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Night Walking South Dakota

By John Andrews

John Banasiak in his office at the University of South Dakota, where he has taught since 1980.

John Banasiak is a passionate experimenter. As we sit in his office at the University of South Dakota — filled with prints, cameras and other ephemera collected over nearly 50 years of teaching — he talks about something that’s been on his mind at least that long.”Over the summer I tried to tweak this process that I did years ago, and I stopped because I almost burned my house down doing it,” he says.”But I thought there had to be some way to do it.”

Back when he attended the School at The Art Institute of Chicago, a professor told him,”You know photography exists, but there are lots of ways to get to it. You invent photography.” That led to an interesting mash up of photography and biology in which he purloined several of his mother’s begonias and put them in the closet, hoping the darkness would manipulate the starches. Later, he taped negatives to the leaves and replaced them in sunlight. He expected the combination of light and starch would produce an image. It kind of worked, but more than 50 years later he thought he’d revisit it by boiling leaves in ethyl alcohol to remove the green caused by the plant’s chlorophyll.”But at a certain temperature it catches fire,” he says with a laugh.”So that was the problem. I threw the pan out the window and there were all these flames. It was crazy.”

Digital photography has captured the 21st century — even in Banasiak’s classes — but there’s still a bit of mad scientist in him that enjoys tinkering with solutions and creating photographs that bring him and his students to places they’ve never been.”There are so many things you can do in a darkroom. There are all these magic tricks you can do that help invent some language, and it’s shocking to people. Then they go on and do it for years. They’re looking for some language, and when they see it happen, they want to do it.”

Thousands of students have found inspiration in Banasiak’s methods, but a career in art was never something the people in his neighborhood on the south side of Chicago envisioned for him. His grandparents from Poland and Ukraine settled there during World War I, finding comfort in the steady work provided by the factories that had popped up along the southern shores of Lake Michigan. Banasiak, born in 1950, was destined to follow his father and uncles into a lifetime of factory work until a teacher at his Catholic grade school noted his artistic ability. In high school, his art teacher pushed him to apply to the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually landing him a full scholarship to attend classes there in the fall of 1968.

A television set peeks out of a repair shop window in Kadoka.

He was admitted based on his talents in drawing and painting, but then he took a class in photography.”The only time I would have ever taken any photos would be for family gatherings, birthdays, graduations,” he says.”Sometimes my mother would hand me the Kodak twin lens reflex and I’d take a shot. I was just nervous I would shake or jiggle the camera because film was expensive, so I didn’t really relate to it at all.”

He loved the poetry of photography, especially in late-night photos that he captured while much of Chicago slept. Banasiak worked as a night watchman at the Art Institute. When his shift was over at 2 a.m., sometimes he stayed.”I slept under Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. I’d wake up to that,” he says.”There was Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge down that way and The Old Guitarist by Picasso. There was a Rousseau jungle painting and van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles. It was my favorite gallery, and I’d just sleep there on one of the cots because I had to get up early for my art history class that was right downstairs.

“On occasion, I didn’t feel like going to sleep and I’d just walk around Chicago with my camera. I like walking around at night. It was like a stage set waiting for the actors to show up. During the day, the sun would move, there would be light and shadows and it would all change. At night, there would be streetlights and it would stay like that for six hours. I could move around and get what I wanted.”

The results included poignant images of alleys, storefronts and other urban settings seen in a different way. It was the beginning of his”Night Walks” series, a constantly growing collection of photographs that continued after he moved to Vermillion in 1980. Though he was 500 miles from urban Chicago, Banasiak found commonalities as he explored his new, more rural home at night.”The atmosphere of the environment is all you need to make up stories. I think they’re part of my wanderings in my memory bank. When I see something, I’m drawn to it because it’s a familiar place. It resembles something of an environment that I have in my mind. They’re kind of archetypal, in my own head. Maybe other people don’t see anything in them. But I see something because they just look so familiar, even though they’re taken in different places.”

A UFO merry-go-round at a playground near Lewis and Clark Lake.

After graduating from the School of the Art Institute, Banasiak received a grant to attend the University of Krakow in Poland. He returned to earn an M.F.A. at the Art Institute in 1975. He served as artist in residence at Light Work and Syracuse University and spent a year teaching at the State University of New York in Oswego. He’d always wanted to explore the South Pacific, so he moved to New Zealand in 1979 and spent a year conducting photo workshops and teaching.

He seriously considered staying, but his mother called to tell him he’d won a sizable grant from the Illinois Arts Council. When he got home, he discovered they’d awarded the grant to someone else because he had been so difficult to reach in New Zealand. He was organizing notes and photos from his travels when someone from the Art Institute told him the University of South Dakota needed a full-time photography teacher.

“It looks just like New Zealand out there,” they told him.”And it did kind of look like central New Zealand. There was the river. I looked it up. And they showed a picture in this encyclopedia of East Hall, and I thought it looked like the Harvard of the West.”

His brother drove him to South Dakota for an interview. When John Day, the longtime chair of the art department and dean of the College of Fine Arts, called to tell him he had the job, he figured he’d stay for a year or two.”But I met all these great people, and the faculty, we’d meet for dinner almost every other night. I loved it out here, and it was peaceful. I applied to a couple of other schools, but I just couldn’t see myself leaving Vermillion.”

One or two years has turned into 44. Sabbaticals took him to Morocco, Jordan, Ecuador, Poland, Spain, Turkey, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba and China. Back home, his teaching brought numerous faculty awards as well as the 2021 Governor’s Award in the Arts for Outstanding Service in Arts Education.

A collection of tree shadows on the outfield fence at Riverside Park in Yankton.

Those honors are wonderful, but it’s clear that Banasiak’s passion will always be the photographic process.”I bought some beet powder not long ago,” he says, and sure enough, a package of beet powder rests on a counter beside some turmeric and other chemicals. He’s exploring how emulsions made from different plant juices produce images.

“The past couple years I’ve been kind of exploring, tweaking and rearranging†possible processes,” he says.”When I do something, I like doing the whole process. When I get done, I’m done with it. I don’t care if I exhibit or sell them. It’s really in the meditative process of doing it. Whatever I learn doing my own art is what I end up teaching. Classes are always different. I’m coming up with new ideas. I’m excited by them, and when I share them with the students they go nuts.”

The idea of retirement is a non-starter. He’ll invent and teach as long as he’s able. He knows infirmities come to all who live long enough, but he’s thought about that.”Sometimes, now that my eyes are having some issues, I might experiment with photographic braille,” he says.”I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility. I might try printing some photos on wood or plastic with the laser cutter that we have in the graphics department. To see with the touch of fingertips can be something worth exploring photographically.†I don’t really believe people see†with†their eyes anyway, they see†through†their eyes, and it makes me think, ëWhat else might I be able to see with?'”

If there’s a way, John Banasiak the experimenter will find it.

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

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A Historical Treasure Hunt

By John Andrews

Sarah Hanson-Pareek, the Curator of Digital Projects and Photographs for the Archives and Special Collections at USD, is digitizing the long-lost 1st Dakota Cavalry ledger, which dates to 1862.

WHEN ABNER M. ENGLISH wrote a history of the 1st Dakota Cavalry — the first military regiment ever assembled in Dakota Territory — his time in that unit was nearly 35 years behind him. Still, he remembered with remarkable clarity several stories from the cavalry’s three years of active duty — from their training days in Yankton, to the mundane everyday occurrences of a soldier’s life to their pursuit of Native Americans as part of General Alfred Sully’s campaign in northern Dakota.

He tried to recall the names of all his comrades in Company A, a task that would have been much easier had he been able to find the company’s descriptive book, which contained a full roster of the soldiers who joined along with some scant biographical data. However, English believed the book had been lost, and for decades historians of Dakota Territory and South Dakota — as well as descendants of our first military men and other ardent genealogists — also assumed that was the case. But what was lost is now found and will soon be available to anyone in the world with a computer and access to the internet.

The book is fragile — not surprising considering it is 160 years old. It contains a dozen pages of written names, ages, heights and hometowns or countries. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a list, but it has the potential to unlock countless stories that can tell us much more about the early days of Dakota Territory.

*****

AMONG JAMES BUCHANAN’S final acts as president of the United States was signing the document officially creating Dakota Territory on March 2, 1861, two days before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. That fall, the War Department authorized Gov. William Jayne (Lincoln’s personal physician from Springfield, Illinois and political appointee) to raise two companies of cavalry. As new states and territories were created, they were authorized under the Militia Act of 1792 to raise military units.

