880 Town

West River’s most prominent round barn serves as a grand entry to the Hullinger family’s 1880 Town, a pioneer village located 22 miles west of Murdo along Interstate 90. Richard Hullinger remembers the day they moved the 14-sided barn from a ranch near Draper, about 45 miles away.”We came across the country on a ridge, and we had to do a little dirt work on the draws to make the crossings.” Built in 1919, before the invention of power tools, the barn’s symmetrical roof is high art to anyone who ever handled a handsaw or hammer.

Mission Hill

Norman Nelsen would be pleased to see the place he named New Hope Farm more than a century ago. Nelsen was a man who appreciated detail. He kept a journal of the materials and costs when he built an octagonal barn in 1913 as a machinery shed.”He recorded how many nails and how many boards he used, and he kept track of the costs,” says his great-grandson Chris Nelsen, who now lives on the farm, northwest of Mission Hill, with his wife Cindy and their children.”You can still see the hooks in the round barn where he hung the longest ears of corn to dry,” Nelsen says.”It was his method of doing natural seed selection.”

In 1914, Norman built a traditional rectangular barn just a stone’s throw to the west. Today, calves and sheep enjoy the big barn, and the smaller one is still used for storage. Chris and Cindy tend fastidiously to both barns — they plan to re-shingle the round barn and they recently sided and roofed the big barn, where letters atop the main door read NEW HOPE FARM.

Sioux Falls

The Shafer family has tended to a round barn on the northeast edge of Sioux Falls for many years. The barn was built of hollow block in 1919-20 by bankers Art Winters and Ray Stevens, who liked the round concept for cattle feeding. They installed a nearby scale and operated the farm like a stockyard.

However, the feeder cattle created too much moisture in the winter months, causing thick layers of ice to collect on the walls. The bankers eventually abandoned their operation and sold the barn to the Shafer family, which owns it today. For years, they operated a dairy in the barn; today it’s mostly used for storage.

Ron Hodne says Lawrence Welk and his band entertained in the round barn.

Winfred

Lawrence Welk and his band played a few songs at a dance in the Hodne family’s big round barn southwest of Madison near the little town of Winfred. Entertaining seems to fit the Hodne family, which now operates a big hunting lodge affectionately called Hodneville (officially the Bird’s Nest) within shotgun range of the barn.

The 80-foot diameter barn was built for beef cattle in 1918. Ron Hodne’s parents bought the place in 1946 and today he lives nearby with his wife, Ev. They and three sons — Brad, Brian and Brandon — run the lodge, which can accommodate 50 overnight guests.

A few years ago, Hodne asked his sons if they thought the barn was worth preserving because it needed a $40,000 roof.”They said, ‘Do it,'” he says.

The family has used the round barn for just about everything you can raise in South Dakota — cattle, hogs and chickens.”We even tried artichokes,” Hodne jokes. It’s empty today, except for a farm cat, but he and his family may eventually find a way to incorporate it into the lodge.

Draper

The Freier barn near Draper was built from a pre-cut mail order kit, possibly from the Gordon Van Tine Company of Davenport, Iowa. It was used as a sheep barn for decades.

Renner

Blocks for a round barn on the northern outskirts of Renner were made from sand and gravel collected at a nearby pit in 1917. The Sorum family has owned the barn for generations. They used it as a dairy for many years, but in recent decades it has served as a horse stable and a cat paradise.

Gettysburg

South Dakota’s largest round barn is on the Sloat farm north of Gettysburg. Measuring 100 feet in diameter, the wood-frame structure is used for swine, beef and dairy.

Sturgis

A barn of vertical pine logs stands in Bulldog Gulch near Sturgis.

South Dakota’s only round barn made of logs lies in Bulldog Gulch, just south of the Black Hills National Cemetery near Sturgis. It was built of pine logs, stood vertically on a circular concrete footing, in about 1941 by the Blairs, a prominent pioneer ranching family.

Dick and Lonna Morkert removed 2 feet of cattle manure when they bought the barn 30 years ago. Once cleaned, they found the barn was perfect for their four horses. Lonna, who then worked at a clinic in Sturgis, met the man who cut the logs.”He was an old-timer who was known for his mules,” she says.”The Blairs gave him the job of cutting the trees. He said he skidded them down from the mountain just to the west.”

Bulldog Gulch has a rich history. The 1874 Custer Expedition stopped there and watered horses at the same creek that the Morkert horses enjoy. Some think the gulch was named for Madame Bulldog, who ran a saloon there.

The Blairs arrived in 1907. They raised registered Hereford cattle and held bull sales at the log barn in the early 1940s. Dick Morkert says old-timers remembered that bidders sat on long benches.

Weddings are sometimes celebrated at the No Name City campground, which borders the Morkerts’ barn and corrals. On a few occasions, a bride with good taste in architecture will ask to have a picture taken by the very clean log barn.

A round barn is among the collection of 14 old agricultural buildings at the Little Village Farm near Trent.

Trent

When the Big Sioux River threatened a century-old round barn near Trent in the 1990s, the landowners called Jim Lacey and said,”You need that barn!”

Lacey agreed, but moving round barns is not easy because they lack the floor beams of rectangular structures. Still, the Beckers of Marion agreed to move it with Lacey’s help, and together they brought it out of the river valley and onto what’s now known as Little Village Farm, a collection of 14 old agricultural buildings.

