Tag: tripp county

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Some Things Never Change in S.D.

By Katie Hunhoff

South Dakotans have patiently awaited the joyful harbingers of spring: a tree beginning to bud, a flash of color from a tulip, grass slowly changing hue from brown to green. But the first sign of spring we received this year was not so welcome. March brought flooding to parts of East River, mixed with a statewide blizzard.

The mid-March storm was no surprise to most of us. We’ve endured our share of spring setbacks. In fact, our March/April issue — published just as the recent storms were gathering — includes a story on the awful historic winter and spring of 1952.

Our longtime writer Paul Higbee began the article with a line that could have made a headline this month:”It was a demon of a blizzard that melted into a monster of a flood.” The January storm of’52 especially hit the Rosebud region of south-central South Dakota. Mission, White River, Winner, Philip, Murdo, Gregory and Pierre were hammered the hardest but the storm swept over the entire state, delivering severe winds and snow from Rapid City to Watertown.

Snowmelt in the spring brought more disaster. High water along the Missouri River valley and its tributaries drove 7,748 people in 17 counties from their homes. Miraculously, there were no fatalities. But 45 houses were destroyed and 584 damaged.

The Rosebud disaster wasn’t the most tragic storm in state history, but it’s one that captured the state’s imagination in part thanks to Laura Hellmann of Millboro, a tiny ranching community in Tripp County. After the storm, she asked 66 writers to quickly submit their survival stories before memories were dulled by time or forgotten. The stories collectively show the tragedy, despair and helplessness that weather can inflict.

Hellmann eventually published the memories in a small book, which she titled Blizzard Strikes the Rosebud. The stories are captivating. A Gregory cafe became home to 32 people for two days; they played cards, listened to the radio and slept in booths. Mildred Benson kept her students at Eden School entertained by organizing a folk dance that went on for two days.

Thor Fosheim, a 75-year-old rancher, rode off on horseback to save his cattle and never returned. Murdo rancher Noel”Pete” Judd went with his nephew to bring his daughters home from school. When their Jeep stalled, the four started walking. Funeral services for all four were held eight days later in Winner.

Most farmers and ranchers didn’t drive four-wheel-drive pickups in the early 1950s, and they didn’t have 100-horsepower tractors with heated cabs and snow blowers. Some of the rescue work was accomplished by foot and on horseback.

However, one thing has remained constant from 1952 to 2019. When times get tough, neighbors and even strangers band together to help one another. Much has changed in South Dakota since 1952. Roads and bridges are better. Dams and levees have been constructed to control flooding. Equipment is better and safer.

But good neighbors are still the greatest blessing when the snow is blowing and the water is rising. It was true in’52 and true in’19.

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Witten: A Town on the 100th Meridian

By Bernie Hunhoff

Seventy people and two goat hers share space in Witten, one of only a few towns that sit exactly on the 100th Meridian.

Disguised between glossy pages of beautiful photographs in Andrew Moore’s book, Dirt Meridian, are harsh themes of survival, loss, emptiness and isolation. Witten is one of a handful of small South Dakota towns with a longitudinal reading of exactly 100 degrees.

Wondering what life is like in a gateway town to the hard country, we traveled to Witten to find the answer. We arrived via S.D. Highway 44 on a late-autumn morning. Main Street was thick with the dust of white 18-wheelers trucking corn and milo to the local grain elevator. Cars were coming and going from a little gray post office. A block away we saw a light in the Village Grocery, so we stepped inside and met Kenny Van Kekerix, the proprietor.

We told him we didn’t expect to find a grocery store in a town of 70 people.”It’s a good thing I’m retired so I can keep it open,” laughed the tall, cheerful man of 75 years. Wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt and overalls, he presided over the cash register with just the proper amount of dignity you hope to see from someone operating the last retail establishment in your town; a blend of business and”old buddy.”

When he’s not working, grocer Kenny Van Kekerix creates wood cutouts of South Dakota and other states.