Kurt Hackemer, a history professor at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion who researches the Civil War era in Dakota, says those units were raised for varying purposes, largely depending upon geography.”In the South you have militias before the Civil War because of the threat of slave rebellion,” Hackemer says.”As you get into the Industrial Age, in parts of the Northeast and Midwest, militias exist in response to industrial violence. In Dakota Territory, when our militia is founded, it’s for protection because there’s contested land between the incoming settlers and the indigenous population.”

Recruiting stations were set up at Yankton, Vermillion and Bon Homme. As volunteers reported to each community, their vital information was recorded in a descriptive book: name, age, height, complexion, eye and hair color, home state or country, occupation and enlistment date. Company A of the 1st Dakota Cavalry officially mustered into service on April 30, 1862. (Company B, also known as the Dakota Rangers, mustered in at Sioux City on March 31, 1863.)

English, a 25-year-old carpenter from Vermont when he joined, later recalled the first weeks of the Dakota Cavalry’s existence. His reminiscence was serialized in 1900 and 1901 in the Monthly South Dakotan, state historian Doane Robinson’s turn-of-the-century version of a magazine devoted to history and culture. It was republished in its entirety in 1918 in the historical society’s South Dakota Historical Collections. English said the men trained under a regular army soldier named Frederick Plughoff, a 36-year-old from Germany.”His strict discipline was quite irksome but we had enlisted to become soldiers and to serve under the flag of our country and we obeyed all orders and soon became quite proficient in drill and discipline,” English wrote.

He said soldiers were issued old Hall’s carbines, French revolvers and a regulation cavalry saber.”The carbine and revolvers were miserable arms,” English wrote,”the men being in about as much danger in the rear as the enemy in front.” They were soon replaced with Sharp’s carbines and Colt revolvers.

Nelson Miner served as captain of the 1st Dakota. Company A’s original roster book remained in his family until the 1980s.

Although the Civil War was raging in the East and cavalry units from surrounding states were called to help fortify Union forces, much of the 1st Dakota Cavalry’s early actions took place close to home.”There’s an interesting misnomer that the Civil War was fought on the Union side by the U.S. Army, and it really wasn’t,” Hackemer says.”There are Army units, but the vast majority of forces raised during the Civil War are state-level units called volunteers in federal service. They are units that are under the authority of state governments who then sign up to serve in federal service, and that’s what the Dakota Cavalry is. They could have been sent east, in theory, to serve in Civil War battles like the 1st Nebraska Cavalry was, but they were kept here for local service because of the threat posed by the 1862 Dakota War.”

That conflict between the U.S. Army and the Santee erupted in violence in Minnesota in August of 1862 and spilled over into Dakota and Nebraska. English recalled that a detachment of 15 soldiers chased several Native Americans on horseback near Sioux Falls in the weeks before Judge Joseph B. Amidon and his son Willie were killed while cutting hay on a homestead claim on August 25. Soldiers and Indians actually fired upon each other in a skirmish near the James River east of Yankton. When rumors began circulating that the Yankton Sioux Tribe planned to join the Santee in war in southeastern Dakota, many residents of the new communities of Yankton, Vermillion and Bon Homme fled to Sioux City. Dakota Cavalry soldiers then helped build the Yankton Stockade, a 450-foot square fortification surrounding roughly a quarter of each block at the corner of Broadway and Third Street (historical markers still note the placement of the four sod and lumber walls).

Soldiers from Company A were also dispatched to Nebraska in July of 1863 following the murders of the five children of Henson and Phoebe Wiseman, who lived on a homestead in the Missouri River foothills south of Meckling. Henson was travelling through Dakota with Company I of the 2nd Nebraska Cavalry, which was under the command of Gen. Alfred Sully and ordered to push the Santee fleeing from Minnesota further west. Phoebe had traveled to Yankton to purchase supplies. She returned home and found her children — ages 16, 14, 9, 8 and 4 — dead or dying. The Yankton and Santee were blamed for the killings, though it was never proven.

In 1864, the 1st Dakota accompanied Gen. Alfred Sully on a campaign up the Missouri River into northern Dakota Territory. They saw action at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain in July, in which Sully’s force of 2,200 soldiers defeated roughly 1,600 Lakota, Yanktonai and Santee under the leadership of Gall, Sitting Bull and Inkpaduta. In August of 1865, a detachment of 24 soldiers from Company B took part in the Battle of Bone Pile Creek near present-day Wright, Wyoming. Privates Anthony Nelson and John Rouse were killed, the only combat deaths the 1st Dakota ever experienced.

Two other soldiers, James Cummings and John McBee, died from illness at the Fort Randall hospital. John Tallman died during the winter of 1864-65 when he crossed the Missouri River south of Vermillion to hunt deer and never returned. A settler found his frozen body lying on the ground and wrapped in a blanket. He was given a military funeral and buried in an unmarked grave on a bluff near Vermillion.

The rest of the 1st Dakota spent that winter in Vermillion, as well. When spring arrived, English wrote,”We rejoiced over the surrender of Lee and were depressed by the news of Lincoln’s death, but our spirits were soon revived by information that we would be mustered out on May 9.” Capt. Hugh Theaker of the regular army arrived to conduct the ceremony.”Then came the last roll call, the usual farewells, and the members of A company were out of the United States service, never as an organization to meet again.”

*****

YANKTON HISTORIAN Bob Hanson was always proud of his family’s long history in Dakota. His great-grandfather, Amund Hanson, immigrated from Eide, Norway, and was among the first settlers in Clay County in the early 1860s. He donated a portion of his land to build the Hanson School, among the first schools in the new Dakota Territory, and in 1862 he joined Company A of the 1st Dakota Cavalry as its bugler. That family connection to Dakota’s first volunteer soldiers fueled Bob’s passion for finding the long-lost ledger.

1st Dakota soldiers helped build the first school in Dakota Territory in Vermillion. The road in the photo is today’s Dakota Street. A monument along the road below the bluff marks the spot.

An introductory note to the 1918 republishing of English’s memoir reports that the descriptive book and roster for Company B was donated to the state historical society by the widow of Uriah Wood, a former soldier who had kept the book as”his most precious relic,” but on his deathbed in 1916 insisted it be turned over to the state. The note also laments the loss of Company A’s descriptive book. Historians apparently contacted the War Department in Washington, D.C., but the adjutant general replied that there was no record of it.

Fortunately, a historical treasure hunt was exactly what Bob Hanson loved. He worked diligently in the 1990s to locate the unmarked grave of John Tallman and place a stone there. Though he believed he knew where the soldier was buried, a stone never came to fruition before his death in 2018. He was successful in Yankton, however, where the final resting place of Pierre Dorion, an early explorer and interpreter for Lewis and Clark, is memorialized with a large boulder at West Second Street and Riverside Drive.

We’ll never know how many letters Bob wrote, phone calls he placed or visits he made to others who were connected to the early days of Dakota. But his daughter, Sarah Hanson-Pareek, recalls a conversation with him shortly after she went to work in the archives of the I.D. Weeks Library at the University of South Dakota.”He asked if we still had Grace Beede’s hat box,” Sarah remembers.”He said the missing ledger was in there and not to let anyone know we had it. I think he was afraid that some government archive might ask for it. He thought it belonged here because it was so important to our history.”

Discovering the book in the Beede collection allowed historians to construct its possible life story. It begins with Nelson Miner, the 36-year-old lawyer from Ohio who became Company A’s first captain. Miner was born in 1827 and came to Dakota Territory with his wife, Cordelia, in 1860. When the War Department authorized raising the 1st Dakota, Miner became the recruiting officer at the Vermillion station. After ably leading the cavalry for three years, he was appointed registrar of the U.S. Land Office in Vermillion. Miner also owned the St. Nicholas Hotel and was elected to the territorial legislature in 1872, 1876 and 1878, but died in October of 1879 before his final term expired.

Just as Uriah Wood kept the roster for Company B, it seems Miner held on to its counterpart from Company A as his own”precious relic.” It passed through the family until it ended up with Grace Beede, his great-granddaughter. Beede, born in 1905, earned a bachelor’s degree at USD in 1926 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1936. She joined the faculty at USD in 1928 and taught classics there until 1970. She donated the Beede Family Papers to the USD Archives in 1985, five years before she died. Today’s Coyotes might better recognize her as the namesake of Beede Hall, a girls’ dormitory within the campus’ North Complex along Cherry Street.