The village’s only other round barn is a brooder house.”It was a prefab job, probably sold by Sears or Wards,” Lacey says.”You put it together just like the old redwood water tanks, with steel bands. Tenant farmers could buy one, and then take it with them if they moved from one farm to another.” If the chickens dirtied a spot, the farmer simply pulled the brooder house to an area with fresh grass.

Jim and Joan Lacey welcome guests to their Little Village Farm, located west of Trent in Moody County. The buildings are full of farm and ranch machinery, tools and collectibles, including more than 6,000 farm caps. There is a small admission fee.

Zell

Twin 12-sided round barns sit in a horse pasture on the northeast corner of Zell, a small village west of Redfield on Highway 212. Zell was named by Benedictine sisters who built a wood monastery there in 1886 which is also standing, though showing its age.

Unityville

A big tile barn once stood just west of a little town with the fine name of Unityville in McCook County. The town was christened as Stark when it was founded in 1907, but when officials learned that there was already a Stark in North Dakota they unified around the new name. The landmark round barn was built in 1921. Unfortunately, Unityville is all but gone, the farmstead is now a cornfield and only the barn’s silo is now standing. Life is stark in Unityville.

Potter County

A 20-sided hog house built by John Nold in 1903 may be the first round barn built in South Dakota, according to a 1995 study by the South Dakota State Historical Society.

Nisland

The entire Butte-Lawrence County Fairgrounds is on the National Registry of Historic Places. Its jewel is the round pavilion.

Buried in the cottonwood and oak forest of the Belle Fourche River valley lies one of America’s truly unique county fairgrounds, and its centerpiece is a century-old, octagon pavilion.

The forested 40-acre site is a mile west of Nisland in Butte County, which has shared a county fair with Lawrence County since 1980. And who wouldn’t want to share such fairgrounds?

The white-washed buildings include two long, rectangular barracks that housed German POWs during World War II. The prisoners helped farmers with the sugar beet harvest. Big-branched cottonwoods shade the buildings and grass. The entire fairgrounds are on the National Registry of Historic Places, but the pine jewel is the round pavilion. President Calvin Coolidge attended the fair and was pictured at the pavilion when he vacationed in the Black Hills in 1927.

The sturdy structure survived several calamities, including a 2012 windstorm that damaged the roof and windows. The two counties and their fair board invested nearly $300,000 in repairs and updates. Officials hope to find ways to use the pavilion throughout the year — maybe for weddings and family reunions — to garner income for future expenses.

The fair is held the first weekend of August, a week before the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Area 4-Hers exhibit crafts, garden produce and other projects on the main floor and a second story balcony of the pavilion. REA co-ops host a free barbecue. Boys and girls show their livestock and compete in catch-the-sheep and dress-a-rabbit contests. At sunset, animals sleep in the barns as country music wafts to the high ceiling of the pavilion.

Admission is free at the fair, perhaps because the atmosphere is priceless.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Dusty Trail

By John Andrews

Bear Butte is a nearly constant presence while traveling the Fort Meade National Backcountry Byway, a 5-mile winding gravel path in Meade County.

South Dakota has thousands of miles of gravel roads, but perhaps none so packed with history and nature as the stretch known as the Fort Meade National Backcountry Byway.

The 5 miles of winding gravel known locally as the Old Stone Road begins at Exit 34 along Interstate 90 and ends at the grounds of old Fort Meade, a military post on the outskirts of Sturgis and in the shadow of Bear Butte that remained active from 1878 to 1944. Army engineers had called for a fort on the outskirts of the Hills for 20 years because they feared an Indian war would likely break out in the prairies below Bear Butte. But the government didn’t act until gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874. White settlers flooded into the Black Hills even though the land was set aside exclusively for Indian tribes under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The army needed to protect gold seekers and the settlements quickly popping up around the Hills, and so Fort Meade grew near the convergence of heavily traveled trails leading from Bismarck, Pierre and Sidney, Nebraska.

The remains of the Seventh Cavalry reorganized at Fort Meade following its devastating defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Over the years, the fort was also home to the 4th Cavalry, the African-American 25th Infantry (whose men were called Buffalo Soldiers) and earned a place in American history for helping turn”The Star-Spangled Banner” into the national anthem.

All of those stories are chronicled in the Fort Meade Museum, which was our reward after spending an afternoon exploring the backcountry byway. We started our journey at Exit 34. The beginning of the byway is clearly marked for motorists heading west from Rapid City, but you’ll know you’ve come to the right spot when you see the meticulous rows of gleaming white headstones within the Black Hills National Cemetery. More than 21,000 veterans of every conflict since World War I and their family members have been buried there since the cemetery opened in 1948.

On the opposite side of the interstate stands the quaint VFW Memorial Chapel. The tiny church isn’t officially part of the national cemetery, but families occasionally stop for a quiet moment of reflection. Inside, there are four short pews and an altar with Bibles and hymnals.

Curley Grimes was buried where he fell.

Though the byway is steeped in military history, the next two stops on the route allow visitors to explore nature and the earlier lawless days of the Black Hills. Just up the road from the chapel is a well-worn walking path that leads to the grave of William”Curley” Grimes, one of the most notorious criminals to work the Hills. Grimes was suspected of robbing a post office and had been arrested by lawmen W.H. Llewellyn and Boone May in February of 1880. As they were transporting him to jail in Deadwood, Grimes reportedly asked to have his handcuffs removed because the winter chill was freezing his hands. The lawmen obliged, but then Grimes spurred his horse northward. Llewellyn and May opened fire and Grimes fell dead, just over the boundary of the Fort Meade military reservation.

