By Michael Zimny

An ancient petrified tree in Perkins County may be one of the largest ever discovered and may eventually tell us more about what kind of landscape existed here in the past.

“My father and a friend of his discovered it while herding sheep back in the 1930s,” recalls retired local rancher Clyde Jesfjeld. “They decided that it had to be a tree because of the way it appeared.”

Contemporary newspaper articles confirm that it was George Jesfjeld and Charles Murphy who first discovered the tree northwest of Bison. “Word got around, and back in those days the WPA was in operation,” Jesfjeld says.”There was a small crew that came in and unearthed more of it than what my father and his friend had uncovered.”

Over the years, there have been several efforts to partially excavate and examine the tree. In 1949, the Rapid City Journal reported that University of South Dakota Museum Director W.H. Over visited the site. He estimated the tree’s age at 60 million years. The same article listed its measurements as 9 feet in diameter at the exposed base, with 84 feet uncovered, extending to as much as 200 feet total as it disappears beneath the sloping ground.

Fred Jennewein, a Bison-area rancher who ran a small range relics museum in town, was active in the effort to excavate the tree. “In the 75 feet of exposed log,” Jennewein wrote, “there is no break thru [sic] the trunk of the tree altho [sic] in recent years there has been some vandalism by shelling off considerable sized pieces of the petrified wood.”

Today, the base of the tree — which is located on a School and Public Lands parcel, but not accessible by road — can still be seen, though much of tree has been re-interred with earth. We counted 37 paces walking along the depression where excavation once apparently occurred, before the earth above it slopes upward. Away from the exposed base, an occasional glimpse of petrified wood emerges from beneath the surface.

At one time, some locals hoped that the entire tree would be uncovered or excavated. “When the summer comes again we are going out with a bulldozer or some other kind of dozer and find out just how much farther that Oldest Old Timer goes back into that hill,” Jennewein wrote.

That does not appear to have happened. After the 1950s, newspaper articles about the tree are scarce. Though there had been some talk of removing the tree intact, that would have been difficult and expensive. In 1967, the state legislature allocated $1,200 to place a fence around the site, probably to prevent its gradual disappearance.

“I remember as a young boy taking a lot of different people down there so they could look at it,” Jesjfeld recalls. “A lot of people took a small piece.”

There is no fence in place, if one was ever built. Souvenir seekers may have forgotten about the tree and its remote location.

“There was discussion about getting the tree hauled out of there and placing it somewhere else where the public could view it,” says Mike Cornelison, Land Agent for School and Public Lands. However, any such effort would have to balance protecting the integrity of the native prairie against extracting the tree, a delicate task in its own right.

“If there was the right kind of supervision, it could be excavated,” Cornelison says.

So far, the funding has not come forward. Recently, several scientists at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology have expressed interest in visiting the site. Perhaps soon we will learn more about the tree’s history and potential future.

Is this the biggest intact petrified tree in the world, as some local enthusiasts claimed in the past? That probably depends on how bigness is measured. Maybe the tree can tell us more about the environment it thrived in, back in the days, to quote Fred Jennewein, “when the earth was young.”

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

By John Andrews

I once accidentally set fire to a tree stump in our yard. It had been cut, and dry, jagged spires of wood rose where the tree snapped as it fell. Naturally it became the perfect place for a boy to stuff firecrackers.

For the 10-year-old me, the remains of that tree were nothing more than an opportunity for Fourth of July fun. The older and wiser me knows there must have been a story behind that tree. It was part of a line of trees planted along our lot line. Maybe one of the town founders planted it?

It’s interesting how in South Dakota, we form connections to trees. Perhaps it’s because when our ancestors first arrived in Dakota 150 years ago they encountered a landscape largely devoid of trees. When we look at the tall cottonwoods around our farmyards and small towns, they are a tangible connection to the pioneers we never knew. They are also full of history.

We’ve written a lot about important trees. There’s the landmark cottonwood that wouldn’t die in Henry. Planted in 1882, it survived a 1971 tornado, a windstorm in 1984 and a fire that destroyed the town cafÈ and bar. Victims of this year’s historic Missouri River flood are dealing with damaged homes and other possessions. But Curt Mortenson told us about a 200-year-old cottonwood near his house that’s been surrounded by water all summer. He said a photo taken in the 1880s shows a steamboat tied to it. No one knows the toll the flood will take on trees in the river valley.

In our September/October 2007 issue, Melvin Marousek wrote about a grove of trees his father planted in Meade County.”For more years than I like to remember, I have made periodic pilgrimages to this lonely but, to me, hallowed homestead where so many memories lie waiting to be resurrected,” he wrote.”It is here that lost memories well into conscious thought and long sleeping ghosts drift by — ghosts of many descriptions, some light and airy and cheerful, others sad, tired and grim.”

I heard about another important family tree just today. A stately cedar stood on the John Hynes homestead west of Conde for 112 years until a wicked thunderstorm ravaged the top third of it in the spring of 1994. The loss prompted Earl Grandpre, owner of the Hynes farmstead, to pen a tribute recalling memories and tracing the tree’s grand history.

Hynes brought his son to Dakota Territory to find a homestead in 1882. They filed on a quarter of land a half mile west of Conde. That fall they returned to St. Paul, where the rest of the family had stayed. Hynes told his wife there were no trees on the homestead he had selected. So the next spring, before they all came to Dakota for good, she went to the banks of the Mississippi River and collected a small cedar sapling. She placed it in a suitcase full of dirt from the riverbank and tended to it during the long covered wagon ride west. They planted the tree just southwest of their original shanty.

“Jack and Ed Hynes told me many times the story of this tree,” Grandpre wrote.”They seemed to want to impress on me the importance that they placed on it. They knew that my wife and I would own and farm this land, and though they didn’t say so, I know they did not want me to destroy this tree. They did not have to worry. My wife would never have let me or anyone else hurt this tree.”

That’s because trees can be as important to us as they were to the men and women who brought them here.

Tag: tree

Petrified Giant

Trees and Us

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