*****

KEEPING THE LEDGER’S location a secret was never a top priority for campus librarians, but Bob Hanson’s rediscovery of it in the late 1980s certainly didn’t make a lot of headlines, either. Still, knowing the artifact is right across campus opens a lot of doors for historians like Kurt Hackemer.

ìHaving it here is pretty exciting,” he says.”At first glance, things like rosters look pretty boring. But the real value of a roster like this is when you see who is serving in a military unit you can then find those names in other records, and you can start building a story about the 1st Dakota Cavalry that is far more than just what the unit did.”

Among those records Hackemer hopes to utilize is a special 1885 census. Congress offered to pay half the costs of conducting an off-cycle census, but only a few states and territories accepted, including Dakota Territory. While debating its structure, territorial legislators created a special schedule within the census to catalog veterans.”They specifically wanted those settlers to be remembered for posterity’s sake. That was their goal,” Hackemer says.”It is the only census of its kind that you can find at a state or territorial level anywhere in the United States. When I’ve taken my research about this to national conferences, historians are floored. There is literally nothing like it anywhere else in the United States.”

The ledger contains a dozen handwritten pages that record the names, ages, heights and hometowns or countries of the 1st Dakota soldiers.

Comparing the 1st Dakota roster to that census and subsequent counts could lead to countless research projects, articles and books.”I learn a lot more about the men who made up that unit and it lets me ask interesting questions,” Hackemer says.”Who felt compelled to volunteer for military service and why? Who thinks they have a stake in this? There are both native born American citizens and immigrants living in Dakota Territory at the time. Is one group more or less likely to volunteer and why? It can help tell you a lot about the creation and the early years of the territory, and for a historian, that’s exciting. There are a lot more stories to be told there.”

When Bob Hanson located the ledger, he had it photographed for preservation. This past summer, his daughter Sarah — the Curator of Digital Projects and Photographs for the Archives and Special Collections at USD — photographed it again to the highest standards of digital preservation in the country. The archives was awarded a CARES Act grant of $193,000 to purchase new equipment to help make primary source and collection materials available to a larger global audience.”Because of COVID and the inability for researchers to travel as easily, there really is this increased need to get materials online for distance researchers,” Hanson-Pareek says.

The new equipment allows archivists at USD to digitize documents, archival manuscript materials, bound volumes, maps, oversize materials, film and glass plate negatives and two-dimensional artworks at standards that comply with FADGI, the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, a collaborative effort launched in 2007 to establish common practices and guidelines for digitization.”We’ve never had the equipment to do it justice,” Hanson-Pareek says of the ledger.”But with this grant funding, we have a camera with significant resolution and power to digitize it.”

The cavalry ledger is among the first historic documents to be digitized with the new equipment, along with a scrapbook belonging to John Blair Smith Todd and a ledger from Cuthbert DuCharme’s trading post. All will be available to researchers online this fall, but for historians curious to see the real thing, the USD Archives — after a long closure due to the pandemic and an extensive renovation project — plans a full reopening in October. Sarah Hanson-Pareek will be there, and her father will be in spirit.

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

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A Decade of State-U

By Christian Begeman

Just under decade ago, on an overcast and cool November afternoon, I got into a small two-seater airplane, camera in hand, and lifted off for a memorable and unique photo opportunity. Drones with cameras were not quite a thing yet, so to capture aerials of the renewed SDSU-USD rivalry football game — on hold for nearly a decade as each school transitioned from Division II to Division I — I was obliged to open the side window while the pilot circled the stadium and occasionally dipped the left wing so I could lean my lens out into the air and start snapping. I found myself reminiscing about this experience during halftime of this year’s rivalry game in Brookings, a 28-3 Jackrabbit victory on October 8. Ten years has seen a lot of change, but much remains the same.

This game always draws a crowd, but this year’s nearly set a record. The 19,332 people who packed Dana J. Dykhouse Stadium created the second largest crowd ever assembled in the Mount Rushmore State to watch a football game. Since the rivalry was renewed, I’ve attended and recorded media at all but three of the games. Since 2012, both stadiums have undergone major renovations and upgrades, resulting in larger capacity, better lighting and bigger scoreboards, all of which make this game an even better experience.

Over the last decade, these games have also showcased talented players who have gone on to the NFL. SDSU tight end Dallas Goedert is now with the Philadelphia Eagles. USD quarterback Chris Streveler won a Canadian Football League championship and now plays on the New York Jets practice squad. I also remember admiring the athletic prowess of SDSU running back Zach Zenner in 2012; he subsequently played with the Detroit Lions. As for memorable plays, just last year we witnessed a Hail Mary for the ages inside the DakotaDome that propelled USD to an upset victory and made the rounds on national TV and social media.

Every game of this magnitude is fun to work, but the meeting that really stands out happened on a cold and bitter day in November of 2018. The temperature topped out at 16 degrees before kickoff and steadily declined throughout the game. The 10-mile-an-hour breeze cut right through my multiple layers of clothing by the second quarter, but the light was gorgeous. The cold made every exhaled breath a misty work of art, and the icy atmosphere added elements in the air around the players. It is ironic that the most physically trying day of photographing this series was also the best day to have a camera. That said, I left sometime in the latter half of the third quarter. The sun had set behind the stadium, so I lost the good light … as well as the feeling in my fingers.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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Herbert Hoover, The Historian

By Jon Lauck

Editor’s Note: Herbert T. Hoover, longtime South Dakota historian and professor of history at the University of South Dakota, died on March 21 at age 89. This story, written by fellow South Dakota historian Jon Lauck, appeared in our November/December 2007 issue.

In the spring of 1973, newspapers across the country carried reports from the Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota, from the village whose name recalled a tragic episode in our nation’s history: Wounded Knee. More than 200 activists, led by members of the American Indian Movement, occupied the town and held law enforcement officials at bay. South Dakotans had watched from the sidelines as riots convulsed America’s big cities during the 1960s. Wounded Knee brought those troubles home.

Herbert T. Hoover taught for four decades at the University of South Dakota and became one of the state’s premier historians. He provided an introduction and five chapters to A New South Dakota History, published in 2005.

Few people outside the law enforcement perimeter could relate to those inside as well as Herbert T. Hoover, a professor of history at the University of South Dakota. He learned of the planned occupation beforehand, while participating in a sweat lodge ceremony at St. Francis, and lent both monetary and ceremonial support to the effort. Once the occupation commenced, he was invited into the village, where he participated with tribal leaders in traditional ceremonies.

Later, when AIM leader Russell Means was on trial in Sioux Falls, Means announced he might go down to Vermillion and take over the University of South Dakota. His threat was a joke, apparently, but in the wake of Wounded Knee, and given South Dakota’s racially tense atmosphere at the time, people took him at his word. Police and highway patrol officers took up positions around the town.

Because of Hoover’s experience and credibility with AIM, USD President Richard Bowen called upon him to help manage the situation. When Hoover went to find his history department colleague, Joe Cash, at the USD Oral History Center, he discovered just how seriously the other professor took Means’ words: Cash had a pearl-handled revolver on the desk in front of him.

“They will never get the oral history collection,” Cash said grimly.

Hoover’s response was,”Get real, man.”

No one ever did try to occupy the USD campus, but Herbert Hoover’s involvement underscores the role he’s played in some of the most significant, highly-charged episodes in Indian affairs of recent memory. He has been rightly recognized for his many years of work chronicling Indian history, but he’s lived it as well.

In 2006, after more than four decades teaching South Dakota history, Herbert T. Hoover retired from the USD history department. All those who care about the history of South Dakota should know Hoover’s story. He is part of an elite group of historians who have delved deeply into our state’s past; their work, hopefully, will help us better understand South Dakota’s present and future.

What is most immediately striking about Herbert Hoover is his name, particularly for those who lived through the Dirty Thirties, the most traumatic decade in South Dakota’s history. When Hoover’s parents named him in 1930, Herbert Hoover was still a Midwestern hero, a small-town Iowa boy who became president. They weren’t alone: the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, has 13 folders of letters from Americans who wrote to President Hoover and proudly announced they had named their sons after him.