Van Kekerix and his wife, Sandy — who has a day job at the Holiday Inn in Winner, 16 miles away — stock the old store’s shelves with canned vegetables, frozen pizza, milk, candy, cigarettes and soda.”Enough to keep you alive until you turn the key and drive,” he says.”We used to have cosmetics, but we were dropped. We used to have a seed corn license but it was dropped. There were a lot of franchises we’ve dropped.”

The word ‘dropped’ sums up the town’s history. Witten was created in 1909 when the Rosebud Indian Reservation was opened to homesteaders. But the original town site was dropped a mere 20 years later when the railroad track missed the town by 2 miles. Witten’s pioneer residents showed typical West River resourcefulness by disassembling the town and moving it to the tracks, where it stands today. Only an old bank vault still marks the old site.

The new town was simply called New Witten. A long brick building was constructed on Main Street to house a bank, mercantile and grocery store. That fine building still stands, but only the grocery remains; all the other doors on the building are locked, even though the roof is falling in on the bank.

Thirty years after the town moved, the railroad dropped the tracks from its route. The high school was dropped in 1969, the same year that Van Kekerix came to Witten to work for Larry Bauer, a contractor who started a little factory that made building blocks.”We brought the sand from Gregory, and the concrete from Rapid City and the crushed red rock from a quarry by Spencer,” he says.”They called it Miami Stone because it’s a brand name that came from Miami, Oklahoma.” Buildings constructed with Miami Stone can be found across the Rosebud country. They include the newspaper office and farm cooperative at nearby Winner and the American Legion Hall in Gregory.

But Miami Stone was dropped in 1976, so the Van Kekerixes bought the grocery store. Partners helped for a few years, but soon they dropped away and the Van Kekerixes were the sole owners. Is that opportunity or responsibility? Van Kekerix has been too busy to ponder anything that profound these last 40 years.

He and Sandy have no children –“no more Dutchmen running around” — but they’ve adopted the town, running the only retail store for many miles. Every day is different. Monday brings customers that ran out of milk on Sunday. On Wednesday, a small stack of Winner’s weekly paper, The Advocate, arrives, followed by certain residents who aren’t subscribers. Van Kekerix plans his weekly stocking order on Thursdays and the delivery arrives on a Friday truck.

Doug Best runs a welding and equipment repair shop in Witten with help from his daughter, Naomi.

He might be closed for a doctor or dentist appointment — his own or more likely that of an old veteran who can’t drive himself to Rapid City. His duties as commander of the local Legion and VFW chapters also might infringe on his store hours, but other than that you’re likely to find the Village Grocery open six days a week.

Main Street in Witten is busy during harvest. Dozens of grain trucks come and go, kicking up dust and spooking a pair of Norwegian dwarf goats penned across the street from the big gray steel grain bins.

All of Witten’s eight streets are gravel. They squarely separate several dozen modest houses, a few commercial buildings (leftovers from more prosperous times) and two churches — Baptist and Lutheran.

Cars and pickups converge at the post office on the south side of town. The clerk’s window is only open for two hours in the morning, but the building also doubles as a meeting hall. Fourteen wood chairs face an old desk, the setting for official affairs. Atop an upright piano lies a spiral notebook containing town ordinances that govern gambling houses, indecency, poison control and pets.

Just a block away, LuAnn Klemann raises rabbits, chickens, donkeys and goats on her tiny farm at the edge of town. She likes the quiet pace.”People come by to look at the goats, but nobody bothers anybody here,” she says. That’s a high compliment in any West River town.

Witten might not seem like much of a gateway community to the 100th Meridian if judged solely on its eight dusty streets. But that’s not how you gauge a town surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat, milo, sunflowers, cattle and cowboys.

The post office, the grain elevator and the grocery store would probably have been dropped long ago if not for the ranching community that surrounds the town. And Doug Best’s welding and repair shop would never have started.”We’ve got more cats and dogs than people in town,” says Best, 58, but his customers come from miles around, mostly with farm equipment that needs repairing.