Llewellyn and May rode to Fort Meade and reported the killing to its commander, Col. Samuel Sturgis. He sent a detail to bury Grimes where he had fallen. Today a single tree stands over Grimes’ gravestone, which lists his death date as 1879, even though most accounts place his murder in early 1880. The stone is inscribed with a haunting verse:”buried with his head down / just as he fell / the whispering pines / will never tell.”

Llewellyn and May were tried for Grimes’ murder in August of 1880, but they were acquitted. And Grimes has obviously not been forgotten. On the day we visited, two fresh bouquets of flowers, one white and the other purple, decorated his final resting place.

Across the road from the Grimes gravesite stood a lone tent along Alkali Creek, a bubbling brook that begins about 3 miles to the southwest and flows 30 miles east through Meade County before emptying into the Belle Fourche River. A nature trail begins at the creek and winds just more than half a mile through the lush vegetation of the creek valley, stands of tall ponderosa pines and mixed-grass prairie.

A marker along the Alkali Creek Trail.

The Alkali Creek Nature Trail is a favorite for families because there are few steep inclines and kids enjoy finding the 10 numbered posts found along the path. Each post corresponds to a story about the flora and fauna found in the area. Parents can grab a brochure at the trailhead and read at each post. We had no problem finding the first three posts in a heavily wooded portion of the trail. But at post 3 the path passed through a gate and entered a vast prairie of chest-high grasses. The path became narrower, almost like an off-road biking trail. We trained our eyes on the ground, ever vigilant for rattlesnakes, and before we knew it we had arrived at post 6.

Further up the creek lies an expanse of land where several hundred Ute Indians camped in the fall of 1906. The Utes were upset at their treatment on the Uintah Reservation in Utah. Much of their land had been allotted and portions of their reservation were opened to white settlement. They decided to live somewhere without such white encroachment and chose the sparsely settled Northern Plains.

About 400 of them left Utah and traveled through Colorado, Wyoming and into Montana before being intercepted by federal troops, including a detachment from Fort Meade. They brought the Utes to Belle Fourche, where a future meeting was arranged with President Theodore Roosevelt in which they could air their grievances. After that, the Utes were taken to a campsite along Alkali Creek, about 2 miles from Fort Meade.

A count in January 1907 showed 371 Utes living in the Alkali Creek camp. Their meeting with President Roosevelt also took place that month. The two sides agreed to create a new home for the Utes on land leased on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

The Utes began their arduous 150-mile march in June. About a month later, they arrived at their new home near the confluence of Thunder Butte Creek and the Moreau River. Unfortunately the arrangement did not last long. As part of the agreement, President Roosevelt and the Secretary of the Interior required members of the tribe to seek jobs and send their children to boarding schools, which they did not want to do. False reports of a planned uprising led to the gathering of several hundred army troops on the Cheyenne River Reservation. The Utes remained at their Thunder Butte campsite through the winter, but in the summer of 1908 they returned to Utah.

The byway includes other wide-open spaces. In one such sea of grass, ruts made by wagons traversing the oft-travelled trail between Sidney, Nebraska and Deadwood are still visible about 40 yards from the road. A little farther, visitors see the rocky remains of two cavalry jumps. And in a little valley below the road stands a long stone building constructed in 1940 to replace a wooden structure that housed targets used for practice. Terracing in front of the building marks the firing lines.

The remains of an old cavalry jump. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

The Old Fort Meade Cemetery, which also lies along the byway, is one of the only post cemeteries that remain intact. A folder inside a small visitors shelter contains a list of all 235 soldiers, wives, children and others buried there since 1878. They include two Medal of Honor winners and several soldiers from the African-American 25th Infantry.

One of the men, Corporal Ross Hallon, died as a result of vigilante justice in August of 1885. Hallon was reportedly seeing and abusing a woman from Sturgis named Minnie Lewis. She sought treatment from Dr. H.P. Lynch and told him about the source of her injuries. Lynch encouraged her to report the violent Hallon to his commanders at Fort Meade. Lewis told Hallon she would do just that if the beatings continued. Hallon, upset by what he saw as interference from the doctor, went to Lynch’s drugstore in Sturgis and shot him.

Hallon was arrested for Lynch’s murder the next day and was jailed in Sturgis. A couple of nights later, a mob of armed men broke Hallon out of jail. He was hanging from a tree west of town the next morning.

The byway passes the site of Camp Fechner, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp during the 1930s, just before it meets Highway 34 and the grounds of old Fort Meade. Though the U.S. Army deactivated Fort Meade in 1944, it remains a training institute for the 196th regiment of the South Dakota National Guard and the site of a Veterans Administration hospital. Drive the perimeter of the old parade grounds and you’ll see hospital staff walking from building to building and soldiers driving around the compound.

Many of Fort Meade’s original buildings and houses remain, including the post headquarters, which now houses the Old Fort Meade Museum. Inside we found John Tesnow, a minister and volunteer museum director.”We preserve 66 years of military history here,” he says soon after we walk in the door, in what sounds like a standard introduction for tourists. But after a few minutes of conversation, he talks about some of the fort’s more intriguing stories, including the suspicious court martial of Major Marcus Reno.