Hoover’s middle name is Theodore, after Theodore Roosevelt. With such namesakes his passion for American history was virtually guaranteed. After the Great Crash of the American economy in the 1930s, and the staining of President Hoover’s reputation, our Herbert Hoover wisely chose to go by the name”Teddy” until the animus against President Hoover passed.

Hoover was raised on a farm in Wabasha County, Minnesota, which is also the home of Eugene McCarthy. Hoover’s mother, a school teacher, instilled a love of books in her young son. He attended Plainview High School, then went on to the University of Minnesota. After his studies were interrupted by service in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, Hoover returned to UM as a more serious student and completed the requirements for a degree in chemistry. Hoover preferred history, however, and quickly abandoned the”dull” life of being a pharmacist. He enrolled at New Mexico State University and in 1961, earned a master’s in history.

In graduate school, Hoover turned to the history of the American West. That wasn’t a cutting-edge field at mid-century, but by the 1970s Western history was booming. After finishing his master’s thesis, he moved on to the Ph.D. program at the University of Oklahoma, which was known for its study of American Indian history. His Ph.D. advisor was Eugene Hollon, who was himself a student of Walter Prescott Webb. (Students of the history of this part of the United States will recognize Webb as the author of The Great Plains, a seminal tract published in 1931 that is still in print.)

While at Oklahoma, Hoover came to know another famous South Dakota historian, Gilbert Fite, who was beginning his career in the University of Oklahoma’s history department. (Fite’s first book, Prairie Statesman, a biography of South Dakota governor Peter Norbeck, was recently reissued by South Dakota State Historical Society Press.) Fite helped set Hoover on his path to a lifetime of teaching South Dakota history. In 1967, long-time USD historian Herbert Schell was reaching mandatory retirement age. Fite, who had studied under Schell as an undergraduate at USD, recommended Hoover to the university.

As the years went by, Hoover’s courses at USD increasingly focused on American Indian history, one of the most explosive areas of historical research in recent decades. Hoover’s great interest in the history of the Sioux was complemented by the large body of work generated by other historians. Hoover once noted that,”no other province in the United States ever attracted greater attention,” than that claimed by the Sioux. In the recently released A New History of South Dakota, to which he contributed the introduction and five chapters, Hoover wrote that the Sioux have garnered more international attention than any other tribe, in part due to their famous resistance to white encroachment.”You couldn’t push the Sioux around,” Hoover says.”They never lost a battle against the U.S. Army.”

Hoover’s interest in the Sioux stems in part from his own Indian heritage. His father was part Ioway, the tribe which gave the state its name.”I was always the dark guy in the school picture,” says Hoover.”Every time I got in trouble they would say it was that Indian blood.” He endured much less than other Indians because of his heritage, says Hoover, and in later years it was”a marvelous asset” in his professional development.

Hoover helped spur scholarly interest in Indian history with his published writings and research work in archives and library stacks. These professional interests also positioned him to appreciate what he terms the”Indian renaissance” of roughly 1965-85, when traditional spiritual ceremonies and cultural practices that had been driven underground were revived on the reservations.

Hoover’s interests and academic position made for a unique opportunity. Several of the movement’s leaders asked if he would host traditional ceremonies on his farm near Vermillion, which would give Indians in the east and whites alike a chance to learn about and participate in them. Hoover built a sweat lodge and environment for the sacramental use of peyote on his farm.”I had to be careful of the peyote church, because the FBI was creeping around,” he recalls.

As a lodge keeper, Hoover came to know many medicine men,”who wanted to educate the people of South Dakota about the fact that they weren’t a bunch of heathens, or pagans.” Indian leaders, including members of the American Indian Movement, also took part in the ceremonies. Hoover’s involvement with AIM and his research on American Indians unfolded against the backdrop of growing Indian activism in both the nation and South Dakota, creating a unique fusion of academic standing, experience with traditional Native culture, and first-hand knowledge of a burgeoning social movement.”That farm made things out of my career that I could not have made any other way,” Hoover says.

Hoover’s experience and years of study have made it possible for him to begin work on his next book, a history of the American Indian renaissance. Many of Hoover’s photographs from the days on his farm and the period of the Indian renaissance are currently being placed at the Center for Western Studies, on the Augustana University campus in Sioux Falls.

Hoover also became involved in a famous murder trial during his early years at USD. In the late 1960s Baxter Berry, a West River rancher and the son of former governor Tom Berry, shot and killed an Indian who was trespassing on his ranch. Berry was acquitted of murder charges but ended up suing NBC News for defamation for the story they ran about the shooting. When Hoover testified for NBC, he was accosted on the steps of the courthouse in Pierre by one of his university students who sympathized with Berry.

While at USD, Hoover also began writing for encyclopedias, and, with the aid of a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, he began collecting oral histories of Indians on all of South Dakota’s reservations. Hoover interviewed over 750 people and deposited many of the interviews in an archive at USD. With the help of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Hoover also completed a study of Indian-white relations in Sioux Country. For South Dakota’s centennial, Hoover organized a book of essays entitled South Dakota Leaders, which chronicled the lives of prominent South Dakotans.

In one of his greatest accomplishments, Hoover collected two bibliographies of publications about South Dakota, one of which was completely dedicated to the history of the Sioux. After countless days”in dusty archives and libraries across the United States and Canada,” Hoover compiled and annotated a list of 4,614 sources relating to South Dakota history.

That experience caused Hoover to realize there is no”state in the history of the West that has received as much attention from legitimate scholars.” With good reason, he says. South Dakota has been favored with what he deems exaggerated diversity, a mix of races and nationalities that few other states can match. Compared to South Dakota, the history of neighboring states”is really dull.”

Hoover thinks that the production of books about South Dakota could have been larger, however. USD’s master’s degree program in history should be complemented by an equivalent program at South Dakota State University, he says. He also believes the state is limited by the lack of a Ph.D. program in history, one which could promote historical research on South Dakota. Even so, Hoover opposes the creation of such a program without a substantial increase in the size of the history departments at the state universities, additional funding or the merger of the state’s largest universities.

Hoover is not afraid to break with conventional wisdom and ruffle feathers. Despite his great respect for Indian culture, he believes that Indians are as much to blame as whites for any remaining racial enmity between the two groups. On another matter, he thinks tribal governments desperately need a civil service system because,”every time there is a turnover in the presidency or tribal council, everybody gets fired,” causing political instability on Indian reservations.

Hoover also believes that the disappearance of”legitimate medicine men” has created a vacuum of spiritual leadership in Indian Country. The political and spiritual problems on the reservations today represent a step backward from the revival years of the 1970s.”The renaissance gave Indians a chance,” says Hoover,”but they are losing it.” In his next book, he hopes to explain what went wrong.

After many years in the trenches of South Dakota history, Hoover joins the pantheon of the state’s great historians, which includes Doane and Will Robinson, George Kingsbury, Herbert Schell, Howard Lamar, Gilbert Fite, Lynwood Oyos, Gary Olson and John Miller. Never afraid to speak his mind, Hoover plans to continue his writing regimen and his contributions to South Dakota’s historical corpus. His coming history of the Indian renaissance will not pull any punches, he promises. He will not spare Indian leaders the failures he’s seen in Indian country during recent years.†

Yet Hoover is unafraid.”I mean, who’s going to knock off a 77-year-old man who wears glasses?”

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A Seed on Fertile Ground

By Otto Neuhaus

W.H. Over led the search for Arikara village sites along the Missouri River during summers from 1917 to1919.

How did a Perkins County homesteader with an eighth grade education develop a scientific career and become director of the University of South Dakota Museum?

It all began when young William Henry Over found an arrowhead in his father’s field near Albion, Illinois, where he was born in 1866. Like the seeds his father planted in that field, the chipped scrap of stone would produce many crops in a lifetime of collecting and learning.

While other boys entertained themselves in more conventional ways, young Over began collecting insects, plants and artifacts. “When I was 15,” he told a USD Volante reporter in 1942, “I exhibited my first archaeology items in a small showcase in my home in southern Illinois. It was then I knew my ambition was to direct a large museum.”

As a young man, Over moved to Minnesota to engage in business. But he continued gathering artifacts, a collection he exhibited in 1901 at the American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. During these years he lectured locally on topics from potatoes to primitive man.

By 1908, Over was living in Deuel County. His interests had extended to fossils, and his growing expertise enabled him to recognize unknown snail and crab fossils, two of which were subsequently named after him: Pisidium overi and Dakotacancer overani. Soon, Over, his wife and their two sons moved west to homestead in Perkins County.