The youngest member of the Witten workforce is Best’s 29-year-old daughter Naomi, who grew up there and lived in Tennessee and California before returning to marry Will Littau, a local rancher. Naomi helped her dad as a child, so welding and wrestling iron wasn’t foreign to her. Their bright, clean shop has a satisfied aura, as best evidenced by the ever-wagging tail of Naomi’s big white Husky named Hatschi.

Best also serves as fire chief to a department of 17 volunteers. Along with extinguishing an occasional grass fire and hoping nothing worse happens, the firemen also host the town’s biggest annual social event — a Third of July barbecue and fireworks display.

Successful small town fundraisers usually have a precise formula. That’s true in Witten, where local ranchers donate”three hogs and a whole beef,” all of which are barbecued by the firemen and served to a hungry crowd of about 500. As many as 1,000 people arrive by the time the fireworks begin, spooking the town’s two herds of goats and all those dogs and cats.

But when the fuse is lit on the last rocket, all but 70 of the people get in their cars and trucks and depart in darkness down Highway 44.”It’s nothing but tail lights all the way to Winner,” laughs Best.

As if a curtain dropped, darkness and quiet reclaims a gateway town to the 100th Meridian.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Lonely Place at Ideal

By Leroy Iseminger

The Koenig family (from left: Martha, Anna, Martin, Heinrich and Bertha), was photographed before abandoning their homestead for Minnesota.

Heinrich Gustav Koenig was serving his ninth year as pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church, a rural German congregation south of Canova. His salary of $500 per year was supplemented with beef, pork, eggs, garden produce and oats from his congregants.

The Koenigs fording the White River before arriving at their homestead.

Heinrich and his family had food and shelter but he worried he couldn’t save enough to buy a home after his retirement. Then he read that homesteads would be distributed by lottery through the 1887 Dawes Act, which opened much of the Rosebud Reservation for white settlement. He traveled to Gregory in 1909 to register along with future president Harry S. Truman and thousands of others. Hoards of hungry men, excited horses, yipping dogs and a jangle of harnesses contributed to the pandemonium on the day of the drawing. Harry Truman drew a blank, but Heinrich won 160 acres in Tripp County near Ideal, and a new beginning for his family.

He resigned from the Canova parish, and he and his wife and four of their five children — son Martin and daughters Hulda, Frieda and Bertha — embarked on their great adventure in the spring of 1910. Gustav, their oldest son, remained behind as a farmhand near Canova. He would rejoin the family after the fall farm work was done.

The Koenigs loaded their livestock and the family’s possessions aboard an immigrant train that took them as far as Kennebec. After reloading their possessions onto a wagon, they struck off across the prairie to the homestead site, about 40 miles southwest. Along the way they would see nothing but prairie. Eventually, the Koenigs came to the White River, which had to be forded in order to reach the staked-out land 3 miles beyond. It was spring and most of the pasque flowers had already bloomed. Prairie chickens boomed their spring mating call and strutted on their dancing grounds.

The Koenigs built a 12-by-14-foot claim shack on a knoll overlooking their future 80-acre field. Pastor Koenig dug a root cellar adjacent to the house. The family began work so quickly they didn’t have time to determine the vagaries of soil and climate, the cycles of the seasons, and finicky violent moods of the sky.

Prairie neighbors gather in a procession to carry the caskets to the grave.

They broke the sod and planted a garden that included hollyhock seeds, Harrison Rose bushes and rhubarb roots that Martha had brought from Canova. Pastor Koenig also transplanted three ash trees on the west side of their home.

They hauled water from the White River, flowing out of the Badlands, but it was not suitable for human use. Fortunately there was a spring in a nearby ravine and rainwater was also caught and saved. After the crops were planted, Heinrich began constructing a dam 300 yards northwest of the house. A heavy rain the following summer filled the dam’s reservoir. Martha could now irrigate her yellow Harrison Rose bushes, rhubarb and hollyhocks. There was water for the rest of the garden. No longer would the family have to bathe in dirty water.