Reno was the senior surviving officer of the Seventh Cavalry after its defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His actions during the battle raised questions, but a formal inquiry in Chicago in 1879 found no grounds for court martial and offered no criticisms of his battle decisions.

Still, his reputation was clouded when he relocated to Fort Meade. The commanding officer, Colonel Samuel Sturgis, had lost his son at the Little Bighorn and clearly laid part of the blame on Reno. During his time at Fort Meade, Reno was known as a gambler and heavy drinker. Soon, he faced a court martial for public drunkenness and fighting with another officer.

Fort Meade is known for its role in elevating Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner.” The museum houses many artifacts of importance to the fort’s history and the West.

While under arrest, Reno was allowed to walk the grounds for exercise. One night, as he passed the Sturgis home, he noticed the commander’s daughter, Ella, sitting by a window. Reno had become infatuated with Ella Sturgis, and could not resist the temptation to approach the house and tap on the window. He frightened both Ella and her mother, who summoned Col. Sturgis from his bedroom. Reno fled, but Sturgis had the charge of window peeping added to the list of grievances against Reno. He was convicted and dismissed from the service on April 1, 1880.

Reno spent the next nine years trying to clear his name, but he died in 1889. In 1967, a military review board re-examined the case and cleared Reno of any wrongdoing. His remains were disinterred from a cemetery in Washington, D.C. and buried at the Custer National Cemetery on the Little Bighorn battlefield.”I think he got the shaft,” Tesnow tells us.

A more uplifting legacy of Fort Meade is how”The Star-Spangled Banner” became our national anthem. In 1892, post commander Caleb Carlton sought a song that could be played at parades and concerts and at the end of every day. His wife suggested Francis Scott Key’s song, which became part of daily life at Fort Meade.

Gov. Charles Sheldon took note of the custom when he visited Fort Meade in the mid-1890s. Carlton later wrote that not long after that, he spoke to Secretary of War Daniel Lamont, who ordered the song played during retreat at every Army post in the country. Congress officially declared it the national anthem in 1931.

There’s much more to see at the Fort Meade Museum, including Poker Alice’s cavalry hat (ìI’m skeptical,” Tesnow says), an original Seventh Cavalry safe that appeared in the film Dances with Wolves and other artifacts from the soldiers and their families who lived here across nearly seven decades.

The Fort Meade Backcountry Byway is maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. Its National Backcountry Byways system includes more than 2,900 miles of trails in 11 Western states, but the 5-mile stretch of gravel between I-90 and Highway 34 is the only such byway in South Dakota.

Several years ago, the idea was raised to turn the byway into a bypass route between those major roads, allowing for more traffic and increased speeds. But the BLM nixed that plan, arguing that the road itself is an important part of the historic and natural integrity of the area. Perhaps there’s no better way to explore the land of cowboys, Indians, gold hunters and soldiers than on a modern-day dusty trail.

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Reminders of Our Outlaw Days

By Katie Hunhoff

Cuthbert DuCharme’s cabin stands in a Geddes city park.

People who ventured into Dakota Territory during the 1800s were either bravely adventurous or very desperate. The faint of heart did not leave family, friends and comforts of home for a dangerous and uncertain existence. South Dakota remains the center of the American frontier, where remnants and reminders of territorial history still surround us.

Furthermore, descendants of some of our most colorful characters still live here. Several years ago, South Dakota Magazine featured an article on outlaws. We wrote about a man who had lured investors to the Hills by switching mineral samples. The suckers realized they had been duped when miners processed 3,000 tons of ore and extracted only $5 in gold. It’s a good story, but one of our readers took offense. “My grandfather was not a crook!” wrote a nice lady from West River. It turns out her ancestor was also a pillar of the Rapid City community.

Other reminders of our outlaw past remain in every corner of the state. In Geddes the cabin of fur trader Cuthbert DuCharme sits in the city park. DuCharme, called “Old Papineau” because of a talent for making whiskey (Papineau is French for pap water, or whiskey), lived along the banks of the Missouri River. His roadhouse boomed when Fort Randall was established, and wild parties were held every night.

On the other side of the state, a tree used to hang three accused horse thieves still stands on Skyline Drive in Rapid City. The tree died long ago, but the trunk is now embedded in concrete, a grey reminder of an era when hangings were punishment for a crime that might not merit a prison sentence today.

One of those killed that night was a teenager. His two traveling companions admitted their guilt, but declared to the very end that the boy was innocent. Some Rapid Citians felt there was a curse on their city because of the boy’s hanging.

Yes, our past is hard to escape. A new gravestone now marks the Gregory County burial site of Jack Sully, the famous Robin Hood of the Rosebud country. The shackles worn by Lame Johnny on his last stagecoach ride (vigilantes stopped the coach and hanged him) are now split between the State Historical Society in Pierre and the 1881 Custer Courthouse Museum. Potato Creek Johnny’s 7.75 ounce gold nugget can be seen at the Adams Museum in Deadwood. And you can still sleep at Poker Alice’s house in Sturgis.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Bear Butte Burning

A weekend fire, reportedly caused by debris that escaped from a nearby rancher’s burn pile, scorched 150 acres on the north side of Bear Butte, near Sturgis. Firefighters, aided by an inch of snow that fell Sunday morning, had the blaze under control about 15 hours after it was initially reported. No buildings were damaged and none of the animals in the Bear Butte State Park bison herd were injured. John Mitchell captured these images as the blaze burned.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Rally Ritual

By Debora Dragseth

Each year, when motorcycle enthusiasts gather in Sturgis, the town’s population swells from 6,500 to 500,000. Photo by Ron Linton

The outrageous phenomenon known as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has evolved into a week-long, $987 million party for nearly half a million people. Every August, the city of Sturgis in the northern Black Hills hosts biking enthusiasts in a combination carnival, racing event, party, music festival and shopping mall.