Over’s occupation now was farming, but he never stopped collecting. In 1912, he published an article entitled “Notes from Northwest South Dakota” in the journal, Curio Collectors. He began to study natural history in Perkins County, ranging from freshwater shells and fossils to colossal triceratops bones. And he described artifacts left in Perkins County by the Arikara people.

The previous year, Over had written about the hard work of breaking rocks to obtain specimens of Sphenodiscus lenticularis. The essay came into the hands of University of South Dakota Dean E.C. Perisho, who also served as the state geologist. “This article was the means of getting me to Vermillion,” Over said. The family moved to Vermillion in 1912, and Over became assistant curator of the USD Museum.

W.H. Over supervised a dig at the Arikara site near LeBeau in 1932. The village is now under Lake Oahe.

In his new position, Over became especially active in archaeology, developing his interest in the history and culture of the Native peoples of South Dakota. In 1907, he had given a talk in Clear Lake about the earliest South Dakotans, the Arikara, whom he described as semi-civilized people who used fire, made tools and pottery, and cultivated the soil, raising corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and tobacco, semi-sedentary people living a “quiet and peaceable life” in earth lodges in permanent villages.

From 1917 to 1919, Over and his associates spent two months of each summer searching for prehistoric villages along the Missouri River, finding 125 such sites. Over’s article, “The Arikara Culture in South Dakota,” provided the earliest understanding of these people. A 1931 Volante article said the USD Museum had the largest collection of Arikara artifacts in the United States, a collection that Over said, “put the Arikara Indians on the map.” By 1934, he had concluded that their earth lodges, pottery, corn and other plants indicated the Arikara had originated in the Southwest.

Two years after joining the museum, Over began gathering live animals. Committed to attracting and educating young people, he obtained three live opossums, a snowy owl and some snakes, including a diamondback rattlesnake from Texas. In 1941, the Chicago Zoological Park bought all of Over’s snakes from the university.

Throughout his long career, Over’s interests continued to expand. His writings include Amphibians and Reptiles of South Dakota, Birds of South Dakota, Fishes of South Dakota, Mammals of South Dakota, Trees and Shrubs of South Dakota, Wild Flowers of South Dakota, Archaeology in South Dakota and the Life History of Sitting Bull. He left practically no sphere of knowledge about South Dakota untouched.

In 1936, the Board of Regents and the university recognized Over’s accomplishments by granting him the honorary degree of doctor of science. After 35 years of service to the university, Over retired in 1948 at age 82. The following year the regents renamed the university museum the W.H. Over Museum.

William Henry Over died February 20, 1956, having provided an incredible amount of knowledge about South Dakota’s natural and cultural history. The seed that fell on W.H. Over had truly multiplied.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Little Giant of USD

By Ann Grauvogl

Editor’s Note: Bill Farber died in Vermillion in March 2007 at the age of 96. This story is revised from the July/August 2005 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Bill Farber taught political science at the University of South Dakota for 38 years, and mentored many of South Dakota’s most successful people.

The small man with the mighty legend prefers his brown recliner just inside the front door of a small house across the street from the University of South Dakota campus.

It’s been Bill Farber’s favorite spot for years. His call,”Come in!” has welcomed students and politicos, dreamers and those who needed a firm kick. Set to celebrate his 95th birthday on July 4, Doc, as many of those students still call him, has become a living history lesson whose hand has moved behind the scene for decades in South Dakota, but whose reach has extended far beyond our borders to tackle questions of international cooperation.

When I was asked two years ago to help Doc write his autobiography, I had no idea how many lessons he still had left to teach. They’re the ones rooted in history, the ones we’re doomed to repeat unless we pay attention.

We began in March 2003 with a transcript of interviews from nine years earlier. We began with Doc’s dream of writing his autobiography from those transcripts. We began believing my job would be to write, rewrite and massage. Instead, we — Doc, political science secretary Mary Smart and I –embarked on a treasure hunt that became that history lesson.

The basement was our Shangri-La. A trip downstairs suggests Doc never threw out a piece of paper that crossed his desk, mailbox or any conference table at which he sat. Minutes and agendas — often multiple copies — from meetings held everywhere from Vermillion to Paris for the last eight decades. Letters to Doc and from him. Speeches and bits of speeches mixed with copies of the high school newspaper and yearbook he edited, old report cards, college papers, reports and research material.

The basement yielded treasures, but none so good as the day Doc wondered what was in the battered suitcase under another tall pile of papers. Inside, we found the letters he’d sent home from World War II and asked his mother to save. We also found letters he’d sent from Korea when he was setting up a school of public administration.

More than two years later, Footprints on the Prairie is due from the publisher this month (July) in time for Doc’s birthday celebration. At nearly 95, nothing seems to quench his interest in the world. Maybe to the chagrin of administrators and lawmakers, nothing can stop the endless flow of suggestions to improve government.

Just this spring, as committees discussed how to revitalize the legislature, Doc suggested that lawmakers meet quarterly, so they could deal with problems continuously through the year. Bills could be introduced in one session, adopted the next. Legislators could take advantage of what’s being done in other states.

Since money has always been a problem for state government, Farber also suggests adding 2 percent to everyone’s federal income tax returns and designating the revenue for health and education.”It’s simple,” he said.

A believer in travel and public service, Farber served in the Air Force at Hickman Field in Hawaii.

His rallying cry for more laws to encourage government consolidation in a state with few people never ends.”We need to do some bold thinking and not be afraid of experimenting,” he said.

The broad outlines of Doc’s story have often been told. He was hired to teach government at USD in 1935, and long before he retired as department chairman in 1976, he had become a force to reckon with. He’s still tickled that his July 4 birthday — just after the cutoff — meant he could teach until he was almost 66, instead of the previously state-mandated 65.

Here is the rare man who practices what he preaches. He believes in teaching and in public service. He helped establish South Dakota’s Legislative Research Council, and worked for constitutional revision, home rule, and single-member legislative districts. Besides the school of public administration in Korea, he helped set up an international training program for public administrators in Bruges, Belgium.

And he taught, his students becoming his family as he challenged them to do more than they thought they could. Among others, he prodded Tom Brokaw and Pat O’Brien — arguably the state’s best-known television personalities — out of college failure.

“His influence reaches well beyond the courses he taught in political science or the forums he organized, the research projects he supervised and the papers he graded,” Brokaw wrote in the introduction to Footprints.”Bill was a life force on campus, a roly poly energy cell constantly encouraging students in his department and others to look beyond the horizons of the Great Plains, to take their place in the wider world as well as in their home towns and counties across the prairie.”

At Farber’s retirement dinner, O’Brien remembered:”Doc and I talked about the fact that he is setting people up in life all over the country. He said to me, ‘I feel like the playwright sitting in the balcony looking down on stage at all my creations.’ I must say this playwright has had more success than Shakespeare.”

Besides that noteworthy duo, Farber mentored Rhodes and Fulbright scholars, and his students run multinational corporations, teach at the nation’s largest universities, run for political office and write books.

Most of Doc’s protÈgÈs are men. Mary Lynn Myers, one of the few exceptions, said there weren’t many women political science majors in her era. Besides, many of the men Doc mentored were those who were dropping by the wayside, she said.”Young women didn’t do that very often.” Women had to be smart, determined and wear thick skins if they went into political science.

Farber’s house is packed with miscellany from around the world. A Korean screen was a gift from a grateful father after Doc wrote a tuition check for the son. Doc’s dad started the collection of barber bottles. And there are books and photographs, more photographs than anyone would want to count.

In the 1950s, Farber helped to establish a school in South Korea and was pictured with a group he called, “five wise men.”

Bill Farber, the legend, is a small, portly man with a deceiving twinkle in his eye. He knows what he wants, and he usually gets it. The story began July 4, 1910, the day Doc was born but not breathing. The doctor swished him between hot and cold water and slapped him on the buttocks to make him cry. As Doc wrote in the book:”Some might suggest that from that point on I have never ceased to express myself in emphatic terms.”

Doc’s South Dakota accomplishments are well known. When racial equality became an issue in the courts and on the streets, Doc helped found the Institute of Indian Studies at USD, which brought tribal leaders together to talk about challenges they faced. When state senators and representatives saw the need for better information, Doc pushed and helped organize the Legislative Research Council. But his eye has never been confined by the state line.