Pioneer children created their own entertainment and fun. The three oldest children constructed a raft made with lumber left over from the house and small granary. On the morning of July 24, 1911, Gustav and Frieda launched the raft. Hulda, Bertha and Martin played on the bank of the dam. It is not known how the raft capsized. Gustav and Frieda did not know how to swim. Hulda heard their screams and plunged in to save them. Tragically, all three children drowned.

The gravestone provided by Koenig’s old church.

Martin, then 8 years old, ran barefoot a mile south to tell neighbor Elof Lanz. Daughter Bertha ran southeast to alert neighbor George Leats. Soon several neighbors arrived at the Koenig homestead. The three bodies were retrieved, laid in the shade of the homestead shack and covered with blankets. The July heat was overbearing and augmented the communal grief. Mrs. L.F. Heller, a neighbor, reported that no one slept that night. A neighbor with a fast team and wagon headed for Gregory, 40 miles away, to get three caskets. Mother Martha wanted white ones for the girls and a dark one for her son. The neighbor brought back what was available, one white and two dark caskets.

Neighbors arrived early on the morning of July 25, 1911. The children’s bodies were washed and dressed with clean clothes. Three graves were dug southwest of the house. Then neighbors formed a procession from the house to the gravesite. A collection was later taken for a grave marker when Heinrich’s Immanuel congregation back at Canova heard of the tragedy. A stone was selected and the names and birthdates of the three children were cut into the stone. Written in German at the bottom of the stone are the words: all three died on July 24, 1911.

The rest of 1911 wore on with a sameness that Martha had never known. Every time she left the house, her eyes focused on the mound of dirt over her children’s graves. She could not stop the tears, nor did she want to. Prairie isolation added to her struggle. No one else spoke her native language of Switzerland. Her neighbors spoke Scot, Dane and some Norwegian. She believed, or perhaps she hoped, that her husband would realize that living there would be difficult and questionable. It was not true that rains follow the plow.

She longed for Iowa and Minnesota, but when Maria Martha Zurcher married on January 3, 1894, she made a promise to submit to her husband and obey him (und ihm gehorchen). God would expect her to keep that promise. She no longer found solace in caring for her Harrison Roses or the garden. Heinrich could not console her. Even the birth of their sixth child, Anna, would not bring back her smile.

Steel cattle gates now protect what remains of the children’s grave.

Martha became increasingly determined to leave the prairie, even if it meant breaking a wedding vow and disobeying her husband. Her husband sensed the seriousness of her resolve and made inquiries to church officials. A few weeks later he received a letter of call to become the pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Aiken, Minnesota. He dispersed their possessions, the livestock, wagon and other implements to neighbors and they moved to his new parish in 1913.

The Koenigs would move once more to Hector, Minnesota, where Heinrich served as pastor from 1918 to 1926. Martha developed cancer and died in 1922. She had never returned to South Dakota. Because of failing health, Heinrich resigned his parish in 1926 and lived out the rest of his life in the homes of his children. He died in 1952.

Willa Cather writes of the prairie being in the process of reclaiming itself. The only evidence today of the tragedy in 1911 is a fence made of steel cattle gates around the gravesite and a broken gravestone. The scars made by Heinrich’s Sulky plow with its single 14-inch plowshare are gone. The dam that Heinrich built is filling with silt. Prairie grasses will finally overtake the place, a blessed part of the cycle of forgetting.

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

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South Dakota’s Best Breakfasts

By Katie Hunhoff

“A timid salesman has skinny kids,” quipped a sales consultant at a recent business meeting in Sioux Falls.

That may be especially true for salesmen in sparsely populated South Dakota, where you can literally run out of prospects and even restaurants. So the smart traveling salesman of the prairie makes the most of every day, every town, every mile.