It’s the oldest, biggest, loudest, most authentic and out-of-control motorcycle rally in the world. Sturgis’ small population, 6,500, skyrockets to become the largest city in the state by a factor of three. That equates to each household in town hosting 183″guests.” Consider this for comparison: New York City: 26,402 persons per square mile. South Dakota: 9.9 persons per square mile. Sturgis (projected): 160,427 persons per square mile.

If past rallies are any indication, nearly 500 festivalgoers will land in jail. Hundreds more will receive tickets for violations such as indecent exposure, open container or driving on the sidewalk. Some 350 will require emergency room visits, two or three will die of heart attacks and a half-dozen or more will die in traffic accidents. Keeping its guests safe costs the city of Sturgis over $1 million in insurance, increased law enforcement, attorney costs and fire and ambulance services. Nobody has tabulated the costs to the state’s judicial and state prison systems.

The town’s temporary denizens come clad in skullcaps, sunglasses, boots, sleeveless shirts and black leather. Tattoos are standard, piercings optional. Body paint, thongs and pasties will do for women. For men, cleanliness is not a virtue; grimy grubbiness is fine and chest hair encouraged. Don’t come to Sturgis looking for metrosexuals — they’re as rare as pedal bicycles.

The streets are thick with beautiful, scantily dressed women, but the real beauties are the motorcycles, their chrome sparkling in the sun as though they had just left a showroom floor. Even visitors who don’t live the motorcycle culture will marvel at the thousands of custom-painted Harley Davidsons parked four rows deep and lined up for blocks. Many are true works of visual art, and they make beautiful music. Few noises compare to the undulating river of 700-pound motorcycles. Hunter S. Thompson described it as”a burst of dirty thunder.”

Author Debora Dragseth may live in Sturgis, but during the rally she looks like an outsider next to the thousands of tattooed and bearded bikers.

But strip away all the aesthetics and the Sturgis Rally is an economic engine that drives state tourism and represents capitalism at its finest. According to a survey funded by the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, $987 million comes into South Dakota annually from the event. Rally-goers pay an inflated $5.50 for a beer at the world’s largest biker bar. Fortunately, a free pancake breakfast is served daily by the Son of Light Ministry, whose sign proclaims,”Flapjacks along with the word of God. And the best part — they’re both free!” In the same vein, the Christian Motorcycle Association will bless your bike while offering you a free bike wash, coffee and pancakes.

Tens of thousands of people get”inked” at the rally.”A decision that will last a lifetime,” warns the tattoo artist who works in a small concrete building that just last week was a beauty parlor. Many local businesses are”repurposed,” in other words, closed down and rented out to vendors for handsome sums. Grocery stores, gas stations and a local department store remain open for business; high demand items include sunscreen, pillows and energy drinks. The only liquor store in town is city-owned, a smart move on the part of Sturgis’ founding fathers given that rally-goers drink an estimated 3 million gallons of beer. On average, visitors stay 5.5 days and spend $180 per day.”It’s like a really loud relative comes to your house, stuffs your pockets full of money and leaves a week later,” quipped one Sturgis citizen.

Demand exceeds the supply of hotel rooms, camping spots and bathrooms. Hotel rates double and triple, climbing as high as $300 a night for a room — and most lodgings within 50 miles are full. It seems as though every square foot in town is rented to someone: locals rent their homes for $3,000 to $10,000 a week; some even rent their yards to campers who pitch tents or park bikes. City law limits homeowners to 19 renters per property.

Three types of people come to the Sturgis Rally. First, the casual observers who ride occasionally or not at all. They’re easy to spot — they point a lot and look awestruck, like kindergarteners on the first day of school. They carry shopping bags filled with T-shirts as proof to the folks back home that they risked the mayhem and rubbed shoulders with the black leather crowd.

Next are the recreational riders. Mostly in their late 40s and 50s, they own bikes but don’t belong to biker clubs. They ride their Harleys only on sunny and mild weekends. They trailer their $35,000 bikes to the rally behind big pickups with heated leather captain’s seats. This group offers the best opportunity for vendors. They look like walking billboards for the Harley-Davidson brand, and buying the fantasy of the biker subculture does not come cheap.

Finally, there are the bikers whose leather jackets have a cracked”been there, done that” patina that matches their sunburned faces. (You don’t get that look by hauling your bike on a trailer or riding on weekends.) Their bikes have never seen a trailer, they do their own tune-ups, they sport socially offensive tattoos and they don’t own rain gear.

Although it’s impossible to determine the exact number of people at the rally, city officials use several metrics, including traffic counts and taxable receipts. Over 700 temporary vendors set up in the city, hawking everything from $2 rubber bracelets to $125,000 custom-made motorcycles. For a more ingenious method of estimating crowd size, the locals measure the quantity of what’s left behind. Over 500 tons of”rally garbage” was hauled away in 2011, and the town doesn’t expect this year’s guests to leave any less.