In the two years we worked together, America invaded Iraq. Farber had lived through and helped shape national and international policy during the Cold War; he believed then, and he believes now, there’s no reason to go into combat.”Footprints” doesn’t dwell on war and peace, but the times threw war in our faces.

Doc has believed in a global community since he was president of the international relations club at Northwestern University during the Depression. He still remembers the German speaker who predicted that war would come, and Germany would be blamed. He does not excuse Hitler, but he says the economic roots of World War II were fostered by greed in countries like the United States.

When war broke out in Europe a decade later, Farber was teaching at USD. What many have forgotten is that this country was largely isolationist in the 1930s. In 1940, Doc debated against Roosevelt’s lend-lease deal with Britain, believing it would draw America further into the war. He taught a Sunday school class for young men who knew they would have to go.

At 30, he asked a local minister whether a Christian could kill, even in military duty. The minister preferred not to answer. Today, Farber still feels guilty he wasn’t a conscientious objector.”I just didn’t have the guts,” he said.

Farber advised a young Tom Brokaw to quit college until he was done partying. Brokaw returned to campus with a better attitude and the rest is broadcast journalism history.

As a political scientist, Doc watched the war propaganda machine spring into motion, and he remembered how British propaganda had deceived America during World War I. Viscount James Bryce, an author of a well-used American government textbook, verified that Germans had killed Belgian priests, then hung them, heads down, as bell clappers. Knowing Bryce, the American political scientists supported war. Doc wrote:”Evidence after the war, however, showed the Germans had not massacred the priests. When confronted by the political scientists, Lord Bryce said he wanted to save as many English lives as possible and thought his report would help if it convinced Americans to get involved.”

Doc lived through war pricing and rationing, and his basement yielded sheaves of letters to merchants and manufacturers. A Des Moines manufacturing company learned how to set South Dakota prices for salad dressings; the Watertown War Price and Rationing Board was not allowed to add an extra charge for sacking sugar; an Iowa cafÈ was allowed to raise its milk prices.

At 33, Doc was drafted and spent the next three years in the history division of the Army Air Force in Texas, Hawaii and Guam. At one point he convinced Vermillion’s George Johnson to carry his 80-pound barracks bag because it was too heavy and his shoulders too small. When it came to marksmanship, he wrote home:”As you can guess, I am the class dumbbell on most of these outdoor things, and the corporal has a worried look every time he glances in my direction.”

The warrant officer test also proved a challenge:”I’ve only rarely been able to chin more than once — one jump up, then down. I knew I couldn’t do it until a guy asked me if I was really stupid enough to want to go overseas. When I said yes, he grabbed me around the knees and pushed me up 10 times so I could qualify.”

Doc did not dispute that a country should go to war if attacked. But he could not stop questioning the why of sending young men into the Army. He wrote to friends in 1943:”The great tragedy of those in the army is, as I see it, in all the time that is being taken from real living. The tragedy is all the greater for those in their twenties. To see these alert young men being conditioned to army thinking and ways of doing things, and to the army type of social contacts is most discouraging. War is blight from which not many recover.”

No university professor in South Dakota history has been accorded the honors of Dr. Farber on USD’s Vermillion campus, where there is a Farber lecture series, a Farber scholarship fund and Farber Hall. An outdoor bronze of the genial prof was unveiled in 2002 on the university lawn near Old Main.

From war, Farber learned to trust international organization; he’s convinced the 1945 formation of the United Nations should have eliminated combat. But he’s been discouraged.”Here we are again not seeing to it that the United Nations is the institution it ought to be,” he said recently. He’s convinced that the United States still does not understand the importance of international problems.

“We are all human beings on this globe,” he said.”We all ought to be concerned with the welfare of everybody on the planet.”

A dedicated traveler, Doc learned about fitting into another culture when he spent six months in late 1958 — just five years after the end of the Korean War — in South Korea helping set up the school of public administration at Seoul University.

The school hoped to train senior public servants to be more efficient and effective, so democracy would be more readily accepted. Doc writes:”In a country plagued by red tape, poorly paid personnel and duplication, our challenge was to adapt medieval society to the modern world overnight.”

In true Farber fashion, Doc half adopted a troupe of high school boys, helping them with their English, taking them out to eat and to see sites in Korea they would not see on their own because they had no transportation. And he learned.

“Very quickly one discovers Ö that that which one had thought of as being rather firmly fixed principles, may not be so firmly fixed at all,” Doc wrote in 1961.”One finds himself examining almost at once the fundamentals of his so-called science. Indeed, it goes much further than that, and one has some real questions to raise about things in the conduct of his own living that previously have been accepted without examination.” American representatives in foreign countries ought to be humble, Doc wrote, remembering an old Korean proverb:”Don’t speak too soon; wait and see.”

The lessons continued when South Dakota’s Sen. Karl Mundt asked Doc to be minority counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, a committee charged with making government more efficient. In his first Washington stint, 1960-61, Doc studied New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s proposal that would allow the president to appoint a first secretary of government to reorganize the executive office and improve response to national security and foreign affairs — an idea Farber would still like to see implemented.

Although Farber left Washington when John Kennedy arrived, he still believes firmly in Kennedy’s words after the Bay of Pigs invasion was averted.”The world knows that Americans will never start a war,” the president said.”This generation of America has had enough of war and hate Ö . We want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.”

“Unfortunately,” Doc wrote,”this century has proved Kennedy wrong. The current Iraq war shows we still must learn to make peace.”

Returning to Mundt’s service in 1965, Doc became the senator’s consultant to the North Atlantic Assembly’s Committee on Education, Information and Cultural Affairs. In that capacity he helped set up an international training seminar for mid-level government administrators. This was Doc doing what he believed in most: Training public servants to be the best they could be.

The North Atlantic Assembly assignment sat Farber across the table from Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a British representative, who already in 1966 predicted America would never win the Vietnam War.”The most important thing would be the propaganda effort with the people to get them to support you,” Maclean told Doc.”Americans think all they have to do is bomb the hell out of anybody and they’ve won. You can’t do it that way.”

Another message stuck.

Doc despairs at America’s inability to avoid war.”We ought to be better, and I am not confident, on the basis of our past record, that we can successfully avoid another major conflict — and that could well be the end of civilized society as we know it,” he wrote. His conviction has not changed.

After two years with Doc Farber, his vitality — even in his 90s — remains with me. I understood best when I told him I’d just turned 50. Doc’s bright eyes peered out from a Yoda-like face.”Well,” he said matter-of-factly,”then you’ve got another 50 to go.”

That’s when I understood Doc’s magic.

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The King Hits the Road

By Roger Holtzmann

One of the world’s greatest musical instruments, a 16th century Amati ‘King’ cello housed at the National Music Museum (NMM) in Vermillion, is part of a summer-long exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“The ‘King’ is one of the National Music Museum’s crown jewels, the ‘Mona Lisa’ of Italian stringed instruments,” said NMM Director Cleveland Johnson.”We are proud to share this treasure with The Met and its many visitors this summer. We’re especially grateful to the NMM’s corporate sponsor, Citi, for underwriting the expenses of this loan and making the King’s trip to New York possible.”

The Amati ‘King’ cello is the earliest surviving bass instrument of the violin family. Made in the mid-1500s by Andrea Amati, the founding master of the Cremonese violin tradition, the ‘King’ remains an iconic masterwork of the Italian Renaissance. The innovative craftsmanship of Andrea Amati, his sons, and grandsons directly influenced Antonio Stradivari and an entire lineage of renowned stringed-instrument makers.

The ‘King’ derives its name from its royal commissioning. In the 1560s, the instrument was painted and gilded with the emblems and mottoes of King Charles IX of France, son of Catherine de’ Medici. The cello formed part of a set of 38 Amati stringed instruments made for the Valois court. Evidence suggests that this set was dispersed by the end of the French Revolution, according to NMM Curator of Stringed Instruments Arian Sheets, and only a few of the instruments have survived.

“Years later, around 1801, the ‘King’ was ‘modernized’ and cut down in size, possibly by Parisian maker SÈbastian Renault,” said Sheets.”Wood was visibly removed down the center of the cello’s back, leaving the painted and crowned woman who represents ‘Justice’ without her waist, left arm, and her scales of justice. Despite the alteration, the instrument retains its beauty and rich sound.”