And the experienced salesman knows the advantages of starting the day right, with a tasty breakfast enjoyed in a place where the locals meet — so we asked a few road veterans to share their favorite breakfast establishment as a travel tip for the rest of us.

Joie’s Cafe — Winner

Although Wayne Hopkins of Brookings sells electrical and air conditioning parts for Nielsen’s in a four state area, he chose a restaurant in his home town of Winner. “In the winter I’d go in the cafe, just a block from my school, to have a hot chocolate and warm up. It still looks the same as I remember it 30 years ago,” Hopkins says. His favorite item is the breakfast burrito.

Brock Green succeeded his father-in-law at Joie’s years ago. Special recipes for biscuits and gravy and made-from-scratch pancakes haven’t changed. He even has his own specialty sausage, made just for Joie’s at the local Super Duper Store.

The 140-seat Main Street cafe is a Winner mainstay that was called Sargent’s when Hopkins was growing up. Visitors are welcome to sit at the businessman’s roundtable, where locals shoot dice to see who picks up the noon tab. But be careful.”Usually it’s the new guy or the guy who only had soup that gets nailed,” laughs Green. Call 605-842-3788.

ALASKA CAFE — Lemmon

Lemmon is South Dakota’s northernmost city, but it’s still a far cry from the tundra so travelers are surprised to see the Alaska Cafe sign on Highway 12 and they often stop to pose for pictures.

Inside, they get an even better taste of the Land of the Midnight Sun. Pictures of grizzly bears, moose, the Bering Strait and North Pacific fishing boats grace the walls, and proprietor Laura Casey — who runs the cafe with her daughter, Breanna Thomas — has a big compass, the only surviving artifact of her father’s commercial halibut boat that was lost in a storm. Several years after the accident, Laura’s parents moved to Lemmon and she followed seven years ago and opened the restaurant.

Amy Pravecek of Winner chose the Alaska Cafe in Lemmon as her favorite breakfast spot because “everything on their menu is wonderful and the cafe is full of friendly locals who are always willing to visit,” she says.

Pravecek is the territory manager for Phizer in western South Dakota. She travels West River back roads visiting veterinarians, animal health distributors, farmers and ranchers, telling them about Phizer’s vaccination programs.

Alaska Cafe serves breakfast from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. The big breakfast is a country fried skillet with scrambled eggs, hash browns, chicken fried steak, country gravy and cheddar sauce. Pancakes are the size of big plates.

Pravecek likes to dine on the biscuits and gravy and then take a little walk through the petrified wood park across the street. She also recommends visiting Lemmon Livestock sale barn if you are in town on a Wednesday. Call 605-374-7588.

SPARKY’S — ISABEL

Sparky’s operates from a nondescript building on Isabel’s Main Street, which is busier than you might expect because it also sits along S.D. Highway 65, a north-south corridor that cuts across West River country.

Operated by Ryan Maher, a young entrepreneur and Republican state senator, the restaurant serves three meals a day and sometimes even provides the evening entertainment, which has ranged from karaoke and country bands to pool tournaments, goat-roping and an ugly sweater contest.

Monte James of Yankton chose Sparky’s for their “All American Breakfast” — two sausage patties, two eggs, wheat toast and homemade hashbrowns. “The food is off the charts,” says James, a territory manager for Sioux Steel Company. Sioux Steel is a fourth generation family-owned business that opened in 1918 and makes grain bins, livestock equipment and other steel supplies for farmers and ranchers across the world.

James also frequents Sparky’s while announcing for the Isabel Rodeo, which he has done for the last ten years. “The locals are friendly and fond of visitors,” he says. ” They will want to know all about your comings and goings. And as the name indicates, it is not only a grill but a bar as well and the nightlife at Sparky’s is legendary.” Call 605-466-2131.

Editor’s Note: You can find more delicious South Dakota breakfast options in our January/February 2013 issue. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.