The rally has been held annually in Sturgis since 1938 with the exception of two years during World War II when gas rationing prevented recreational travel. Nine racers participated in the first rally, competing for $750 in prize money in front of a small crowd of racing enthusiasts who paid 50 cents admission. Attendance hit 800 in 1960 and 2,000 by 1970. This year, the city expects 500,000.

Campgrounds (empty fields during the rest of the year) pulsate with rock bands from high noon to early morning. The largest, the infamous 600-acre Buffalo Chip, has been estimated to host 25,000 rowdy revelers, transforming overnight into the third largest city in the state. Like several local campgrounds, it doubles as a concert venue. The Buffalo Chip also offers less conventional entertainment — topless beauty contests, redneck games and a shooting arcade for grownups billed as the ultimate Second Amendment experience. Participants can choose from World War I, World War II, Korean and Vietnam War era weapons and receive the training required for a 35-state concealed carry permit.

All the entertainment provides for some unusual entrepreneurial activity in South Dakota. Zackiary Crouch, a third-generation hair stylist, has the enviable job of making female bartenders look pretty. During the rally he works 14-hour days beginning at 5:30 a.m.”The rally isn’t as glamorous as it sounds,” he insists.”Girls who have been living at a campground and haven’t showered for a week are like a Monet, pretty from far away, but close up — a bit nasty.” During the 2011 rally, Crouch saw a heart attack and a stabbing both on the same day. At One-Eyed Jacks Saloon, where he has headquartered for the past five years, the self-described”gay kid of Sturgis” defines his job as a combination of hostess, hairdresser and psychologist.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally seems like an anomaly to South Dakotans, but such events hearken back to ancient times. The Romans celebrated what anthropologists call rituals of reversal, times in the yearly calendar that allowed patricians, plebeians, and slaves to abandon the constraints of an ordered culture. The society enjoyed a”time out” during these festivals when people could break the rules without fear of recrimination. Reversal rituals included a strong sexual focus, anonymity, costumes, feasting to excess and some form of intoxicant to reduce inhibitions.

Tony Bender, an avid biker and former news director and publisher of Sturgis’ local newspaper, The Meade County Times-Tribune, spoke to what the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally really means.”I think it is one of the great expressions of American freedom. The open road, the sense of rebellion, the pulse of the V-twin motors … and yet, a real sense of brotherhood.”

Want to unleash your id? Come to Sturgis. My 6,500 neighbors and I are happy to see you, but to be honest, we’ll be kind of happy to see you safely leave as well. Go home, shower and shave, put on your khaki Dockers and your loafers, and squeeze back into your cubicle. In other words, get back to work — you will need to pay off your August credit card bill.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Art, Violence and Poker Alice

By Michael Zimny

Legend says that Poker Alice damaged this painting when she fired her shotgun inside her Sturgis brothel. Image courtesy of the Days of ’76 Museum.

There is art that memorializes, mourns, celebrates or foments violence. Then there are works that get a value-upgrade out of real acts of violence.

Henry Ford paid a mint for the rocking chair Abraham Lincoln was reclined in when John Wilkes Booth shot him. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses killer art from shrunken heads to arms and armor. John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings are creepy enough on their own, but his artist’s bio helps move the merchandise. If the platter Salome used to bring Herodias the head of John the Baptist could be certified, it would fetch some serious coin at Sotheby’s.

Legend says Poker Alice used her shotgun to value-appreciate a decent if unremarkable nude that used to hang on her brothel wall. The painting is now in the collections of Deadwood’s Days of’76 Museum. Reportedly, Alice laced it with holes at her Sturgis brothel and willed it to fellow madam Big Hulda. Local artifact collector Don Clowser later located it at a bar in Gillette, Wyoming. The museum has since had the painting restored.

Is the story true? What can be verified is that Poker Alice was familiar with firearms. There is plenty of legend to go around about Deadwood’s famous card shark. It’s hard to know whether she became a gambler from a young age as some suggest, or as the cigar-chomping elder in the famous photos; or if she impressed future husband Warren Tubbs by shooting a man, who aimed to stab him, with her .38.

She did kill a man. More than a dozen rowdy soldiers burst into her brothel one night in 1913, and according to the Deadwood Pioneer-Times,”started to clean out the place … by cutting the electric light wires and throwing rocks through the windows.” Locked and loaded, Poker Alice”started shooting into the crowd with a .22 rifle,” hitting two soldiers. Private Fred Koetzle was mortally wounded. Two days later the Pioneer-Times reported that the state’s attorney would not file charges against her for the shooting, though she would be charged with”keeping a house of ill fame.”

“Ill fame” surrounded Alice the rest of her days. At 78, some forgotten state’s attorney shut down her business and prosecuted her for prostitution and violating Prohibition. Gov. William Bulow pardoned her. By then she was already a legend, making appearances as an icon of the Old West at the early Days of’76 parades.

Poker Alice.

For decades, she gambled with accomplished gunslingers and took them for everything they had. She outlived three husbands and nearly all the more-famous fellow outlaws — like Wild Bill and Calamity Jane — she may have knocked one back with in the saloons of Deadwood’s”Badlands” district, into an era of gentrification (Black Hills style) that capitalized on the legend of the old days to attract tourists.

So it wouldn’t have been out of character for her to shoot up the place and lodge some shot in an artist-rendered lady of the evening’s backside.

The painting itself is not by an unknown. Astley David Middleton (A.D.M.) Cooper was a renowned artist and protÈgÈ of George Catlin, who had retraced Catlin’s journeys through the American West and often depicted Western, particularly Native American subjects. Like Catlin, he saw the tragedy of westward expansion. His best works serve as elegies for lost ways of life.