Given its rarity and value, the ‘King’ travels infrequently. The last time was in 2007, when it returned to its birthplace in Cremona, Italy, to headline the Andrea Amati Opera Omnia exhibition.

For the cello’s trip to the Met, only royal arrangements would do. It was swathed in protective cases to insure a proper, stable environment and trucked to New York in one climate-controlled 24-hour run.

“We are delighted to host the King cello this summer,” said Ken Moore, Frederick P. Rose Curator in charge of the Department of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum.”This collaboration with The National Music Museum provides an opportunity for thousands of our visitors to see and study this rare and important masterwork alongside other instruments by Andrea Amati, his family and other great Cremonese makers like Antonio Stradivari.”

While in New York, the ‘King’ will be an ambassador for The National Music Museum said Director Johnson.”We work unceasingly at the NMM to introduce new audiences to our nation’s preeminent collection of musical instruments and archives. We are supported at present almost completely by local and state resources, so we need music-lovers across America to support our mission too — especially with a much-needed new museum facility in the works.”

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USD’s Anarchist Professor

By Dana C. Jennings

The football game was tight that October night a hundred years ago, emotions high. The University of South Dakota was on the rival’s grid, her fans outnumbered by partisans of the home team. Agitated youths from Mitchell went too far when they tore the USD colors from the hands of a cheering USD co-ed. The girl’s friends struggled to reclaim the banner, but in the skirmish that ensued, outnumbered USD students were being soundly trounced.

Professor Alexander Pell to the rescue. The usually mellow professor of math leapt into the fray, decking attackers one by one. When the brouhaha was done, according to a story in the 1902 student newspaper, the Volante, Pell emerged with bloodied face and torn shirt, but with highest esteem from his students.

Pell had earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1897, and that fall, the 40-year-old and his wife, Emma, arrived in Vermillion. He had been hired to teach math at the fledgling university on the prairie at the north edge of town.

Pell’s Vermillion friends knew that he was born in Russia, that he had fled the czarist rule of his homeland, first to Canada and then to the United States. They knew in a general way that Pell had opposed the czar. But they knew few details about his life before he arrived in America. Pell talked little about his past.

Pell quickly gravitated to the center of social life in Vermillion, playing in chess tournaments, ice skating, entertaining the football team in his home, leading pep rallies as well as academic debates, taking his turn directing chapel exercises.

Alexander and Emma Pell even took needy students into their home.

In those early days, USD counted 410 students. Pell realized there might never be enough students to fill his math classes, so he shifted to applied sciences and promoted the idea of a department of engineering, a goal he would reach in 1903. Pell was regarded as”a model teacher, an able administrator, and a kind, generous, outgoing friend to students and faculty colleagues,” wrote Von Hardesty and John D. Unruh, Jr. in a 1972 article in South Dakota History. In 1904, the year Emma died, students dedicated the Coyote yearbook to the Pells.

Pell’s popularity and his proselytizing grew the new engineering department so rapidly that within two years, the governor was complaining that there was”too much mechanical engineering [taught] at Vermillion.” By 1907 the engineering department was firmly established, with Pell as its dean. Pell’s friend, the legendary Dean Lewis Akeley, would later recall that Pell had once proclaimed that girls couldn’t make it as mathematicians, and if one did,”someone would marry her and spoil it all.” Nevertheless, in 1907, when he was twice her age, Pell married his prize former student, Anna Johnson from Akron, Iowa, whom he had tutored and promoted for graduate study.

It came as a surprise the next year when Pell resigned his full professorship — and the $1,650 salary that went with it. He and Anna moved to Chicago, where Alexander taught math and theoretical mechanics at Armour Institute of Technology, and where Anna earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, the second USD graduate to earn a terminal degree.

In 1911 Pell suffered a stroke, which two years later forced him to give up teaching. Anna was appointed assistant professor of math at Mount Holyoke, and the Pells moved to Massachusetts. Later they moved to Pennsylvania, where Anna taught at Bryn Mawr. There, in 1921, Pell died, and with him, Sergei Degaev.

Perhaps if Alexander Pell’s students at USD had known of their professor’s former life as Sergei Degaev, they might have better understood his rampage on the football field. If they had known that a”wanted” poster issued by the czar’s imperial police two decades earlier had offered 10,000 rubles for his capture, they would have been impressed. If they had known he had betrayed his comrades and shot a secret police officer in cold blood, they might have feared him.

But that was not Alexander Pell. That was Sergei Degaev. That was a different continent, a different time, far from the insulated life of Vermillion, where adoring students called him”Papa Pell.”

Sergei Degaev was born in 1857 into a Russian family fermenting with revolutionary fever. The lad grew up dreaming of derring-do to free his country from tyranny, a place where merely criticizing the czar could send one to prison for years of hard labor. At the university he studied mathematics, engineering and languages, but was attracted by anarchist politics. Nevertheless, upon graduation he was commissioned a sublieutenant in the Russian army, retiring three years later as a captain.

At some point, Degaev joined a radical group known as the Peoples’ Will, whose goal was to assassinate Czar Alexander II and establish a revolutionary government. Among the projects in which Degaev engaged was tunneling from a cheese factory under a road traveled by the czar in hopes of blowing him up when he passed. That plot failed, but in 1881 another succeeded, and the czar was dead. To the dismay of his enemies, Alexander II was replaced by his son, the even more repressive Alexander III.

In 1882 young Degaev was caught with an illegal printing press and sent to prison. In prison he came into contact with Col. George Sudeikin, inspector of the Russian secret police. It is unclear how the deal evolved, or exactly what it entailed, but perhaps Sudeikin convinced the prisoner that the hope of changing Russia depended upon cooperation between reformist elements of the secret police and the revolutionaries. Apparently an agreement was reached in which Degaev’s escape from prison would be arranged, so he could continue attacks on Sudeikin’s corrupt rivals. In return, Degaev identified comrades who might be drawn into the proposed collaboration.

When the friends he named were arrested, Degaev realized he had been had. He confessed his part to the leader of Peoples’ Will, and was ordered to atone for his sin by executing Sudeikin. Now living under the pseudonym Pavel A. Jablonskii, Degaev used the confidence he had built with his police conspirator to lure him to his apartment. He shot Sudeikin in the back. Two accomplices finished him off with crowbars.

But Dagaev was still distrusted by former comrades, who would soon expel him from Peoples’ Will as a police collaborator. Meanwhile, he was hunted by the police for the assassination, a 10,000-ruble price on his head. Dagaev’s wife, Emma, had fled to Paris, and in 1884 he managed to escape Russia and join her. From there they sailed to Canada, where he faded into obscurity, working as a stevedore and in a printing shop.

In 1886 the Degaevs turned up in St. Louis, he under his third name, Alexander Pell. He got a job as superintendent of a chemical plant, became a naturalized citizen in 1891, and began studying math. In 1895 he entered graduate study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, receiving his doctorate with honors in 1897. That fall the Pells arrived in Vermillion, where his latest life began.

Though Alexander Pell risked discovery by returning occasionally to the East Coast and even to Europe, he did take steps to cover his trail. The year after Pell left Vermillion, he and his brother arranged to have widely published the obituary of Sergei Degaev, purported to have died in New Zealand. Nevertheless, a former fellow anarchist living in New York discovered his old comrade’s new identity in 1915. Apparently respecting Degaev’s good works in later life, he decided not to expose him as a traitor, leaving him to live in peace. In the words of Von Hardesty and Unruh, Sergei Degaev,”informer, agent provocateur, killer” had become Alexander Pell,”outstanding scholar, beloved teacher, warm friend and counselor to students, loving husband.” And defender of cheerleaders, extraordinaire!

Editor’s Note: The author, Dana Jennings, was a longtime South Dakota journalist who passed away in 2009. This story is revised from the May/June 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Oscar Howe’s ProtÈgÈ

Editor’s Note: Bobby Penn, a student of Oscar Howe, was among the foremost Native American artists of the late 20th century. He was a master of oil and acrylic painting, drawing and printmaking. His subjects focused primarily on Indian themes and his own life story. Penn died Feb. 7, 1999, after a long battle with lung problems. His work is included in public collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago. Some of Penn’s artwork is available through the Akta Lakota Museum online gallery. This story is revised from the July/August 1991 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

By Rick Geyerman

From its perch above a southern window in a century-old Clay County farmhouse, a stuffed crow watches Bob Penn paint South Dakota landscapes and Native American symbolisms. Outdoors, a pair of red-tail hawks flies above the hilly grasslands. Just a few country miles away is the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where Penn studied under Oscar Howe, the master of Sioux art.

Penn, a 44-year-old Sicangu Sioux/Omaha, is rising to the top of his field and is currently doing some of his most bold and striking work. Penn paintings hang in permanent collections at the Smithsonian and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago, as well as a dozen regional galleries on the Northern Plains. He has been the focus of 16 one-man shows, including exhibits at the Dahl Fine Arts Center in Rapid City and the Two Rivers Gallery in Minneapolis. Next year, he will share the spotlight with two Oglala Sioux artists, Richard Red Owl and Arthur Amiotte, at an exhibit of Plains Indian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art. A new mural commissioned by the Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Medical Center and the mounting of a traveling retrospective occupy his current studio time.

He served as chairman of the art department of Sinte Gleska College in Mission for three years, and has also taught at three other institutions. Early this summer he taught the Oscar Howe Native American Art Institute at the University of South Dakota, an honor Penn particularly cherished. The workshop had been discontinued since Howe’s death in 1983. Penn originals can sell for many thousands of dollars, and thanks to his partner/wife Alta, many of his works are now marketed as prints.

He never imagined such success when growing up on the Winnebago Sioux Reservation in Nebraska. At the age of 8, he was placed in an orphanage. In the summer, the school closed and students were sent to foster homes.

Bob learned about farming, carpentry and machinery in boyhood summers. He also joined the orphanage boxing team and for two years was the national champion in his weight class. Every boxer on the orphanage team, in fact, placed as either the national champ or the runner-up.

Looking back, he attributes such success to the fact that other fighters cannot “psyche out” an Indian. Bob’s father was a professional boxer and Bob thought about going to the Olympics or turning pro. Instead, he turned to the other love of his life — painting.

Ironically, it was the second time art triumphed over combat for Penn. His first art lesson occurred when his father separated him from a fight with his brother, sat him down and drew an Indian chief’s head. “Sit here until you can do that,” he commanded. Bob was fascinated … and hooked on art.

He attended St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Reservation and then enrolled at USD in Vermillion and experienced “super shock.” It was the first time he felt the pains of prejudice. But it was also the place he met Oscar Howe, the Yanktonai Sioux from the Crow Creek Reservation who became South Dakota Artist Laureate and was recognized worldwide as the leading painter of Sioux art.

Howe rigorously fought the categorization of Indian art. In 1958, the curator of the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa refused one of Oscar’s works because it didn’t fit the “Indian style.” In an indignant reply, Howe wrote: “Who ever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. … Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with individualism, dictated to, as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child … ?

“Well, I am not going to stand for it,” continued Howe’s letter. “Indian art can compete with any art … I only hope the art world will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.”

Howe’s letter cast off restrictions that had bound Indian artists for years at the Oklahoma exhibit. Indian painters deluged the competition with new and innovative styles of work.

It was in this atmosphere of new artistic freedom that Bob Penn began his instruction under Howe. For five years, the two worked together, often one-on-one, and Penn recalls these years as the most significant period of his life. Howe termed Penn his most talented student.

However, talent and hard work don’t always mean immediate success in the art world. Penn has paid his dues. He played in several rhythm and blues bands and worked as an artist for both the USD School of Medicine and USD Educational Media Services. Though much of the work involved graphic layout, signs and posters, he learned technique and self-discipline. Between jobs he traveled to show his art, and slowly his paintings gained popularity.

His career also was boosted by romance. He met his wife, Alta, when she was an art gallery curator in Sedona, Arizona. She is an artist in her own right, but she is also adept at business and handles most of the family financial arrangements. She spirits Bob’s works from the studio as soon as he finishes. “Otherwise,” she says, ”I’m likely to come downstairs and find that he’s done a touch-up, and covered a perfectly good painting completely with an entirely new one!”

They enjoy Clay County living. The hawks who patrol the river valley seem to welcome the Penns, and Bob and Alta persuaded their landlord to preserve the prairie grassland pasture which cascades southward from their front porch to the Vermillion River.

Vermillion, despite those first awkward years in the 1960s, has been good to Bob Penn. The university commissioned him to create a mural for the Lakota cafeteria in 1989. It is a traditional Sioux design Penn had contemplated for years, saving for just the right location. The pattern — narrow horizontal bands of color which represent the four directional winds, struck through with yellow (lightning) and anchored by a shield — wishes visitors a long and fruitful life.

W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion also commissioned a piece that Penn calls “in the Charles Russell style.” The museum is building a room to showcase the painting.

Penn has not yet seen the movie Dances With Wolves but says he was glad to hear it is not just another movie where the white super-hero comes along and saves the Indian. “I understand that (Costner as) Lt. Dunbar is respectful and inquisitive, willing to let the world be what it should be.”

Penn added, “I try to approach my art the same way. To be prejudiced closes so many doors to things you can learn.”

A look around his workshop makes it obvious that Penn, like his mentor Howe, is stretching the limits of what might be considered traditional. Abstracts, still lifes and unusual landscapes are on canvasses. With a smile, he notes that anything he does is Indian art solely because he is Indian.

“The important thing is not to draw limits for myself, but to continue exploring new media and styles,” he says. “If a brush stroke doesn’t give me the effect I’m seeking, I may go into the yard for a misshapen twig. Art is what forces me to grow … my desire is just so strong.”

The crow watches, always, from his roost by the farmhouse window. And the crow often appears in his works. Penn calls it his personal totem.

“Birds were important to the Indian,” he explained. “They could fly higher, carry the prayers closer to God. I chose the crow because of its cunning, its adaptability, and ability to survive. The crow is the organic shape of many of my works that balances the harder edges. For a good painting I try to find a balance; I try to live my life the same way.”

Rick Geyerman, of Mitchell, was a classmate of Bob Penn at USD in the 1960s. One of his avocations is freelance writing.

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A Respectful Rivalry Rekindled

By John Andrews

Photos by Christian Begeman

I remember the old days of State-U games, and I suspect many of you do, too. I saw my share of students escorted out of stadiums and arenas for flinging dead animals and other obnoxious behavior. But the only dead critter that came with the renewal of the South Dakota State/University of South Dakota football rivalry showed up months ago: a dead coyote strung from USD’s cleverly placed billboard near Brookings advertising Saturday’s game.

One team did indeed”have an old friend for dinner,” as the billboard sardonically read, but it was the Jackrabbits who were left picking coyote from their teeth after SDSU’s 31-8 victory at Coughlin-Alumni Stadium in Brookings. I wasn’t sure what to expect walking into the stadium for the first meeting between these old rivals since 2003. I was a student at SDSU from 1998 to 2002. I remember the weeklong anticipation that preceded the football game each fall seemed to surpass that for every other opponent on the schedule. There were offensive T-shirts and equally offensive chants on game day. I saw a few shirts, and maybe the chants were confined to the tailgating lot before the game, but overall Saturday’s game seemed to introduce a new chapter in the history of these two schools.

Both teams have made the leap to Division I, which accounts for the nearly decade long hiatus in these games. It seems the entire state is trying to lift this rivalry to a new level. It’s being billed as the “South Dakota Showdown Series,” which is a new competition sponsored by the South Dakota Corn Utilization Council and Feeding South Dakota that pits the two schools athletically and academically. Head coaches John Stiegelmeier and Joe Glenn seemed to embrace the challenge, meeting at midfield before and after the game with hugs and broad smiles.

And the game day experience has been elevated. Not many people would have thought of tailgating before the game 15 years ago. Today a sea of cars, tents and smoking grills fills the lot north of the stadium. USD brought their marching band along, which never happened when I was in school.”I hope they don’t try to play while we’re playing,” said a fan seated near me, demonstrating that some alums still harbor a faint sense that any group from Vermillion must be in Brookings with innately evil intentions. But there were none. Band members from each school chatted on the sidelines, and Jacks fans even gave The Sound of USD a modest round of applause after their halftime show.

Last week, SDSU officials believed Saturday’s game could break Coughlin’s crowd record of 16,345, set at the Dakota Marker game against North Dakota State in 2007. That record still stands, but none of the 15,270 people who attended saw a single frozen rabbit or coyote. Instead, they watched the respectful rekindling of an old rivalry, and the beginning of a new era of State-U football.