He was well regarded in his time, earning enough to build a garish Egyptian-themed studio in his home base of San Jose, and still has a cult following, though his stature has waned with time. He was also the kind of guy who would enjoy a night at a joint run by Poker Alice. He liked the nightlife and left behind a prodigious output of lowbrow nudes that may have been used to pay off bar tabs.

That’s the kind of Cooper that hung on the wall at the Poker Alice joint in Sturgis, and that legend says she honeycombed with buckshot. If it’s true, she may have embellished the work of a (sometimes) funereal artist with the forensic debris of some john’s last night on the town.

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Suspects in Sturgis

By Paul Higbee

Historic Fort Meade was home to Nazi sympathizers during World War II.

A little less than a year after the United States’ entry into the Second World War, the strange soldiers of the 620th Engineer General Service Company arrived at Fort Meade, near Sturgis. On work details they wore blue fatigues, not green. Prisoners of war were typically issued blue fatigues, but no “PW” lettering adorned the 620th’s work uniforms.

These soldiers numbered between 100 and 200 most of the time. Despite that small number, writer E.J. Kahn would note after the war, the 620th claimed “the distinction of being responsible for four-fifths of the convictions under the Eighty-first Article of War recorded against the 11.5 million men who served in the army during the Second World War.”

Conviction under the Eighty-first Article is deadly serious business: it means being found guilty of aiding the enemy. Members of the 620th were American soldiers, but it didn’t come as a complete surprise when some plotted acts for the glory of the Third Reich.

“What made the company unique was that, except for its officers and a cadre of noncommissioned officers, it was filled entirely with men who were suspected of subversive activity or disloyalty,” wrote Bob Lee in his book, Fort Meade and the Black Hills.

The army had to prove nothing for a soldier to be sent to the 620th, Lee added. Suspicion sufficed.

At Fort Meade the 620th painted barracks, hauled trash, planted trees, graded a landing area for military gliders and made camouflage netting. They were issued no arms.

Like other Fort Meade military personnel, they were free to live off the post grounds. Many lived in Sturgis or Deadwood apartments and commuted to the fort five days a week. Weekends were spent enjoying the Black Hills’ amenities, and pursuing the charms of local young women, many of whom missed boyfriends sent to combat in North Africa, Europe or the Pacific.

Certainly the soldiers of the 620th enjoyed cushy wartime duty, maneuvering their way through pine forests en route to picnics in Custer State Park, rather than through land-mined jungles or sniper-protected villages. The military eventually heard criticism about that, but at the time the army found itself in a bind. Exempting from military service those men who didn’t approve of the nation’s war policy wasn’t fair, plus, doing so would offer an easy out for those hoping to avoid enlistment. At the same time, the army didn’t want these men, some of whom were vocal in their admiration of Adolf Hitler, in regions where they could pass information to the enemy or sabotage American war production. The War Department studied maps, decided Fort Meade was about as far removed from the war as a soldier could get, and formed the 620th under a confidential order in October 1942.

Most of the 620th soldiers were of German or Italian descent. Other companies were established elsewhere for soldiers suspected of sympathy for Japan. It should be noted that many men of the 620th wished the United States no harm in the war, and hoped the whole affair would simply end quickly.

Because formation of the 620th was confidential, the Black Hills public didn’t know of its makeup, although a few remarked that lots of the men spoke with accents and knew all the lyrics to German beer hall songs. “The citizens of Sturgis, had they known the 620th was filled with soldiers the army considered undesirables, would have been shocked, since they had treated these men as freely and as generously as they had the other soldiers from the fort,” Lee wrote.

Stone stables at Fort Meade housed 86 horses each. Located just east of Sturgis, the fort now stands as a National Historic Site.

Along with being shocked, the citizens of Sturgis likely would have worried the soldiers might try something rash if a militant leader joined their ranks. That leader came along in March of 1943, in the person of Dale Maple.

Maple wasn’t typical of the 620th. Maple wasn’t German or Italian. Actually, he wasn’t typical by any standard of American young men. He was, when he arrived in South Dakota, a 22-year-old graduate of Harvard, where he’d studied government and publicly expressed admiration for Hitler’s fascist regime. He attracted enough attention for his views at Harvard that Time magazine once described him as a “native U.S. Nazi.” In his hometown of San Diego, as a child, he’d seen his name in the press often as a piano prodigy. Southern California music critics predicted big things for him in concert halls.

Maple graduated from Harvard, with academic honors, in the spring of 1941. He was still on campus doing post-graduate work the next December when the United States declared war. Hours after Maple heard news of Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, he phoned the German embassy in Washington. He told an official there it looked obvious the German ambassador and his staff would shortly be expelled from Washington, and said he would like to join them when they traveled home to Germany. The embassy official told Maple no.

So Maple joined the United States Army. Had he been sent overseas, deserted and made his way into German territory, he would have had no trouble communicating his Nazi sympathies. He’d learned German and spoke it fluently. But Maple never got near the war. After training as a military radio operator at bases in North Carolina and Maryland, Maple was transferred to Fort Meade in early 1943. The army decided that the support he declared for Hitler at Harvard made him a case for the 620th.

Speaking to South Dakota Magazine 57 years later, just a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, Maple recalled the 620th was quartered in barracks built for and by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s, on the west end of the fort grounds. “We received no military training as such,” he said. “Of course, there were no thoughts that we’d be part of the Okinawa invasion.”

While Maple’s well-documented remarks left no doubt why he’d been sent to Fort Meade, he said some of the others “had no idea why they were in that unit.”

Maple rented an apartment in Deadwood, found he had lots of time for reading and backroom gambling, and made some friends in Deadwood’s bars. Black Hills acquaintances recall him as tall, handsome, well mannered, soft-spoken and a remarkable piano player. He had one minor brush with the law in Deadwood when picked up for tampering with someone’s car.

The 620th liked Spearfish Canyon. In the summer of 1943 the soldiers would sometimes rent a cabin there for weekend parties where beer flowed and rousing choruses of German beer hall songs rattled the windows. The army suspected espionage might be being plotted in the cabin and bugged the place. Surveillance uncovered nothing.

But it was proven later in court that the army had good reason to worry about subversive plots. Maple and a few friends in the 620th spent time in the Black Hills, in the words of E.J. Kahn, “exploring, largely in conversation, courses of action they might take to demonstrate their disaffection — espionage, desertion, mutiny, sabotage, guerrilla warfare against the United States, and so on.”

Site of Orman Dam POW Camp north of Fort Meade near Belle Fourche.

Helping German prisoners of war escape appealed to the conspirators, but no prisoners came to Fort Meade until after they had left. The first week of December 1943, the 620th transferred to Camp Hale, Colorado, 120 miles west of Denver. On one hand, the soldiers disliked the move because everyone but married men had to live at the post. On the other hand, 200 German prisoners were also quartered there.

Imagine Hogan’s Heroes in reverse. The German POWs had a still for making schnapps, acquired a pistol and American military uniforms, and regularly got themselves out of their compound and allowed visitors in. The 620th men, in blatant violation of regulations against fraternization, won the prisoners’ confidence and friendship with gifts of candy, tobacco and whiskey. When POW Erhard Schwichtenberg said he wanted to see the American West, the 620th got him out for a couple days and drove him several hundred miles through Colorado. Nobody missed him. When Maple got a three-day leave, the only place he wanted to visit was the inside of the POW compound, where he spent the entire period, wearing a German uniform and drinking schnapps — and learning that Schwichtenberg and another prisoner named Heinrich Kikillus wanted to escape as much as Maple wanted to help them.

Maple bought a decade-old Reo sedan. On February 15, in broad daylight, he simply drove the car to a rendezvous point just off the post grounds, and Schwichtenberg and Kikillus strolled away from a work detail and climbed in. Nobody noticed for more than 24 hours that the prisoners were missing and Maple was AWOL. By the time they were missed, the trio was far south down U.S. Highway 85, in New Mexico, implementing a Black Hills plan that called for getting to Mexico first. From there the idea was to reach Argentina and secure passage by ship to Spain, and from Spain travel to Germany.

After two flat tires and an electrical problem, Maple got the car within 17 miles of Mexico. Then he ran out of gas, and the three companions hiked cross-country into Mexico by night. A Mexican border patrolman stopped them 3 miles inside Mexico on the afternoon of February 18, and turned them over to United States authorities.

At a military trial two months later at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Maple said the escape had been merely a ploy to call public attention to the injustice of companies like the 620th. Further, he claimed, he’d only pretended to be a Nazi at Harvard in hopes of winning German scholarship money to pursue post-graduate studies at the University of Berlin. Nobody bought his stories and he was convicted of desertion and aiding the enemy, and sentenced to death. Three fellow conspirators in the 620th — Paul Kissman, Theophil Leonhard and Friedrich Siering — were court-martialed and sent to prison. The German prisoners, it was noted, simply had exercised their right and duty to attempt escape.

After Maple’s death sentence was handed down, nobody in the military or federal government seemed to want to see it carried out. The secretary of war sent a memo to President Franklin Roosevelt, saying of Maple: “While he is undoubtedly legally sane and responsible for his despicable acts, under all the circumstances I am unable to escape the impression that justice does not require this young man’s life. I feel that the ends of justice will be better served by sparing his life so that he may live to see the destruction of tyranny, the triumph of the ideals against which he sought to align himself, and the final victory of the freedom he so grossly abused.”

Maple did live to see the triumph of American ideals and freedoms, and, in fact, to prosper by them. Roosevelt commuted his sentence to life in prison, and later it was reduced to 10 years at Leavenworth federal penitentiary. He proved a model prisoner and was still a young man when released in the 1950s.

ìI came back to California and got into a venture building commercial fishing boats,” he said. “I learned about insuring boats, and that led me into the marine insurance business worldwide.” He never returned to the Black Hills.

It is possible the Black Hills would have forgotten Maple and the entire 620th had it not been for E.J. Kahn’s series of articles about the company and Maple’s trial, published in 1950 in the New Yorker magazine. Suddenly people who had wondered about those soldiers’ accents and their knowledge of German beer hall songs had answers.

As for Fort Meade, the War Department declared the post surplus the same month Dale Maple went to trial, April of 1944. Fort Meade then became a Veterans Administration hospital.

“Ironically, aside from the station complement, the 620th was the last company-sized army unit stationed at Fort Meade before the post’s abandonment as a military installation,î Lee wrote. ìIt was a strange ending for a garrison that had included many of the army’s most highly regarded and decorated outfits during its long years of service.”

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.